God Is an Englishman (5 page)

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1 8 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

Sam Rawlinson’s obstinacy seemed likely to outlast the heatwave. Indeed, its breaking-strain was linked to the thermometer for he reasoned that, whereas seven hundred operatives might well feel the pinch of privation in high summer, the nerve centre of his unruly mob would not be touched until rain fell on their slate-loose hovels, an earnest of what was in store for them in November and December.

He was now losing, at his own calculation, about a hundred pounds a week and that apart from orders that were going elsewhere, but although this appalling price exasperated him it did not daunt him. For one thing he could afford it. An overall loss of, say, two thousand pounds, would make no more than a dent in his invested capital. For another his commonsense, which he thought of himself as posses sing in abundance, told him that in the long run the lockout would show a profit, for once the mill was working full-time again no man or group of men would dare to challenge him in the future. There would still be strikes and stoppages at neighbouring factories, so long as employers turned a blind eye to the engagement of men with truculent records, (a policy he consistently opposed at local federation meetings), but there would be no more penny-an-hour or breakfast-break deputations waiting upon him. Whenever the whisper circulated that one was about to assemble, the single men and girls would remember the penniless summer of ’58, and the mar ried men would heed wives with half-a-dozen bellies to fill. To walk through his mill now, to contemplate ten thousand pounds’

worth of modern machinery as idle as his hands, was a depressing experience to a man who, in his teens, had worked a sixteen-hour-day for four teen shillings a week. He found it, however, less irksome than living under the threat of extortion from troublemakers like Cromaty and McShane, both of whom, he noted, had absented themselves from the deputation that had trudged out here two days ago, begging him to reopen on any terms short of a cutback in daily rates.

He knew millworkers, and he flattered himself that he knew Sam Rawlinson.

Under present circumstances acceptance of the deputa tion’s terms would amount to a compromise, and a compromise was half-way to surrender, perhaps all the way if one thought in terms of years rather than months. He could hold on, if necessary, until Christmas, and neither loss of orders nor the hint of violence that that bloodless old stick Goldthorpe had dropped when they had last met, could shake his nerve. He had studied the rules of the game of industrial bluff.

During the ’47 riots, that had spread north from the Midlands like a heath fire, erupting in every town within a day’s ride of Manchester, he had been running a mill with less than seventy operatives, and although he kept his mill open he had GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 18

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heard some of his own hands sounding off at street corners during the troubles.

But in the end he had seen those same men crawl back to work after the military had reinforced the police and the yeomanry. A few factories had been gutted, a certain amount of plant damaged, and acres of local palings had been torn up and used as weapons against batons and bayonets, but within hours of the North Western Railway depositing the Guards at the Manchester terminus there had been no more talk of “Moscowing the town,” whatever that meant. He had even had the sour satisfaction of erasing the names of street orators he recognised from his tally book.

As for the present upset, a short strike and an extended lockout, it was a personal not a national demonstration. Cromaty, McShane, and a few like them, had staked their reputations on wresting that penny-an-hour and that ten-minute breakfast break from him, and he knew what lay behind the demand. They were hoping to use these piddling concessions as a recruiting slogan for their newly formed Spinners Alliance, a David pitting himself against the Goliath of the Local Federation and in this sense, or so Sam told himself, he was fighting everyone’s battle. For if the Bible story repeated itself in Seddon Moss then God alone knew what price employers all over the country would pay in cash and lost working hours in the approaching winter.

So the Seddon Moss deputation had trudged the dusty road to Daresbury in vain, arriving and departing empty-bellied and empty-handed. It had been a rare pleasure to watch McEwan, his Scots gardener, hosing the half-moon flowerbeds only a few yards from the front steps while the men argued and pleaded.

He had not given them so much as a drink of water and it must have been a leather-tongued sextet that trailed back to town, for all the streams on the plain were dry and every cottage was hoarding well water.

Meantime he had plenty to think about. Enforced idleness had given him an unlooked for opportunity to weigh every aspect of Matthew Goldthorpe’s hint of a dynastic alliance, and the prospect of having Goldthorpe’s poop of a son as the father of his grandchildren took priority over even such a matter as the shutdown of Seddon Moss Mill.

Up here in his summerhouse, with his back to the trees, he could choose a highway for his thoughts and march along it, shoulders squared, pugnacious jaw outthrust, prominent blue eyes—“marble” eyes his rivals called them—bulging balefully at his unlikely castle that always had the power of focusing his attention, if only because it represented proof that anything was attainable providing you wanted it enough.

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2 0 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

He thought first of the bloodless Goldthorpe, reputedly the richest ground landlord between Salford and Birkenhead, and then, reluct antly, of Goldthorpe’s son, Makepeace. What a damned silly name to christen a boy! What a gratuitous handicap to fasten upon a strip ling due to walk into an income of several thousand a year once they trundled the old man away.
Makepeace!
Who wanted peace and, if peace was thrust upon a man, who wanted the odium of bringing it about? He remembered asking Goldthorpe what the devil had prompted him to penalise the boy at birth, and the old man had told him that his son was named after the novelist, Thackeray, who was, it seemed, distantly related to Goldthorpe’s hoity-toity wife. To Sam it was an inadequate explanation, but he felt obliged to admit that it suited Goldthorpe’s son and from here it was a short step to the contemplation of Makepeace Goldthorpe’s loins.

It seemed unlikely, at first glance, that the boy would be capable of siring anything more aggressive than a jack-rabbit. He was thin, shambling, toothy, and completely subdued by the prospect of his father’s wealth. He had a moist handclasp, a wispy moustache, and a faint stammer, but did physical disqualifications matter? Admittedly the prospect of grandsons was important, but was that prospect limited to the womb of the one child his own wife had brought him and died, most inconsiderately, in the process? He was only forty-seven and would probably marry again when he could spare time. The lack of a wife over the past nineteen years had not troubled him overmuch. He spent very little time at home, retained the services of Mrs. Worrell, an excellent cook-housekeeper, and had access to any number of lusty operatives glad to satisfy his occasional needs for the price of a shilling. He had no regular mistress (the maintenance of one not only gave women grandiose ideas but invariably got about among the chapel people and was bad for business), but, by his own computation, he had probably sired half-a-dozen bastards. The claims of all had been silenced by a routine arrangement he had with Doig, his lawyer. Having satisfied himself that there was a chance of a claim being established, a small lump sum, and a statement exoner ating his client from any further responsibility, disposed of the mat ter. Lately, on Doig’s advice, Sam had taken care to find his fun in Manchester, among some other mill-owner’s employees. It was, perhaps, an expensive way of going about things, but Sam Rawlinson was not averse to spending money on himself. The arrow-slits and the four Gothic turrets embellishing Stannard Lodge proved that.

By now, however, with the prospect of finding a well britched hus band for Henrietta, Sam’s thoughts had been turning more and more to bringing order GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 20

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into his private life, and there seemed to him no reason why he should not begin looking around for some healthy young woman who would get him a string of heirs to compensate for his wife’s extreme carelessness in dying after producing a single child and that a daughter. As for Henrietta, she could make herself useful by marrying young Goldthorpe, or somebody like Goldthorpe. By so doing she would not only make fresh capital available but take out insurance in the matter of grandchildren.

He made a guess at Matthew Goldthorpe’s pile. It was probably in the six figure bracket, even though most of it reposed in bricks and mortar of which half was property on the point of falling down. Not that that mattered. The real value lay in the sites and the Goldthorpes, who had been landowners about here for two generations, were known to own a great slice of the eastern sector of the town and to have pocketed upwards of twenty thousand when the railway came through twenty years before. On the face of it he was hardly likely to improve on Makepeace, particularly as Matthew also owned the strip of rubble-strewn land between his offloading bays and the railways goods yard. He wondered, remembering this, if Goldthorpe could be talked into making this over to him as a wedding pledge and decided that it was possible. As always, when he was assessing a problem, he identified with his opponent, and on this occasion the result was encouraging. Matt Goldthorpe was copper-bottomed but he was also greedy. Unlike Sam he did not think of himself as a rich man but continued to behave as though the odd sixpence represented the dif ference between a herring supper and going to bed on an empty stomach. The prospect of marrying into the family of the district’s largest employer of labour obviously attracted him.

Had it been otherwise nothing would have induced the close-fisted old buzzard to make the first approach. Deciding this Sam also made up his mind on the spot but in doing so gave a passing thought to the couple themselves. Makepeace, he knew, would marry a woman with two heads if his father gave the command, not because he was filial but because, endowed with his father’s extreme fondness for money, the prospect of running contrary to its source, with younger brothers in the offing, was unthinkable. Apart from this, if he was a man at all, he would not find the prospect of marrying Henrietta displeasing, irrespective of any settlement Sam might make. Henrietta was a shapely, spirited girl, with her mother’s refined features and his own clear skin and matchless health. With the minimum of assistance from Makepeace she could, he was sure, produce a flock of children, and old Goldthorpe, a slave to tribal prejudice, would respond to that and be likely to observe the rules of primogeniture when it came to making his GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 21

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will. Sam did not know, neither did he care, how Henrietta would react to the bargain. Their relationship was humdrum. Most of his time had been spent at the mill, or drumming up orders, and because she was only a girl he had left her education, such as it was, to a suc cession of nursemaid-governesses. She could, they told him, tinkle the piano, sew a little, cook a little, and while away her time on other woman’s pursuits, like pokerwork, crocheting, and dressmaking.

Unlike her father, she had been able to read and write since she was a toddler, and no man in his senses would give a girl who promised to be pretty more than a minimal education.

Musing thus, it occurred to Sam that he knew less about her than he knew of some of his hands, and he put this down to the fact that he had never recovered from the shock that she had not only had the gall to be the wrong sex but had, in arriving, killed his Irish wife, Cathy, thus depriving him of a chance to correct the error.

His memory, so accurate concerning matters of business, retained little of Cathy now. He saw her as a willowy girl who had caught his eye during a visit to the docks at Merseyside, one of innumerable refugees from the first of the Irish potato famines in the thirties. He found her sitting on a tin trunk looking extraordinarily composed in the midst of the dock turmoil, and, for a reason that he could not, for the very life of him, recall at this distance, she had made him laugh so that he had whisked her off and fed her with the intention of seduc ing her as soon as he had concluded his business with a Levantine skipper.

But although she had eaten what had seemed to him an enor mous amount of beef, cabbage, and Lancashire cheese, she had laughed in his face when he had proposed she should settle the bill upstairs and had offered, instead, to wash his shirt that had been soiled by the Levantine’s tarry cordage. He must have been in excep tionally high spirits on that particular trip—perhaps he got the better of the Levantine in the matter of freightage—for her impudence had made him laugh again and he proposed that she accompany him back to Warrington in his dogcart. Surprisingly she had agreed, and had even entertained him with sad Gaelic songs all the way home. Searching his memory for further fragments of the brief association he recalled now that Mrs. Worrell, his cook-housekeeper, had taken a liking to her, and it was probably the cook’s remonstrances that had prevented him from turning her loose to fend for herself when she rejected his renewed advances with contemptuous good humour. Why, in God’s name, had he decided to marry the girl? Had it been an impulse, related to the acquisition of Seddon Moss about that time and the need to establish himself among the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 22

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