God Is an Englishman (51 page)

“You’ll want every man and woman standing out there to dig the track free of snow for the horses to get up the gradient,” Lovell said. “See that they spread the snow evenly each side of the track. That way I’ve some kind of platform to work on.” And then, with a nod, he turned on his heel and walked out as men GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 268

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ran before him and past him on their various errands, and the crowd parted to let them through, as though their urgency represented the first seeds of hope planted in that place since the siren had summoned them there.

5

Mercifully the sky remained clear and no further snow threatened, but towards the middle of the afternoon the wind got up, blowing down from the mountains and raising a spume of powdered snow on the surface of the drifts. It was an easterly that cut to the bone but nobody heeded it. Down the length of the mile-long narrow gauge a thousand men and women scooped and shovelled, laying bare the sleepers and digging deep into the hard snow between them with spades and hearth shovels and scraps of board and sometimes their bare hands.

They worked tirelessly and in almost complete silence, so that soon the track lay exposed the whole of its length, with sand and gravel making a fairly level path all the way from the main line halt to the first of the loading bays. Over to the right, where the wind ing gear of the new shaft was silhouetted against the sky, men were making a second path, not broad enough for a waggon, for these had been Lovell’s instructions, but wide enough for the passage of a horse or a string of horses, one yoked behind the other. The shed at the end of the path was stripped clean, its contents flung out into the snow, and when Dowlais was satisfied that all that could be achieved pending the arrival of the pump had been done he stumped the length of the track, asking for an Abergavenny haulier called Lovell, and learning that he was below awaiting the special goods train that Stationmaster Davies had dispatched on his own responsibility.

Down here was tremulous expectancy, in great contrast to the active, feverish atmosphere higher up the slope. Men, women, and children stood about, blowing on their hands, stamping their feet, and every now and again each of them glanced up the line, hoping to be the first to spot the smoke of Trevor Davies’

Special, carrying the miraculous Shannon, as it came trundling round the bend.

Dowlais, striding through them, found Lovell supervising the work of remov ing the wheels from two drays borrowed from a brewery, and when Dowlais realised what he was doing he said, wonderingly, “What are you about, man? You can’t get the pump up that mountain without wheels, can you?” but Lovell said, in the same quiet tone, that he could not get it up there on wheels, and was converting the linked drays into a large sled that could be dragged over levelled stretches of packed snow on either side of the track. Harnessed to this a string of horses, one GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 269

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ahead of the other, would have some hope of finding a sure footing in the gravel between the sleepers.

Dowlais knew then that he had been far luckier than he deserved, than any man in his situation deserved. This politely spoken Abergavenny haulier was a genius, a genius of improvisation, and no other kind of genius would have been the slightest use to the men trapped in the pit. Dowlais’ practical training came hurrying to his rescue, so that he was able to accept the man’s thesis at once and consider its implications. He said, speculatively, “How many horses will you need, Lovell? Remember that gradient is one-in-six,” and Bryn replied, “I’ve had offers of fifty but I can’t use more than ten. They’ll have to work in a string and a string of ten will be hard to keep in line. I’ve already selected the ten strongest. They’ll do it, I hope, properly managed.”

“You’ll stay and supervise?”

“I wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it. A generation ago people in the valleys knew something of horses. But since then you’ve done your hauling by rail.” Dowlais said nothing to that. His own life, as surely as the lives of the men in the flooded galleries, depended upon this quiet, force ful stranger. If the men and boys could be taken out alive, he still had a chance. If they were already dead he was finished anyway, not because dismissal would surely follow but because no man in the valleys could carry that load of guilt and survive.

A ripple of excitement culminating in a ragged cheer announced the first sighting of Trevor Davies’ Special and as the engine and its two flat cars rattled round the wide curve in the line it was seen that the raid upon the Merthyr goods yard had been successful. Two tar paulin-covered humps on the cars proclaimed the presence of the pump, and within seconds of the train sliding into the halt a hundred pairs of hands were stripping away the fastenings and exposing the green casing of the Shannon in four, straw-filled crates, each as tall as a man.

Down here on the platform the snow was no great hindrance. Men slipped and slithered, and one fell on the line breaking his leg, but the crates, eased from their clamps on the cars, glided across the platform and down the ramp to the point where the dismantled drays had been laid, two cumbersome rafts bolted together at twenty points, and stripped of every protuberance that could be removed with hammer, screwdriver, or wrench.

Lovell himself backed the first of the horses into the single shafts, a great broad-chested Shire, the only horse present that would have caught his eye at an auction. Then, with a volley of shouts, a snap ping of leather, and the pleasant jingle of metal, nine other horses were added to the string, so that children prancing in GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 270

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the snow forgot their grief and terror for a moment and stared wide-eyed at the caval cade, seeing perhaps a sledge made ready for a winter journey by a warrior king, Llewellyn, or Arthur himself.

Lashing the crates dead centre of the sledge proved tricky, but Lovell, not to be hurried, instructed the carpenters to screw a set of clamps either side of the centreboard and then, as an additional safeguard, he used some fifty yards of rope threaded through the iron loops on the leading edges of the drays. Dusk was falling when the strange cavalcade moved off across level ground to the foot of the narrow-gauge track. Breath hung on the frost laden air and lanterns were lit to illuminate the scene round the point of departure where Lovell set about marshalling the team in a dead straight line before calling Dowlais to ask if he could recommend a reliable man to take the bridle of the leader.

“My place is with the wheeler,” he explained, “for that’s where things can go wrong. One false step from that Shire and the sledge will slip sideways, and God knows how we should get it back on course if it happened halfway up.” Dowlais said, “Ted Hughes is your man then. You don’t need me, I’ll go ahead and collect a team to assemble the pump overnight. With luck we could have her working by morning.” He did not add what was in his mind, that even if the Shannon was as good as he anticipated, twenty-four hours would elapse before it pumped shaft and road free of water. By then the men would have been entombed for thirty-six hours. He looked back halfway up the slope and saw, as in a scene painted by Brueghel, the long string of bobbing lanterns around the double-blob that was Lovell’s sledge.

Lovell placed a man on either side of each horse, twenty men in all, with himself astride the line holding the wheeler’s bridle. Others he told off to space themselves back from the rails all the way up the slope, with instructions to keep the snow untrodden on each side of the track. If it once turned to slush under their feet, he said, a straight course was out of the question and all hope of an ascent would be forfeited.

When everything was ready he gave the command and the long line moved off, passing smoothly over the first two hundred yards where the gradient was no more than one in ten. Then, when they were level with one of the rock flaws that had tormented the railway engineers, the team faltered and the ungainly vehicle began to lurch, left, then right, then left again. For five seconds the enterprise hung in the balance as he threw his whole weight forward, as though to drag the wheeler up the slope, and suddenly they were back on course, moving at the rate of perhaps a mile an hour, with a score of men pushing, or trying to push, and GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 271

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two files strung out along the advance, each man holding a wedge to jam under the backboards if the horses floundered and the sledge began to slip.

At the halfway mark, at a word from Lovell, they dropped in their wedges and the horses took the strain, their hooves flailing madly in the gravel and skidding from the glacial surfaces of the sleepers. For a moment it was touch and go but once more, after a moment’s breather, they started upward again, the crowd of strug gling men in the rear growing every moment as more and more came streaming down from the pithead.

A rumour that soon became fact ran among them as they heaved and struggled in the wake of the sledge. Bummy Watkins, seventeen years old, had emerged half an hour ago, bobbing out of the black water in the shaft like a man returning from the dead. Incredulously they heard that he had swum the dip, twenty yards or more under water, surfacing half-drowned among a swirl of props floating on the scummy surface. The feat was a miracle and one that only Bummy could have performed, for he was reckoned the strongest swimmer in the Valley, but he would have drowned for all that if, beyond the dip, he had not had the luck to surface directly under a spot where roof subsidence gave him head clearance.

Then, understanding pre cisely where he was, he had dived again and this time he had made the shaft, attracting the attention of a safety inspector who was perched there taking soundings. He was too chilled and exhausted to tell them much, but the news he brought out was enough to sustain hope. At least fifty-one of the missing men were alive and clear of the water level. There was no gas down there and although some of the men were injured they could hold out if enough water was pumped out to enable them to wade as far as the shaft. Dowlais, hearing Bummy’s story first-hand, went out to the loading platform and stared down at the long, bobbing line of lanterns, now, he esti mated, within four hundred yards.

“We’ll save ’em yet,” he told the linesman. “We’ll save every one alive down there but we couldn’t have, we couldn’t have done a damn thing without that man Lovell.” He resisted the temptation to join the scurrying groups, now racing down the steepest section of the hill towards the crawling sledge. His place was here, briefing the men who would install and operate the Shannon pump before daylight crossed the rim of the mountain. For this at least he could promise, if only the Shannon could be brought to level ground.

They were about two hundred yards from the crest when the leading horse stumbled and its follower, throwing its weight on its haunches, sent a shudder down the whole line so that once more there was recoil and the sickening, hor-rifying zig-zag, left, right, left again as the cry went up for the wedges.

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They held her for more than a minute, muscle contending with gravity, iron-shod boots skittering for a purchase on the damnably slippery surface. Lovell, scrambling out of the line, stumbled the full course, remarshalling the team, steadying each horse and each man with word or gesture. Then they were off again, moving now by inches, and five minutes later he knew they would do it for the leader, breasting the crest and finding a firm foothold on level ground, exerted his full weight for the first time since setting off and this straightened the line and doubled the pace as horse after horse came floundering over the rim.

Lovell dragged himself clear, saying nothing about a crushed toe where a hoof had descended on it a hundred yards back but feeling very little pain from the injury for his legs were numb from the knees down. In the confusion of whirling across flat ground to the new pumphouse, and the excitement of offloading and unwrapping the sections, he lost Dowlais but made no effort to seek him out.

The man, he thought, would be working to a schedule reduced to seconds. He would have no time to spare for civilities.

For a few moments he watched men clawing the sections from the crates and then limped across to the manager’s office, where cocoa was being brewed in a great soup tureen. Someone handed him a mug and he sipped it gratefully.

Sensation returned to his feet and he sat down on the floor, pulling off boot and sock to find that both were bloody and the nail of his great toe was askew. As the wound began to throb he took out his handkerchief, bound it round the toe and then replaced sock and boot, wondering where he could find someone to remove the nail and apply a proper bandage. Then, des pite the persistent throb, a great drowsiness stole over him and he rested his aching back against the timber walls, his chin touching his breast.

He was still there at four o’clock in the morning when Dowlais, satisfied that the Shannon would be pumping within three hours, came stamping in for cocoa and almost fell over the man asleep, his feet to the fire. He said, wonderingly, “For Christ’s sake…!” and bent to wake him but then changed his mind and left again, throwing his reefer over the lower half of Lovell’s body and leaving in structions that when he awakened he was to be sent across to the pump house.

But Lovell did not receive the message. He slept on for another two hours and was overlooked in the turmoil that accompanied the first plunge of the new pump, and the wild cheering that greeted the news that it was a corker, and would reduce the flood to a string of puddles in no time at all. He pottered around for a while and then, after giving the teamsters instructions to return the horses and drays to their owners, he went limping down the slope into the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 273