God Is an Englishman (60 page)

“You’d prefer that?”

“Ay, I would. I had a man of my own once, and there’s times when I fancy another. You don’t want it spelt any clearer, do you?”

“No,” he said, laughing, “and I take it as a great compliment, Edith,” and reaching behind him for saddle and bridle swung him self down from the seat.

She followed more slowly, standing off and watching him as he tightened the girths and slipped the irons down the leathers. He did not notice that the sparkle had left her as she stood looking down on the road, her freckled forearm resting on the edge of the tail board, but when he had adjusted his saddlebag, and was raising a foot to the stirrup, she called, sharply, “One minute, lad…!” and held out her arms. He left the mare standing and embraced her and she said, as their lips parted, “Good luck, lad!” and broke from him, moving quickly round to the step and hoisting herself back on the seat. He stood irresolute for a moment, wondering whether she was the kind of person who was able to make light of a roll in the hay and deciding, glumly, that she was not. Against her inclination she had given him good advice and it was incumbent upon him to accept it. He mounted and turned the chestnut’s head off the road and on to a moorland bridle path that made a bowstring for the wide arc of the Ripon road.

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He had looked for torpor in the cotton belt, where he knew most of the looms were silent now that the bales to feed them arrived in a trickle from blockade-runners and a few fast-sailing privateers, like the Liverpool-built
Alabama
there had been so much fuss about. Lassitude, and an all-round slackening-off maybe, but not this, not a plague that hung over the huddle of towns like a new Black Death that would ultimately carry off half the population and reduce King Cotton to beggary.

The clearest evidence of what was happening was all around him before he had ridden a hundred yards from Exchange Station. The army of workless, sullen, listless, and mostly in rags, stood about at street corners, many of them looking as if they had not eaten a good meal in months. Mendicants, old and young, were everywhere, and down near the Cathedral he passed a soup-kitchen around which pallid children were being marshalled into queues, too dispirited to rattle their cups and pannikins.

Further out the blight was even more obvious. For the first time in his experience the sky overhead was high and clear, and the smell of the great city was not the familiar reek of smoke, but the sour odour of decay under a burning sun, a smell that made him think of alleys and hovels in places like Lucknow and Allahabad.

He went first to his father-in-law in Rochdale, finding Sam sub merged in the general gloom, and this despite the fact that his chim ney was one of the few still sending up a plume of smoke.

“Aye, but it’s a desperate business, lad,” said Sam, when Adam commented on the slump. “You’ll ask me summat I can’t tell you if you ask how it’s likely to finish. In bankruptcy all round as like as not, and half-a-million on parish relief.

Ah’m still running but I’ll be silent come autumn, this road. Living on me fat, you might say, for I saw this a mile off, and stocked up, as well as hoisting my rates. But nine mills out of ten are on quarter-time, and thirty shut bloody gates long since. None of us bargained for a war running to years, and that’s a fact. A twel’month, or half as long again mebbe, but there’s no sign of it finishing yet, or any one o’ the plantation ports opening up and shipping over.”

“It always amazed me why you people crammed all your eggs in the one basket,” Adam said. “Why the hell didn’t you diversify when you had the chance?” but Sam reacted to this as if he had uttered a blasphemy. “Busy oursen wi’ owt but cotton? And city well on t’road to becoming capital o’ the country? Nay, lad, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 318

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don’t talk that way up here, not even now. We would have had Parliament sitting up here if those damned fools could have settled their quarrel wi’out cutting one another’s throats and ours into t’bargain!”

“How are you going to manage when your stocks are gone?” he asked and Sam said he supposed he would have to enter the frantic scramble for Liverpool contraband. That, or shutting down and sit ting it out like his competitors. “It’ll be making itself felt on your freight line, no doubt?” he asked, but Adam said he could only answer this when he had seen Catesby. After giving Sam family news he excused himself, taking a cab back to the city and out to the Salford depot.

Catesby also looked grim, admitting that town haulage had fallen off to nothing, and that all the waggons in the Polygon were idle. Farmers north of the belt had a surplus, but the demand for it among town wholesalers had kept pace with the catastrophic decline in wages. “I’ve got ten men-o’-war and a dozen frigates here and in the Appleby depot that haven’t been harnessed up in a month,” he said. “Couldn’t you use them elsewhere? Fraser in the Triangle is paying his way, and the Mountain Square has gone ahead since Lovell hauled that Shannon pump to the mine.”

Adam said, “They’ve both got their full quota, and if they need more teams they’ll put in a demand for them.” Then, “I saw a soup-kitchen ladling out stew on the way over. What kind of relief organ isation have the city fathers established?” Catesby, surprisingly, admitted that it was a better one than he would have anticipated, but grossly overburdened.

“It’s a queer thing,” he said, “but real trouble brings out the best i’ folk, even the hardfísted among ’em. We’ve raised enough funds to fill a hundred thousand saucepans a day, but it’s hard to find meat and fresh vegetables wi’out paying famine prices for the stock and greens. Not much is coming into the Belt from the north or the Cheshire farms. The railways have cut their regular goods runs, and I don’t have to tell you overland haulage on that scale sends the market-garden prices rocketing.”

Adam said, thoughtfully, “Are you in touch with the soup-kitchen?” and Catesby, looking at him shrewdly, replied, “Aye, I am that. I’m on t’committee.

But why do you ask?”

“I’ve got an idea and I’d like your comments on it. Suppose there were stock-men and market-gardeners willing to sell second-quality produce at cut rates, instead of feeding it back to their ani mals, or trying to market it locally?”

“I could name a score,” Catesby said, “but funds still wouldn’t run to bringing it in. You can’t fill half-a-million bellies twice a week on small change, gaffer.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 319

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“You could make it go further if the haulage was free.”

“Use those laid-up waggons? You’d authorise that? They’re long-ish hauls, and rough roads at that. It would take a year off the life of every waggon and team, wi’ nowt coming back into the till.”

“It would pay off in the long run. The war over there can’t last forever.” Catesby began to calculate aloud.

“Twenty waggons, hauling free of charge to the kitchens already dishing out. It could mean the difference between a square meal a day and a bowl of thin stew twice a week. But make no mistake, gaffer. Folk you’d be helping to feed aren’t those who could make it up to you when t’mills were running full time again.”

“I daresay not,” said Adam, “but it’ll get around, the same as it did in Lovell’s area. Where’s the profit in waggons standing idle and teams out to grass? See what you can arrange while I’m up at Appleby. I’ve telegraphed to Fraser to cross over and meet me there from the Hexham depot.”

“Aye, I’ll do that,” Catesby said thoughtfully, and then, with a grin, “Happen they’ll put a handle to your name before you’ve done.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Adam, “but Lovell’s brains in Wales and Ratcliffe’s high jinks in the West taught me the value of getting talked about. If this war drags on indefinitely everyone about here will forget we run a service. Free hauls will help to keep us in mind. How’s that boy of yours, the one serving with the Massachussetts regiment?”

“Not heard in weeks,” Catesby told him. “The last letter was one I sent on, telling about a big battle they had at a place I can’t call to mind.”

“Sharpsburg,” Adam reminded him, “and I daresay you’ll have heard since that Lincoln issued the emancipation act?”

“Aye,” Catesby said, “and to my mind he should ha’ done that at the start of it.”

“That chap knows what he’s about,” said Adam, “and you can back him to win.

See to those waggons, I’ll look in the day after tomorrow.” But it was a different Catesby he found on his return, two days later. He came in from the north, passing a trio of his own waggons loaded with potatoes and green vegetables on the outskirts of Bolton, and knowing Catesby’s preoccupation with the troubles of the under privileged, he would have expected to find him setting up new feed ing centres. He was not to be found in his office, however, and a waggoner told him the manager could be located in a tavern near the docks, a place called “The Three Tuns,” patronised by the canal bargees.

Catesby was there sure enough, and at first glance it occurred to Adam that GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 320

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he was drunk. He sat leaning against the wall, his long legs thrust under a bench on which stood an array of tankards and three or four tots that had contained whisky chasers. The liquor had done nothing to lift his spirits. He groped in his pocket and pulled out two folded sheets of coarse paper, handing them over without comment. One, covered with a childish, pencilled scrawl, was from his son Tam, and was headed “14th Dec. Fredericksburg.” It had been written in two parts, for halfway down the page there was a break and the following date was 9th May, when young Catesby, now with a Pennsylvania Regiment, was back in Washington as a convalescent.

The letter, written with what looked like a carpenter’s pencil, was surprisingly literate for a lad of twenty, whose schooling had been limited to a couple of years at a penny-a-week Church school. It read: “
We got into a stand-up fight here before
Christmas but I got no chance to rite because we were whipped by Johnny crost the river an
lost more than half our mates trying to get up to there guns on some hills behind the town.

I’m no jeneral but it seemed daft to me to send us bekos Johnny had any amount of guns
there and I was lucky to get off in one piece. I did tho and ever since I been helping get the
wounded away and our jeneral Burnside has been sacked an a new one called Hooker put
in for another go when the ground hardens up. I’ll rite more when I gets a chanct but this
it to say Im still givin as good as I get. Your lovin son, Tam
.” The second half of the sheet was laboriously compiled, and told how Tam Catesby had taken part in the new general’s advance to a place called Chancellorsville, where the famous rebel General Stonewall Jackson had been killed, but the Federal forces had again been defeated. In the withdrawal the boy had been shot through the thigh and said he was lucky to have reached Washington, where the wounded were “thick as flies on a dead dog along the Irwell.” He went on to say he was getting good nursing, and that his father was not to worry, for it looked as if he would be on rear duty when he re joined his unit.

Adam then read the second letter that was written in a firm hand, and signed by a man calling himself “
Walt Whitman
.” Its message was brief. Whitman, whoever he was, had written, “
Sir, I found this letter on going through your son’s kit and it
seemed right I should send it on, together with the sad news that your son died under an
amputation here early today (21st May), his leg wound having morti fied and an amputation being the only way open to the surgeons to try and save his life. This is a very terrible
war, sir, and the suffering on both sides is grievous, but for our part we mean to go on to a
finish that I pray may not be too far in the future. If you write me at this hospital I will
try and send on some small personal effects of Private Catesby but they may take a long
time arriving. Meantime, sir, I know the President and all our people here would wish me
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to thank you for having shared our national sorrow and assisted in our great cause, also
to tell you that I kissed your boy for you before we laid him to rest with his comrades in
Arlington Soldiers’ Cemetery
.”

What was there to say? Catesby had taken the news badly, as though it seemed never to have occurred to him that soldiers were killed in wars and something told Adam that, although he had not heard from his boy in months, he had never worried much. All the usual platitudes, “died in a good cause,” “fought for something worth fighting for,” seemed far too banal to utter, for Catesby had not only loved the boy but had been proud of him, as though, by crossing the Atlantic, and joining the Federal army, Tam had embraced his father’s crusade for human dignity everywhere. And now he was dead, his blood poisoned by a neglected wound, and the corpse was tucked away in an alien patch of ground three thousand miles away. There was some kind of link here, Adam thought, with Tim Garvin who had died under Rawlinson’s horse beside the Liverpool line, with the trapped miners Lovell’s enterprise had been unable to save, and with the bundle of sooty rags in the hearth at Tryst. It was always these poor devils who bore the brunt of the battle and sud denly, as never before, Adam Swann identified not only with the silent Catesby, but with all the Catesby’s determination to demolish the pyramids of privilege and avarice that straddled the lost farm lands of the Western World.