God Is an Englishman (76 page)

The blueprint was before them in their collective experience and in the simpli-fied figures of Tybalt and the written statements of Saul Keate, the one proclaiming the facts, the other assessing them in terms of past, present, and future.

They sat along each side of the long trestle table, with Adam at the head, Tybalt on his right, Keate on his left, and at the far end the clerk Rookwood, whom Adam thought of as the Artful Dodger. Rookwood’s duties were to take careful notes on what might emerge from the discussion.

They were all there, talking little among themselves and each, it seemed, impressed by the solemnity of the occasion. Catesby, with his Caius Cassius look, Bryn Lovell, thoughtful and attentive, and Hamlet Ratcliffe puffing at his cherrywood pipe that he had asked permission to light as an aid to concentration. Wadsworth GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 406

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and his daughter Edith were there representing the Crescent South, the one looking his phlegmatic self, the other dressed in her Sunday best. Immediately below her, representing the Border Triangle, sat the Scot Fraser, making his first visit to the capital and still dazed by the speed of his journey south that had begun twelve hours before. Compara tive newcomers were there, some of them meeting one another for the first time; Vicary, from The Bonus; the islander Dockett, from Tom Tiddler’s Ground; young Godsall, from the Northern Pickings, secretly assessing Blubb whom he would succeed in a year or two, and thinking it might be sooner than that as he contemplated the old coachman’s purple complexion and vast, waistcoated belly. Abbott, the Southern Square slave-driver, was there, a man who be grudged the time spent so far from his patch, and Morris, the Jew recently given the task of seeing what he could make of the Southern Pickings in the Hereford-Worcester area, a man who had impressed Adam with his knowledge of the high-grade china traffic that demanded a specialist’s packing. The tally was complete with Goodbody and Horncastle, sub-depot managers who worked under Wadsworth’s direction in Crescent Centre and Crescent North, together with Lawrence, the Headquarters’ farrier, whom Keate had called in at the last moment.

They heard Tybalt and Keate in attentive silence, the clerk giving a rundown on the year’s estimates, the waggonmaster translating the figures into terms of waggons and teams, and as the voices of the two men droned on Adam watched the faces of the fourteen men and one woman for reactions, reading very little in their expressions for, with the exception of old Blubb and the laconic Abbott, each of them seemed awed by the occasion. Only the pink-cheeked Ratcliffe, once again fearing for his future, showed signs of stress when Keate announced that unless the turnover could be doubled in twelve months depots would be closed down, and the waggons and teams absorbed into a truncated network. He said nothing of personnel, leaving them to draw their own gloomy conclusions.

When Keate sat down there was a volley of throat-clearing and foot-scuffling and then everyone was silent again as Adam rose.

He did not make a long speech, telling them simply that the crisis had been brought about by two factors, his backer’s unexpected dis appearance, and his own over-extension. He owed it to them, he felt, to make this clear, lest any of them should assume he held the view that they had contributed to the situation.

He was unequivocal, how ever, regarding the necessity to bring about a dramatic increase in business within a very limited period, and underlined this by announcing the terms under which he had purchased a new fleet of waggons, to GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 407

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be distributed according to the demand among the dis tricts. It was this statement that made the maximum impression, perhaps because it introduced an element of competition among them. The hint was clear enough. Those who brought new business would qualify for new teams whereas, if there was to be contraction, the sluggish areas would be those selected for the pruning-hook. As he sat down and lit a cheroot he caught Edith Wadsworth’s eye and her glance seemed to say, “So far, so good. Now let’s see if their loyalty can match mine,” and suddenly he felt immensely grateful for her presence, for it seemed to anchor him to them in a way that had not been so obvious when he rose to speak.

Surprisingly, Dockett was the first to comment, a gangling man with a prominent Adam’s Apple, who had never had much to say and had seemed, up to that time, a conscientious manager content to work on a very limited scale. He used what Adam thought of as the “Southcountry-Barsetshire” brogue, flattening his vowels and lengthening his consonants, in the manner of the traditional yokel in a music hall sketch. Standing there, sweating freely and red in the face, he groped for words, reminding Adam of a recruit facing his baptism of fire.

“I got somethin’ to zay,” he began, swallowing hard, “but mebbe it conzerns my patch on’y. It’s shifting chattels, house to house. That’s my strong line on the island. Alwus ’as bin. Dunno why,” and he stopped, as though appalled by his own temerity.

“They got var more’n their share o’ fleas over there and it keeps ’em moving,” prompted Blubb, and there was a general laughter that died quickly when Adam snapped, “Hold your tongue, Blubb! You can joke as much as you like over your pot afterwards, but we’re not here to amuse each other. Carry on, Dockett.” Blubb subsided and Dockett plunged again. “It’s just we could zave money on mileage wi’ box-cars, same as the railway use on the mainlan’. We could make one trip take the place of three but charge the zame.” Catesby said, “Aye, happen you could. But those box-waggons need a four-horse team to haul ’em.”

Blubb spoke up, this time seriously, “What’s wrong with a four some, if it saves time an’ mileage? It never paid to pull a coach unicorn in my day, and the same applies to freight today.”

“What do you say to that, Keate?” Adam asked and the waggon-master said that Dockett and Blubb were talking sense, providing secondhand box-cars could be bought cheaply from Blunderstone.

“I ’abben vinished yet,” Dockett said, still more surprisingly, and although Edith Wadsworth smiled, this time nobody laughed. “What I was leadin’ up to GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 408

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was this. A chattel haul has been a straight door-to-door job up to now, wi’ the customer packing and unpacking the goods. That’s well enough, and zaves us the trouble I reckon, but it wastes time and it wastes space, for most o’ they vools got no notion of how to stow an’ pile it on any old how. Suppose we make an overall charge for crating and uncrating? All but the poorest volk would be right pleased to get shot of the job, for it’s a main tiring one if you don’t know how.

We could use our own crates and do it in a quarter o’ the time, besides which we’d stow in a way that’d cut down on damage in transit, and scotch all manner o’ claims, just an’ false.”

“That’s more good sense,” Blubb said, and there was a murmur of agreement that encouraged Adam to ask a general question.

“I’ve always thought it strange that Dockett is the only one here who does a steady line in house removals,” he said. “Suppose we charged a standard rate according to mileage and the number of waggons used, how many of you would be likely to increase turn over?”

Half a dozen hands were lifted and Adam said, quietly, “Thank you, Dockett.

Mr. Tybalt will go into the figures and I’ll see what we can do to replace a dozen flats with box-cars. That’s exactly the kind of suggestion I’m looking for,” and Dockett sat down as suddenly as a spent mechanical toy, blushing at the round of applause Adam’s compliment had earned him.

He had done something, it seemed, to put the others on their mettle. Blubb declared that beyond the London fringe the pinnaces were uneconomical, and should be withdrawn and five other man agers agreed with him, it being argued that a carter driving a three- or two-horse waggon cost the firm the same when he was hauling a third or half the tonnage and that all the light vans should therefore be relegated to local runs.

Then Morris, of the South Pickings, said that not nearly enough effort had been made to undercut the railways in the transport of fragile goods, such as his own Worcestershire ware, and that he could vouch for the fact that manufacturers of high-grade china and glass would prefer to see their goods carried the full distance in the waggon that received them at the factories.

“It doesn’t need thinking about,” he said. “As it is, where we or any other haulier carry a load marked ‘Fragile,’ the risk of breakage isn’t in the journey but in loading and offloading. Send a crate by rail and what happens? It gets bumped up into the waggon at the factory, bumped off again in the goods yard, manhandled across plat forms at God knows how many junctions, and finally heaved aboard another waggon for delivery to the customer. Goods of that kind are always GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 409

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packed by experts, but the breakage rate is enough to turn a man’s hair white.

I’ve gone into it and costs rise steeply on account of insurance rates. With a single loading and offloading we could demand a competitive insurance quotation and there would be a sav ing all the way round. Why don’t we all put in for the full journeys and make a bid to cut the railways out altogether?” Both Keate and Tybalt thought this a very promising suggestion and said so, as did Wadsworth and Godsall, both of whom had been handling fragile goods in the last few months. Young Rookwood’s pen was now flying over the paper, and Tybalt, anxious that he should not miss a word of the decisions reached, moved his chair round to assist in the notetaking. Everybody, Adam noted with satisfaction, had something to say, and once Dockett had broken the ice nobody seemed to mind saying it. Discussions, some laconic, one or two acrimonious, ranged around the subjects of installing a resident far rier in each area, the life of a tarpaulin sheet, the cost of cordage, the strength of lynch-pins, the balance to be struck between speed and safety, the false economy of using a short, bad route when a longer haul over a good highway was available, and the folly of using an identical waggon for hauling Grimsby fish-boxes and, say, manufactured soft goods that arrived smelling of herrings. They dis cussed the need for specially adapted vehicles for very heavy loads, such as Abbott was now hauling out of Portland quarries and Lovell from the Llanberis slate terraces, a demand from the Border Triangle for double teams in order that Fraser could compete for the trans port of heavy machinery between unconnected rail junctions, and all manner of adjustments concerning the haulage of agricultural products from fleeces, in Crescent North, to hops and root crops in the Kentish Triangle and the Polygon.

By the time Adam called a break, and they had all moved on to the George to drink one another’s health and eat bread and cheese, there was hardly a product between the Border and the Channel that had not found its way into Rookwood’s notes.

Adam, thinking it wise to give them an opportunity to talk among themselves for a spell, carried his ale to the window of the saloon bar and through the lattice he saw Edith Wadsworth sitting apart in one of the galleries open to the blustery weather. She looked small, lonely, and a little out of it sitting there in her neat clothes, a woman far removed from the sunburned lass in clogs, blue woollen skirt, and short reefer jacket who chivvied the carters about the Boston yard, and his first thought was to join her and tell her what had come of their extraordinary encounter under the walls of Richmond earlier in the year. Then caution checked him, as he remembered that their names had been linked by the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 410

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gossipmongers of the network, and that her father was known to be a crusty old Yorkshireman with strong notions concerning propriety. It would be foolish, he thought to jeo pardise the solid gains of the conference by giving substance to the tittle tattle, so he remained inside, and when she glanced in his direc tion he raised his glass to her and left it at that. Half an hour later, when they reassembled, she merged into the group when Catesby, in the process of airing a theory of his concerning the relative benefits of rail and road haulage, accidentally set in train a project that dominated the remainder of the agenda and led to the conference being reconvened the following day. By the time they had dispersed plans were sketched out for a development that promised, if achieved, to recast the entire structure of the enterprise.

They had been checking routes in relation to the latest maps showing the advances of the various railway companies insofar as they con cerned their territories.

In the five years that had passed since the first Swann-on-Wheels waggons had been seen in the lanes of Kent and Surrey, railway ex pansion and railway-company amalgamation had proceeded un checked. The new railway map he maintained looked very different from the one Aaron Walker had given him in the Plymouth depot, the day after he had come ashore to hawk dreams. Several of the big lines had entered into mutual agreements to run traffic over one another’s tracks so that, to a great extent, the bitter rivalry upon which they had traded in the early days had been moderated and in some areas eliminated.

In addition, scores of short spurs had been run out to link some of the older market towns that lay off the main routes to the nearest junction and whereas, in the late fifties, the big companies had con centrated almost exclusively on a profitable passenger traffic, they were now, one and all, out to capture their share of freight, particu larly in the larger population centres.

They had always, of course, maintained fleets of freight delivery waggons, but these were reckoned slow and cumbersome by all heavy and light industrialists whose products were transported in bulk, as in the mining valleys of Lovell’s territory. Catesby, however, whose routes crossed one of the best-served concentration of towns in the country, had heard persistent rumours of a strong bid on the part of the London and North Western to capture the lighter, short-haul traffic, and now he voiced this threat as a warning. “It was time we met and agreed on a policy, notwithstanding all that’s been said about shortage o’ brass and overdue renewals. The fact is, we could be run clean off the road in my patch the moment GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 411