God Is an Englishman (86 page)

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next year’s holiday season. He compiled a list of local beauty-spots and places of interest, thus adding a new leaf to Frankenstein’s en cyclopaedia, and he made plans to circulate all the adjoining tea-gardens with the intention of coming to some arrangement on the commission basis as regards excursionists set down on their door steps. By early September there were twenty-two brakes plying in eleven of the territories, and Blunderstone’s designers were at work on a four-horse prototype to be put into commission by Whit Week, 1865.

There was only one manager whose response to the circular was negative. Ian Fraser, one-time carrier who ruled in the Border Triangle, wrote
“
Not Practical” in answer to question one of the directive, and although he submitted a list of targets for jaunts across his territory, including Alnwick Castle, the battlefield of Flodden, Holy Isle, and Grace Darling’s tomb, his reaction to the memo was discouraging, for he wrote, in the “please comment” space, “
The weather up here, even
in August, is not likely to encourage excursionists unwilling to do their sightseeing afoot
.” Adam did not press him. He had formed an opinion that Fraser, although dour in all his judgements, knew his business as well as any man in the provinces.

There was, in fact, a good reason behind Fraser’s contemptuous dismissal of Hamlet Ratcliffe’s brainwave. On the day Adam’s directive reached him he was poised on the threshold of an enterprise that promised, at long last, to edge the Border Triangle into the limelight and hoist it into the same bracket as the Southern Square, or the combined Crescents under the vigorous leadership of Edith Wadsworth. Fraser, for some time now, had been sensitive to the fact that he was lagging far behind in territorial turnover, and since his daughter Phoebe had joined the Swann household he liked to think he had formed a special relationship with the young man who had appeared out of nowhere, bought up his rundown stock, and offered him security in his middle age. These factors, however, were only marginally responsible for Fraser’s great leap forward, in July of that year. The main impetus was in his blood and bone, and could be traced back to ancestral memories that exerted a strong, sub conscious pull upon the character of the Borderer.

Ian Fraser, although the bearer of two good Scots names, was none the less a renegade. Several centuries had passed since his par ticular branch of the clan had moved across the Tweed, intermarry ing with former enemies who raided north instead of south, and there resided within him a profound distrust of Lowlanders whose great grandfathers (notwithstanding the Act of Union) had never ceased to look covetously at Berwick and beyond. In the old days they had been content to GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 460

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mount a cattle foray twice a year and an occa sional full-scale invasion that took them as far south as the Plain of York. For centuries the ding-dong battle had continued up here, the clang of peel tower bell summoning both sides to resist a raid north or south of the border, but since the final ruin of the Stuart cause, rivalry of a different kind had replaced the incursions of the moss-troopers. Men who had once contended with bow, bill, and Lochaber axe, now cheated one another of small change, and com mercial competition up here was cut-throat, especially in the carry ing trade.

It was this competition that had contributed to Fraser’s failure to improve his position in the areas between Berwick, Carlisle, and New castle. He could hold his own among English hauliers but was persistently undercut by shaggy little carriers who plied their trade in the wild areas of Lammermuir and the Pentland Hills.

These gip sies (in his new status as resident manager Fraser could regard them as nothing else) were always liable to make a piratical inroad into his territory and because, as he himself put it, “They could ply on twopence a day and a bowl of porridge,” because they used brokendown transport and the breed of ponies their forebears had used for cattle-raids, they could always undercut his quotations, so that he came to regard them with the same hostility as the most implacable of his ancestors. His greatest wish, and of late it had become an obsession, was to best them, preferably on their own ground, to have his waggons rolling across their routes, loaded down with their products, and the means of achieving this occupied his thoughts whenever he was in the northern sector of his beat. It took a fortuitous summer storm, in the third week of July, to attain his heart’s desire.

There was, based on the town of Eyemouth a few miles north of his frontier, a prosperous general wholesaler called McAlpin, who reigned as a kind of king among the Lowland distributors, and had established, by exercising thrift and foresight, a very considerable business along the eastern coast as far as Montrose and beyond. McAlpin owned a small fleet of colliers plying between Newcastle and Leith, but he dealt in many other things beside coal, having cor nered the wholesale traffic in cheap, manufactured goods in that part of the country, mainly because he could command bulk transporta tion by sea, enabling him to buy cheaper and sell at the normal price. He was not, in any sense, a direct competitor of Fraser’s but McAlpin’s haulage contracts, particularly inland to places like Edin-burgh, Peebles, Lauder, and Greenlaw, dangled before Fraser’s eyes like a long, long row of ripe, juicy plums, and despite the fact that he had been given headquarters’

sanction to sally into Scotland if the opportunity presented itself, he never had succeeded in doing so, and his failure nagged at him like an old wound.

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On the 13th of July 1864, one of McAlpin’s colliers lost its rudder in a choppy sea off Burnmouth, drifted ashore, and began to break up in Hilton Bay, no more than four miles north of the border. Word of the incident reached Fraser at once and partly from motives of curiosity, partly in anticipation of the pleasure it always gave him to see Scotsmen lose money, he had ridden north along the coast, where he could watch all the layabouts for miles around merrily helping themselves to the old skinflint’s coal that was being thrown upon the beach by every successive wave. To add seasoning to his extreme satisfaction he saw old McAlpin himself, wringing his hands over the agonising spectacle, alternatively bellowing for magistrates to inter vene and berating his luckless skipper, who had come off in the dinghy as soon as the vessel struck.

It was, Fraser decided, a heartening spectacle. Every tide, he esti mated, would cost the miserly old devil a handful of sovereigns, and he kicked his cob a little closer, in order to overhear an animated ex change between the merchant and the local coastguard. McAlpin was bleating, “Can ye do
nothing,
man! Must ye stand by and witness such barefaced thievery? Look at them down there, wi’

buckets and barrows and sacks, pilfering ma coal by the hundredweight!” but the coastguard, an equable man, only sucked an empty pipe and said, with quiet certainty, that there was nothing to be done. It was his opinion that coal washed ashore in these particular circumstances ranked as flotsam, and was therefore the legitimate harvest of any one who cared to salvage it. He saw no reason to add that his own wife was about the business, or that his daughter Jenny had been sent home for the wheelbarrow.

It was the word “salvage” that recollected Fraser to his duty and after a moment’s thought he gave a lad a penny to hold his horse and approached McAlpin, saying, without deference, “No doubt you’ll remember me, McAlpin. My name’s Fraser, and I’m north-eastern manager for Swann-on-Wheels, hauliers from over the border. I’ve quoted you from time to time, but you’ve never paid me the compliment of replying,” and the old man replied, un graciously, “Aye, I mind you, Fraser, and your rates come far too high for my liking. Ye’re here to gloat, nae doot?”

“I never care to see good money lost when it could be saved,” Fraser said, and although he rarely smiled he made an exception when he saw McAlpin’s face light up. “Ye’re telling me ye could
save
my coal? Before those damned brigands take the last of it from the beach?”

“I could save four-fifths of it,” Fraser said. “I grew up on the coast and the heavy knobs won’t wash ashore until the next high tide. That’s twelve hours away.” He GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 462

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drew a deep, satisfying breath. “Give me the nod and I’ll have my waggons here before that happens. More over, I know a way to check the tidal drift south, and cheat all the Berwick beachcombers out of a jubilee. But it would stand you in at thirty shillings a cartload.”

McAlpin winced and bucked, as though someone had jabbed a nail into the small of his back. “
Nay, man!
That’s close on half the wholesale price o’ the coal.

It’s the best house coal, ye mind, for a special customer no more than twenty miles from where we stand!”

“You’ll lose the entire shipment if you stand there wringing your hands,” said Fraser. “What’s more, once the coal is in my wag gons, I’ll deliver it direct.”

“Aye, but ye’ve a point there,” conceded McAlpin, and then, as a boy staggered past carrying two buckets of “flotsam,” “but can ye no
stop
barefaced robbery while you fetch your waggons? Why, man, it’ll tak’ ye best part o’ three hours to get here, and by my reckon ing half the stuff ’ll be stowed by then and past recovery.” Fraser contemplated the beach for a long moment. Then he said, judiciously,

“Aye, I could stop it, providing you consigned the cargo to my charge. Are we agreed on thirty shillings a haul?”

“Ha’ mercy on a man who’s just lost a fine brig! Twenty-five.”

“Thirty,” said Fraser, “or I ride on home.”

“Beach to coalyard?”

“Aye, and the sacks thrown in.”

“Ye have my word on it,” said McAlpin, but the words issued from him jerkily and breathlessly, like a confession extracted under torture.

Fraser moved lower down the beach and took his stand on a hil lock. Cupping his hands he shouted; “I’ve just paid McAlpin for every knob of coal off that beach, and my foreman is standing by to take the names of every man, woman, and bairn who lifts a bucket ful after turn of tide!” One or two of the beachcombers faltered in their work, but the majority went on picking at an accelerated pace. The tide, he saw, had half-an-hour to ebb and soon, by his reckoning, the sea would make amends to McAlpin. By the time he returned most of the area would be inaccessible. When he climbed the beach again he saw a very rare sight indeed, much rarer, in fact, than a wreck on this section of coast. It was McAlpin smiling.

He was back again at high tide with every waggon he could sum mon, having left orders for the diversion of any others that came into the Berwick yard.

Within an hour of the job beginning he had two men-o’-war, three frigates, and four pinnaces lined up and less than an hour later a tenth waggon, borrowed from GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 463

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a Berwick smithy, ap peared loaded with fencing stakes, each of them eight foot in length, for he had made his plan during the canter to and from his yard. The scour ran almost due south to the Needles Eye just above Berwick, and what was needed to check further drift from the wreck was a makeshift breakwater south of the beached
Bonnie Mary.
If there was sufficient time between tides he would try and erect another bar rier north of the heeled-over vessel, and he used the time spent wait ing for the ebb to assemble materials from the neighbouring area. Logs, a broken ploughshare, a length of wicker fencing bought from an astonished grazier, and sand-filled barrels were piled along the tideline, and the moment the water was waist deep round the exposed keel Fraser’s team went into action, ramming the piles into the sand and building a curtain wall in the shallows slanting beachwards at about forty-five degrees. Coal cascading from the gaping hold began to pile against it almost at once and before the tide began to flow again they had filled five waggons, that were at once dispatched to McAlpin’s customer in the Coldingham area, with instructions to return the moment they offloaded. The improvised breakwaters were strengthened while the men in charge of unladen waggons stayed on the beach overnight, as did McAlpin himself, and work went on by relays all though the next day and the day after that. On the fourth day, when Fraser returned to the scene fortified by a good night’s sleep and his first hot meal in seventy hours, quantities of silt and rubble had accumulated under the barrier to make access to the wreck possible at half-tide. Moreover, as the weather improved, and the sea went down, returning waggons could be reloaded from the riven hold on arrival. By the end of the fourth day, Fraser’s team working almost nonstop, the collier was empty and McAlpin, who seemed never to have quitted the beach, and was said by some to be counting the knobs as they came ashore, was jubilant. “Aye, man,” he said, tugging Fraser’s elbow, “but ye’re a bonnie worker! There’s no’ but a few sackfuls o’ dust in that brig now, and I’ll come straight wi’ ye. She’s insured but her cargo wasna’! Twenty-five shillings a haul was your price, I believe!”

“Thirty,” said Fraser, “and if I’d known what I was up against it would have been thirty-five and cheap at the price.” Then, staring the old man down, “Why does a man of your experience cheat himself on every inland haul he makes?

Damn it, man, you save pennies and squander sixpences. You say my rates are high and so they are, compared with the trash you use to carry your goods north and west out of Eyemouth. But you can see for yourself the kind of equipment I use, and the men and horses my gaffer in London has me employ. Do you think a reputation like Swann’s was built on saddle-galled, knock-kneed beasts, and a GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 464