God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  He hinted at the necessity of farrier and veterinary services. He told gloomy stories of cracked axles and lost lynch pins, of bad debts, bad roads, and bad characters among the waggoners, few of whom he could vouch for except as masters of their craft. But in the end, after the first year's trading figures were shown him, he capitulated, and perhaps even his imagination was stirred by the vastness of the project, a criss-cross of light and heavy waggon routes embracing thirty counties, a caravanserai equipped to serve the great gridiron that now linked every sizeable town in the country. He said, when he had studied the maps, “So be it, Mr. Swann, and God be with you. I’m your man now and so is Tybalt. We’ll find enough waggoners if they are there to be found.”

  Tybalt, the chief clerk, was the most important of Keate's proteges. He and Keate were fellow workers in the Lord's vineyard, in as much as they both attended the same Thameside Mission Hall, and were equally obsessed with the necessity to work their passage across Jordan and past the barriers of the Celestial City. Tybalt was as small and insignificant as Keate was huge and impressive. Standing beside his friend, the top of Tybalt's bald head barely reached Keate's shoulder, and whereas Keate had a chest like a beer barrel, Tybalt, viewed from the neck down, could be mistaken for one of the urchins who skylarked in and about the stables, or danced a jig on the end of one of the knotted ropes at the tailboards of the waggons. Yet Tybalt, with domed head, parchment pallor, and rimless eyeglasses, could perform prodigies of mental arithmetic, so that Adam came to depend upon him to a very great extent, recognising in the man the same quality of conscientiousness exhibited by Keate, and also something of the gambler that was absent in his friend. Adam would sometimes look down on this strange pair as they paced the yard, debating some problem that concerned him or their personal salvation, and his imagination, heated by the stresses of the adventure, would encourage him to see them as a talkative David and an attentive Goliath acting in concert. He would tell himself, with a grin, that St. Peter would be a jackass to refuse either admission, for, whereas Saul Keate could be relied upon to quell any repetition of a Satanic revolt, the finances of Paradise could have no better auditor than Andrew Tybalt.

  It was strange that a busy man, with a wife and future family to support, and every penny he possessed locked up in a single, complex project, should indulge in fancies of this kind but it was an aspect of the new Adam Swann who, in his secret heart, believed himself a match for anything that awaited him in a war far more demanding than any he had engaged in so far. Admittedly the pace was killing, and the day-to-day risks sometimes terrifying, but as his own master he was in a position to weigh risks as he had never been able to do in the field. It was this, perhaps, that enabled him to mount that first exploratory campaign with joyful gusto, advancing across an unfamiliar terrain with the aid of talents he had never been called upon to employ as a soldier.

  One such talent, he discovered, was an instinctive discernment of a man's potential worth, and it came into play when Keate asked him to inspect a mob of waggoners assembled in the yard.

  They stood in a sullen rank, thickset, ruffianly, blear-eyed men, dredged up from the murky pool of London's unemployed coachmen and guards, rendered obsolete by the march of the railroad that had, in a matter of ten to fifteen years pulled them from their perches on the box-seats of their Telegraphs and Tantivys, and left them to rot in idleness after they had grown to manhood thinking of themselves as an elite.

  It was an aspect of the railway boom that he had never thought about, the genocide of a class of men who had once been the best paid and most pampered professionals in England, pocketing their substantial tips with the air of men conferring a favour on passengers, grossly flattered by young bucks with incomes of five thousand a year, and fawned upon by armies of innkeepers, ostlers, and barmaids along the metalled highroads that ran out of London in every direction. For these were the men who had whirled passengers the one hundred and fifty-eight miles to Shrewsbury in fourteen hours, forty-five minutes, to Birmingham in twelve hours at eleven miles per hour plus, or from the “Bull and Mouth,” at St. Martins-le-Grand, the two hundred and seventy miles to Newcastle in a matter of thirty hours, including stops. These same men, and their four-horse equipages, had been the wonder of their time, a race apart, as dissolute and dependable as the toughest infantry at the peak of training, yet here they were lining up for haulage jobs in their late forties and early fifties, traditional truculence undispelled by their desperate need to earn a living the only way they knew.

  He talked at length to one of them, a man named Blubb, who had driven a four-in-hand at seventeen, and later taken the overnight coach to and from Newark through ten winters of storm, snow and flood without a single accident to blot his record. It was from Blubb that Adam learned that these derelicts had one thing in common, an unremitting hatred of the innovation that had dispossessed them, which they referred to as “the gridiron” or “the tea-kettle,” and could hardly bring themselves to mention without the blasphemy for which they had once been famous. Blubb said, bluntly, “You’d never have got the half of us here, guv, if it hadn’t got about you was ready to challenge the bloody gridiron. We’ll serve any man who does that, who holds out agin ’em, as Chaplin and Home should ha’ done. Now there's a brace as can roast in hell for my money. Time was when they stabled fifteen hundred apiece o’ the best leaders and wheelers in creation, but what did they do after the bloody gridiron pushed as far as Brum? Went into partnership with ’em, and invested all the blunt we made for ’em in bloody railroad stock, while the likes of us were turned off to beg or starve or drive omnibus short stages, if we could fit ourselves for lad's work! Now you’re signing us on to hump baggage behind carthorses, and there's some here who would ha’ cried shame at driving ‘pickaxe’ or ‘unicorn’ a dozen years ago.”

  “It's regular work,” Adam said, “and there's no shame in that,” but the old coachman was unrepentant.

  “We’ll do it, Mr. Swann, but I’ll have you know one thing. It's not because it's that or starve, but because it's a pleasure to serve a man who can still smell out a good bit of horseflesh when he sees it, and’ll risk his shirt beating the bleeders at their own game! I’m not such a fool, mind, as to think we could ever compete for the passenger traffic, but we can still beat ’em in the haulage field, no matter how far they spread. I’ll take the job, and I’ll get through to places they can’t, and in weather hazards they stinking tea-kettles couden face, and you’ll find most of these brandy-faced devils over there in like mind, for it’ll prove we’re still flesh and blood, and not waitin’ on smoke and clatter for our meat and drink.”

  It says a good deal for the widening of Adam's mental horizons that he recognised at a glance how he could harness this thunderous truculence to his advantage, for his business was at once a direct challenge to the railroad, and an answer to its deficiences. He also saw the implacability of men like Blubb as the nucleus for an esprit de corps that might, with skill and patience, be injected into the enterprise. Against Avery's advice he signed on every ex-coach-and-four driver who applied, promising them thirty shillings a week basic plus overnight allowances. It was his first independent decision, and he never regretted it, despite the warning from Keate that some of these rejects drank to excess and carried themselves, on occasion, as if they were still passing the ribbons to a nobleman to drive a coach over a level stretch at a shilling a mile. Mixing with them, listening to their breezy reminiscences of the great days of the coaching era, he soon picked up their jargon, and perhaps it was this that encouraged him to view them as he would have viewed a newly raised regiment of troopers high in potential but without battle experience.

  As time went on his ideas about them crystallised and he introduced a uniform consisting of blue reefer jacket, leather breeches, yellow gaiters, and low-crowned hat with a band bearing the Swann insignia over the brim. To Keate's astonishment (for he and Tybalt thought of each of these men as earmarked for hell) the uniform was a succes
s, restoring to them a little of their pride, and elevating Adam to a pinnacle alongside the former coach proprietors, like Chaplin and Sherman, and this, as Tybalt warned him, was surely premature, for according to his ledgers twice as much money was going out as came in from the short-haul contracts they depended upon in the early days of the venture.

  Tybalt was right, of course. Recruitment was the least of Adam's worries. The dominant worry was always finance, for out of his starting capital of about four thousand he had laid out four-fifths in equipment, and that without opening a single branch depot. The staggering total of the initial outlay took his breath away when Tybalt brought him the figures on the last day of the old year, before they had earned a penny, or secured more than promises in the way of long-term contracts. His order with Blunderstone for the heavy drays and the light vans, that he thought of as his men-o’-war and pinnaces, cost him a little under two thousand four hundred pounds, and his middle-aged Clydesdales, bought in at a cut rate of thirty pounds per beast, accounted for a further one thousand three hundred. For the lighter Cleveland Bays he had to call on another draft on Avery, and when he had bought his harness he had less than three hundred in his account, including his own savings.

  The first month of the new year was a testing time. Somehow a wage-bill of round about seventy pounds a week had to be found, plus an additional twenty for forage, farriers, and harness fitters. It was Tybalt who staved off disaster by securing an unexpectedly large contract from the tannery where he had worked and the directors, attracted by a low quotation, paid out a quarter's advance. After that Keate came in with a short-haul contract between the docks and the nearby match factory, and then, but with agonising slowness, Avery's nebulous business contacts began to bear fruit, and a series of regular runs were established between a group of small manufactories south of the river, mostly wholesalers who needed daily transport to and from the docks to keep their warehouses from becoming choked.

  It was this that drew Adam's attention to the fact that very few of these smaller firms had transport systems of their own, finding it cheaper to rely on outside haulage. Immediate advantage was taken of this so that the Spring trading figures showed a small excess of income over expenditure. Keate went on worrying and so, but silently, did Adam. Only Avery never wavered, and when his advice was sought would reiterate his counsel to “think in guineas,” and urge his partner to drive his staff to breaking point in order to maintain Swann's reputation for punctuality. He also advised Adam to keep the vision of expansion well in view. Only thus, he would declare, could a raw amateur hope to capture the heavy hauls between isolated shire areas and railheads that served the sources of raw material so vital to the manufactories. He advanced another argument in support of an invasion to the north and west, basing it on the rapid expansion of the cities, where local populations were increasing at the fantastic rate of a thousand families a week.

  He would say, rolling the eternal cheroot between his lips, “They’ve all got to be fed, man. They can’t work a twelve-hour day on broth and potato scrapings. They need meat, milk and vegetables, and every back-to-back street of hutches these damned jerry-builders run up reduces the homegrown yield within local delivery distance of the mills and furnaces. These places were still growing their own food a few years ago, and every pint of milk they sold off the streets came from a cow within ten minutes’ walk of where it was sold, but not now. Go see for yourself. Some of these new towns shelter a hundred thousand hands, and nothing but a few cabbages grow within miles of ’em.”

  “How about the railway companies’ spur lines?” Adam argued, partly against himself, for he had never forgotten Aaron Walker's advice concerning the empty squares of the gridiron. “Most of the big companies are laying down branch lines to every country town within twenty miles of an industrial centre. Come up to the eyrie and look at my railway map.”

  Avery said, hunching his shoulders in that suit-yourself gesture that was characteristic of him, “I don’t give a fig for your railway map, notwithstanding the trouble you take to keep it up-to-date. That map is all but complete now. The main line Exeter-Truro extension was the last big thrust. From now on all the little fish will be gobbled up by the pikes. I’ll make a wager with you. I’ve got fifty guineas here that says twenty years from now every railway in the country will come under one of six sets of Directors, and don’t let that Bible-thumping Keate persuade you otherwise. Pike aren’t interested in tiddlers once they’ve cornered every yard of permanent way between here and John-o’-Groats. They prefer red meat, and they won’t go looking for that in hopfields and turnip patches. Some of these country districts won’t get a branch line within the lifetime of the people who live there, but people do live there, more than two-thirds of the nation still live there, and to continue doing so they’ll be obliged to export nine-tenths of their produce to the cities. Study maps by all means, but not that railway chart hanging in your office. Make maps of your own, and trace ’em over with the rail network that already exists.”

  It was this conversation that induced Adam to devote most of that Spring and Summer to what he was to look back upon as a railway odyssey. It took him over every railway between the Carlisle-Berwick-Newcastle track in the north, and Brunel's broad-gauge track in the west. In the course of these journeys he left the railway in order to make any number of exploratory trips into the rural areas separating the triangles and rectangles and oblongs of what coachman Blubb called “the bleedin’ gridiron they’ve laid on the country.” And wherever he rode or walked in these months he carried a red leather day-book that became, for as long as he lived, a ready reckoner in terms of distances, road surfaces, river crossings, gradients and, above all, accessibility to railroads built or in building. And this in turn related to the crafts and practices and natural wealth of every district he visited, so that when at last he returned home it was not, as Henrietta had hoped, to take a holiday, but to closet himself in his den at the top of the house and translate the day-book data into a gigantic section map that ultimately covered seven of the eight octagonal walls of his office, with the eighth reserved for the faded map Aaron Walker had given him the day he came ashore from the clipper.

  It was this enormous map, more than any knowledge gained in his wanderings, that fired his imagination in a way it had not been fired since his encounter with the disenchanted railway superintendent For this was his own creation, owing nothing to Walker, or Keate, or the ledger-bound Tybalt, or even Avery, whose advice had sped him on his pilgrimage. He saw it as a blueprint for the entire future of Swann-on-Wheels, indicating, as well as the line of flight in the first stage of a migration into the shires, its likely breeding grounds stationed as far apart as the Welsh coast and the Norfolk-Lincoln border, the Isle of Wight and the slopes of the Cheviots in the far north. Into each sub-section went its yield, actual and potential, a miscellany of everything from fish to filbert, butter to butterscotch, slate to sheep, chalk to china clay. It was much more than a map. It was a private encyclopaedia of almost every human activity that went on in remote areas so that when, years later, business cronies met over their chops, and somebody would mention a village or a valley and ask, in the way of Victorians, “what it was good for,” someone would say, with friendly irony, “Ask Swann. He flies over it twice a week,” and the gibe, or variation of it, found its way into the glossary of city small-talk.

  But that was much later. For the time being Swann's flights were limited to a quadrilateral staked out by Maidstone, Windsor, Uxbridge, and West Ham, and his insignia, the swan with waggon wheels where wings should have been, had never been seen a day's haul beyond London, or talked of either, unless one recalls the prattle of a girl riding pillion behind a man who plucked her from a puddle on a moor years before.

  He thought of his territory as an ambitious farmer thinks of his meadows and again like a farmer he gave each parcel of land a name that might have remained a nickname had he not, in a moment of mischief, entered those names on the compan
y's maps. After that neither he nor anyone in his employ ever thought of the territories by any other title.

  He went about it in a methodical way, first tracing out the borders of the sections, then relating each of them to the districts on either side, particularly those areas where local crafts were practised, or areas that were known for the production of a special crop, a mineral, or even a delicacy. Then, having marked the nearest railhead and made allowances for natural barriers that promised to keep the railways at bay, he ringed twelve separate stamping grounds, each with its provincial capital where the local base would be established. He then went to work tracing waggon routes between the bases and the extremities of each section, and feedback routes from capital to railhead, after which he listed the local products of all the sub-areas in all the main sections, relating each to its likely needs in terms of transport equipment. This part of his survey, of course, was largely guesswork, but it was inspired guesswork. By now he not only knew what specialist goods every shire in the country produced, but also the probable markets for those goods in the nearest distribution centres and, above all, in the capital itself.