God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  Tybalt, he discovered, he could trust to complete any task set him, and they were in almost hourly contact with one another, usually through a booming speaking-tube that connected the belfry with the counting-house near the weighbridge. Keate, who was inclined to be over-conscientious, was obsessed with the shortage of reliable carters, men he felt he could personally recommend to an employer who had lived up to all his initial promises and was now absorbing most of the local waifs who could be lured into regular employment. It was by no means easy, he told Adam, to find men who could be trusted out of his sight in places as far away as Salisbury, Exeter, Abergavenny, and Maidstone, and it was essential, as he saw his duty, to put such men as consented to serve in the provinces in charge of thoroughly trustworthy depot managers, who could be relied upon to resist the temptation to “shoulder” goods, as men like Blubb had once “shouldered” passengers, that is to say, carry them intermediate distances on a coach-run and pocket the fares. Such men were difficult to find, and of those interviewed only a few signed on to undergo a period of training at Headquarters.

  It sometimes seemed to Adam, vetting all the applicants, that there were now only two kinds of Englishmen. Humourless, Bible-educated evangelists, like Keate and Tybalt, who although hardworking and scrupulously honest, allowed their judgements to be clouded by moral prejudices, and hard-drinking, hard-swearing rascals like Blubb, who could be relied upon to do a good day's work but were usually of an extremely independent turn of mind. Even the waggoners and their apprentices tended to drift into one or other of these two camps, mutually contemptuous of one another, and united only by their loyalty to the man who filled their weekly wage-packet. Among the coachmen there was a minority of Holy Joes, enlisted by Keate or Tybalt from the lowest strata of the mission hall congregations, but the majority were men of Blubb's stamp, who had known better days, and were not slow to remind younger colleagues that they had once conveyed belted earls over the turnpike roads at fifteen miles an hour and were now reduced to humping goods from one district to another at an average rate of under ten.

  He had almost given up hope of finding men with managerial propensities, who were neither preachers nor crusty old drunkards, with a hatred of everything associated with the railroad. Then, out of the blue, John Catesby presented himself, and Adam discovered an entirely new type of artisan who seemed to him a direct product of the new age, a man who was equipped to meet its brassy challenge and prepared to fight hard to enlarge his precarious foothold in society.

  Catesby was frank from the outset. He was partially self-educated and both conscious and proud of his essential place in a world where a man's labour was all he had to sell. He demanded a guarantee of six months’ employment, subject to Adam's satisfaction and expressed a preference for piece-time rates against the basic wage and out-of-town overnight allowance. He was a tall, ravaged Lancastrian, who had spent his childhood in the mill before the Ten Hour Act went some way towards the abolition of juvenile slavery, and his experiences there had left an indelible mark upon him. His truculence, however, unlike Blubb's, stemmed not from a distrust of mechanisation (of which he wholly approved) but from a hatred of exploitation of the majority by the lucky few, men like Sam Rawlinson, who had made the grade and were now hard at work forgetting how their success had been achieved.

  Adam, liking his outspokenness, encouraged him to talk about the laissez-faire relationship between labour and capital that men like Palmerston championed, declaring it to be the only road to riches for master and man. Catesby, risking the job he had come seeking, denied this doctrine, saying that it was the best prescription he knew for a French-style revolution, and could only be made to work for both parties if the labour forces of the country organised themselves into guilds or unions, like the craftsmen among their mediaeval forefathers. “As it is,” he said, “the only safeguard the majority has against enslavement is the presence in Westminster of a humanist minority, led by Lord Shaftesbury, and he has to fight vested interests every inch of the way, even for such obvious improvements as fenced-in machinery. I’m not quoting from an anarchist's pamphlet, Mr. Swann. I’ve slaved under the overseer's strap in one of their damned mills, a mite of nine, working a twelve-hour day, and being beaten black and blue if he nodded off and was lucky enough to fall backwards and not face foremost into the cogs! I’ve seen folk treated as no plantation owner in the cotton fields would treat blacks he valued as property, and this is a Christian country! I’ll admit to another thing and you can make what you like of it. I’ve done time in one of their stinking gaols for rioting in Bolton before I were twenty, and I wouldn’t be telling you that if it hadn’t got around that you were a good man to work for, who pays over the odds hourly rates, and don’t treat men like cattle.”

  Adam made one of his swift, intuitive decisions. “I’m looking for a man to open up northern territory,” he said, “and I prefer local men if I can find them. My base up there, in what I call the Polygon, will be Appleby. It's a biggish area, and virgin ground so far as I’m concerned, well north of the cotton belt but within reach of the rail network, with a south-western limit at Preston. In that kind of country, where there are still hundreds of towns and villages bypassed by the North Western, I hope to carry manufactured goods in and farm produce out. If there's enough work for them I’ll send in a couple of men-o’-war—flat drays—to haul graphite, lead, slate, and marble, but for the moment it will be lighter vehicles, perhaps half-a-dozen to begin with. Are you a married man, Catesby?”

  “Yes, with two grown children, a boy and a girl. The boy, Tam, is unemployed, and we live in one room and a cubbyhole off the Jamaica Road. Could I take the boy along as a waggoner?”

  “Providing Mr. Keate approves him,” Adam said. “It would do your family good to breathe clean air again. I’m offering forty shillings a week but if you want piece rates it would depend on what we haul once we get started.”

  Catesby said, knitting his brow, “I’ll take the basic for the first twelvemonth, Mr. Swann. If I increase the turnover we could come to a new arrangement, mebbe. You won’t find me wanting. I’m not one of these scabs forever bellyaching about the privileges of capital and selling the boss short on labour.”

  “I’m sure you’re not,” Adam said, “and as for that spell in gaol I regard it as a recommendation. I’ve seen what goes on up there, and I sometimes wonder why we still send our missionaries to Papua and Calabar.”

  They shook hands on it and within twenty-four hours Catesby was travelling north to hunt up a yard and stabling in Appleby, with the promise of getting his first waggons within a fortnight. Before he went Tybalt gave him a rundown on the results of the canvass in northern Lancashire, western Yorkshire, and the Lakeland area, Catesby undertaking to make personal contact with the farmers and small manufacturers who had asked for quotations.

  The engagement of Catesby began a small run of luck in an area that had caused the maximum anxiety, the enlistment of reliable men as base managers. Within a week two other vacancies were filled, the Mountain Square and the Kentish Triangle, the first by a thoughtful, middle-aged Welshman, who seemed to lack the gregariousness and garrulity of his race, the other by Blubb, himself a Kentishman, who surprised everyone by applying for the Tonbridge vacancy, where he had innumerable contacts among the old coaching and mail-carrying fraternity. Adam gave him a trial on the strength of this, for he had an intimate knowledge of the roads and the contract situation down there was already well advanced.

  For roughly the same reasons he engaged the Welshman, Lovell, who had travelled the Mountain Square as a packman. Lovell spoke Welsh and this seemed to Adam an essential qualification for a manager based in Abergavenny, and concerned almost exclusively with the fanning fraternities in the Principality. Lovell, it seemed, had no great admiration for his countrymen, placing small trust in their promises represented by the canvass.

  “I’ll be satisfied when I see the colour of their money,” he said. “It's a rare place for bad debts and
no Englishman could collect them.”

  Lovell and Blubb left for their depots in the second week of June, Blubb actually driving one of the fully-loaded three-horse drays allocated to Maidstone. He voiced an ultimate grumble when he saw the stablemen harnessing a third Clydesdale in front of the two wheelers.

  “Time an’ agin I’ve spat at men driving ‘unicorn,’” he growled, heaving himself on to the box, “and here I am doing it, be Christ!”

  Keate, overhearing him, reproved him for taking the Lord's name in vain but Blubb, who habitually called his immediate superior “Creepin’ Jesus,” was unabashed. He said, giving his whip a crack that could be heard across the yard, “I got no bloody call to pay lip service to the bleedin’ pulpit. I once pulled a bishop out of a bog when we overturned the old Tally-Ho, just short of Canterbury. Saved ’is bleedin’ neck I did, an’ what did I get? ’Arf a guinea? Not on yer life. ’E makes straight for the gaffer, ’fore he got the mud orf ’is gaiters, accusing me o’ reckless drivin’!” He moved off, blowing out his purple cheeks, and Adam, watching him go, wondered if he had made a wise choice. The following day Hamlet Ratcliffe presented himself, asking for the Exeter vacancy and of the four depot managers he seemed, at first acquaintance, the most engaging.

  Ratcliffe had never sat behind a horse in his life, but he was familiar with a variety of Westcountry trades, having been trained as an auctioneer in Barnstaple and had never lost his North Devon burr during his ten unsuccessful years in the capital. Like Catesby and Blubb he had endured hard times, the firm that had tempted him east having recently gone bankrupt. “I daresay I could get a billet hereabouts,” he said, “for I know the trade, Mr. Swann, but I’m zick o’ the bliddy vogs and clatter, and zo is the missis. The streets yerabouts was paaved wi’ gold, so they told me backalong. All I zeed zince I took the Great Western out o’ Bristol is zoot. Youm offering me a starter of vorty shillin’, ten short o’ what I was paid up under St. Paul's, but the missis says I’ll live to spend me wages down-along, whereas up yer I’ll be carried out in a box bevore I’m vifty.”

  Adam said he entertained high hopes of the westcountry, for it seemed to him unlikely that the uplands of Devon, and the territory north of the new line to Truro, would ever be exploited by railways. Ratcliffe agreed, reminding him that not so long ago the West had a bigger population than any area of the British Isles outside London. “Tidden zo no more o’ course,” he added, sadly, “on account o’ they bliddy savages up north. What's us cummin’ tu, I wonder, wi’ volk crowdin’ into they ole factories? Time was when us lived well enough on the land, and tiz the land us’ll vall back on come a new slump or any fresh trouble wi’ they ole French.”

  He spoke as if the chapter of the Napoleonic wars had been closed the day before yesterday, but Tybalt, who talked to him about agricultural prospects in the area, gave him a favourable report and said he considered him fitted for the job. So Ratcliffe departed ahead of his small fleet of waggons, having secured premises in advance by telegraphing an old friend who ran the White Hart, in the shadow of Exeter Cathedral.

  For the first time in weeks Adam was able to sit back and relax for a spell. Musing over the juxtaposition of the names of those signed on to preside over three of the depots—Catesby, Lovell, and Ratcliffe—he was reminded of a piece of doggerel he had learned at school, concerning the intimates of the last Yorkist king and repeated, chuckling,

  The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the dog

  Ruled all England under a hog.

  It seemed to him some kind of omen, and these days he was very much alive to portents.

  3

  Before the leaves fell she was pregnant again and proud of it, having made up her mind to waste no time founding the line of swaggering sons she had long since resolved to launch upon the world now that she had persuaded him to provide an impressive background for a race of warriors.

  She had sensed that he was a somewhat reluctant partner in this enterprise and had even gone so far as to doubt the wisdom of deliberately increasing their family so rapidly, but by then she was taking his measure more accurately than he had taken hers, or was ever to take it.

  He had his waggon teams, proliferating all over the country, and she had her own obsession, and it seemed to her a more dignified ambition than that of humping other people's packages and milk churns over hill and dale. She had almost forgotten her indirect part in the origins of the venture, and when she saw one of his waggons it was not often she recalled it was she who had suggested the insignia that now made the name Swann prominent in newspaper advertisements and was becoming known, she supposed, to almost everyone associated with the transportation of goods. The engraved ring was there to remind her, but she did not often wear it about here for fear of losing it in a flower bed. Gracefully, and without acrimony she bowed herself out of that part of his life, and he soon ceased to tell her anything about the business unless it was a comic incident, like the ex-coachman Blubb's capture of a pilferer he caught running from an unattended waggon with a ham under his arm, or how the northern manager, Catesby, unaware of their relationship with Sam, had actually hauled one of his boilers into Rochdale where the new Rawlinson mill had replaced the Seddon Moss ruin.

  She had both her husband's and father's ability to concentrate on what she thought of as essentials. Tryst was one, and her enchantment with it grew day by day through the long dry summer. Another was her resolve to produce children in whom she could take pride. A third, of course, was how to handle him both as man and husband.

  The mirror assured her she had not only regained her original shape, with no more than a trifling addition to her waistline, but had taken on a kind of glow that showed in her fresh complexion and an access of vitality that warmed her blood down here in sun and country air. Adam had remarked on it when he came back from his first tour of inspection in the north and west, a tour that kept him from home for a month. She had missed him, of course, but not as much as before, for who could be lonely or feel neglected in a house and grounds of these dimensions, and under the flattering tutelage of Ellen Michelmore, who guided all her decisions regarding furnishing, provisioning, engagement of staff, and a hundred other matters?

  She now had a cook, a parlourmaid, a kitchenmaid, and a sewing-woman, in addition to a gardener, a gardener's boy, and a handyman who did inside and outside work. Ellen, who had ordered her husband to sell the flooded mill and take up residence in the largest of the lodges, was her major-domo and would stand no nonsense from a staff that had intimidated Henrietta because they asked so many questions that she was unable to answer, and in a dialect she could not always understand, but she soon learned to retreat into the shadow of her dear Ellen, who never presumed and was as efficient as Mrs. Worrell had been in house management but treated her as though she was a fragile and superior being, and not a tiresome twelve-year-old. Under Ellen, who had seen service in a Hertfordshire country mansion, she learned to make and receive calls, to compose prim little invitations and shopping lists at her writing bureau, to take solemn carriage rides in the calash, to pretend to an interest in what the gardener raised in the hothouse, to cut and arrange flowers, and even to scold the girls, although she took care to keep clear of Mrs. Hitchens, the cook, with whom Ellen maintained a feud.

  It was, she supposed, as close to the life of a fairytale princess as one could expect here on earth, and most of Henrietta's fantasies could be traced back to princesses in fairytale books drooping over castle battlements and wearing conical hats with billowing veils and gold slippers the size and shape of chisels.

  But this was only her outward life, and she accepted it (though gratefully) as a just reward for someone who had had the courage to run away from home in a thunderstorm, and had later displayed the sense to hold fast to a prince's coat-tails. As to her relationship with the prince, for some time now she was, despite progress, not as sure of herself as she would have liked, for she had discovered that he possessed three identities and she had never decided whic
h was the real one, or, for that matter, which she preferred.

  There was the paternal and bountiful Adam, who was such a generous provider, even though he continued to treat her as if she was a wilful girl about seventeen, and had a disconcerting trick of giving her so much of her own way that she was dismayed when he pulled her up with a jolt, the way he would check the restive horses he liked to ride. Then there was the absent-minded, almost elderly Adam, who mooned about during the weekends as though he begrudged the time spent in her company and was homesick for his stableyard, his lading bills, and all those hobbledehoys with whom he had surrounded himself. And finally there was the hearty, bottom-pinching Adam who came striding into the house, swung her off her feet in a first, crushing embrace and, as like as not, whisked her upstairs before she had digested her supper and lost no time at all demonstrating that he had few regrets about saddling himself with a wife who, as he was not slow to point out, would ruin them with her extravagances and fashionable fads. In fact, his personal approach to her seemed to depend on a variety of imponderables so that in some ways, now that his business was launched, it was like getting married all over again to someone she had known a long time ago. His mood was dictated, she discovered, by things wholly outside her control; how much money he was making or losing; what difficulties he had encountered in what she thought of as a jungle where men struggled with one another for spoils with weapons used by her father and the Goldthorpes. It depended also on whether he had just solved a problem or was in the process of solving one, on how long they had been separated, on his appetite, on all manner of things that needed to be considered in advance, so that the period immediately preceding a homecoming was always an anxious one, needing time on her part to step out of the role of lady of the manor and back into that of the silly little goose she had been the night he set her down at that Windermere hotel, plied her with claret, and initiated her into the mysteries of her new status. For this, so her instinct told her, was how he preferred her on these occasions, not the grown woman she had become but the girl he had carried pillion across the fells, someone he could indulge and dominate but who was expected, none the less, to enter into the spirit and practise of his frolics.