God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  He travelled up from Euston in one of the L. & N.W. smokers, hauled by one of the new Crewe locomotives at what seemed to him a prodigious speed, and Catesby met him at the depot, driving him to Salford where a yard had been rented to handle the traffic north of the Manchester-Liverpool line. Adam was impressed by what he saw. Catesby already had five one-horse pinnaces operating in this area, mostly concerned with the distribution of bolts of manufactured fabrics and hardware to small towns on the western edge of the Pennines, but his main efforts were directed towards developing a system of transporting heavy machinery to out-of-the-way mills in the north and east of the county, where the delays in the goods yards caused men like Rawlinson, regarding time as money, to find alternative means of getting their raw materials from the Manchester depots to their premises. Here, in the extreme southern section of his beat, Catesby had a dozen men stationed.

  He said, “It's largely on account of machines being sent out of the foundries in sections light enough to manhandle. Time was when their kind of equipment was built up in a single unit, needing an eight- or ten-horse team to drag them off the sidings. Nowadays most millowners can assemble their own machinery, and there is a steady demand for spare parts that are needed within hours unless the whole output is to be halted on account of a defective crank or flywheel. I had the advantage of knowing the trade, and that brandy-faced chap Rawlinson has been a missionary on your behalf, Mr. Swann. I made him one quick delivery, and he's told all his cronies for miles around.”

  Adam was not surprised that Catesby, despite knowledge that Sam was his father-in-law, should none the less refer to him as “that brandy-faced chap,” for this was Catesby's way. He was impressed, however, by Rawlinson's apparent eagerness to boost Swann-on-Wheels, and said, “Knowing my father-in-law, I’m persuaded our rates must be well below those of competitors. That old rascal wouldn’t patronise us out of sentiment. I’ll call and see him when I’ve finished my business in Hexham and Keswick. You’ve made a fine start up here, Catesby, and I’d like to thank you. You can go on piece-work rates now if you prefer. If not, I suggest you work on a commission basis.”

  Catesby, a true Northerner, seemed embarrassed by praise, grunting something to the effect that “this could be worked out as time went on,” but adding offhandedly that he was encouraged by the initial figures. Then, becoming thoughtful, he went on, “Things are changing up here, Mr. Swann. Some millowners are finding themselves obliged to co-operate with their hands in a way that would have been impossible a few years ago. There's even talk of an operatives’ union among the lads.” He glanced shrewdly at Adam under grey brows. “How would you respond to the introduction of that kind of bargaining factor in all the basic trades?”

  “I’m hanged if I know,” said Adam, lightly, “but it can’t concern me, can it? I transport goods, I don’t manufacture them.”

  “You employ men,” Catesby said, obstinately. “You must have well over a hundred on your pay-roll at this moment.”

  “I can’t see a scattered gang of waggoners forming a union, but if they ever did, and a level-headed chap like you was behind it, I’m sure we could arrive at some mutually satisfactory arrangement.”

  For the first time since they had met Catesby relaxed his defensive attitude, saying, with emphasis, “Then you can depend on me, Mr. Swann, for I know how to distinguish between a good gaffer and a jumped-up swab. Your kind will always get the best out of a working man, and that cuts both ways, although few employers can bring themselves to believe it,” and then it was Adam's turn to feel embarrassed.

  He travelled north-east, taking the North Western to Leeds, the Leeds and Northern as far as Darlington, and then on through the network of the Newcastle and Carlisle to Hexham, crossing country with which he was unfamiliar. He passed the journey making notes in his daybook, having at last learned the trick of writing legibly in fast-moving trains. It seemed to him, up here among so many inter-related lines, that the prospects of road-haulage were barren, and he was also confirmed in his earlier prejudice that the industrialised belt enclosed by Harrogate, Redcar, Newcastle, and Allendale, at the northeastern tip of the Polygon, could not support an independent service unless he was lucky enough to find another Catesby. This was not the case, however, in the territory marked out as the Border Triangle. Here, apart from the coastal line, and the new Border Counties Company, the land was ripe for exploitation, and when he met the Scots haulier Fraser at Hexham he saw at once that Keate's guess had been accurate, and that Fraser's stock was indeed a bargain, nine medium-sized waggons good for another two years’ work, and twenty-three heavy crossbreds, much inferior to his own Clydesdales and Cleveland Bays, but not the broken-down crocks he had expected to find in the stables of a man who was selling up.

  “Why are you selling the business?” he asked bluntly, and Fraser said because he had no head for paperwork, and that was what every business demanded of its owner nowadays on account of competition from London-based railways. He was, Adam thought, an open-air man, who had probably enjoyed travelling the roads when it was no more than a matter of moving from town to town at his own pace, but the complexities of the railway age, and the price they had put upon speed, had broken the rhythm of his life, and he was ready to work for someone else if he could find a younger man to employ him.

  “Would you consider staying on as my area manager?” Adam asked, and the man seemed astonished.

  “You’re intending to take over the runs as well as the stock? Up here? In border country, that's as foreign to you as London is to me?”

  “That's the point,” Adam said. “I prefer to employ local men.”

  Fraser considered. “There’ll be no paper-work?”

  “Some, but most of it is handled by Headquarters. You could make hauls yourself if you felt inclined.”

  “Aye, I’d like that fine,” Fraser said, thoughtfully, “for snow and rain never bothered me like being stuck in an office. My father was a chapman, a pedlar that is, and my mother another's daughter, so wandering the roads is bred in blood and bone. How much time would I be expected to spend in the yard?”

  “That depends on your turnover. I pay two pounds ten shillings a week for a foreman waggoner, but later on, if the work merits it, I can get you a clerk. The point is, you’ve already broken the ground up here, but I’m getting your goodwill thrown in for the price of your waggons, teams, and stabling. Would you like time to think it over?”

  “No, I wouldna’,” the man said, “for there's no’ so much ‘goodwill’ as ye call it. Give me the price I’m asking for the stock and I’ll stay as manager and find carters who can be trusted to pass an alehouse without haltering.”

  And so it was settled, and during his crosscountry journey to Keswick Adam reflected that he had been very lucky in a trade he had entered as a raw amateur, for here he was opening his fifth sub-depot, and four were already paying off, two of them handsomely. By next spring he would have waggons and teams in all twelve of the territories, and Swann-on-Wheels would be on the way to becoming a household word, like Pear's Soap and Bryant & May's matches. But then he wondered if he would lose something he valued by over-expansion, reflecting that enjoyment of the past two years had been derived from the opportunities offered of learning at first-hand what happened to a rural society when it took off its smock and populated ten thousand factories and foundries in a single generation. He was deeply interested, and always had been, in people like Keate and Tybalt and Catesby, and this new man, Fraser, not as individuals but as segments of the new society, and this, he supposed, had a bearing on his conception of England, English traditions, English values, and England's comparatively new preoccupation with the acquisition of an overseas empire. Throughout the whole of his youth it was this last aspect of national life with which he had been concerned, and against which, he recalled, he had rebelled.

  The train of thought led him on to contemplate England and the English in the abstract. The evangelical zeal and rooted urbanism of Kea
te and Tybalt was only one facet of the race. Cutting a furrow of their own were the men like Catesby, uncompromising in their conception of human dignity, and ready, if necessary, to fight and starve for what they regarded as basic human rights. Then again there were the Blubbs and the Frasers, clinging stubbornly to an England that had begun to wither the day Stephenson laid the first yard of rail along the old Stockton-Darlington line, and there were many other segments that he had taken for granted, the Robertses and the Averys and men of Rawlinson's stamp, who were to be found in their hundreds in Threadneedle Street and on the Manchester Exchange. Thinking of Sam led him to ponder the impact the new iron age had had upon Englishwomen. Most of the men who had made fortunes in a matter of years seemed to have felt obligated to consign their womenfolk to a national seraglio, where they spent their lives whispering, gossiping, and parading a succession of French fashions, so that unless one was almost brutally frank with them (as he sometimes felt he had been with Henrietta), they turned themselves into mindless little dolls before they were twenty-five.

  His thoughts, thus diverted, dwelt upon Henrietta for the remainder of the journey, wondering how much nervous energy he would have to expend in the years ahead teaching her that marriage was much more than an exchange of one set of shibboleths for another, and that he had no fancy to spawn a family of red-coated martinets of the kind he had seen dancing attendance on dolts like Raglan in the Crimea, or copies of Roberts, with his romantic imperial visions. Surely that part of the English tradition was as dead as Blubb's Tally-Ho coach, and Fraser's three-mile-an-hour package deliveries. It would be more rewarding, he thought, to raise a spread of pretty daughters, and spend one's declining years teaching them to put a proper price on themselves as the consorts of a new generation of husbands, the enriched sons of artisans and mechanics.

  2

  The Colonel met him at the gate and told him at once that Charlotte was on her deathbed and that he appreciated his act in turning aside to pay what would surely prove a final visit. The old man looked frail himself, Adam thought, and wondered how he would fare up here alone when the prop of his sister's stronger personality had been knocked away. The redoubtable old lady seemed to him smaller and less formidable than he remembered. She could still converse, he found, but in an urgent whisper, that involved a whistle like the approach of a far-off train, and when he took her hand, and told her about her great-niece Stella, he detected a softening of the rigid lines of her face and a momentary gleam in an eye that had silenced so many noisy children when she ran her dame's school and done battle with those who disturbed her brother's peace.

  He sat there wondering what he should tell her of an enterprise he knew she thought of as vulgar, and unbecoming, but he need not have bothered. She soon demonstrated that she was more interested in Henrietta than in his concerns, and this he found puzzling, for the old besom had bullied the girl mercilessly when she was on hand. She now atoned, however, saying, in that insistent whisper, “Took a rare fancy to that gel. She's a better wife than you deserve, and she’ll prove it before she's done with you. She's got a will of her own and you might have done worse, boy. Have you realised that yet?”

  He said, smiling, that he had, and that nobody need remind him Henrietta had a will of her own, for she had talked him into hanging a millstone round his neck in the form of a country estate that he could only visit one day in ten.

  “That was the right thing to do,” Charlotte said, with a tiny splutter of malice. “It offsets having a husband in trade. It's a pity your child was a girl. Henrietta told me she wanted boys, to carry on the family tradition.”

  “That was just her way of enlisting you,” Adam said, but his aunt wheezed, “She's plenty of time. There's another due, isn’t there? I hope she’ll be luckier this time.” She stopped, rallying her small stock of breath for what emerged as the first direct appeal he could ever recall her making, to him or to anyone else. “Listen, boy, I’ve done my best for your father all the time you were abroad. Will you do something for me? Will you make me a promise that if that child of hers is a boy you’ll have the grace and good sense to let him take up a commission? I don’t ask this for myself, or on account of the family but for her. She…she wrote to me on the subject.”

  “She wrote to you? Henrietta did?”

  The old lady withdrew her hand and opened a gaol of a handbag that stood on the night table, taking out a letter addressed in what Adam recognised as Henrietta's round, babyish hand. “Read it,” she ordered.

  It occurred to Adam then that it was strange he should have been thinking of this obsession of Henrietta's on the way over here, and the letter, a short and simple one that had obviously cost Henrietta some trouble to compose, touched him when he thought of her sitting at that bureau of hers, with her tongue curling between her lips, as she struggled to put her thoughts on paper and enlist an ally.

  “My dearest Aunt Charlotte,” she had written, “Adam tells me he is going to visit you and I’m glad because it is time he did and I wish I was with him because I shall never forget how kind you were to me that time he brought me home and I was so much in need of friends. I am expecting again in early June, and I don’t have to tell you how glad I am, for you remember I so wanted a family of boys. I love little Stella, of course, and she is going to be pretty, but I did very much want a boy and shall weep if I have another girl in June. Adam is away from home a great deal, but he seems to like what he is doing and I do love him very much, Aunt Charlotte, even though I am still sorry he gave over being a soldier like the Colonel and all the other Swanns. However, I do mean to make a soldier out of this one whatever he says, and I am sure you approve and so will the Colonel. My best love to you, dear Aunt Charlotte, and to Adam's father, and I hope your bronkitis is gone when the weather gets better. Your loving niece, Henrietta.”

  He did not say what was in his mind, finding it difficult to tell her that he knew Henrietta far better than she did, and that this appeal was no more than a crafty backdoor approach to achieve what had, indeed, already been achieved, a confrontation on the importance of family tradition. It passed through his mind that here was an unlikely alliance, an old woman, rooted in a tradition that went back across the three centuries, and the vanity of a girl who wrinkled her nose at realities that had been meat and drink to her father and probably a long string of Rawlinsons. But the old lady was now looking at him intently and he said, with a shrug, “Very well, since you both seem so bound to family precedent I’ll give him the option, providing he wants it. You’ll live another twenty years and be on hand to greet some pimply lad when he struts into the house in his scarlet and gold. There’ll be no question of buying him a commission by then. He’ll have to show some aptitude for soldiering,” and she said, “Poof! As if a Swann would lack it!” and then dropped off to sleep, so that he felt some small satisfaction in bringing her a composure she had probably lacked since the arrival of that extremely artful letter.

  He said, when the Colonel and he were at supper, “Don’t think of staying up here alone if she goes, sir. Henrietta would like you to make your home with us, and I should like it too. There's room enough in all conscience, and you’ll find our part of Kent very much to your taste. Henrietta rides now and it would be pleasant to think of you squiring her round the countryside when I’m away.”

  The old man seemed attracted by the proposal, for he cleared his throat, saying, “She really does remind me of your mother, boy,” and his glance shifted to the portrait of the little French woman over the fireplace. He went on, “Something almost piratical about the way we Swanns do our courting. I came across your mother in a pastrycook's on what I thought of, until then, as enemy soil. Never had second thoughts about her nor her about me. Then you have to scoop a wife from some Godforsaken moor, and apart from the colour of her eyes they’re as alike as two peas. It doesn’t end there, either. There was that tale of your greatgrandfather, who served under that damned scoundrel Cumberland. He married the orphan of one of
the MacDonalds who had fought at Culloden. Had to resign his commission on that account I’m told, for he could hardly stand by while The Butcher hunted his wife's kin up and down the glens. Maybe our true role is pacification through marriage.”

  “Henrietta would enjoy that story about great-grandfather,” said Adam. “It has the correct romantic touch and doesn’t necessarily have to be true. Will you pack up and come south if you have to?”

  “Aye,” said the old man, “gladly. You two and your children are all I’ve got now.”

  He rode post to Windermere and travelled down to the Rochdale area where he sent his card along to the gaunt new mill, already aiming one more plume of smoke at the blameless sky. A message was brought to him within the hour, and he walked up the hill to an offloading siding where Sam awaited him in one of the bays, square jaw set, legs planted astride, as though poised to repulse any new attempt upon his dignity as a local overlord. In spite of his stance Adam noticed he had mellowed, and that his aggressive attitude was a pose. There was an aura of conciliation about him and a flabbiness that had not been there when he had come storming into the house to reclaim his daughter two and a half years before.