God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  He saw it all in terms of a succession of hayrides, of the kind that he and his brothers had enjoyed in the days before the railway had come snorting down the river bottoms, and it was in these terms that he put it forward, a little diffidently, promising as a sideline but nothing more. It was Adam, two hundred miles to the east, who grasped the full significance of the idea on the instant, who saw the means of linking it to the modish cult of the seaside holiday, ushered in by the railways. For whereas Hamlet Ratcliffe thought of an excursionist as a purely local phenomenon Adam recognised his national implications at a glance. Having written Hamlet a congratulatory letter, and doubled the bonus due in respect of the Courtenay-Hopgood house removal, he circulated a memo to every base manager whose territory embraced a spa, a ruin, or a seaside resort. Like most of his directives it was brief and factual, reading, “For General Circulation and Comment Within Seven Days. It is expected that heavy vehicles will soon be in use in the Western Wedge during summer months as sightseeing conveyances, carrying day excursionists to places of interest. Information required for possible extension of this use of idle waggons in suitable areas is summarised below, viz:

  1. Do you consider it a practical proposition in your territory?

  2. Could available vehicles be adapted on the spot to purpose defined, i.e. fitted with roll-back canopy and back-to-back seat-accommodation?

  3. Please supply short list of popular landmarks (i.e., castles, abbeys, beauty spots, etc.) within an easy day's haul of base, say 20-mile maximum there and back.

  4. Have you on present staff a waggoner able to act as local guide in addition to driving?

  5. General comments, if any…”

  A copy of this directive ultimately found its way to Hamlet Ratcliffe, who read it aloud to Augusta over the breakfast table. By then however, he had three excursion brakes in full service between Exeter and Plymouth and thus had a headstart over Catesby, in the Polygon, and Goodbody, in Crescent North. Only Blubb, with an old coachie's instinctive eye for perks, was mounting a regular run to Chislehurst Caves and Canterbury Cathedral. It was towards September, Augusta noted, when Swann-on-Wheels excursion brakes had been seen and commented upon as far apart as Snowdonia, Rydalwater, Fountains Abbey, and Stonehenge, that his pride in initiating such a profitable sideline became tinged with jealousy, prompting him to say, as he surveyed a photograph sent him of a brake setting off for Hampton Court: “Gordamme, Gussie, look at that! You’d ha’ thowt it was the Gaffer's idea, woulden ’ee now?” and Augusta murmured her sympathy. She had conveniently forgotten whose idea it was.

  2

  Swann's holiday excursions was one of those simple, trouble-free ideas that found instant favour among base-managers. Almost all of them had a spare vehicle or two that could be adapted, in a matter of days, as a passenger-carrying conveyance, and soon, with a minimum of capital outlay. Swann's brakes were running almost daily through the summer months to various points of interest, notably ruins of one kind or another, that seemed to have a nostalgic attraction for a nation that turned its back on the past and was crowding into cities where the Gothic past was already dominating the imagination of the architects of so many municipal museums, most of which seemed to be dedicated to the memory of the late Prince Consort. Blubb and Dockett got away to a flying start with the holiday traffic, and Catesby, with Wordsworth's daffodils on his doorstep, was not far behind. In close pursuit came the indefatigable Abbott, of the Southern Square, whose territory enclosed Stonehenge, Cheddar Gorge, and the Rufus Stone, as well as Nelson's flagship, the Victory, riding at anchor within hailing distance of the shore. Bryn Lovell, in the Mountain Square, went so far as to open a sub-depot at Caernarvon, catering for summer excursionists, who were trundled along the coast to gaze at Edward the First's castles, or inland to try their luck at scaling Snowdon. Even Edith Wadsworth, who had far more important things to do, gave Goodbody and Horncastle, her deputies in the Crescents, permission to convert a couple of men-o’-war apiece into brakes to convey weekend shrimpers and paddlers to Yarmouth, Whitby, and Scarborough, whereas Vicary, in the flat Bonus country below her southern boundary, based his single three-horse brake on Ipswich and specialised in Roman ruins. The traffic had the advantage of demanding no more than a small injection of capital and was, moreover, something that lent itself to long-term planning, so that Adam's commercial instincts prompted him to take two steps towards an extension of the scheme pending 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 encyclopaedia, 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 doorsteps. 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, subconscious 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 particular branch of the clan had moved across the Tweed, intermarrying with former enemies who raided north instead of south, and there resided within him a profound distrust of Lowlanders whose greatgrandfathers (notwithstanding the Act of Union) had never ceased to look covetously at Berwick and beyond. In the old days they had been content to mount a cattle foray twice a year and an occasional 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 commercial competition up here was cut-throat, especially in the carrying trade.

  It was this competition that had contributed to Fraser's failure to improve his position in the areas between Berwick, Carlisle, and Newcastle. 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 gipsies (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 cornered the wholesale traffic in cheap, manufactured goods in that part of the country, mainly because he could command bulk transportation 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 Edinburgh, 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.

  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 intervene 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 estimated, would cost the miserly old devil a handful of sovereigns, and he kicked his cob a little closer, in order to overhear an animated exchange 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 anyone 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, ungraciously, “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 drew a deep, satisfying breath. “Give me the nod and I’ll have my waggons here before that happens. Moreover, 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 waggons, 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 reckoning 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 hillock. 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 bucketful 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 summon, 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 a Berwick smithy, appeared 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 barrier north of the heeled-over vessel, and he used the time spent waiting 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!”