by John Masters
Some delicious fruits have already appeared on the market. A few English peaches were warmly welcomed, principally as gifts for wounded soldiers, many of whom, alas! were destined to enjoy them for the last time. The same may be said of new black grapes, perhaps the most comforting of all fruits in the sick-room. It is noteworthy that nearly all choice fruits are bought by people who are not indulging in selfish enjoyment, but giving them to those who have fought for the noble cause …
It was hard to concentrate on such arcadian prose when your son was missing, lost on the field of battle, which was now so huge and formless, since the beginning of the German offensive over a month ago. Since the original curt War Office telegram, he had heard nothing. He had had an item inserted in the Agony columns of the Irish Times – Lt Laurence Cate, Weald Light Infantry, reported missing in action April 3 : but Margaret had not responded, though he was sure she would have seen it.
But why had Quentin not written, with some details? Was the poor boy nearby when some big shell burst, and so vanished, as had happened, apparently, to John Kipling? Had he simply been cut off, and was now perhaps in hiding behind the German lines, waiting for the tide of war to swing the other way?
Garrod came in with the mail, laid four letters silently beside his plate, and went out. One of them was from Quentin: at last he had been able to write.
Cate hesitated before opening the letter; then steeled himself and slit open the back of the envelope. The letter trembled in his hand as he began to read:
Dear Christopher – I am sorry to tell you that Laurence is to be court-martialled for desertion. He was found by the Military Police in a village sixty miles behind the front, apparently working as a labourer on a small isolated farm run by two women, who tried to hide him from the police. I do not need to tell you how serious this is, as he was under orders for an attack when he vanished. I will see that he gets the very best officer available for his defence when the time comes, which will be soon, as his trial will not be long delayed in the present circumstances. No one can understand why he did it, except that in battle I and others have noticed that he was often not there, and so this was in a way merely taking his body where his mind already was. My adjutant thinks he may be able to prove shell shock. We can only hope for the best. He is not wounded or sick. Nor am I, except for a scratch or two in the recent fighting. Yrs. Affec. – Quentin.
The letter fell from Cate’s hand, fluttering to the floor. Slowly he stooped to pick it up … court-martial; with the death sentence an obvious possibility … It was he who should be facing a firing squad, not Laurence! It was he who had not seen that the boy was by nature totally unfit for killing, for the human degradation of war. Margaret must learn of this, at once: she had always loved Laurence more than any of the rest of them. And he must talk to the Governor in case it came to getting a pardon. He must … He jumped to his feet, spilling his coffee, and hurried out of the house, his brain racing.
Chapter 8
Hedlington, Walstone: Wednesday, May 8, 1918
They were crowded into the managing director’s office at the Jupiter Motor Company factory in North Hedlington, five men – three bare-headed, the other two wearing on their heads the ceremonial headgear of factory foremen – a bowler hat. An asthmatic goods engine wheezed up and down the railway siding outside, shunting wagons into a train which, in due course, it would take down the river to Chatham. Every now and then it whistled shrilly, when crossing one of the service roads that ran between the factory and the barge loading dock. The windows were open, and the English present – Richard Rowland, Ginger Keble-Palmer, and Tom Pratt, were not wearing their overcoats; the Americans – Henry Overfeld and David Morgan – were; the May morning seemed chill to them, although both had now been in England for some years.
Richard said, ‘Well, we’re all here, so let’s not waste time … especially as that is what we are here to talk about – how not to waste time in our plants – or, of course, energy, and money. Fairfax, Gottlieb, who as you know are the majority owners of both these businesses, want us to increase production. They feel that this year there is going to be a great demand for lorries – trucks – and for heavy, long-range aircraft. We make both. They want us to achieve greater production while lowering the unit cost …’
‘That means more capital,’ Overfeld said, pulling on his cigar. He was an automobile production expert, hired away from General Motors in 1914 when Fairfax, Gottlieb decided to set up the Jupiter Motor Company to assemble road freight vehicles in England. Originally he had worked under Richard as assistant managing director; but when Fairfax, Gottlieb, early in 1916, formed the Hedlington Aircraft Company, Richard moved up to an overall supervisory position and Overfeld became operational head of the Jupiter Motor Company.
Richard said, ‘Fairfax, Gottlieb understand that. They’re willing to provide it. Mr Merritt – Mr Stephen – is coming over as soon as he can to discuss with us how much is needed … and, most importantly, what for. He – and the rest of the board over there in New York – are convinced that after the war wages will increase rapidly, as wartime restrictions are removed. In some businesses that wouldn’t be so bad. By increasing wages as much as he did Mr Ford produced an entirely new class of consumers – his own and other workers. But our workers will not directly buy more lorries, or aeroplanes, so our aim is to replace men with machines as far as possible, because it will be cheaper in the long run.’
Pratt said, ‘Not if we get shut down every other week by strikes, Mr Richard, it won’t be.’
Richard said grimly, ‘No one’s going to strike while the war’s on, for fear of being dismissed and put into uniform.’
‘Except the women,’ Morgan said. ‘They’ll not be conscripted.’
Richard said, ‘I was coming to that … We will increase the women’s pay to bring it closer to the men’s … even if they can’t set up and do exactly the same as the men can, we’ll wink at those little things to keep them happy and make sure they have no grounds to believe that they are being exploited … But the men, well, they are going to get more pay, too, if they increase their output, and to the extent that they increase it. That’s the guiding principle behind everything that we are going to do.’
‘It’s not so easy, Mr Richard,’ Pratt, the Hedlington Aircraft foreman, said. ‘Men don’t work one by one, if you know what I mean, do they? They’re teams, like, and to produce more everyone in the team has to do more.’
‘That’s just what we’re aiming at,’ Richard said. ‘The productivity bonus is to be calculated for the factory as a whole, not by individual men, or even small teams, such as those that work on lorries here, or on aircraft at HAC … First, we will have another look at the efficiency study Frank Stratton did eighteen months ago. Things are changing as fast in the factories as they are on the Western Front. So, first, we decide what new machines we want to use – how many, where, why. Be prepared to justify your suggestions in terms of number of jobs eliminated or amalgamated. When we have an idea of that, then we will bring the efficiency people in to help us work out how best to use them.’
‘The men won’t like it,’ Pratt and Morgan, the JMC foremen, said in chorus.
‘I know they won’t, because damned agitators like Bert Gorse have been at them … but you’ve got to make plain that more efficiency equals more production equals more pay. It’s very simple, really.’
‘Them as is going to get their slips won’t see it that way,’ Pratt said.
Richard said, ‘We can’t help that. There’s a war on. If we can produce more and use less men, releasing those men for the army, it’s our duty to do so … Ginger, you’ve been looking as though you don’t know why you were invited to this conference. Well, you design aircraft for us. You must think, at every step, how will this produce … will it be easy and cheap to set up for volume manufacture? Of course, we want the best product possible, especially as our airmen’s lives will depend on it, but we also have to think, will we be better of
f making a hundred machines that are 90 per cent perfect or two hundred machines that are 80 per cent perfect, in the same time … that 100 per cent increase in productivity being achieved by designing every little part, as well as the whole, with production in mind. You understand?’
‘Yes, Richard,’ Ginger said. He didn’t like the idea; he didn’t like a good many of Richard Rowland’s ideas, while liking the man. Richard was the product of another generation. His father, old Mr Harry, thought in much the same way, and Richard had learned from him. Their attitude towards the working men who were their employees was very ambivalent. In one area they regarded them as ciphers to be hired, punished, dismissed, as though they were no different in kind from the machines they worked at; in other areas they regarded them as members of their own family, uneducated, of course, but nevertheless solid, trustworthy true Britons … He’d have to tell Betty to think more about production, and she’d hate it. The loving care she spent on every last little detail took up a lot of her time. She’d designed some great improvements because of that worrying, gnawing search for perfection. Now the goal must not be the perfect but the producible.
Overfeld said, ‘What are we thinking about, boss? How much do we want to increase production? Fifty per cent? A hundred? We have to have some idea.’
Richard said without hesitation, ‘Triple … 300 per cent. With an increase of not more than 100 per cent in manpower. That means a productivity increase of 50 per cent. And it’s got to come from everywhere … purchase, sales, design, transport, accounting, inventory – the lot. That’s all.’
Probyn Gorse was poaching trout, poaching by tickling, late in the evening, under the bushes on Scarrow bank, near where the Taversham to Walstone road was 200 yards away, and shielded by its own high hedges. He was poaching Lord Walstone’s trout, because he was fed up with a diet of rabbits, and half the rabbits that Queen Alexandra and Mrs Keppel, his ferrets, were killing in the warrens these days were heavily pregnant females. Probyn didn’t mind eating pregnant rabbits, but it might be bad for next year, especially as more and more country folk were put to get extra meat – city folk coming down, too …
He lay on the bank, hidden from all sides except directly in front, across the river. Both banks were Walstone Park land here, so the keepers might come from either direction; but they wouldn’t. It was a chilly evening, but Probyn wore his old deerstalker hat with the flaps up. He always left his ears free, to hear, if he could. The sun had sunk an hour ago, the light was still strong … east wind, that’s what made it cold and blew the smoke of the village fires faint in his nostrils. He moved his slightly cupped hand gently back under the overhanging bank. No, the keepers wouldn’t be down here this evening. If they were out of their cottages at all, they’d be watching over the pheasants … as if they knew anything about how to raise pheasant chicks, those old farts his new lordship had hired after sacking the other old farts his old lordship had hired when the original keepers went off to the war … or to better-paying jobs in the towns, like Skagg, the previous head keeper. Skagg was a regular bastard, like most keepers, but he knew something about pheasants and trout and rabbits and hare. He’d ’a known better than to sit up watching over pheasant chicks in case Probyn Gorse came to take them; Skagg would ’a known that Probyn Gorse would wait till they were grown up, they made more and better eating then. So Skagg would ’a thought, p’raps he’s down by Scarrow, I’ll go and take a look … But Skagg was long gone, working like a copper in a big factory somewhere up north, seeing that the workers didn’t steal anything: just the job for a gamekeeper … Something touched the side of his hand and he moved it gently back, feeling. It was a trout … a good big ’un, about a pound and a half … half as big again as the one he’d already got, that was wrapped in grass in the back pocket of his old coat … tickle tickle along the belly line … gently, firmly behind the gills, and out, here we are … He banged the trout on the back of the head with a stone, wrapped it carefully and slipped it in with the other … Plenty to eat tonight, even if Bert came down, as he’d said he might, last time they’d met … Bats were swooping along the river now, and an owl was hooting from the woods on the far bank. He could see the lights of the big house glimmering up the rise: time to go home.
He set off in the darkening twilight, shuffling fast along the path that was part a right of way, part rabbit runs, and part the runs of otters that came, like him, to poach his Lordship’s trout. After five minutes the lurcher at his heels, the Duke of Clarence, stopped suddenly, whining, staring into the dark ahead. ‘What is it, Duke?’ Probyn muttered. An unearthly shriek arose from the bushes, the cry of a woman in torture. The hairs on Probyn’s neck stiffened and crawled. Light gleamed and a face appeared, a face chalk white, lit from below by a greeny glow, a woman’s face, shrieking, mouth wide, black wide bonnet on her head, the ribbons tied under her chin … Oh Jesus, his mother, again! And closer, more terrifyingly real than ever! Black-clad arms began to wave, but Probyn was running as fast as he could, back along the path, stumbling in his panic, the lurcher whining in front of him, tripping him up.
At last he stopped, sat down, and waited for his heart to stop pounding. ’Twas another, last warning to him, that’s what it was! Mother had always hated him poaching … told him he’d come to a bad end, why when she was young they’d sent poachers to the colonies for that, Australia or America or somewhere … He could see her face, then, so sad … and now, worse … she smelled of all the years she’d been in her grave, a cold smell of wet earth and dead leaves … Now he had to pass by the place again, to get back to his cottage. Perhaps he should stand up and swear he’d never poach again, and if he did, God could strike him dead. Safer to say, I’ll never poach again if I can help it … but what were he and the Woman going to eat, if he didn’t poach?
He stood up, raised one hand, and cried in a quavering voice, ‘Mother, I swear to stop poaching, if I can … can’t say fairer than that, can I?’
The Duke of Clarence appeared from wherever he had fled to, and licked his hand. ‘You was as scairt as me,’ Probyn muttered. ‘Good cause, too … Come on.’
They went back towards the cottage, side by side now. Probyn slowed at the place where his mother’s ghost had appeared, his heart pounding so that he was sure it could be heard a hundred yards away … but there was nothing. The Duke skirted the bushes wide, and five minutes later they slipped through the gap in the brambles and hazels and opened the cottage door.
Probyn stood a moment, eyes lowered, until they became accustomed to the light. Then he looked up. His son Bert was here, standing by the fire. The Woman was poking a piece of wood and moving a pot. She glanced at him and, almost at once, away; but not absolutely at once; there had been a hesitation. She had seen something in his face. He had not told her about the two previous visitations by his mother and he would not tell her about this one. It was between him and his mother. He fished in his back pocket, brought out the trout, and laid them on the table. The Woman picked them up, took them to the sink, and began cleaning them.
Bert said, ‘Willum’s a prisoner, Dad.’
Probyn sat down at the table. Willum was his eldest son, by the first Woman he’d had. He was a good strong man, but weak in the head. The army had no business taking him, but he was bound and determined to go, after the Germans killed Colin Blyth, his cricketing hero. Then, near a month ago, Mary his wife had had a telegram from the War Office saying Willum was severely wounded and missing.
Bert said, ‘She’s had another telegram. Willum’s had both his legs took off, and is in hospital in Germany … So Mary and her brats will be nearer starving than they was before.’
Probyn said, ‘She can get money from Florinda.’
‘So could I,’ Bert snapped, ‘if I wanted to, but Mary thinks Florinda’s a whore, and so do I … and she’s become a proper upper-class parasite, into the bargain.’
Probyn said, ‘What’s Mary going to do, then?’
‘Make more baby clothes
for rich bitches, till her eyes drop out … wash more sheets and towels, till her hands moulder away.’
‘If that’s what she wants to do,’ Probyn said coldly, ‘that’s what she’ll do.’ He didn’t like this Albert, his son by his second Woman. Bert wasn’t a country man, but smelled of steel and oil, and talked of a future where there would be no fields or woods, only factories, belching smoke, and in the factories, men like himself, snapping and snarling at each other.
Bert got up – ‘I’m going back to Hedlington.’
‘Plenty of time before you start for the station.’
‘I’m walking. We need all the money we have to organise the union.’
Rachel Cohen knocked on the last door in the narrow street of small houses in North Hedlington. The street sloped down to the blackened and soot-grimed Scarrow, here at the limit of barge traffic, almost opposite the Jupiter Motor Company’s factory. The door opened and a man in shirt sleeves and carpet slippers stood there, the News of the World in his hand.
‘What d’you want?’ he said. ‘If it’s selling something, ’op it. We’ve got no money.’
‘It’s Mr Griffiths, isn’t it?’
‘What if it is?’ the man said suspiciously. He looked like a labourer, burly, walrus-moustached, about forty-five.
Rachel said, ‘I’m Rachel Cohen, secretary of the Hedlington Socialist Party. My husband’s going to stand for this seat in Parliament at the next election, whenever that may be. Our programme is to negotiate an immediate end to the war, end conscription, bring our boys back, end all wartime regulations that operate against the working man. May we send you our material … news letters, announcements of meetings and speeches? We need your help. The country needs your help.’