God Is an Englishman (31 page)

“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 en couraged 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 intro duced a uniform consisting of blue reefer jacket, leather breeches, yellow gaiters, and low-crowned GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 161

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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 success, 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 manu factories south of the river, mostly wholesalers who needed daily transport to and from the docks to keep their warehouses from be coming 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 in come 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 GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 162

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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 iso lated shire areas and railheads that served the sources of raw mate rial 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.”

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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 rail way 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 cross-ings, gra dients 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 him self 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 GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 164

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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 company’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 min eral, 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.

His arithmetic was sketchy, but his mapwork was as precise as an old maid’s crocheting. When he had finished he carried the sections to the largest room in the house, pushed back the furniture and pinned the sections together so that he could get a clear idea of how much of England and Wales was at his disposal. He was surprised to discover that, in terms of area, it was more than half, and in order to be quite clear on this point he shaded the areas that lay outside his sections.

It was at this point that he began to see his territory in terms of a family and reminding himself that every member of a family has a name, and sometimes a diminutive, he amused himself christen ing them, beginning with the “Western Wedge,” with its capital, south of centre, at Exeter, and its frontiers at Bristol and the tip of the Cornish peninsula. Down here, in untapped areas north and south of the arteries represented by the Bristol and Exeter, the South western extension, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 165

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the South Devon, and the recently opened Corn wall line to Truro, there must exist a potential, especially as there was only one important lateral railroad, the Exeter and Bideford. It was typical, perhaps, of all the sections, inasmuch as it had main line railways but very few spurs to the country towns, and the rich agri cultural districts no longer linked by coach services of the kind once served by men like Blubb. For here was an obvious anomaly. The railroad had killed coaching but although, where a railroad ran, goods and passengers could now pass from one main depot to another at ten times the speed of traffic in previous generations, the maps proved beyond doubt that whole areas of the country were withering, and that life in some of the holes in the gridiron had slowed to the pace of a Tudor peasant.