It was in this kind of mood that he closed his well-worn copy of Matthew Arnold's poems in early April 1884, unpacked and repacked his knapsack (discarding all but what he considered essentials to get the overall weight below the sixty pound maximum), and set off due north, over the first few miles of his private odyssey, with Arnold's lines from The Scholar Gypsy running through his head…
But once, years after, in the country lanes,
Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew
Met him, and of his way of life inquired.
Whereat he answer’d, that the Gipsy crew,
His mates, had arts to rule as they desired,
The workings of men's brains…
He saw himself, at that moment, as the gentle Arnold's prototype, putting theory into practice, turning his back deliberately, a little self-righteously even, on the temptations of a three-year intellectual spree at Oxford, in order to search more diligently for secrets where they were more likely to be found. In the lanes and hedgerows. Along the high road. Through the old, close-set woods. On windy uplands and, more surely perhaps, among the fume and clatter of the industrial North and Midlands, where his father's waggons moved through complexes of railyards, back-to-back houses, and tall belching chimneys.
He had no clear idea what he was seeking, but whatever it was he was sure, in his own mind, of one thing. He was more likely to find it here than in the pedant-haunted quadrangles of Arnold's city of spires that he had visited (and at once distrusted) when he went up there to sit for his scholarship the previous autumn.
Thompson—his earnest, monocled headmaster—thought him mad and told him so, more than once. “You’ve got more intellectual promise than any boy I’ve had under my hand,” he said, a day or so after Adam gave Giles permission to bypass Oxford. “I’m not questioning your father's judgement. Unquestionably he made his way without the mental disciplines and friendships available at a good University. But you’re both forgetting something. Your father travelled the world in his twenties and fought in a number of wars. War and travel educates a man and sometimes enables him to recognise truth when he sees it. Truth about himself and truth in general. But you don’t even intend crossing the Channel or looking down the barrel of a gun in the way your eldest brother has since he enlisted. What, apart from a bit of botany, are you likely to learn living the life of a tramp? That's what I’d like to know, lad.”
Giles could be stubborn. “Stevenson learned something in the Cervennes, didn’t he, sir? And so did Borrow and Cobden, by moving around.” But Tommy, who had nourished the boy for five years now, made an impatient gesture, so that his monocle fell from his eye socket.
“Stevenson is a sick man in search of health. And as for Borrow and Cobden, they were eccentrics, who didn’t live in an industrial age. Like it or not, technology is taking over from here on. You would be far better advised to make an engineering pilgrimage, like your other brother. Poking about local hedgerows, as you propose to do, is no more than a fad, and if you ask me your father is merely humouring you.”
Was he? Giles was by no means sure, despite the amiable discussion they had had a month before up at Forty Beeches. The governor had done the same thing himself, it was true, but with a specific purpose in mind and to survey a field in which he meant to operate. He had no such specific purpose, only a vague curiosity to discover for himself the underlying reasons why this country, alone among Western nations, had sloughed off its ancient traditions, turned its face from an agricultural past, and sprouted wings that had carried it to the ends of the earth and made it the new Rome.
The answer, diligently as he had searched, was not to be found in books, but it was there somewhere lying out among the broken shards of the old civilisation and the smoke-tainted manufactories of the new. The important thing to discover was how this convulsion, less than a century old but now pushing shock waves across the world, governed the lives of ordinary people. People like that old couple, for instance, whom he had seen ejected from their cottage and separated by Bumbledom; people like those wharf rats his father recruited as vanboys; people like the sweep Luke Dobbs, who had choked to death in a Tryst chimney only a few years before he was born.
He said, uneasily, “I don’t know what I’m looking for, sir, but if I find it I’ll make use of it one way or another and you’ll be the first to hear about it. I’ve been very happy here. This is a wonderful place to spend one's formative years, and I’ll always need to come back, again and again. Maybe I’ll come back for good one day. I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything save the need to learn more before I can teach.”
Thompson did not miss the hint and regarded the boy thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you one thing more, Swann, before you raise blisters on your feet. I always have thought teaching was your vocation. You’ve got something most professional teachers haven’t got and rarely develop. Genuine intellectual curiosity, plus natural tolerance. They’re your principal assets, so don’t squander them on social indignation.”
They shook hands on that and Giles went up to the Brereton dormitory to spend his final night at school. Hugo was asleep, his great limbs sprawled half in and half out of the narrow iron cot, and Giles, regarding his genial, slightly bovine features in a shaft of moonlight that clipped the line of wash basins and touched the bed, thought, a little enviously, “Good old Hugo! One of the lucky ones. Whatever he does, wherever he goes, his physical apparatus will be his compass, for the needle doesn’t swing above his neck,” and outside, in the beeches of the east drive, an owl corroborated.
The route of his first stage differed from that of his father's ride of more than twenty-five years ago.
Adam had ridden northeast from Plymouth to Gloucester, before heading north to the cotton belt, so that his way had taken him through nearly two hundred miles of predominantly agricultural country as far as Warwickshire and then, a day or so later, to the Potteries. To an extent this had governed the entire nature of his enterprise, at least in the early years, for even now around half his hauls involved produce.
Giles, having come to manhood in a more sophisticated age, aimed at the heart of the new Britain, striking across familiar North Devon moorland to the Bristol Channel where he found a collier at Minehead. For half a crown the captain set him ashore in Wales, midway between Cardiff and Swansea.
His instinct, at this time, was to explore the mining districts, where newspapers said there was always industrial tension, where militant radicalism was gaining ground in the ruined valleys, where hundreds of thousands of Welshmen whose fathers had been farmers now clawed for coal, the staple commodity of the nation. Coal. That gritty, shining substance that looked worthless when you held a knob in your hand, wondering at its relationship to the primeval forests that had covered all England when England was a spread of green fingers thrust into the Atlantic, with the wrist somewhere about the delta of the Rhine. Coal, that black, yellow-seamed, rather brittle substance was really everything inasmuch as it made everything else work when you thought about it. For without it, without the men who risked their lives every day to get it, there would have been no industrial revolution, no factories and foundries, no ironclads and no ships to carry four-fifths of the world's wealth from one coast to another. There would have been no Swann-on-Wheels either, and probably no Giles Swann to ask questions about it. Yet here it lay in abundance, enough, they said, to last for another century, or so long as Welshmen could be bribed or bullied to hack it from seams deep below the spoiled hills and valleys of their homeland.
He had never previously visited Wales and took an instant liking to the Welsh, with their tug-of-war between body and soul that was evident, even to a stranger, in the number of chapels in every township and village he visited, in their sad songs, in the soft lilt of their tongue, and, above all, in the terrible squalor of their pits and crowded dwelling areas close by. Every brick hutch seeming to lean on its neighbour, like stacks of very grubby, finely balanced playing cards laid in rows across the h
illsides where no grass grew, and the scrabble for coal had converted what had once been an enchanting land into a midden.
Even here his terms of reference remained vague, but he had done what he could to prepare himself. In his knapsack was a sheaf of introductions, and the first put him in touch with Bryn Lovell, manager of the Mountain Square, who met him at a small town in the Rhondda and obtained permission from a customer to take him down a coal mine.
Bryn, whom he had met briefly at Stella's wedding, refused the offer of a guide. He had himself been below on many occasions, he said, and knew this particular pit, having worked on top as a boy when his father had been in charge of the pumps. He said, as they made their way to the pithead, “You’ll ask awkward questions, no doubt, and I might find it embarrassing to give you a straight answer in the presence of their outside men. After all, this mine is worth good money to your father, and it won’t do to let them know my convictions concerning the industry as a whole.” He looked at Giles shrewdly. “Just what do you expect to find in the Rhondda, Mr. Swann?”
“I haven’t the least idea,” Giles told him, cheerfully, “but I’m very curious about coal-mining, and I’ve heard all about the risks these men run down there. I suppose I want to see the conditions they work under and the compensations there are, if any. I’ve talked to miners on the way up, and spent a night with one family. There were seven of them sharing three little rooms. Two of the boys, both pitworkers, were under thirteen. I was amazed to learn they were working underground.”
It seemed to Giles then that Lovell's face hardened, taut lines showing either side of his mouth. He had, Giles decided, a very ascetic face, but his manner, even when you made allowance for the fact that he was entertaining one of his employer's sons, was uneasy. He said, briefly, “Nothing unusual about that. Within a mile of where we stand there must be two to three thousand lads under twelve on the lower levels. We’ve been agitating for legislation to stop it for years.” He gave Giles one of his shrewd, impersonal looks. “Can you imagine this place as it was when I first remember it? And I’m only sixty.”
Giles glanced up the valley, noting the rampart-like ridges of the mountains and, between them, a widespread smouldering furnace, spiked with skeletal pitheads and scarred in a hundred places by the steeply rising tiers of miners’ houses. It was a fine day but the sun did not penetrate here, or only in fitful gleams, occasionally striking a slag heap or a patch of turgid water. “I can’t imagine it was ever pastoral, Mr. Lovell.”
“You’d be wrong,” Bryn said. “There were open-cast workings, plenty of them, but no real blight, as you see now. Men grubbed coal from near the surface, with hardship, maybe, but not much danger. Read Roscoe, and discover for yourself what it was like to walk down the valley of the Rhondda and other Glamorgan streams a generation ago. Roscoe talks of waterfalls, of the mountain current breaking clearly on rocks, of pools you could fish in and heavy timber on those hills. Look at it now and judge for yourself the price we Welsh have paid for the coal-owners’ country estates, and the nation's industrial lead you read so much about in newspapers printed by men who have never drawn a breath of Welsh air, fair or foul. However, we’ll go below as your father did once in my company.”
“My father went down a coal mine?”
“He did that, for he's also a man who likes to see for himself. Maybe that's one reason why he's reckoned a good gaffer in the network.”
Giles would liked to have asked him more, but Lovell was obviously bent on an object lesson rather than a lecture. They borrowed miners’ caps, lamps, and leather jerkins from the pithead store and entered what seemed to Giles a very insecure cage that rushed them down into the mountain at a speed that made his senses reel.
“We’ll start in from the lowest level,” Bryn said, when, retching slightly, Giles staggered into a low-roofed underground chamber.
It was like yet another scene from the illustrated Dante's Inferno, seen in Mr. Thompson's library, a pall of velvet darkness shot through with indistinct points of yellowish light, where gnomelike men stumped to and fro across a maze of intersecting rails. Trolleys, pulled by ponies, rattled by and other trucks, recently emptied, were riding into one or other of the tunnels, or roads as Lovell called them, leading to the coal face.
He did not know what he had expected but it was not this, and neither was it the long, toilsome journey down a foot-wide track beside one of the railways. The darkness, a darkness you could almost grab by the handful, would have been absolute had it not been for the glimmer of Lovell's lamp, moving ahead, or the welcome break of a dimly lit bay, scooped in the face of the road at rare intervals. Everywhere the roof was so low that Giles, despite his lack of inches, had to crouch, and it crossed his mind to wonder how his brother Hugo would have fared down here. Bryn said little, confining his occasional comments to a word or two flung over his shoulder, and Giles gathered that nobody wasted breath in conversation down here. One needed it all to adjust to the crouching stumble if one was to avoid tripping over the rails, or smashing one's head on the revetted roof that constantly scraped the leather hat he was wearing. He had thought of himself until then as very fit and agile, but movement, and survival too he would wager, demanded a different kind of fitness to that a man acquired on the Exmoor upland. One needed to be a dwarf, a contortionist, and a tightrope walker, so that when, at a bay, Lovell stopped to permit the passage of an unseen oncomer, he gasped, “How much further to the face?”
“Two—three hundred yards. If you’re that puffed…” But he did not complete the sentence, holding up his hand and cocking an ear in the direction of the approaching footfalls.
They were hurrying. Even Giles noticed that, and when a miner came level with the bay he at once linked his expression with a subdued but definite pattern of sounds that issued from the tunnel, a sustained murmur punctuated by a series of sharp, metallic clankings, and then an agonised cry from close at hand.
Lovell said, detaining the passing miner, “A derailment? Is the road blocked?” The man, shaking himself free, replied, “Truck running free. And some of Owen Williams's toes along with it,” and he jerked his head towards the opening.
“Bady hurt?”
The man shook his head. “They’re bringing him outbye. Stay here, whoever you wass,” and plunged onwards towards the shaft, moving very swiftly at a loping crouch that was like the passage of a hunted animal.
It struck Giles at once that Lovell did not seem so concerned as he should have been, and when he asked if this meant there had been a serious accident the manager said, unconcernedly, “Truck over a man's foot. It happens every day. It might be trivial, or it might mean amputation when they get him to the pithead.” And then, with what Giles thought of as a tincture of malice, “There's far worse happens down here than the loss of a couple of toes or even a foot. At least that means Williams will be kept on, and work above ground, and that doesn’t happen to most casualties. The ones that survive, that is. I’ve seen a dozen men carried out on stretchers from one shift and they were the lucky ones. Two dozen more were under a fall, or gassed and beyond human aid.”
The clank of a string of trucks approached until its rattle made speech impossible. On the first of them lay Owen Williams, a young man about Giles's own age, or possibly a year or so older. In the light of a brace of lamps carried by the boy leading the pony, and an older miner riding the tub behind and supporting the injured man's shoulders, Giles caught a swift glimpse of the recumbent man's face. It was twisted with pain that the mask of coal dust could not conceal, and it seemed to Giles that he was having as much as he could do to keep from screaming. His left boot had been removed and his foot was swathed in roughly-applied bandages. Thick as they were, blood was seeping through. The mournful little procession passed in a matter of seconds, so that it was as though it had been part of a confused dream. Bryn Lovell called after the last loaded tub, “Good luck, man…” but nobody answered and he moved forward again, Giles following, sweat striking cold
in his armpits and under the browband of the hard leather hat he was wearing.
It was only the first of a series of revelations, nightmarish most of them. Although here and there, particularly at the coal face, he found himself technically interested in the processes of removing coal from a seam and transferring it, via the conveyor, to the waiting tubs.
He saw men stripped to the waist lying in crannies that were hardly more than eighteen inches high, clawing away at the seam with a speed and precision that he would not have thought a machine could accomplish in these cramped, claustrophobic galleries. He saw the place where the truck had left the rails and crushed Owen Williams's foot; he saw a shift of boys, none older than Third Form boys at school, eating their “snap,” as Lovell called it, before starting another four-hour spell at the conveyor, where they were charged with the work of tipping the loaded sections of the conveyor into tubs and easing the string down an incline to an open space at the hub of the galleries. He did not speak to them. It seemed to him that it would have been patronising on his part, but he stored in his mind the deep impression they made on him, a dozen bleary-eyed imps, gossiping gaily among themselves, as though they were taking part in a parody of a junior-school tuck-shop spree.
He saw many other things that he never afterwards forgot, for the hours spent down there, beginning with that backbreaking scramble to the bay where they waited to make way for Williams, and ending with the blessed relief of smelling daylight at the top of the shaft, were etched into his memory in a way that nothing he had previously experienced could rival in terms of truth and sobriety.
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 54
