Theirs Was The Kingdom

by R. F Delderfield

  “And so it is, by God. I’m beginning to think your father and I would see eye to eye on any number of things. No doubt I shall have the pleasure of meeting him sooner or later.”

  “I certainly hope so, sir,” replied Giles, fervently. But if the magnate noticed his elation, he gave no sign but said, rising, “Let me say this, in order to spare my girl's blushes. I’m uncommonly obliged to you for breaking your journey, and keeping her company the way you have. It's lonely for a lass of her age, stuck away up here, and you’ve succeeded in keeping her out of mischief, where everyone else has failed. Are we likely to see anything of you in London later in the year?”

  “I’d be delighted to call, sir, when I get back from the north. Would some time in October be convenient?”

  “Whenever you like, my boy. Glad to see you. Or any of your brothers and sisters for that matter. What are your immediate plans? Or don’t you know?”

  “I’m taking a look at the Polygon, sir… I’m sorry, that's what it's called on my father's maps. Broadly speaking it's the cotton belt, from Cheshire to the Lakes. Then I hope to visit Edinburgh and spend a month exploring our Scottish beat. After that it’ll be no weather for walking, so I shall take a train south, and hope to study the business from our Headquarters near London Bridge.”

  “Good… good,” said Sir Clive, but vaguely, Giles thought, as though he had only asked out of politeness.

  After that, on the landing near her room, he had no more than a brief moment with Romayne who seemed preoccupied and barely responded to his kiss saying, in extenuation, “I’m sorry, dearest… I’m in a terrible tizzy. That Prickle wrote again this morning, with hundreds of last-minute instructions, and I’m sure I shall leave something important behind.”

  He said, with an air of modest triumph, “Your father has just invited me to call in the early autumn,” and that had the effect of riveting her attention for a few seconds. “Around October,” he added, “so if you feel inclined to fall in love with anyone else don’t make it final, will you?”

  “You don’t need reassurance concerning that,” she said, “you’re just fishing for compliments,” and then, looking him carefully up and down, “Don’t ever throw away those walking clothes, Giles. It might sound silly but I’d rather you didn’t, not even when they’re worn out. You see they’re you… the first ‘you’ I ever saw and several minutes before you saw me. Just a young tramp but a very handsome one, of course. That was why I pretended to drown,” and before he could comment on this she gave him a peck on the tip of his nose and darted back into her room.

  He stood and watched the waggonette weave through the traffic of the narrow street towards the station and then, whistling softly, turned his back on the city and began his dusty tramp along the flat Cheshire hedgerows, remembering when he saw a signpost for Daresbury that he was crossing the countryside Lewis Carroll had used as a background for Alice's adventures in Wonderland. From here on he moved in his own Wonderland and the miles passed unheeded as he thought and thought about her, and all she meant and would come to mean in the future, so that it was with some surprise, towards sunset, that he saw the chimneys of Warrington on the skyline, and recalled that it was about here that his father and mother had met, much in the way that he had met Romayne. The recollection, vague as it was, gave him a curious feeling of drawing level with Adam, who, until then, had seemed as far removed from him in terms of age and experience as Chiron, the centaur-tutor of the Argonauts, who was his favourite character in mythology. He was tired and dust-parched by then and glad to accept a lift from a passing milk-float, finding the run-down-looking inn near the goods yard and falling asleep over his game pie and porter.

  He was up and about, however, when the landlady called him about eight, telling him that a Mr. Catesby was enquiring for him. It struck Giles, as he hurried downstairs, that his father's managers were a punctilious lot, for he had not expected him until mid-morning.

  He had met Catesby at Stella's wedding and five minutes’ exchange of conversation confirmed his opinion that Lovell had been right, and that “he and that revolutionary chap would get along well.” Concerning his odyssey, Catesby came straight to the point.

  “It's not just transport you’re interested in, is it? I hear you want to take a close look at working conditions in the Belt. Does that mean you’ll be reading philosophy up at University?”

  Giles told him that there was no question of his going up to University, and was surprised to discover Catesby's reaction was similar to Thompson's. “I’m not sure that's wise, lad,” he said, gravely. “Education's a fine thing, and a man ought not to pass up on it lightly. You’ll have heard plenty about me and my views I daresay, but what we need, if we’re ever going to remake society, is leaders above factory level, youngsters like yourself, maybe, with no personal axe to grind, men who can take an impersonal look at pay, conditions of work, bad housing, sanitation and God knows what else that's amiss in places like this and the coalfields. Oh, I’m not denying it hasn’t improved since I were a lad, standing thirteen hours a day beside unfenced machinery. But the working day is still far too long, the factories are neither safe nor sanitary, and we still have to fight for every penny an hour on piece rates. However, you shall see for yourself if you’ve a mind to, and don’t be shy of asking questions. Your father never is, I’ll say that for him.”

  “I’d like to ask one right now,” Giles, said warming to the man, “and it concerns my father. I’ve never really understood his attitude to the social problems of an industrial society. I mean, is he with you or against you? Sometimes he seems progressive but other times, well, he's got a touch of the old-time gaffer about him. How do you rate him as a boss, or is it unfair to ask?”

  “No, it isn’t unfair,” Catesby said, thoughtfully, “but difficult to answer. He's a progressive certainly, and you’ll have heard in the Mountain Square that he's looked on as a good gaffer by the men, top and bottom grades. He's fair, generous, and won’t look on his workforce as cattle, the way most of ’em still do about here. But he's the most obstinate cuss I ever struck. If he gets a wrong-headed notion it takes blasting powder to shift it, but if you succeed in changing his mind he's never too high and mighty to own he was wrong. We’ve had our ups and downs over the last twenty-five years, mostly ups I might add. He doesn’t take kindly to sharing power with a trades federation, of the kind I’ve been working for all my life. I understand that, mind. He's the last word in individuality and it’ll take another generation to hammer out a set of rules that’ll stand four-square, without leaning one way or the other. The thing is, however, your Dad is one of the few big employers who recognises the right of hands to have a say on their pay and conditions, and that's why he and I get along, and why I’ve any amount of respect for him. If that answers your question let me put one to you. How does he rate as a father?” And Giles laughed, saying that this was even more difficult to answer, for Adam Swann's real family didn’t live at Tryst but were spread across the network. “According to my mother,” he added, “he forgets our names sometimes, but I never knew him to forget one of yours.”

  “Aye, that's what I reckoned,” said Catesby, “and there's a reason for it. After all, any damned fool can reproduce himself any number of times, but it takes a rare spirit to create a business like Swann-on-Wheels out of a Johnny Raw's dream.”

  The conversation established the tone of their relationship and all that week, and part of the next, Giles travelled about Lancashire in Catesby's company, visiting half a dozen mills, from the model establishment, once owned by Sam Rawlinson, his grandfather, but now a cooperative nominally owned by his mother, down to the ramshackle eighteenth-century concern in Rochdale, where Catesby had worked as a lad.

  “That wasn’t so long after they’d installed Cartwright's power-looms,” he said, “those that were burned out time and again by hand-loom weavers, who saw their livelihood threatened. Not that I’ve ever had a dam’ bit o’ patience with Luddites, or any oth
er give-us-the-old-days bleaters, although I understand well enough what scared ’em at the time. I never did see the sense of fighting machines when you can make ’em do the hard graft for you.”

  Giles looked at the line of clattering looms and expressionless men, women and girls tending them. Much earlier in the day he had seen a hundred or more turn out and clatter down the cobbled streets in their clogs, and he supposed they would stand here until shutdown, unable to communicate one with the other above the ceaseless roar and rattle of the looms, and the monotonous whine of the complex of belts above their heads. The fearful drabness of their existence compared to his, or that of someone like Romayne Rycroft-Mostyn, occurred to him, so that he recalled, for the first time in a month, those smutty-faced urchins in the gallery below the Welsh hills. He said, as they regained the airless yard, where the bale-breakers were hard at work, “Do the machines work for them? Are they ever going to squeeze anything out of them, beyond a pittance to keep them penned there in all that racket? What's gone wrong and when did it start going wrong? Surely people led richer and more interesting lives in mediaeval villages.”

  The manager grinned. “Aye, lad, you got it bad, haven’t you? But there's nowt to be ashamed of on that score. Your father tells me you called in on Lovell, in the Rhondda. How does it compare?”

  “If I had to choose I’d prefer the silence underground, for at least a man can think down there. From the safety angle the mill's better, or looked so.”

  “A damned sight safer than it were. In my young days every fourth man you passed in a mill town lacked a hand or an arm. We reckoned to lose about one lad a day from an accident. Keep your eyes open and you’ll still see some of the old uns at their begging.” He lit his short pipe, drew on it, and led the way out on to the railway sidings, where a Swann-on-Wheels pinnace stood with a sleek Cleveland Bay between the shafts. From the box-seat Giles could see clear across the landscape, a grey sea of tile and slate broken here and there by a tall chimney and the looming bulk of a mill. High above the blue-black streamers of murk the July sun was fighting a losing battle with a pall of smoke that lay over the entire plain, dense where chimneys proliferated at a town, ragged above strips of green, featureless country between, almost solid over Manchester to the southeast.

  Catesby said, “When did we start going wrong? You might say a century ago, when they moved the power-looms in, took the weavers out of their cottages, and herded them into brick and tile gaols of that kind. But don’t run away with the idea it were all beer and skittles before that. I’ve known families work from dawn to dusk in their own hovels for less nor one skilled lass takes home today. It's not just a matter o’ living in towns either. You’re country-bred. I don’t have to tell you what a farm-labourer living in a tied cottage picks up come Saturday. Or what happens to him when the damp in his bones slows him down. When did it all start? The day some fool invented the wheel and money, I reckon, but that's neither here nor there now for we’re hitched to ’em both, for better nor worse, and it's up to all of us to make ’em work. That's what the Trades Union Congress is all about, some kind of attempt to strike a balance between master and man. I daresay Lovell let on I was for revolution. That's a cock-eyed notion on his part. They’re always trying that on i’ France, and take it from me, for all their bloody brickbats and barricades, working conditions aren’t so good there as they are right here, i’ Rochdale an’ Burnley. Or in the Rhondda for that matter. Nay, lad, that's no way to change industry. You’ve got to have gaffers who know what they’re about, and gaffers won’t work for nowt any more than a mill-hand or a miner. The thing to do is to admit that right out and work at it together. I’m as loyal to t’bloody system as anyone, and don’t let anyone tell you diff ’rent. I’m hopeful too, at long range that is. All I’ve fought for since I came out o’ gaol, after the rioting back in the fifties, is common sense. Common sense on both sides. I don’t ask for more than that, and your Dad will tell you the same.” He gathered up the reins and cracked his whip over the nag's head. “We’ll move on then. You’ve a rare lot to see yet.”

  Slowly and inquisitively Giles picked his way over the Polygon, surprised to find, here and there, sizeable stretches of arable land and any number of prosperous farms. In this way it differed materially from the coalfields, for here industry had been concentrated in densely populated pockets, with the spaces in between relatively sweet if one could ignore the all-pervading acrid whiff of smoke carried on the wind high above ploughland and pasture.

  The towns, he noticed, had many things in common with the Welsh mining villages. The serried rows of tiny dwellings were almost identical, acres of brick and slate broken, here and there, by a red-brick chapel of one sect or another. But the men, women, and urchins he encountered did not seem bowed down by the drabness of their surroundings or, for that matter, by the terrible demands made upon them in the slab-sided, smoke-belching factories where they spent upwards of seventy hours a week. On the contrary, they seemed as perky and easy-going as the miners, and there was often the sound of laughter in the steep cobbled streets, even from homegoing shifts at twilight. When he drew Catesby's attention to this the manager's reply was similar to Lovell's, in the Rhondda.

  “Nay, an’ why not? A Lancashire man in work is an optimist, no matter how much bloody muck he lives in. There are compensations, lad, that a Southerner like yourself can’t be blamed for missing while he's wiping smuts from his eye. For one thing, the folk hereabouts are proud o’ what they produce, and so they should be. Best spun cotton i’ t’world. For another, they’ve got their pastimes, pigeon-fancying and suchlike. But the main thing that keeps ’em going is one another, I reckon.”

  The Polygon tour stirred him deeply but it did not have the scarifying effect of the day spent below ground in Wales, and this was not because the people up here had less to put up with or worked, in the main, under better conditions. It was a personal amelioration, his state of mind having mellowed in the interval. A very young man deeply in love is not the best kind of emissary for an expedition of this sort. Instead of concentrating his mind on the glaring evidence of social injustice, Giles found himself making mental notes that would never find a place in a blue book or statistical survey. The girls, he noted, still ogled young men under the gas-lamps after dusk, and young men, pale but neatly turned out, still circled the gravel paths of the blighted little parks of a Sunday afternoon, sporting their buttonholes and twirling their canes. And once, when they were jogging back to Salford yard through a thunderstorm an hour after sundown, they happened to pass a junction where a flash of lightning revealed a lad and his girl locked in a passionate embrace under a tilted umbrella. Catesby, noticing his glance, grinned and said, with a perception Giles had learned to expect of him, “Aye, lad, that's still free. Even here, in t’bloody Polygon downpour.” Then, in that aggressive tone they all seemed to use up here, “You can tour the regions from Tay to Channel but there's another product that gets pride o’ place i’ Lancashire, apart from cotton. Rare pretty lasses if you’re looking for ’em, and I alwus was at your age!”

  Giles said nothing to this. He liked and trusted Catesby but could not bring himself to speak Romayne's name to anyone as yet.

  The day he was making ready to move one of the clerks came into the Salford warehouse and asked if he had a moment to spare for a lady enquiring after him. His heart missed a beat, for the only woman who knew his whereabouts, with the exception of his mother, was Romayne, but it seemed very unlikely that she had followed him up here. He was so excited at the possibility, however, that he dashed across to the weighbridge without enquiring the visitor's name, stopping short when he saw a fashionably dressed woman in her thirties standing beside the checker, who pointed to him, saying, “There's Mr. Swann, Mrs. Broadbent.”

  The woman looked confused but then smiled rather nervously and said, “You won’t know me, Mr. Swann, but I heard you were here. I… er… just wondered if you could give me any news of your brother, Mr. George
Swann.”

  There was something so hesitant in her approach that his chivalry was touched and he said, tipping his hat, “You’re a friend of George, Mrs. Broadbent?” Then, seeing her glance at the checker, “Would you like to come into the office? The clerk there is having his lunch and Mr. Catesby is away today.”

  She murmured her thanks and followed him, saying, as he motioned her to a chair, “You’ll think it frivolous, no doubt, but I was always anxious to hear about George, and it didn’t seem… well… fitting to write to the firm. After all, the dear boy has probably forgotten all about me by now. Does the name ‘Broadbent’ mean anything to you?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he said, knitting his brows and trying to guess the relationship between this shy, pretty woman and George, but she went on, swiftly, “My husband was manager here for a time. He left. There was… well… trouble, and I thought your father or brother might have told you. Obviously they didn’t.”

  “You mean trouble involving you, Mrs. Broadbent?”

  It seemed unlikely but one never did know what George might get up to and he remembered now that, prior to going abroad, he had lived in the Polygon.

  “No, Mr. Swann,” she said, firmly, “not in any way. I daresay my husband tried to imply as much but there was nothing… nothing you understand that Geo… Mr. Swann need regret in any way. The fact is he stayed with us out at Bowdon while he was up here, and I grew very fond of him. He's a very charming young man, Mr. Swann, and in the circumstances… well, naturally I’ve wondered about him. Is he well? Is he working in London with your father's firm?”