by John Masters
John said, ‘I don’t know. He’s twenty-one and in the army – I suppose so.’
‘I hope it wasn’t with some dirty native. Love is too important for that. But I don’t think he would go to such a woman … and he’s too nice for those wicked married women in India that Mr Kipling used to write about, in hill stations, wasn’t it?’
It was his turn to ask a question that had been in his mind, off and on for a year or more; but he had not thought that Louise had wished to talk about it. Now he said, ‘What about Naomi?’
She said, ‘Naomi? Why, John, you can’t be suggesting that she …’
John felt awkward, but persevered. ‘Well, we’ve just seen that young ladies are not … different … not all of them. And do we know Naomi, really, even though she is our daughter?’
His wife spoke with a little less certainty. ‘She’s not like Stella or Carol. She’s not man mad. She doesn’t flirt. In fact, she tries to make out that she despises young men. She’s not “modern” like some of the girls you hear about in London. She’s not experienced enough to be one of the sort that used to be in the old King’s set … and I hear he always treated unmarried women with great delicacy. It was the married ones they all considered fair game. And most of them delighted to be so, I understand.’
‘I wonder what it can be like, at Girton? I can’t imagine it, somehow. A community of young women but under discipline, involved with a wider community of men. I should think she’d be happier doing some kind of work, and having a little flat of her own.’
‘She’s too young for that,’ Louise said sharply, ‘and I don’t approve of young women of our class working in that way … But when she’s away, I don’t know what she’s thinking, or feeling. Her letters don’t tell us.’
John said quietly, ‘Is it really any different when she’s at home, dear?’
Louise said at last, ‘No. I suppose it started when she became a woman … you know. She built a barrier. I’ve heard other mothers say the same thing of their daughters. There were certainly many matters I didn’t want to speak to my mother about. I’d rather talk about it, whatever it was, with other girls. Naomi’s the same, I suppose. Only, now that I’m the mother, it hurts.’
‘Rachel Cowan is the one Naomi confides in, as far as I can see.’
Louise sat up in bed a little and faced her husband. ‘I don’t trust that young woman. There’s something unhealthy about her. You know what I think – she has a crush on Naomi. She’s in love with her.’
‘She’s not very pretty,’ John said.
‘That shouldn’t turn her head towards another woman. Oh, there can’t be anything … beastly about it, but it’s unhealthy.’
John said, ‘We started talking about Naomi at lunch, then we turned to something else. But we ought to discuss it. What is she going to do when she leaves Girton?’
Louise stirred uneasily. ‘I don’t know … Most of the girls at Girton are going to be teachers, or professors. Naomi’s not that kind. We’ll have to discuss it with her. She has two more years, doesn’t she?’
John said, ‘Listening to her, I get the impression that she is finding Girton rather confining, even now. When the full effects of this war have been felt by all of us, she might feel that even more strongly.’
Louise said definitely, ‘She must finish her tripos or whatever it is. And by then we will all have decided what she is going to do.’
After a while John said, ‘Have you told Naomi the facts of life?’
Louise said, ‘Living on a farm, she knows what happens, of course. But the emotions … I hope she doesn’t know, yet how can a girl guard herself if she doesn’t know? She looked like a being from another planet, when we went into the barn, didn’t she? Carol.’
John nodded. Carol Adams’ normally pleasant but rather large and not beautiful face had been transformed, the skin suffused and translucent, straw like a halo round and in her hair, an intense aura of emotional crisis radiating from her struggling body.
Louise said severely, ‘She was like an animal.’
John thought privately, yes, but there was a great human affection, too, in the way she was holding Fred. He remembered her, lips parted, teeth clenched on her own hand, the moaning of the primal symphony pouring out into her lover’s ear, driving him to further passion, the final rhythmic shudders.
He turned to his wife and they made love, without words, or acknowledgement of love, as always.
Daily Telegraph, Tuesday, November 3, 1914
FIGHT FOR CALAIS
Hottest Since Mons
German Forlorn Hope
From Wm. Maxwell. In France, October 28. The road to the coast is barred: the march on Calais has failed as the march on Paris and Warsaw failed. There is a halt in the fighting in the north. Does it mean that the enemy is exhausted or is about to change his plans? He has paid a heavy toll on the Yser, yet he gives no sign of retiring. On the contrary he clings grimly to the one footing he won a week ago south of the canal – the loop near Tervaete, midway between Dixmude and Nieuport. It is manifest that the Germans have not given up all hope of forcing this passage to the sea. Tervaete, if it remains in their possession, is to be the covering point for another assault …
Yes, the German plans had been foiled, thanks to the courage and determination of the fighting men of many countries; and, obviously, to some major miscalculations on the part of the German General Staff, which was supposed to be so all-knowing. Thank heavens for human weakness, in this case! The war would go on a long time now, that was sure, unless President Wilson could persuade the warring powers to come to terms; that would be no easy task. Everyone’s blood was up; all had suffered so much that all wanted more than victory now – they wanted revenge, a pound of flesh.
A long war called for more manpower and more production. America would play an important part on the Allied side. She would try to keep out of the actual fighting, of course, while selling her goods and raw materials to any who could buy them – and take delivery – at much enhanced prices; for countries with a powerful enemy at their throats are in no position to haggle over prices. The only weapon the Allies had was the Royal Navy. By blockading the Germans, and their allies – indeed the whole continent of Europe that was not directly under Allied control – the navy could reduce America’s possible customers to one – the Allied side. So far, so good, but that wouldn’t help unless the Allies could also refuse to accept inflated prices, and that they could not usually do without risking defeat.
But surely the biggest step Britain could take to increase her war effort was to increase her own productivity by every means possible. Lloyd George was on the right track there by trying to get the trade unions to give up many of their restrictive practices for the duration of the war. But the managerial side would have to give up something too – and learn something from the more efficient methods of the Americans and, yes, the Germans. Richard Rowland was in the forefront there, as John was by employing women. That new company Richard was hoping to form with American capital, to make lorries with American production-line techniques, was a giant step in the right direction. The soldiers in France, and the sailors at sea were every moment having to deal with new problems, work out new methods to deal with new dangers. It would be criminal folly for the business men, the trade unions – and the government – to think that at home the nation could still carry on ‘Business as Usual’.
15 Hedlington: Thursday, November 5, 1914
A thin ground fog filled the valley of the Scarrow between Beighton Down and Busby Down, in North Hedlington. The locomotive pulling a small train of shallow goods trucks northwards towards Rochester emitted billows of white smoke in the damp air. Its whistle shrilled curtly for a level crossing, the wheels of the trucks ground over the factory siding’s rail joints, the loose couplings clanked one after another as they took the forward strain. The people who passed, hunched men on bicycles, women with shawls over their heads and market baskets on their arms, wore dark, heavy clothing aga
inst the chill: it was only 45°F, but in this damp the cold penetrated to the bone.
Four men stood in the entrance of a huge warehouse set on a rail siding between the South Eastern railway running lines and the Scarrow, just above the barge terminus, the upper end of commercial navigation. The floor of the building was concrete, the metal roof supported by steel tie beams. Large sliding doors were spaced at regular intervals along the west side, where the rail spur ran past the warehouse. The main doors, where the men stood, were each thirteen and a half feet high and twelve feet wide, sliding apart to form an opening thirteen and a half by twenty-four feet.
‘It looks all right,’ the short man with the bowler hat stuck on the back of his head said. His accent and clothes were unmistakably American, and an American would have recognized from the grating of the syllables that he came from the Middle West. He continued, ‘You’ll have to have an engineer test that the ties will take the extra weight of the roof windows we’ve got to put in. The walls won’t support the travelling cranes, of course. They’ll have to stand independently. The floor looks OK, but it’ll have to be tested, to take a hundred pounds a square foot. And we can cut the doors out to seventeen feet overall, if we want to run overhead trolleys or cranes in through them later.’
Richard Rowland eyed the floor. The assembly line which Mr Overfeld was dying to build, on the Ford model, would fit nicely into the building. Sub-assemblies could be delivered through the side doors. It might be necessary to cut more doors on the river side, too. There was at least a hundred yards of unoccupied land between the building and the river bank. They could store the sub-assemblies and lesser parts there, and feed them in by belt, perhaps. Or…
Stephen Merritt said, ‘This seems suitable, then, for the assembly plant, Mr Overfeld?’
‘Yes, Mr Merritt,’ the man in the bowler hat said, ‘we’ll need a body shop, probably, unless we contract out for them, too. Power plant. Lighting for winter, at least. Paint shop. And a lot of storage, so production isn’t held up because a sub-contractor’s men go on strike – or a ship carrying engines hits a rock.’
‘Or is sunk by the Germans,’ Richard said. ‘They could call motor engines war material.’
Stephen Merritt said, ‘How soon can we fit out this building? And design and build another – for all the things you mentioned?’
Johnny Merritt waited at his father’s side. They were both wearing dark grey overcoats, dark grey felt hats, with silk scarves, Johnny’s white, his father’s beige. Richard and Overfeld talked technicalities for a few moments, then Overfeld said, ‘Are you willing to pay overtime?’
‘Whatever’s needed,’ Stephen said. ‘Time is money, in this case.’
‘If we can order what we need from Detroit right away, by cable, and if they have it, and can put it on ships on the East Coast within, say, three weeks … another two weeks to get to Liverpool … that’s five weeks. From then, we should be ready to roll in another six weeks, in this building. That’s towards the end of January. And if Mr Rowland can get the design, and the materials, and the contractors, and the labour – here, the other building should be ready about the same time.’
‘Freighter space is tight, I know,’ Stephen Merritt said. ‘Perhaps we could hire a small ship just to get the assembly line equipment over, with a first shipment of engines and sub-assemblies from Armbruster’s.’
‘Do you think you’ll definitely buy Armbruster’s now?’ Richard asked.
Stephen said, ‘It looks that way.’
Richard felt in two minds about the prospect. Armbruster’s was a small firm which made commercial vehicles in Columbus, Ohio. Fairfax, Gottlieb had an option to buy it, by the end of the year, at a very low price. It was a good firm, but was having trouble competing in the American market, and the bank’s original thought, in acquiring the option, was to put in more aggressive management to make the firm more competitive. That could still be done, but if part of Armbruster’s production was shipped to the new plant in Hedlington, put together there, with other parts sub-contracted from smaller manufacturers all over England – Richard would be very much a small-scale version of Ford, Reo, and other American automobile manufacturers who had set up operations in Britain. When Richard had first talked in detail to Stephen Merritt about his ideas, he had thought to design and make his own vehicles, from the bottom up; but Merritt had made him see that there was no time for that; nor would it be so efficient as assembling parts made elsewhere. The design of machine tools, dies, forges, and presses for Richard’s all-new lorry – let alone the making of the tools – would take many months, years even, and in wartime Britain the high grade tool steel might not be made available. At all events, the new factory could not possibly have produced a lorry within a year and a half.
Armbruster’s made two models, one with a 116“ wheelbase and a 24 hp 4-cylinder engine, designed for a payload of 30 cwt; and another with a 131” wheelbase and a 45 hp 6-cylinder engine, designed for a payload of 3 tons. In discussions with the Merritts all had agreed that if they finally did use Armbruster major sub-assemblies, they’d concentrate on the larger model.
And, at the beginning they’d be receiving crated sets of parts, which wouldn’t need much more than a few spanners to assemble. The crux of the problem after that was to get sufficiently large orders quickly enough to make the Ford-style assembly methods justifiable in terms of capital outlay. And by then, say a year from now, they ought to be thinking and planning in terms of a Mark II JMC, in which the American components might be no more than the engine, gearbox, and back axle – all the rest would be British made, and adapted to the original basic Armbruster’s design.
Stephen turned to his son, ‘It’s time we put up or shut up. What do you think?’
‘This is the best prospect we’ve seen,’ Johnny said. ‘I think we should go ahead with the whole project, based on making the vehicles in this building. I think we may have some difficulty getting hold of some materials, though. And labour.’
Stephen said, ‘Our bank has had dealings in the past with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Lloyd George. I will see him, and advise him of our plans. He cannot but welcome such an influx of American capital, at this time. And I shall cable New York this afternoon, because … I agree with you.’
Richard said, ‘Well, good! I’m delighted. But when you see Mr Lloyd George, please stress the importance to us of getting some large government orders, quickly – otherwise we might get into financial trouble … and England would lose what’s going to be a very efficient and effective plant.’
They walked towards the back of the warehouse, where they had left their cars, Richard his Rowland and the Merritts their hired chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. There they parted, after agreeing to meet again the following day with more detailed notes on design factors for the new building. Then the Americans drove away. Richard stood a moment, looking at the warehouse, soon to be the headquarters of JMC – Jupiter Motor Company. The Armbruster assemblies would have American sizes of screws, bolts, nuts … little would be interchangeable with standard British parts. That didn’t matter now, it might later; what did matter was that parts within each machine should be interchangeable, so that a bolt missing from somewhere could be replaced by another from somewhere else; and of course that the parts in one JMC machine were interchangeable with those in another.
A clock in North Hedlington struck twelve and he started his car; his next appointment was at 12.15 in the White Horse, nearby.
He drove out through the open wire mesh gates of the warehouse yard, got out, closed and locked the gates behind him and was about to get back into the car when a man accosted him. ‘Mr. Rowland.’ He recognized Bert Gorse, and said, ‘What can I do for you, Bert?’
‘Got a cold. Took the day off… You going to make the new factory here?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘When’ll you be starting work?’
‘Not for some months yet… two or three. We’ll be building before then,
though.’
‘There’s Yankee money behind you, I hear.’
Richard answered coldly, ‘There is American interest in the venture.’ He wished he could trust Gorse, wished he could make him realize that his best interests lay in using his intelligence to help the managers, the owners, rather than in trying to weld the unthinking and largely unskilled workers into an organized opposition.
‘You’ll be paying Yankee wages?’
‘We’ll pay well. I must go …’
‘Will you give me a job, as soon’s you’re ready? A better job than I got now, with Mr Harry?’
Richard looked into the narrow-set green eyes. There weren’t many working men as sharp as Gorse – or as skilled – or as dangerous, perhaps. But he was going to be in a terrible bind for overseers and foremen of all kinds. His father would be furious, but that couldn’t be helped.
He said, ‘I’ll take you … if you promise to do no union work.’
‘You’re making a mistake,’ Bert said, real earnestness in his voice, ‘if you supported a union – the Engineers, say – they’d support you.’
Richard said, ‘If you want a shop foreman’s job, you’ve got to get out of the union. That’s final.’
He engaged gear and drove off. In the rear-view mirror he saw Bert Gorse standing, legs akimbo, arms folded, cloth cap pulled down over his forehead, watching him go.
As he slowed to turn on to the main road a small boy ran alongside and shouted up at him, ‘Penny for the Guy, mister!’
He found a sixpence in his pocket, pressed it into the grubby palm and drove on, the treble voice chanting behind him, ‘Thanks, mister. Penny for the Guy! ’Oo’ll give a penny for the Guy?’
Outside the White Horse in North Hedlington, the inn sign hung still in the damp windless air. It showed the prancing White Horse of Kent, a broken chain flying from its neck – the same device which, set over a stringed bugle horn, was the cap badge of the Weald Light Infantry. It was a big pub, with saloon, private and public bars, a dining-room facing over the muddy Scarrow, and a reputation as a good place for assignations. The owners, an ex-petty officer RN and his wife, possibly an ex-chorus girl and certainly an ex-barmaid, were honest and reasonably hard-working, and they were not inquisitive: business flourished.
