God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  There remained Edith and he was by no means sure how to express his appreciation of her unpaid services as deputy when Wadsworth's work took him out of the Boston area. A gift of money might be misconstrued, but a trinket, or a gown accompanied by a letter of acknowledgement would be appreciated. He exchanged pencil for pen, took a sheet of paper embossed with the Swann device, and wrote, “Dear Miss Wadsworth; I am enclosing a draft for ten pounds in respect of your father who may or may not be on hand. Give it to him with my compliments, and thanks for all his work in establishing us in such a vast stretch of territory. In due course, as I have told him already, I will pursue the original plan to split the area into three—north, central, and south, and whilst he will retain overall authority, I hope to engage two sub-managers, leaving him based on Boston as now. In the meantime, aware of the very real contribution you personally have made in the area, I am sending you a Christmas gift under separate cover, to arrive within the next two or three days. My warmest regards to you for the festive season and the new year. I remain, very sincerely, Adam Swann.”

  He read the letter through and it seemed too formal to harmonise with their relationship, so he added a postscript: “I expect to be in Boston in late January or early February, and look forward very much to seeing you again. I don’t feel obliged (in view of what I observed on the last visit) to ask you to keep the carters up to their work and safeguard our reputation for undamaged deliveries!”

  He made out the other drafts, stamped the envelopes, and then, looking at the clock, noted it was coming up to eleven. Shrugging himself into his topcoat and muffler he extinguished the lamp and descended the spiral staircase to the yard gates.

  When he remained overnight in London he used a hotel in Norfolk Street, and on occasions like this, when the night was free of fog, he would compensate for his hours spent at the desk by walking the distance across London Bridge, down Cannon Street to Ludgate Circus, into Fleet Street and on past the Law Courts to the Strand. Tonight, because the frosty air invigorated him, he took pleasure in the walk and arriving at the junction of Norfolk Street decided to extend it, moving on down the Strand and past Charing Cross into the Mall.

  As the moon rose its pale light subdued the yellow glow of the gas lamps, set at regular intervals along the thoroughfare. Traffic was very light, a few roysterers driving to or from the stews in Covent Garden, handbarrows and a dray or two, making overnight deliveries to restaurants and hotels, and every few paces a beggar or a perfumed drab, wan and hesitant in the guttering lamplight. Two or three women accosted him halfheartedly, but he moved on, minding them no more than the grind of traffic, or the acrid whiff of horse manure awaiting collection by the scavengers.

  Once in the Mall, with the spectacular facade of Carlton House on his right and St. James's Park, still under frost, to his left, he went on down towards the Palace, intending to make his way back to his hotel via Victoria, but as he approached the railings of the Palace a smart, gaily painted equipage dashed out of the double gates, and the elegance of the coachman told him that it was not one of the ordinary mail vans, for whom everyone else was expected to make way, but one of the vehicles from the royal mews. He was watching it disappear, wondering a little at its reckless speed, when he saw an officer of the Grenadier Guards making his rounds of the sentries, and his professional eye registered something unusual about the man's uniform so that he looked at him carefully, noting the crepe band tied above the elbow of the right arm.

  The significance of this was not immediately apparent, not even when the lieutenant stopped outside a sentry box and the sentry slapped the butt of his weapon, the sound echoing in the frosty air. Then a police constable confronted him, a friendly, full-bearded officer who half-hesitated, as though he was finding his night patrol tedious and sought contact with another night-prowler. He said, in a respectful tone prompted by the quality of Adam's braided topcoat and calf-length boots, “Very sad news, sir. Her Majesty is going to be might put out over this,” and Adam said, with the eagerness accorded any sensational news-item, however shocking, “The Prince Consort? Is he dead?” and the man nodded, gravely and deliberately, as though it was his duty to put the worst possible face on such a national calamity.

  “You saw the mail dashing off to catch the boat train? I thought there might be a special edition on sale but it's too late, I imagine. The papers will make hay out of it in the morning, I wouldn’t wonder. Did you ever see His Royal Highness, sir?”

  “No,” Adam said, “I never did,” and at once the man expanded, saying proudly, “I did, often enough. I was a stone's-throw from here, as a youngster, of course, when that lunatic took a pot shot at ’em. And now he's gone, and him only forty-two.” He leaned towards Adam conspiratorially. “Typhoid, they say, and it don’t say much for the doctors, does it? If they can’t cure him how would the rest of us fare, I wonder?”

  The man was not unsympathetic but a generous part of him was already responding to the enormity of the occasion, and Adam supposed, by the time the winter's sun rose over the city, that this would be true of millions of Englishmen. There would be an orgy of mourning, of crêpe hangings, with black-bordered newspapers, flags at half-mast, and pulpit eulogies without number. But he remembered a time when these same Londoners had begrudged Albert his Parliamentary grant for, although the Queen's husband, he was yet a foreigner, with foreign notions about how to conduct himself. They had even sneered at his Hyde Park exhibition until it had proved such a thumping success, and it was only dogged persistence that had won their respect, although never their affection. He said, suddenly, “What did you make of him, constable?” and the officer, stroking his beard, said, “Oh, he wasn’t at all a bad sort for a foreigner. And Queen Vic must have liked him, for they’ve a rare tribe of children.” It was, Adam supposed, as kindly an epitaph as a foreigner could look for this side of the Channel.

  He said good night to the policeman and crossed the gardens towards the Horse Guards. With him, consciously assembled, went a hotchpotch of history, for he remembered that the amiable, whoring Charles the Second had walked these same paths with his spaniels, and that, within a couple of hundred yards, was the spot where his father's head had been hacked off by a masked butcher's assistant. The place reeked of history. From close by, Charles’ brother James, had fled his capital throwing the Great Seal into the Thames, to be recovered by a waterman, and then, as the next century wore on, a workable compromise between king, grandees, country squires, and people had been hammered out and labelled “Democracy.” Yet it had never deserved that name until the Chartist mobs had scared the Government into extending the franchise, and the new iron age had dawned, driving the Blubbs and the Frasers from the roads, and filling vast areas of a green countryside with filthy, urban sprawl. He supposed now that there would be a State funeral, like the funeral of the old Duke that his father had travelled all the way from Keswick to attend ten years ago, and as he remembered this he had a sense of crossing a watershed that was both national and personal, for the Duke and his peers were mostly dead and buried under the new civilisation that the German Prince and a few like him had traced out, often in the teeth of reaction. Now there would be more changes, thousands of changes, proliferating with the years, and if he lived out his normal span he would doubtless play a part in some of them, but change would soon leave him behind. His two children would be a year or two younger than Albert when the century drew to a close, and by then who knew what kind of England would have emerged, or how close the rest of the world had come to overhauling her?

  The inevitable drab emerged from the belt of shadow between two gas lamps. “Hello, Mister…hey, Mister…!” one of the twenty thousand said to be making a living on the London streets, the streets of the capital of the world. He walked on into Whitehall and crossed it, heading for the Strand. Bengy Hall's gigantic clock at Westminster struck the first stroke of midnight, and the reverberations of the ponderous strokes followed him as he drew level with Charing Cross. There w
as a kind of fatalism in the long, booming sounds, and they seemed to have a message for him but what it was he could not tell. Perhaps it was a lap bell, warning him that he still had a long way to travel. Or maybe a knell for the earnest humourless man, now lying dead. He reached the corner of Norfolk Street and hurried down it, suddenly eager for his hot toddy and sleep.

  COB AT LARGE:

  1862–1863

  One

  1

  WHEN, TOWARDS THE END OF THE NINETEEN-FIFTIES, ALGY SWANN, FOUR TIMES married and the father of nine children (five of them legitimate) saw fit to make public his denial of the rumour that he and two of his most powerful rivals were merging, a good deal appeared in the press concerning the origins of Swann-on-Wheels Limited, and Algy, smiling over it, promptly commissioned an official history of the firm, then within a year or so of its centenary.

  It was a shrewd move, for a book of this kind, tracing the history of Swann-on-Wheels through nearly ten decades of national and international hurly-burly, bestowed upon the enterprise that accolade of antiquity so dear to the heart of every English tradesman, as proclaimed by foundation dates adorning the premises of ten thousand businesses up and down the country. Algy, as it happened, did not sell, but the book put a higher value on his principal asset. For even men who make their millions on the telephone, without knowing more than a dozen of their five thousand employees by name, like to think they are buying history as well as stock-in-trade and goodwill. It flatters the least romantic among them to reflect that they are now the masters of something that has resisted the buffets of time, and it offers a challenge to late arrivals bent on grafting a chromium-plated personality on a venture that is more of an institution than a going concern, as though they were buying the Monument, or the Tower of London, with licence to demolish and redesign the one, and open the other as a self-service store, selling their own brands of margarine and quick-mix baking powder.

  The book that resulted from the researches of two hacks, however, made only tolerable reading, for it skipped nimbly across the earliest years of the enterprise and dwelt lovingly on the dawn of the motor-age, and yesterday's post-war boom, when Swann's wheels, eight and ten to a vehicle, could be numbered in thousands. It did not probe deeply into the subtle stresses of the first, post-expansion period, years that saw the completion of the British gridiron, for its authors had no reason to regard 1862–4 as the watershed Adam had predicted that December night when he stood in the Mall and learned from a policeman that the Prince Consort had succumbed to typhoid fever. This period came under the vague, general heading of “Early Beginnings—the Age of the Horse,” and at least three incidents that went some way to making Adam Swann a national figure were not mentioned. There was no reference, for example, to Hamlet Ratcliffe's spectacular feat in the west, or Blubb's bloody brush with Fenians in the east. Neither was mention made of how Bryn Lovell, in the Mountain Square, brought off the Swann treble in a remote Welsh valley, in the very last days of that eventful year, and this despite the fact that all three occurrences found their way into newspapers that printed Gladstone's speeches verbatim. For how could these things be known to a couple of hired hacks (with one eye on the money to be made out of a TV soap-opera) when the names of Ratcliffe, Blubb, and Lovell were no more than entries in an account book, handed to them by Algy Swann when they were halfway through their chore? In this way, perhaps, historical keys fall through the pockets of time. Adam Swann should have written his own history, instead of confining himself to casual jottings in the daybook he kept in his eyrie.

  Hamlet Ratcliffe, sometime auctioneer who had taken the post Adam offered him as manager of the Western Wedge, had not succeeded in making good the promises given shortly before returning to his native Devon in the vanguard of Swann's provincial missionaries. Hamlet was an amiable man, too amiable perhaps for the initial prejudice he encountered, but Adam had not completely misjudged him. He was loyal, hardworking, and honest, and had he succeeded to a branch already established by a younger, more thrustful man like Vicary (who soon had a virtual monopoly in the section marked on the map as The Bonus) he would have been an excellent choice. He knew his Devon and his Devonians, and proved as much by getting plenty of short-haul work in the base area on both sides of the Exe Estuary; but he failed lamentably to attract business further west and north, where the majority of hauls were commissioned by agriculturalists, and the goods carried by road were almost exclusively produce of one sort or another.

  Ratcliffe was under no illusion as to the reasons for his failure. Most of the prosperous farmers, that is to say, men cultivating four hundred acres or over, were committed to locally based carriers. Others had made satisfactory arrangements with the two main railroad companies operating in the west and others again, among whom were many of the smallholders, made do with their own transport, a cart or a haywain, pressed into service for the collection and delivery of milk churns and the transport of goods and cattle to local markets. Thus, one way and another, Tybalt's canvass of the area yielded almost nothing in the way of long-term contracts. It was difficult to convince men of this type that speed was money in their pockets, for down here speed was not and never would be a feature in the pattern of their daily lives. The farmers had adjusted to the pace of herds coming in from pasture, and to the slow but predictable rhythms of the seasons. Deliberation was bred in their blood and bone. They were as fond of money as the next man, but they did not need it so urgently as the men of the cities, for the means of continuity reposed in the soil, the timber, the thatch, the leather, the very clothes they wore on their backs, providing they were prepared to work fourteen hours a day in their meadows and byres. It needed a more persuasive man than Hamlet Ratcliffe to convince them that he could lighten their burdens and increase their turnover by hauling cheap manufactured goods in and carting produce out, but rooted conservatism was the least of his worries. In the two populous cities, and the three dozen thriving towns in his territory, near access to the railways had already been achieved. Exeter and Plymouth were both situated astride main lines and so, for that matter, were towns in the southern half of Cornwall. The North Devon line ran clear across his territory to Bideford where, as a native, he might have looked for some support, and three great slices of his domain, Exmoor to the north, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor to the west, were sparsely settled and did not boast of a single good road, so that large areas were completely isolated in severe weather.

  All these factors—prejudice, conservatism, established local opposition, bad roads, rough terrain, all these were obvious handicaps to him, and he took cognisance of them, severally and collectively, and yet, because he was an inward-looking man, he knew that they were not the basic causes of his failure. The real cause was closer to home, reposing not in his circumstances but in his temperament and record, boy and man.

  Nobody, from the moment he had trotted round his father's farm in the wake of a string of lumbering, Jan Riddish brothers, had paid much attention to Hamlet, or judged him capable of anything in the way of personal achievement. About the farm he had always been referred to as The Runt, for what other label could his parents give a son measuring a shade over five feet, when his shortest brother, Abel, was an inch over six? And it was not merely a matter of inches. His brothers were hulking, musclebound peasants, capable, so it was said, of balancing carts on their bellies and pointing them to the sky. Each was a slow, purposeful man, dedicated to the soil, and beside them, scuttling about the South Molton holding, Hamlet looked like a timid terrier who had strayed among oxen or, more accurately, perhaps, a rosy little cider apple lost among pumpkins. Not only did he fail to grow, his complexion was proof against the North Devon sun and wind. His skin did not ripen and coarsen after puberty but remained, even at fifty, as smooth and pink as a girl's, and it was on account of these physical disparities that his father decided that Hamlet should wear a collar and “work clean,” apprenticing him at the age of twelve as clerk to a corn-chandler.

  It was the
first of his failures. He remained perched on a stool (from which he was obliged to leap down to the floor) through the remainder of his boyhood, then drifted through a succession of indoor jobs, counter-jumping jobs mostly, but made his mark nowhere, and the reason for this was that he was always at war with himself, a very small man with big ideas that would inflate in each new environment until they were pricked by his own inadequacies.

  When he was twenty-two he met and married Augusta Bickford, youngest daughter of a Tiverton undertaker, and here, at last, he found the one person in the world who would accept him at his own valuation, believing him to possess not merely brains and initiative but, beneath a cherubic exterior, a hard and unrelenting masculinity.

  There was a reason for this too. When Hamlet appeared Augusta was twenty-eight, the very last of the seven Bickford girls who sat stitching shrouds for their father until somebody spoke for them. Agnes, the last to go, had been married four years when Hamlet proposed, and Augusta, speechless with relief, enfolded him in an embrace before he was halfway through his proposal. In a sense she had never relaxed her hold. As though fearful that one day he would escape, and she would find herself back at the shroud bench, she invested her entire emotional capital in him, inflating his confidence like a nonstop bellows, and dismissing all his failures with the statement, “Twadden gude enufî vor ’ee, ’Amlet.” When any of the Bickfords or the Ratcliffes pointed out that it was time Hamlet chose a trade and stuck to it, Augusta would shake her head and say, “No, that ole job— twadden gude enuff for ’Amlet,” and leave it at that.