Give Us This Day (38 page)

It came on to rain after they rejoined the main road and he had all he could do to keep moving, with Dartmoor drizzle reducing visibility to fifty yards, but they kept going and were within hailing distance of the Great Western Railway crossing at Wrangton when Channing, scouting ahead, came back signalling a halt. He said, tersely, “What do your maps say about the bridge yonder?” and George, making a check, said there was a twelve-foot nine clearance.

“Somebody is behind the times,” he said. “I’ve just measured it, and it’s an inch or so under twelve. Come and see for yourself.”

They went down towards the bridge, and it was just as Channing had said. New pointing had reduced the clearance below the minimum and even with the tarpaulin stripped off there was no prospect of passing The Hump under the arch. It would foul the bridge two inches or more below the summit.

“Have you got a detour pencilled in?”

“Yes, but the Gov’nor queried it. There’s a road bridge on the lower road and the surface is unmade. However, there’s no help for it. We’ll have to try the Ugborough-Ermington loop.”

It was still raining when they nosed their way down a narrow country road south of the main route, then headed west again over an atrocious surface where their speed was reduced to under two miles an hour. He thought, sourly,
With ordinary luck—yesterday’s luck—we could have made Plymouth tonight. We’ll never do it now
. He sent Edward ahead to reconnoitre the bridge.

The boy was back in ten minutes looking glum. “It’s even lower than the rail bridge,” he said, “and there’s only one way of passing it. We’ll have to lower the road level by six inches or more.”

He went forward to see for himself. The bridge, an old one, had once given haywain clearance, but that was long ago. Winter rains had worn away the banks and there was actually a slight incline up to the arch where the road was surfaced with hard-packed rubble.

“It’s a pick and shovel job,” he told Edward. “Get Morgan, Rees, and the tools.”

“We’ll need more than one pick and shovel to shift that in the time. How about local labour?”

“Is there any to be had at short notice?”

“Farms, I daresay. I’ll look around,” and he plodded off into the seeping mist while George, momentarily forgetting him, set to work with Scottie and the two waggoners, scrabbling at the surface with such tools as they had.

They had hardly broken the surface when Edward was back in a blue farmwaggon driven by a moorman with straw-coloured hair and a brogue so thick as to be all but unintelligible.

“Us iz zendin’ ver Bain,” he told George, after a long and hostile scrutiny of the cavalcade. “Youm bliddy well mazed, maister, to bring that gurt contrapsun round yer. Anyone knows you earn taake a wain from Yuish to Ivy-bridge this road.” He made no reference to the rail bridge at Wrangton. Presumably local men had adjusted to both underpasses.

“Do you know what he’s saying?” George demanded, irritably, and Edward said, “We don’t have to. He understood me the moment I offered him a sovereign an hour for his labour and tools. I had to show him the money, however. No flies on these boys.”

“Bain” (subsequently identified as “Ben,” senior hand at the nearest farm) arrived a few minutes later, with two mute assistants and a load of tools. With a labour force of nine they made rapid progress, carting soil and rock chippings away in a wheelbarrow that had an excruciating squeak. Darkness closed in, however, long before the section was cut and levelled, so that George sent for storm-lanterns to hang in the hedges, and the work continued in the soft yellow glow, lighting both sides of the arch.

When they were down to a uniform ten inches, and both approaches had been levelled off to some extent, he sent Edward in the moorman’s cart for planking, busying himself with Scottie and the waggoners stripping the tarpaulin from The Hump. He took his time now, covering the dip with carefully placed planks two inches thick, and it was well past midnight before they were ready to move. Channing appeared out of the murk, a heron with bedraggled plumage, who was already acquainted with the cause of the long delay. Rumour circulated quickly in this kind of country, he said, and Ivybridge was alerted as to their presence a mile south of the main road. “I’ve sent my man on into Plymouth with a letter to the authorities at Crownhill,” he added, breathlessly. “We’ll get every co-operation in the city. Will you wait for the light now?”

George told him no. All he wanted was to be out of this bottleneck without further delay, and Channing, perched in the dripping hedge on the Plymouth side of the bridge, watched them pass through and tackle the incline towards the main road. The bridge had claimed something in excess of eight hours.

He curbed his impatience then and splashed up a muddy lane to the farm where the farmer’s wife, whose brogue rivalled the carter’s, made tea and beef sandwiches, and he paid Bain and his team for their labour and took his turn to wash under the kitchen pump. Dawn was lighting the eastern sky now and they made a fresh start about five, crawling into Ivybridge an hour or so later and pushing through it without a stop. Despite the early hour half the town assembled to watch the procession.

The final leg, some twelve miles from Ivybridge to Devonport, occupied them close on for three hours, and it was nearly eleven-thirty when they trundled through the dock gates and saw Channing again, miraculously spruced up, who agreed to superintend the unloading and find someone to take care of the horses. He said, after a taciturn naval officer had inspected the naked cupola in its waggon-bed, “You realise how close we came? Another ninety minutes and they would have refused delivery.” George, stifling a yawn, replied, “They would have had to haul it back to Bromsgrove under their own steam, for I wouldn’t make that trip again for a king’s ransom. We all need a hot meal and twelve hours’ sleep. Did you book any lodging hereabouts?”

“Not me,” Channing said, wrinkling his lip in the second smile George had seen him attempt during their brief but eventful acquaintance, “but I’m led to believe your father did.”

“My father?”

“He’s waiting in a local hotel. I forget the name. It’s a half-timbered building, a stone’s throw from the dockyard gates. Arrived yesterday, I hear.” Suddenly, and with what was clearly an effort for so reserved a man, he extended his hand. “I won’t forget this, Swann. I’m uncommonly obliged to every one of you. Will you give this to your men to share?” He passed over an envelope, later found to contain a cash bonus of a hundred guineas.

The naval officer summoned him then, and George was watching the mobile crane go into action when Edward plucked his sleeve, pointing to a spare figure in a grey frock coat, standing squarely on the cobbles immediately outside the gates. “You can’t keep the Gov’nor away, George. I think he’s ruffled you didn’t ask him along for the ride.”

“I did,” George said, “and he laughed in my face. He’s nicely placed nowadays. All the fun without any of the grief. I’m beginning to think there’s a lot to be said for getting long in the tooth.”

They went out together and Adam, deliberately laconic, shook hands with each of them. “You cut it fine, boy,” he said, as they crossed to the grill room of the hotel, where Scottie and the waggoners were already wielding knife and fork. “What kept you so long over the final leg?” George, suddenly recalling his father’s stories of old coachman Blubb, the Kentish Triangle manager who had once driven the Lord Nelson coach and four north from the Saracen’s Head in Snow Hill before the railways threw him on a scrapheap, said, “You could call it ‘that bliddy gridiron’, Gov’nor. I daresay old Blubb would have had something quaint to say about it.”

“Ah, I daresay,” said Adam, “but he would have been equally foul-mouthed as regards your means of traction.” He unfolded a
Westminster Gazette
dated four days earlier, indicating a somewhat blurred picture of the cavalcade, moving through Worcester. “I’ve sent for the negative of that,” he said. “We’ll use it in the autumn advertisement programme. It should help to win you a handsome majority at the next conference. You’ll talk them into going ahead with the fleet of motors, I imagine?”

“Scottie Quirt is travelling north tonight to put the original plan into action as soon as he’s caught up on his sleep. They’ll be approving a
fait accompli
when they finally get around to it.”

“Ah, that was my way,” Adam said. “Democracy? It’s well enough in theory, but it’s no substitute for the committee of one, boy.”

* * *

Adam Swann, whom few would have described as a family man in the literal sense, was none the less an interested observer of family alliances. Down the years he had pondered each of them objectively, feeling that there was something fresh to be learned about people in the shifts and loyalty patterns that went on under his nose. Perhaps it was this curiosity that enabled him to draw what he regarded as the really important lesson from George’s two-hundred-and-fifty-mile haul with that bloodless chap’s gun-turret.

It was not a reaffirmation of his unwavering faith in George as a pioneer, the only male of his brood in whom he saw himself in the splendour of his youth; neither was it the certainty that George, although moving at a snail’s pace, had managed to whip the carpet from under the feet of his colleagues at the board table. Rather, it was a new relationship that had flowered under stress between New Broom and New Boy, his youngest son, Edward. For George, until then, had seemed not to need an ally within the family, whereas Edward (whose reverence for George had been evident since infancy) had been waiting in the wings for a long time now and had at last been summoned, to savour the bliss of what seemed, to Adam, a full and equal partnership. Overnight, as it were. Somewhere between Bromsgrove and Devonport Docks. And under what circumstances? The factors contributing to form this interesting new alliance teased Adam all the way home, so much so that he took the very first opportunity that presented itself to satisfy his curiosity, when Edward, leaping out to lay claim on a cab as the express slid into Paddington, left them alone for a moment or two.

“How did the boy shape, George?”

“Edward? To have along on a trip of that kind? First-rate, Gov’nor. Absolutely first-rate.” George hesitated a moment, standing with his back to his father and his hand raised to the luggage rack, and in the compartment mirror Adam saw the wide, familiar grin light up his face. Then George turned, heaving at their grips. “Damn it, I’ll go further. Why not? Maybe I’m getting woolly. Maybe he’s a marriage of your patience and Sam Rawlinson’s bullheadedness. I’ll come right out with it. He saved our bacon twice over. Without him I’d never have made it. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“I’ll own to it, too, George. It’s what I suspected and wanted confirmed.”

Three

Confrontations

I
t was times such as these when, drowsy after an interval of tenderness crowned by a lovemaking, he had dropped away into sleep, that the sense of identity came to Romayne. A presence, half-shade, half-fancy, yet almost tangible, standing beside the bed like a fairy godmother or like the jovial ghost of Christmas Present in
A Christmas Carol
. Warm and munificent, a personification of the benedictions of a lifetime, so that she was aware of a fulfilment that had eluded her since childhood.

It had grown a little, this presence, ever since they settled here, in this scarred monument to greed, with its tips and its skeletal pithead gear, its undulating seams of dwellings etched against a ragged skyline, its long tradition of toil and deprivation. Not a presence one would be likely to associate with ugliness and desecration, but at home for all that, far more so than it would have been in the pampered circumstances of her earlier life, and the difference lay, she imagined, in her personal contribution to the serenity of their sojourn and the reality of their newfound comradeship.

For ever since coming here she had seen him grow, a little every day, as he moved about among his miners and their cheerful, extrovert families, healing their small feuds and weaving their isolated protests against fate into a force and fervour that would one day carry him to Westminster as their champion. And it was the very certainty of this that enlarged him so that, looking back to a time when he was dabbling in trade, he seemed small, baffled, blighted, and insignificant, with no outlet for his brimming reservoir of compassion.

She acknowledged, proudly and cheerfully, her role in this enlargement. Yet all she had done, when she came to think about it, was to point him in the right direction after so long in the wilderness, although her claims in another, more private area were more substantial. Not only had she brought him a son, and was soon, she felt sure, to bring him another, she was there to offer succour and revitalisation when he came home tired and used up, nurturing him as a lover in this nondescript room when rain came slashing in from the Atlantic and the wind roared down from the mountains, re-inflating his ego in a way that revealed to her not only his innermost secrets, but also those of every man and every woman who had ever sought and found deep, personal fulfilment in physical fusion. It taught her something vital about the relationship of men like his father and women like his indomitable mother who had, as it were, fed upon one another’s being in a long and fruitful association, and she was so happy that she feared it was too rich and rewarding to last out their lifespan.

Thus she no longer thought of herself as Romayne Rycroft-Mostyn, the spoiled and wilful child of a money-mad industrialist whose despotism extended over mines, dyeworks, and chain foundries. Here, within the easy freemasonry of an enclosed community, where four out of five families wrenched a living from the seams deep under the mountain, she was plain Rosie Swann, the candidate’s wife, and she rejoiced in the title. She had come home, out of the long, growling storm.

She withdrew her free hand from the blankets, half-turned, and ran her fingertips across his chest and down over his warm belly to the groin, smiling secretively at the limpness and insignificance of her discoveries, wondering briefly if he was capable as yet of re-enacting the climactic surge of an hour ago, and dreaming it possible if he was sufficiently encouraged. But then, turning away, she remembered he would need rest for tomorrow’s winter foray into the Chamberlain citadel at Birmingham, beside his hero and sponsor, David Lloyd George, for whom their son had been named. She did not fear for him or his mentor on those Midland battlements, despite gloomy warnings of party wiseacres and newspapers, who said the Brummagers would make good their threat to lynch any pro-Boer who ventured among them. Giles Swann and Lloyd George could be relied upon to give a good account of themselves on any battlefield where then-deepest convictions were challenged. In the end, despite slanders, violence, and mob hysteria, they would win the day.

2

Giles, stepping out into a flurry of sleet on New Street platform a few hours later, did not share her confidence, being under no illusion what kind of opposition they would be likely to face up here and what excesses a Brummagen mob were capable of committing whipped on by the scourge of partisan-patriotism. Patriotism, he thought, was a word that should be expunged from the dictionary. It had become pitifully debased of late and was currently being used to justify every kind of outrage, both here and on the veldt where, so they said, thousands of Boer women and children had already died in Kitchener’s concentration camps. A necessary price, Tory newspapers claimed, to be paid for denying the enemy access to areas of recruitment and supply. Such facts, if they could be believed (and the latest underground intelligence from the Cape persuaded him they could), dishonoured not only the perpetrators, but also the entire nation, especially a people whose boast it was that their homeland was the power house of freedom.

He wondered how his brother Alex would answer such an indictment. Or his mother. Or Hugo, poor devil, whose life had been shattered by impulses set in train by that same word. Surely war against the dependants of a gallant and already defeated minority was indefensible, even when British soldiers were dying at the same rate in tented hospitals behind the blockhouse wire. The entire war was indefensible, had always been indefensible, and his loathing for it welled up in him afresh so that he hunched his shoulders against the December sleet and set off, grim-faced, towards the Liberal Club; there he sought the latest briefing on the Town Hall rally where Lloyd George, despite police appeals and a flood of warnings from his own supporters, had pledged himself to speak that night.

He found the sense of foreboding had spilled out of Headquarters into the streets. Police were everywhere, mounted and on foot. Shopkeepers were boarding up their premises, as against a siege or street battle. The very air was charged with strain, the tensions releasing themselves in the thud of hammer on clapboard and the bravado of the party workers, one of whom told him that, although entry to the Town Hall was strictly by ticket, thousands of tickets were known to have been forged and violence was a certainty. Lloyd George himself, he learned, was not yet in the city and his method of entry, and progress to the Town Hall, was a closelyguarded secret, but that he would appear as promised nobody doubted, least of all Giles, for here was a situation the Welshman would relish. All his life he had been moving towards this kind of climax, and his personal courage was equal to any of the men who had sworn to silence him, hopefully forever.

By mid-afternoon, under a sky heavy with snow, he had threaded his way through dense crowds to Victoria Square, where the Town Hall stood on an island, already besieged by patriots, so that Giles wondered how any legitimate ticket-holders could expect to get in without being manhandled. Here again scores of police were on duty, but there was little, seemingly, that they could do to control the dense crowds. On a piece of waste land in Edmund Street, he saw a huckster doing a profitable business selling bricks at three a penny “to chuck at Lloyd George.”

It took him nearly an hour to work his way round to the committee-room entrance, where the presence of over fifty policemen succeeded in keeping open a narrow gangway along which ticket-holders ran the gauntlet of the Chamberlain mobs, screaming abuse and obscenities at everyone whose ticket was accepted as genuine. He thought, on reaching the relative sanctuary of the hall, packed with supporters, What the devil has happened to the country? In the old days part
y rivalry was rumbustious, but there was a schoolboy element about its clashes… It was never vicious, or never on this scale… He wondered if it might not have bee
n wiser to cancel the meeting after all, for if the mob broke in something far worse than broken heads and bloody noses would result, and, even if he escaped, Lloyd George’s obduracy would be deemed responsible for the carnage.

But then, his confidence returning as he looked at the massed ranks of the faithful and the knots of prowling stewards, he thought:
Damn them all… David is right! Someone has to show the real flag. Someone has to make a stand for free speech and democratic tradition, and who better than him?

* * *

He slipped in quietly and unobtrusively about seven o’clock, almost unrecognisable under a heavy peaked cap and a rough, workman’s overcoat. Utterly composed, and with the familiar twinkle lighting his eye as he said, seeing Giles, “Well, Johnny Peep? How’s this for a peaceful exchange of views? A little livelier than a House debate, but more productive, too, if I’m not mistaken. How is your wife? Did she come along for the fun?”

“She would have if she hadn’t been pregnant, L.G. She sent her regards, and said I was to tell you we’ll make it next election. We came much closer than I expected last time.”

“And she’s right, tell her. The mood of the country is changing, despite this welcome party. This is no more than a local fracas, the natural outcome of our Go-For-Jo campaign. Next time we’ll give them the shock of the century.” He moved off to chat to Birmingham supporters among whom, Giles noted with some apprehension, were a number of women, already dishevelled by their passage into the hall.

The roars outside beat upon the isolated building like prodigious breakers on a rock, wave after wave of baying that made speech between individuals difficult and would certainly prohibit a public address. Giles shouted, in the ear of a rosetted official, “He’ll never make himself heard against that.” The man, his face flushed with excitement, shouted, “He
knows
that! We
all
knew it! It’s
being
here that matters!”

It was true enough, he supposed, and Lloyd George, the Welsh Cœur de Lion as they had christened him since the Bangor riot, was already dictating a speech that he knew he would never deliver, seemingly unperturbed by the terrible uproar caused by the use of heavy notice-boards torn down from across the Square now being used as battering rams on the doors. News filtered in, all of it bad. The baying mob had burst through the outer police cordon. The outer doors had yielded to assault. Infiltrators were trickling into the body of the hall. The meeting could only end in bloody chaos, unparalleled in this century.

At seven-thirty, Lloyd George led the way out of the committee room on to the platform, fronted and flanked by a phalanx of police. It was soon apparent that the pessimists were right about infiltration. His appearance was greeted by a howl that blotted out the continuous clamour from the Square. Volleys of bricks crashed through the windows as the speaker, leaning forward to address a word to the press bench, was assailed by a boarding party who swept up to the platform in a body, overwhelming the press box in such numbers that it collapsed and precipitated a wedge of pressmen on to the floor. The reporters scattered, notebooks flying. The police and stewards counter-attacked, and the storming party was seized and thrust down again. Arrests, in these circumstances, were impossible.

Half an hour passed. Stewards fought, police fought, and the mob fought back, drunk and delirious with hate, but all the time, slightly in advance of the shrinking party platform, Lloyd George stood there, relaxed, half-amused, fascinated it seemed by the tempest his presence occasioned. Police whistles shrilled, glass continued to shatter along the full length of the hall, and the body of the building was jammed with a heavy, scrambling mass out of which rose a cacophony of screams, yells, and hysterical appeals for help. The gesture was made and it was time to retreat. Shepherded by police, the platform party edged back into the committee rooms, where barricades were instantly erected and all lights were extinguished on the orders of the Chief Constable. Slowly, fighting for every inch of ground gained, police and stewards regained control of the hall, but outside the mob now ruled unchallenged. According to police instructions it had been reinforced, and the Chief Constable, reappearing, said he could no longer guarantee the safety of the party. There was only one means to extract Lloyd George from the beleaguered building. He would have to pass out under the protection of a policeman’s cape and helmet. As for the others, plans were being made for a retreat across the road to the Midland Institute offices, where they might wait until time and falling snow thinned the mob.

Giles watched him don the disguise, protesting that it was ridiculous, but submitting, as he explained, for the sake of the Chief Constable’s professional reputation. He said, as Giles sidled across, “How do I look, Johnny? Like someone from the chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan?” Giles said, gravely, “Don’t ask me until you’re clear of this, L.G. We can joke about it later.” They shook hands and as Lloyd George took his place in the line he called, “You were here, Johnny! I won’t forget that, lad!”

They passed out in a marching file, heading for Paradise Street and Easy Row and ultimately, Giles learned later, the sanctuary of Ladywood police station clear across the city. But for the platform party the problem of exit remained and would do so as long as it was believed L.G. was still inside.

The respite was temporary. Soon a police inspector arrived from the main battle area, grunting that the line could only hold for a few minutes. At the committee room exit, a carriage and pair, assailed from all sides, and escorted by flailing mounted police, drew the attention of the main body of assailants. Before it was realised that its interior contained not the arch-traitor but police reinforcements, the stragglers had made their dash across the street under another police escort. They were only just in time. Giles, one of the last to leave, heard the mob storm back into the hall, climb the platform, and range through every room, smashing and overturning everything in their path. They were not ejected until the Riot Act was read and a baton charge could be mounted.