Give Us This Day (66 page)

It was more than an urchin’s soapbox, of the kind one saw in every city and suburban street where youngsters were at play. To begin with, it was non-rigid, its steering apparatus housed on what looked like a small, elevated raft on which the steersman sat on a biscuit box nailed to the main structure. Behind him, carrying a total of four passengers—three girls and a boy—was the carriage itself, two linked fish-crates with the glitter of scales still on their boards, and he noticed also the astonishing lock the design of trolley gave the steersman. Using his right foot as a means of propulsion, he brought the whole thing round in a tight circle as he shouted in high, nasal Cockney, “Everybody aht! ‘Arry, Floss, ‘Arriet—look sharp, an’ stand by ter tow her up for the nex’ trip!”

Three of the tiny passengers scrambled out. The fourth, a little girl of about five, sat hugging her knees and crooning with glee as the older boy added, “Orl right, leave Ada be. She don’t weigh nothing.” He seized the looped cord fastened to his steering box preparatory to hauling his trolley up the incline.

George sauntered over, saying, “Hold on there—just a minute, boy. You’ve got a nippy little runabout there. How’d you come by it?”

The older boy, who wore a cloth cap with the peak at the back, said, with that mixture of amiability and insolence only met with on the streets of the capital, “Well, I didn’t nick it, gov. Ast the kids if you like. Knocked ‘er up I did, lars night.” And then, with a craftsman’s pride in his work, “She ain’t bad, is she? Turns in’arf’er length and seats the ‘ole bleedin’ fambly. Get aht of it, kid, and let the gent’ave a proper squint at’er.”

The sole remaining passenger climbed out and joined her brothers and sisters as George, bending low over the steering platform, peered between biscuit box and foremost fish crate to observe that the front axle was part of a perambulator, with its original wheels bolted to the chassis. He moved along its length and inspected the coupling, a length of steel wire running through a pair of sizeable staples and then turned to the engineer, saying, “She’s first rate. Best I’ve even seen and I’m in the trade. Where did you get the idea for that steering-gear?” He had been on the point of saying “articulation,” but realised that the word would mean nothing to the boy, who had clearly arrived at a means of improving the lock by the application of common sense.

“Well, I ‘ad the pram chassy and I thought I’d try it on for a change. There’s five of us, see, and Mum won’t let me aht if I don’t take the bleedin’ tribe. My ole ‘bus woulden take no more’n three an’ you coulden turn ‘er on the pavement.” He gave George a long, speculative look and added, half-mockingly, “You wanner try’er, gov? You c’n take over for a tanner.”

George Swann was probably the only middle-aged man in London who would have accepted such an offer. He said, chuckling, “Why not? Can you leave the girls with your brother for a minute?”

“I c’n lose the four of ‘em fer a tanner,” the boy said, and with a brief, authoritative nod at his brother and sisters, he began lugging his trolley up the slope to a point where the pavement levelled out.

It was a very narrow side street, free of traffic for the moment and almost clear of pedestrians. The few that were there were obviously Londoners to a man and acclimatised to eccentrics, for they gave George no more than a glance when he seated himself behind the driver and went shooting down the hill at the pace of a fast-trotting horse.

They had almost reached the waiting children and were slowing down appreciably when George shouted, “Bring her round—full circle!” and the boy did, leaning heavily to his right as the linked soapboxes swung the full width of the pavement and stopped. He said, warmly, “My word, she’s a corker!” Then, extricating himself, “What’s your name, boy?”

“‘Ere, what’s the catch? No names no pack drill my Dad alwus says.”

“All right, no names. What’ll you take for her as she stands?”

“You got kids? You wanter buy it?”

“I’ve got kids, and I’ll buy if you’ll deliver. How about five bob, and an extra shilling for delivery?”

The boy now looked more suspicious than ever, but then, having tried and failed to guess his patron’s motives, he grinned and said, “You’re ‘avin’ me on, ain’t yer?”

But George rummaged in his trouser pockets and brought out two half-crowns and a shilling. “I’m not having anybody on. Here’s the money…” Then it occurred to him that so original a boy deserved an explanation and added, “Do you know Swann-on-Wheels, the hauliers?”

“‘Course I do. Everybody does, don’t they?”

“Do you know Swann’s depot, in Tooley Street?”

“You bet.”

“Well, my name is Swann and I deal in everything on wheels. Here’s your money and you’ve given me an idea worth more than six shillings. I’ll go to ten if you’ll have that soapbox in my yard inside the hour. Now will you tell me your name?”

“‘Ardcastle,” the boy said, pocketing the silver, “but I still don’ know what you’re at, gov.”

“I’ll tell you, Mr. Hardcastle.” But then, to George’s mild distress, the smallest of the boy’s sisters began to blubber, and was at once joined by the girl he had addressed as Ada who wailed, “But it ain’t yours to sell, Arty. It b’longs to all of us, don’t it, ‘Arriet?” And the eldest girl said, in an aggrieved tone, “We helped yer make her, didden we? We did, didden we?”

“Yerse, yer did,” said Arty, with unexpected mildness, “but I c’n start knocking up another the minnit we get ‘ome. The back’arfo’ that pram’s still in the yard, ain’t it? Besides, you c’n ‘ave a tanner all rahnd if you’ll give me an’ and over the bridge. Then yer can buy enough gob-stoppers to make yerselves bleedin’ well sick, so ‘old yer row, will yer?” He turned back to George, “Ten bob it is, then? You coming wiv us?”

“Er… no,” said George, wrenched from a speculation of a network served by a fleet of Arty Hardcastles. “I’m going ahead by cab to make sure you aren’t turned away at the yard gate, but before I go, and in case we miss one another, would you mind telling me when you leave school?”

“In a fortnight, thank Gawd.”

“Got a job lined up?”

“Sort’ve. My Dad’s a porter at Smiffield. Reckons he c’n get me taken on as an errand boy with ‘Enson’s, ‘is firm.”

“How much will that pay?”

“Arf a crahn a week. Couple o’ bob more in tips maybe. Depends on me rahnd. West End’s all right, ‘otels especially, but the ‘olesalers is stingy. I know, see, I done a bit o’ delivering before school summer-time.”

“Well,” George said, “I can pay you twice that, and you can start on a suburban round where some of my vanboys make ten shillings a week in tips alone if they look lively. Here’s my card. Show it to the Tooley Street weighbridge clerk, but don’t part with it. Give it to your father and get him to bring you along first week of the holidays.”

The boy took the card and examined it carefully. Then putting his fingers in his mouth, he produced the most earsplitting whistle George had ever heard. A taxi-cab, bowling along the Old Bailey, braked hard and George said, “Thank you, Arty,” and walked towards the cab.

* * *

Unlike his father, George was not, and had never been, a man of quick decisions. In this respect at least they were complete opposites; whereas Adam would, almost invariably, act upon instinct, George would contemplate each factor in any problem and then form a pattern in his brain. Once formed, it was seldom subjected to adjustment.

It was so in this case. The pattern had been all but complete when he was nearly overset by Arty Hardcastle and his articulated soapbox in Snow Hill, but he had been unaware of it. The final piece in the jigsaw was missing and without it the pattern was not applicable. Now it was, however. Arty, turning that tight circle on the pavement with his full load of passengers still safely seated, had struck the spark that had fired George’s train of ideas; for it occurred to him on the instant that here was the real answer to all that niggling local competition and that formidable drift of trade away from wholesalers and manufacturers converted to the notion of owning their own transport and saving costs.

The answer had two parts. One was concerned with manoeuvrability, afforded by the housing of vehicular power forward in a compact unit with independent steering; the other was a matter of stowage involving linked vehicles in the form of trailers. Together, he decided, they could revolutionise one’s entire concept of road haulage, for so far the mulish rigidity of a vehicle, driven in streets designed solely for horse traffic, had applied severe limits on the size of the following container, it being impossible to employ a motor over a certain length in the sharp turns and angles met with in the old towns and congested cities of every region in the network. An articulated vehicle based on Arty Hardcastle’s precept promised far greater mobility, and more mobility meant more overall length and twice as much stowage. And this, in turn, meant cheaper hauls over long and short distances.

It did not take him long to evolve a detailed plan—a few hours at the sketchboard, a ten-hour session with Scottie Quirt (summoned by telephone from his Manchester workshop), and finally a long discussion with Withers, the chief accountancy clerk, roughing out an approximate estimate of the initial outlay partial conversion required. His sole remaining concern was to convince the vice roys, summoned to discuss the crisis, each of them, he suspected, in a suitably chastened mood.

Swann-on-Wheels had never concerned itself much with records, that is to say, with data that might prove invaluable to a historian of the firm in the distant future. It had never once occurred to Adam, or indeed to George, that developments over the years and changes in policy generally would be likely to concern anyone but themselves and their current work forces. For both, in their time, had been men of the present, and the future, apart from what it was likely to yield in increased turnover, could be left to itself. Thus George Swann had worked, year by year, developing the commercial motor. In the accumulation of day books and minute books and old ledgers stored in the depository adjoining the new counting-house, one could have found any amount of data concerned with the day-to-day running of the firm, but very little relating to the inspirations, doubts, and arguments of individual members of the firm. There were, in that small depository, maps by the score marking regional frontiers old and new, ledgers in which diligent searchers could have discovered the ratio of profit and turnover in every part of Britain, details of the rewards of men who administered and operated them, and careful records of expenditure on plant and rolling stock, from the day Adam Swann sent his first three-horse waggon into rural Kent with old coachman Blubb on the box. But the real heart and bones of the enterprise were not to be found in these dayby-day recordings, not even in the master minute book, started by the head clerk Tybalt in December 1863, when Adam first summoned his managers to help him surmount his first major crisis. Decisions were there but not the manner in which decisions were arrived at or the pressures that lay behind those decisions.

And yet, once in a while, a researcher of the future might have come across a nugget of gold among all this dross. Such a find lay in the laconic entry towards the end of the twenty-odd pages recording the business of the extraordinary general meeting of July 12, 1911. It ran:

Resolved, by sixteen votes to three, no abstentions. That the sum of £50,000 should be set aside for the conversion of twenty motor vehicles to articulated lorries based on the accompanying sketches, a maximum of half this sum to be earmarked for the assembly of three new vehicles and subsequent research thereon. This total to be reviewed at the January conference, 1912.

There was no mention of Arty Hardcastle’s soapbox, and why should there be? The production of a child’s soapbox, assembled from a discarded perambulator, a biscuit box, and two fish crates taken by stealth from Billingsgate Market, had no place in the deliberations of some score of serious-minded transport men, each and every one of them worried by a sharp falling off of profits. And, in any case, when George laughingly displayed the soapbox to some of his colleagues as they trooped out into the yard at the conclusion of their discussions, the clerk whose job it had been to take shorthand notes of their deliberations was already on his way home to his young wife and baby in Clapham. He did not hear George say, to a puzzled group of executives that included his own son Rudi and two of his nephews raised on a Kentish farm, “Take a good look at her, gentlemen. She cost me ten shillings. She’s just cost you fifty thousand!”

2

Most of the third generation Swanns (they now numbered around a score) had a favourite uncle, and had a poll been taken among them it is probable that Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Swann, veteran of Isandlwana, Rorke’s Drift, Tel-el-Kebir, and various other engagements featuring thin red lines and slaughtered savages, would have emerged the winner. After Alex, no doubt, would have come Uncle Hugo (also performer of a deed that won the Empire, once winner of an entire roomful of athletic trophies, and now
Sir
Hugo). Giles, a mere politician, would have come third; a poor third, notwithstanding the fact that he was a playful, soft-spoken man. Edward, who was not much older than some of the elder grandchildren, qualified as a courtesy uncle.

Uncle George, despite his jocularity and generosity at Christmas-time, was not a contender for the title. Perhaps, on account of his high spirits, the younger Swanns saw him as one of themselves, but there was one at least who did not, who entertained for him a respect approaching reverence. This was Martin, second son of Denzil and Stella Fawcett of Dewponds Farm, and his regard for his Uncle George had nothing to do with Christmas stockings or birthday tips. It was based on his easy familiarity with a real live giant and dated from a summer afternoon around about 1890, when Martin, then aged about eight, had been invited into the old stable block at Tryst to watch the Giant Maximilien, who lived there.

Martin had never forgotten that enchanting afternoon, and in a way it had dictated the course of his life. For, alone among the Swann grandchildren, he came to share George’s affection for the great shining monster, with its brassy lungs and blue breath, seeing it not as an ogre (and a very noisy, smelly, and dangerous one at that!), but as the bondsman of his Uncle George. He told Martin that he had found him far across the sea, had since taken care of him, fed him with oil, and given him a home in the tile-hung outhouses on the eastern side of the stable-yard.