Theirs Was The Kingdom (24 page)

“Oh, there was,” said Adam, chuckling. “I knew absolutely nothing about anything else that went on in the City. From your age, until I was turned thirty, I was trained in two skills. How to stay alive, and how to blow the head off the chap the far side of the breastworks. Apart from that, nothing save how to care for horses. I took someone’s advice about it. I do that from time to time and it saved my bacon in this instance.” He paused a moment, cocking his head, as though listening to the hiss of the halted train, now enveloped in thick, yellow fog. Then, “You ever remark on your mother’s ring? That fine ruby, with the Swann crest on the shank?”

“Often. Has that anything to do with it?”

“Everything to do with it. That’s the sole survivor of a string of thirty Burmese rubies I lifted from the field at Jhansi, in January ’58, the last action I was in. I smuggled it home in my sabretache and raised money on it. I was going to invest in railway stock but a railwayman I met had a better idea. He advised putting it all on the horses, but not in the usual way. He gave me a railway map of the period and told me to fill in the empty spaces. That was the start of it. Whole damned outfit emerged from that.”

“Did you never have second thoughts?”

“No,” said Adam, “I never did. Not even in the worst times. I believed in what was happening around me. Most people didn’t. Most people, particularly the well-educated, regarded the industrial wave of those days as a flash in the pan. I knew it wasn’t. I knew Watt and Stephenson and Brunel and all the pioneers had changed the face of the world, not just the face of the country. I kept a hold on the horse, that was beginning to go out of fashion just then, with everybody around me going mad about railways. But horse or rail I like to think I kept ahead of the best of ’em. Does that answer your question, George?”

“Very fully, thank you, sir,” said George, with his usual politeness, but Adam noticed that he remained thoughtful all the way home to Croydon where they picked up their gig. The fog was thinner out here, although visibility was still bad, and they were moving under dripping trees a mile or so short of Tryst before Adam broke the long silence, saying, “As to questions, lad, never mind asking ’em of me or anyone else. You learn that way. As to decisions, make ’em yourself, right down the line. Good, bad, or indifferent, they’re the better for being your own. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, sir,” said George, reflecting yet again that the Governor, however formidable he might look and sound, was a bit of a card when you really got to know him.

2

That was in the final weeks of the preliminary canter as he came to recognise it. After that it was a life of movement and bustle the full length of the country, in order to learn at first hand the local difficulties and advantages of every region in the network, together with what they hauled, what equipment and teams they rated, how high or low their managers were on the Headquarters’ table and why, how far their territories extended, where it merged into a sister territory, what the local roads and railway services were like, and what the rate of growth was in their cities and market towns. There was so much to learn. Who was hauling what, and why, and in what quantities? Why were hauls geared to certain factors—overall weight, roads, weather, and availability of teams? How did Swann’s service compare with that of other hauliers? Who was on the way up and on the way down, a vast proliferation of agencies and special circumstances that sometimes caused a newcomer like himself to wonder how men like Tybalt had stayed sane all these years. And also how Adam Swann had forged ahead on two legs, much less one.

Sometimes he was tired and very occasionally he was bored, but usually he was absorbed in what he was doing, in the men he met and the country he travelled over. Just occasionally, as when he came up with an idea that looked like saving money or tapping an unexploited field, he was exuberant and prepared to work half the night putting his ideas on paper.

By the end of summer he was fairly familiar with the Kentish Triangle, the Southern Square, the Western Wedge, and the Mountain Square of Wales. He had taken a liking to the ageing, cherry-faced Hamlet Ratcliffe and his adoring wife, Augusta, with whom he lodged in their seaside house at Exmouth, in Devon. On the other hand, instinct warned him that the manager of the Southern Square, an ex-vanboy (whom everyone at H.Q. continued to refer to as “Young Rookwood,” although Young Rookwood was nearly forty) regarded him as an interloper, so that he was relieved when he moved into the far West.

He got along well with Bryn Lovell in the Mountain Square based on Abergavenny, discovering that Lovell was as much a legend in these parts as was his employer on the banks of the Thames, for they told him that Lovell had once been instrumental in saving the lives of fifty-seven entombed miners and had thus put the name Swann on the map in these parts.

Towards autumn he moved up into a region marked on the office maps as “Southern Pickings,” a triangle of territory angled on Worcester, and concerned, in the main, with the transport of high-grade china. Still later, as winter drew on, he had worked his way north into “Northern Pickings,” hinged on Derby and Buxton. After the Christmas break he began the New Year in one of the largest and most profitable of the regions, named on the maps as “The Polygon,” a five-sided square embracing the whole of Lancashire and parts of Cumberland and Westmorland.

By then, of course, as Adam noted but did not comment upon, he was converted. He ate, thought, and slept haulage. Adam was content. The Crown Prince Designate looked like settling to the collar as comfortably as a well-broken Cleveland Bay.

George arrived in The Polygon at a time of transition.

Less than a year before, John Catesby, who had ruled the region since its inception and was known as one of his father’s closest friends notwithstanding his militant Radicalism, had resigned to manage Grandfather Rawlinson’s cotton mill, a few miles north of the Salford base. Here he was experimenting with cooperative production, a process that involved sharing the duties of management with senior hands through a consultative committee. Sam Rawlinson, who now spent most of his time on “Change” as he called it, shook his head over this when he met his favourite grandson at Manchester’s London Road Station, in the first week of January.

“Eee, lad,” he said, in the fruity North-country brogue that had fascinated George from childhood, “tak’ no bloody heed of anything
that
chap tells you about handling men an’ lasses! Time was when I thowt he was one o’ them anarchists, ready to blow us all to kingdom come, but Ah’ve since come to reckon him soft in t’bloody noddle. When a chap in t’charge o’ mill has to run to hands for advice on how to reckon profits, it’s time he put his feet up to my way o’ thinking. Will tha’ be staying along o’ me and my Hilda while you’re getting the hang o’ things hereabouts?”

George said, regretfully, that he would not. His father had thought it more practical for him to lodge with Broadbent, the man who had replaced Catesby as manager of The Polygon, and was reputedly making a success of his stewardship. Sam, it seemed, had met Broadbent, and had reservations about him. “He’s sharp,” he said, “but then he’s Liverpudlian and they’re all sharp out there. They have to be, living cheek by jowl wi’ twenty thousand blacks, and any number o’ Paddies, not to mention a sprinkling o’ Greeks, Turks, and heathen Chinese. But there’s summat Ah can’t put a name to about yon Broadbent. He’s not lah-di-dah, for he come up t’same way as I did, but he’s got what we call a downy look. He’s been twice married, like me. They tell me his second wife were barmaid at the old Cock and Hen, in t’shambles, and free with her favours before she took up with him. But maybe that’s rumour, on account of him getting John Catesby’s job over everyone else’s head. However, his turnover’s good and that father o’ yours is a rare picker when it comes to finding men to make brass for him.” He looked at George shrewdly and added, “Your mother’s well, I hope?”

“Blooming, grandfather, and sent her regards,” George said. But Sam commented, with a grin, “That’s blarney. Our Henrietta woulden tell me t’time o’ day left to herself. I don’t hold it against her, mind. She’s done well for herself and no thanks to me, for you’ll ha’ heard she married dead agin me, when she was nowt but a bit of a lass. Ah’ve owned Ah were wrong about your father mind, but women don’t forget easy and that’s a fact. Well, now, you’ll be wanting to get out to Bowdon, where that chap Broadbent has a snug house Ah’m told, wi’ two servants and a carriage and pair. And him nobbut a wharf-rat one time. That’s the way of it up here. Rags to riches if a man looks out for hissane, as me and your father did when we were young an’ spry like you.”

George would have liked to have asked him a great deal more about the family story concerning Henrietta’s runaway match, but decided it could wait. Curiosity concerning his family background was continually enlarging itself during his drift around the regions. Every manager and every foreman had something to say regarding the amazing career of Adam Swann, one-time mercenary soldier, who had built a transport empire on the proceeds of a necklace picked up on a battlefield. Already, in George’s imagination, a romantic picture of the enterprise was assembling, having about it the elements of a regular fairy story complete with runaway brides, irate fathers, burning mills, train crashes, and a hotch-potch of other exciting ingredients. Sam piloted him to a suburban railway station and he was in the pleasant village of Bowdon within thirty minutes, finding that it occupied a steep hill overlooking the Cheshire plain, its church standing out like a citadel against the grey, smoke-tinged sky. A sense of adventure stirred in him that had not accompanied his entry into other regions, and he wondered if this was due in part to the fact that he was now standing on the heart of industrial England, where the helter-skelter began about a century ago, to spill down over the shires, catch its breath beside the Thames, and then sweep halfway across the world.

Broadbent, and his wife Laura, were on the doorstep to greet him, together with Broadbent’s two sallow daughters, Lizzie and Hester, one a year or so his senior, the other a sly-looking girl about sixteen. The atmosphere was one of nervous expectancy, as though he was a lodger of some consequence, and after being shown his comfortable, over-furnished room at the front of the house, he sat down to a dinner that was served with claret and port wine, luxuries that appeared at Tryst on gala occasions only.

During the meal he was able to study Broadbent and his wife, looking for clues to the man’s obvious success, evidenced by his relatively high style of living and the furnishings of a home that would not have disgraced a mill-owner. Broadbent was a well-muscled, hard-faced man about forty. His wife was a pretty woman more than ten years younger, with auburn hair and little to say for herself, for she seemed subdued in the presence of her fast-talking husband. Broadbent’s daughters contributed nothing to the occasion but sat primly at board, gazing at him as though he had been a duke’s son who brought unimaginable prestige to the house by consenting to sit at table.

Like Sam, he did not quite know what to make of Broadbent, who seemed enterprising and well on top of his job, with any number of ideas for expansion, so that George could make a guess at the reason why he had been promoted over the heads of senior men. He seemed anxious to ingratiate himself with a son of his employer, treating George more like a Headquarters’ delegate than a raw apprentice. As the meal proceeded George got the impression that he was unsure of himself, despite his bombast, and was also, to some extent, sounding him out on how Headquarters had reacted to his spectacular progress up here.

“I’ve had to cut away a lot of dead wood, Mr. Swann,” he said, using an ironed-out accent in which traces of his native Liverpool lingered. “Catesby, of course, was a first-rate man at his job but… well, at the risk of sounding superior, I’d say he was too provincial, too inclined to go after the minnows outside the hub of the beat, which is right here, in Manchester. We get little enough profit from cross-country hauls in the hill country to the north. Time was, of course, when we depended on ’em. The railways had it all their own way in the Cotton Belt then but nowadays we’re landing more of the big fish, who look for time saved on a haul and to the devil with freight costs. I’ve just signed up Barlow’s, the biggest packing warehouse between here and Liverpool. I’ve got a two-year contract out of them and it’ll mean taking waggons off the rural runs. There’s talk now, however, of cutting a deep-water canal between Trafford Park and Eastham, on the Mersey. It’s my belief a haulier should get his foot in the door of every warehouse in the area before that happens. When it does, carriers working on small budgets are going to the wall.”

He rose abruptly, before George could comment on the prospect of a canal linking Manchester with the coast, and ordered Lizzie to play the piano, an upright, silk-fronted instrument in the parlour. “Lizzie has a good touch,” he said, “or so I’m given to understand, and Hester is having singing lessons. No damn sense in a man getting ahead if he doesn’t put a bit of polish on his family, eh, Mr. Swann?”

George wondered how he would adapt to six weeks’ domesticity in these surroundings, but followed his host into the parlour, seating himself dutifully in the brocaded armchair while Lizzie entertained with “The Battle of Prague” and Hester, who had a high-pitched, rather warbling voice, sang some of Moore’s Irish lyrics to her sister’s accompaniment.

Mrs. Broadbent still said nothing, but sat with folded hands in a high chair beside the huge coal fire looking, George thought, as if she was insufferably bored with her stepdaughters’ clumsy attempts to entertain. She was, he noted, a very attractive woman, with soft, brown eyes and a high complexion that might or might not be the result of merciless corsetting that made a cottage loaf of her youthful figure. He had thought of her as around thirty, but now he realised she could be no more than twenty-five, and prettier than she had looked under the flaring gas-jets of the dining room. She had soft features and a generous, slightly crumpled mouth, as if at any moment she would begin to cry, so that he wondered whether the assertive Broadbent bullied her and lavished all his affection on his plain, rather marionettish daughters.