Give Us This Day (32 page)

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  The kings, princes, and flunkeys moved on and he sipped a whisky, awaiting dispersal and a chance to make his way back to Charing Cross and home. His old friend Lord Roberts repassed below, his horse (black like everything else today) led by a groom, along with the horse the King had been riding, and there came to him again a brief vision of the crossroads he and Roberts had occupied immediately after the Sepoy Mutiny, when Roberts had opted for glory while he had seen a military career for what it was—years of boredom and heartache for all but the mystics like Roberts. Instead he had devoted himself to what? To money-making, or something more exalted? What was it exactly? Surrender to a compulsion that had nagged him since boyhood? To make a mark, to fulfil his own extravagant fancies in competition with other egotists? He didn't know. He never had known with certainty. Yet he was sure of one thing. He didn't regret his choice, and given his youth he would do it again but sooner, much sooner. The real point was, where did one go from here, if anywhere? He was seventy-three and unlikely to see another royal funeral, unless Edward VII, fourteen years his junior, gorged and whored himself to death. The long years of striving were behind him and in the time left he could never be more than a spectator. A keenly interested one, however, not only of his own concerns but of the ultimate destiny of his race, and he could make no more than a guess or two at that. They had passed their apogee, he supposed, a year or two back, when they involved themselves in this ridiculous war with a bunch of farmers, but the country was still sound enough, politically and financially, so long as it stopped short of tearing itself in two unequal halves, the Little Englanders on one side, the Imperialists on the other. And that mightn't matter in the end. It was hard to believe that anything cataclysmic would result from this temporary schism for the people. Even those like Giles and his radicals howling for social reforms, were conservative at heart, trafficking mostly in compromise. It seemed more likely that the real challenge would come from outside. Not from the Germans as he had once thought—they wouldn't get far with that ass of a Kaiser raising dust everywhere he went. More probably from France that George said was leading the field in the new technologies, or from that vigorous offshoot of the British across the Atlantic that had its own way to make in the world. If he lived as long as Vicky he might begin to discern some of the answers. Whatever they were they would be interesting… interesting…

  The penetrating cold tormented the stump of his leg, and he thought longingly of his own fireside and Henrietta's eager questions about the funeral procession. He said his good-byes, despatched an urchin for a cab with the promise of a florin if he got one, and went downstairs on to the porch. The crowds were rapidly dispersing, already forgetting the bier and its contents in search of something to keep out the cold. The boy arrived with a growler and he climbed in, sitting back in the musty interior saturated with spectacle and turning his thoughts towards home.

PART THREE

Towards the Summit

One

Headstart

T
he old hands about the yard—and there were still some who remembered Adam Swann's heyday—exchanged wry jokes when it got about that the New Broom had retreated to the tower, the only section of the Thameside premises to emerge more or less intact from the fire.

  It struck them as ironic that a man who preached the heresy that the horse was obsolete, and was threatening to supersede them by the spawn of that snorting, juddering contraption he had driven down from Manchester three years ago, should choose a draughty, fourteenth-century belfry, approached by a narrow, twisting stair, as the hub of his empire. In deliberate preference, moreover, to the new red-brick office block they had built fifty yards short of the Tooley Street exit.

  It was out of character somehow. A man who had, as it were, forced upon them every kind of innovation in the last decade, was not a likely candidate for withdrawal to a lumber room lit by oil lamps and not even served by a telephone but equipped, instead, with the speaking tube apparatus Adam had employed all the years he had worked up here. In a way they saw it as a recantation, an admission that the new ways were, after all, inferior to the old, and when he remained up there fourteen months, making but fleeting visits to ground level, they told one another that he had mended his ways and not before time.

  They would have been outraged had they realised that what George was doing was to use his father's eyrie as a kind of Guy Fawkes's cellar, to hatch a plot aimed at erasing every familiar aspect of the yard and setting in motion shock waves that would be felt in every corner of the network beyond. Neither did they suspect that the tidal wave that followed would wash every last one of them into premature retirement, making way for newcomers who would talk a language largely unintelligible to them, who would think in terms of horse-power rather than horses, and whose avowed purpose would be to reduce haulage schedules, routes, and laden capacity to a series of formulae that made no kind of sense to them.

  For all that, they were not entirely wrong about him. There was about his withdrawal a hint of the Adam of the 'sixties and 'seventies, a man who found it essential to commune with himself in solitude before he could focus his mind on the immensity of his task and solve a thousand closely interrelated hypothetical conundrums. For what George was doing in the fourteen months that succeeded the submission of his engineer's report that a fleet of motor-vehicles was costed down to the last detail, was to redesign the national arena in which the fleet would operate. Such a task, far more formidable than any his father had tackled in his up-and-coming days, needed not merely physical stamina but a very high degree of concentration. To say nothing of access to the hundreds of route maps and trade summaries built up over the forty-two years Swann-on-Wheels had been in operation.

  No one else could have done it. No one else could have attempted it, and there was a reason for this. George Swann, New Broom Extraordinare, was the firm's only real link between past, present, and future. At least, the future as he saw it.

  It was, he came to decide, a matter of gradients. Everything in his flirtation with power-driven vehicles over the past twenty years suggested that gradients were the key to every imponderable. Perhaps others would see it differently, would give priority to factors like wear and tear of rolling stock, centres of population, concentrations of industry, quality of road surfaces, and other come-day-go-day aspects of the hauling trade. But George's experience equipped him to survey each of these factors separately and make a deliberate choice as to which of them demanded maximum attention. It did not take him long, after studying Scottie Quirt's report, to select gradients as the keystone of the exercise. Everything else was relative. Everything hinged upon a single, deter-minable axiom, viz: Can a Swann-Maxie waggon haul a given weight from point A to B if a gradient, in excess of a given limit, interposes between point of departure and point of arrival? If it could, well and good. If it could not, one might as well consign the whole complex of dreams to the wastepaper basket and indent for fifty thousand pounds' worth of younger horseflesh and new waggons, leaving the advancement of power-driven vehicles to the wealthy amateur with time on his hands and a bottomless pocket.

  It looked at first as if the answer to this equation was negative. Swann's main routes, according to copies of Adam's maps (the originals still occupied pride of place in The Hermitage museum, at Tryst), established that a laden waggon, with flexible traction as regards the number of horses employed per haul, could be dragged over almost any terrain where business was to be found. All the initiator was required to do was to increase teams or change the nature of the waggon in relation to the load and the natural obstacles in question. Bearing this in mind, the entire country was wide open and Adam Swann had proved as much forty years ago. Swann's frigates regularly crossed the Pennine Ridge and used unsurfaced cart-tracks in the remotest areas of Wales and the West Country. Its pinnacles, with one nimble Cleveland Bay between the shafts, threaded the most congested centres of the nation's cities, usually without loss of routeing time, for there was always a maze of side streets available. Even Swarm's men-o'-war and Goliaths, eight-, six-, and four-horse vehicles, could, given a leisurely time schedule and diligent routeing, haul enormous loads clear across country, from North Sea coast to Cardigan Bay. But Scottie Quirt's report confirmed that one could not hope for such flexibility if one substituted power-driven vehicles for the drag-horse. Britain was not a level plain, served by modern bridges. There were always, God curse them, gradients, some a mere one in ten but often as steep as one in five, or even four, that could defeat, with a sneer-scream of grit or a flurry of liquid mud, the maximum thrust of a Swann-Maxie engine.

  It had not needed his experiences on the trial run south to teach him this, although those experiences highlighted the two-edged sword suspended over the neck of the too-hasty innovator. Two-edged because it involved not only ascents but also descents. Whereas it was a matter of routine to apply drag-shoes at the summit of a hill before tackling a sharp descent with a waggon, one now had to rely upon braking power, and he foresaw that it might be years before some bright spark evolved a foolproof method of checking a fully-laden waggon on a one-in-four hill. One could not always rely on the presence of an amiable and inventive amateur, awaiting one's thundering descent into a ford, as had occurred early in the trial trip. Neither could one bank on the presence of an evangelist knife-grinder to straighten things out, as had occurred on his second day's run into London. He saw now, looking back, that he had enjoyed the devil's own luck on that trial run south. Who could hope for such fortunate encounters when Swann's new waggons were making daily runs from the Tay to the Channel, from the Wash to Cardigan Bay?

  It was then that he began to regret his arbitrary abolition of the localised structure of the network. With the original seventeen territories reduced to a mere five, with the scrapping of the old patriarchal system, and the new (and so far successful) policy of centralisation, the initiative of the regions had been superseded. More and more hauls were planned and routed from Headquarters. Improvisation on the part of provincial viceroys was not encouraged. Indeed, in many respects it was frowned upon. The power of the men out there had been subtly curtailed as they had learned to rely more and more upon the guiding hand of Headquarters, less and less upon their own reactions to local problems and this policy had seemed to pay dividends. For one thing, it put a stop to regional jealousies. For another, it checked indiscriminate exchange of teams, waggons, and even contracts between managers who liked one another and overall reluctance to co-operate between men who did not. It knit the entire enterprise together. It encouraged a variety of lucrative byproducts, not least among them a far closer co-operation with the railways than any achieved in his father's day. But it had, as he now saw with dismaying clarity, a fatal defect. It introduced a system of long, interlocked hauls over all kinds of terrain, and Maxies could not adapt to such demands. In a month, he suspected, Headquarters would be swamped with reports of ditched vehicles, stranded loads of perishable goods, helpless drivers, and infuriated customers. In bad weather half the fleet would be off the roads. And in six months Swann's forty-year-old boast, that he could haul anything anywhere in less time than his liveliest competitor, would become a tavern jest. What could result from that but ruin?

  It cost him a great deal to face up to this conclusion. His faith in the petrol engine was all but absolute and he never doubted, not even now, that a time would come when nobody but a rural baker's roundsman would invest a penny in a horse as part of his stock-in-trade. But geography was geography and, although extremely obstinate, he was not so pig-headed as to risk his own future, plus the livelihood of three thousand men, on a fiction that wishing it could reduce Britain to a level plain, like the old Crescent Centre territory in Lincolnshire. At the same time, as in all human equations, there had to be an answer, and he set himself to find it.

* * *

  The answer, when it came, was so obvious that it hit him like a piece of falling tackle, projecting him nose foremost into the jumble of maps, sketches, and halffinished sums that covered his desk.

  It was there in that same summarisation of his father's maps that he had brought up here a day or so after receiving and studying Scottie's report, and it now lay buried under so much clutter that he had to dig for it.

  There it was, a curious relic among all those figures and designs and memoranda, a scale condensation of the seven original maps Adam had drawn up in 1858, between them embracing every shire in England and Wales, for neither Scotland nor Ireland featured on Swann maps of the period.

  He unrolled it almost reverently, a piece of parchment measuring about three feet by two, with every regional border sketched in and, what was more to the point, every railway line and contour marked in coloured inks. The old discarded nicknames were there—The Bonus, the Kentish Triangle, The Polygon, and so on—and as he identified them one by one he was afforded a searching glance into his father's mind when he had split the country into so many irregular and disparate sections. For Adam, at that time, had clearly been beset by the identical problem—gradients, and what they meant in turns of profitable road haulage.

  The key was there and he used it to unlock his memories, memories of a hundred conversations he had had with his father about the early days of the network. Some were sharp and clear but others needed to be chased into corners, and it was one of these that convinced him, without a shadow of a doubt, that the answer was almost within his grasp. Something about a railway engineer who had counselled Adam on the subject of investing his capital… Something to do with natural obstacles standing between Swann and his destiny. And then, with a growl of triumph, he heard his father's voice speak across the years from a time when the two of them had been stuck in a fogbound railway coach on their way home to Tryst, when he was little more than a boy. The voice said, "Fellow told me to fill in the empty spaces… whole damned outfit emerged from that." And in response to George's query as to the wisdom of staking everything he possessed in a single idea Adam's gruff reply, "Never had second thoughts about it… Believed in what was happening around me… Most people didn't… thought the industrial wave of those days was a flash in the pan. I knew it wasn't. That's why I kept ahead of the best of 'em…"

  He got up and went over to the wall cellarette, pouring himself a brandy four fingers high and carrying it back to the table. It gave him a lift he did not need. He had his answer.
Re
-regionalisation, and to hell with his pride! A redivision of Swann's four big units into a score of smaller ones, each self-supporting and self-administered. Only this time what would determine the regional frontiers was not the curving lines of the 1858 railway system, but the factor that had drawn them in that specific pattern when Stephenson, Brunei, and all the other pioneers were assembling their gridiron.
And what was that but contours?
For railroads, even now, half-a-century later, were still the slaves of rock formations and river valleys, shoulders, marshes, and plateaux that took shape when the earth cooled and the islands were subdivided by as many haphazard ridges as one could expect to find on a baked apple!

  He cleared the desk of everything but the map and an atlas open at a page of England and Wales unscored by his father's inks and crayons. He overlaid the smaller map with a sheet of tracing paper and began to work, drawing a kind of parody of Adam's breakdown with an eye that never strayed from the light and dark brown shading of the highlands, not even when he reached for his glass, put it to his lips and sipped the undiluted spirit. And as his pencil skimmed the tracing, a new regional network emerged with startling clarity, a minced and sliced version of an England ripe for conquest by Scottie Quirt's fleet of Swann-Maxies, all but two of them still on the drawing board awaiting Headquarters' go ahead. The borders almost drew themselves, bondsmen of the Cheviots, the Cotswolds, the Chilterns, the Cambrians, the more testing areas of the Pennine Chain, and the high plateaux of the West Country moors. A few regions were much larger than Adam's but most were smaller, separated from one another by gradients that a petrol-powered waggon could never hope to climb unless it tackled them unladen. And even then, in places like Shap, Dartmoor, the Fells, and the North Riding, it would do so at risk.

  Day after day he sat there, tracing, retracing, noting down, calculating distances in relation to centres of industry where his customers were thick upon the ground, siting motor depots with an allocation of light horse transport, and sub-depots on the lower slopes of the highlands where, at a pinch, he could call on teams of draught horses to help power-driven freight over a hump and ease it down a steep declivity.