Give Us This Day (67 page)

Martin, soon a very regular visitor, thus grew to love both Maximilien and his master, seeing them as interdependent on one another. For he discovered, as time went by, that Uncle George came out here to commune with his servant at all hours of the day and night, giving as his explanation that Maximilien was a restless, thirsty fellow who needed a great deal of exercise to prevent his joints getting rusty and that Uncle George, having found him scared and lonely in a strange country, was now obliged to keep him in good fettle against the day (not long now, Uncle George prophesied) when Maximilien would travel at a speed faster than any horse in the world could gallop.

For three years, until he was turned eleven, Martin did not believe this part of the story. He had never seen Maximilien actually move, that is to say, to step down from his wooden blocks, pass the stable door, and cross the outside yard. He always looked as if he was about to do this but he never did, contenting himself with a kind of stationary dance that involved rapid movements of all his vitals and a steady spinning of his two immense rear wheels that sometimes turned at such a speed that the giant began to gasp and puff his blue breath into every corner of the stable. He was far too big, anyway, to pass the door, and while George assured him that he could take Maximilien to pieces and put him together again, Martin did not believe this either, having long since decided that the stable must have been built around him the day he arrived.

In the meantime, however, it was fascinating to stand here and watch Uncle George tend the brute, touching a knob here, pulling a lever there, applying his oil can to various joints in the giant’s armour, and sometimes polishing him with rags and leathers. Martin said, one day, “You’re
jolly
kind to him, Uncle George, I mean, considering he doesn’t
do
anything.” George had said, “Ah, but he will, as soon as he’s ready and I give him the nod. You see, Martin, he’s promised to make my fortune one day. Mine and your Auntie Gisela’s, so naturally I have to keep him fit and good-tempered.”

Martin accepted this as a reasonable explanation of his uncle’s cheerful servitude but he could never have said at what point in his boyhood the brassy-throated Maximilien transformed himself from fairy-tale figure to fact of life. It must have been somewhere around the day he came over here, when he was thirteen, to find the stable doors swinging free and both Uncle George and the monster gone, the latter never to be seen around these parts again.

His grandmother told him what had happened. Uncle George, she said, had taken the Maximilien away to Manchester, to show him to
her
father, and Martin’s great-grandfather, Sam Rawlinson. It was more than a year later when Martin saw George again and asked him if this was true and he said it was, and that Maximilien had kept all his promises in the north and had even persuaded Grandfather Swann of his merits.

From then on a warm relationship developed between uncle and nephew, beginning with the admission that Maximilien was not a stray monster but a mechanically-propelled vehicle, and Martin’s confession that he had known this for some time but had never liked to admit it in case he was forbidden the stable. He also added, with a grin, that he had earned several thrashings from his mother for coming here, for his mother, in common with all the womenfolk about the estate, regarded George’s engine as a potential child killer.

It was some years after that that Martin was dramatically rescued from the neverending chores of his father’s farm and sent up to Manchester himself, there to work in Uncle George’s engine shed, where any number of streamlined Maximiliens were assembled and sent out to work on the roads.

The translation from Kentish countryside to a clamorous North Country workshop proved to be the most exhilarating experience of his life. While Uncle George’s manager, the taciturn Mr. Quirt, was a heavy taskmaster, given to sudden outbursts of temper, he came to enjoy every moment he spent on the benches in the company of his brother John and about a dozen other apprentices.

John Fawcett, unfortunately, did not last the course and emerge as a journeyman mechanic. In his second year up north he developed asthma and was ordered south again, there to find open-air work in Swann’s Maidstone depot, for Dewponds was not sufficiently prosperous to support three families, Stella’s eldest son, Robert, having married and moved into the farm’s tied cottage.

In the meantime, Martin, learning something new about the internal combustion engine and heavy coach-building each day, qualified as Scottie Quirt’s favourite assistant. This fact seemed to please George, for every time he came up here—it was generally at least once a month—he called for Martin’s progress reports and, having studied them, demanded of Scottie whether or not (family favouritism on one side) Martin could be given further responsibilities as head of the draughtsmen’s section.

It was not often that Scottie paid anyone a compliment. His northern dourness compelled him to qualify any praise he doled out, or at least to preface it with a warning such as, “Ye’ll no’ get bigheaded aboot it!” Or, “When you’ve been at the trade as long as me ye’ll have reason to ask yourself…” On this occasion, however, he was more forthright.

“The laddie’s the best ye’ve sent me, there’s nae doot aboot that! He doesna give a hoot how long I keep him at it when we’re pushed and, by God, George Swann, ye’ve been pushing us hard lately, hae ye not? Aye, gi’e that lad a year at the drawing board and see what he comes up with.”

“And after that?”

“Och, maybe he’ll tak’ on where I leave off, for the fact is I canna teach that boy any more.”

It was the first time in their long and strenuous association that George had ever heard Scottie concede technical equality with anyone.

So Martin Fawcett went into the drawing office, emerging, from time to time, with some very practical blueprints aimed at various modifications, and it was to him, more than to anyone else, that Quirt turned when George presented them with a seemingly impossible challenge—the almost overnight conversion of a small fleet of Mark IV Swann-Maxies to articulated steering, with an engine thrust capable of providing the power to haul two loads in one. This, plus an edict to design and build three articulated trailer vehicles from scratch and do it all by the turn of the year, now less than six months ahead.

Scottie had argued vehemently that it could not be done, not even if they signed on a dozen extra mechanics and worked double shift. “Ye’ll hae to choose between one or the other,” he declared, “for ye canna hae both, man, in that span of time. Do you no’ ken the size o’ the task in these quarters, when there’s no room to swing a cat?”

George conceded him the point regarding space. For a long time now the present quarters in Macclesfield had been badly overcrowded, and the assortment of tinroofed sheds in the yard outside had not kept pace with regional demands for more vehicles and faster repairs. He said, briefly, “Then we’ll separate the projects. You stay here, and get ahead with the conversions, and Martin can build the prototypes in premises I’ll rent for him in Leeds. You’d join me in backing him for the job, wouldn’t you, Scottie?”

“Aye,” said Scottie, judiciously, “I’d back any lad I’d trained. But yon more than most.”

3

It was wonderful watching it grow. It was marvellous to watch it move, stage by stage, from a sheaf of sketches, blotched by oily thumb-prints, to blue-print, and thence to the foundry, factory bench, and carpenter’s shed. But best of all was to contemplate it in the white glow of the unshaded lights after all the others had shed their overalls and gone home, to sense its assumption of a corporate personality from mere hunks of tortured metal and baulks of timber, so that it was no longer an artefact but a thing of sensibility and temperament, that needed to be tamed and schooled by someone who had created it from a thousand and one components.

Time ceased to exist for him. In some ways, indeed, time telescoped, so that he was sometimes a child again standing beside the flailing, hissing Maximilien in the Tryst stables, sometimes a journeyman mechanic working on his first real assignment, and sometimes the kinsman of men like Gottlieb Daimler and the Wright brothers, or Blériot and Captain Cody, whose pioneer flying feats over English shires had captured every headline in Fleet Street.

This thing had moods. Occasionally winsome, and more often fractious moods. There were days when it was sluggish and inert, and others when it was woodenlimbed, like a sulky child being dressed for Sunday for an unwanted outing. There were times when it seemed to resist a stage in its assembly, so that it seemed like a huge, fractured pipe men were trying to reduce to its original pattern. When this happened, Martin’s landlady saw nothing of him for days together, for he would stay on the job all night, snatching a few hours’ sleep on a bagged-out mattress in the drawing office and living on fish and chips and cocoa brewed on a burner.

But gradually it took on shape and form and a kind of looming grace, reaching almost from one end of the shop to the other, preening itself under its three coats of green and gold paint with the Swann emblem etched in black on the sides of the trailer. Then he would prowl around it, contemplating its immensity and the ponderous thrust that lay dormant under its downsloping bonnet, and he would picture himself driving it over the most punishing roads of England dragging a load that no Swann vehicle had ever hauled across a regional frontier in the fiftythree-year history of the enterprise.

Uncle George came north once a fortnight now, praising his tirelessness and ingenuity, and sometimes bringing messages from his Kentish homestead. In October, when they were well forward, he commissioned Martin’s chief lieutenant to begin work on the second giant. In early November, having been assured that Mark I would be ready to run by mid-December, he told his nephew that four regional viceroys were quarrelling furiously over the honour of putting the first articulated trailer van on the roads, and he had been obliged to draw lots between his son Rudi in The Polygon, his brother Edward in The Funnel, Higson in the Scottish Lowlands, and Rookwood in the Southern Square.

Word came, a day or so later, that Rudi had emerged winner so that the vehicle’s trial run, exclusive of routine road testing, would constitute its delivery, entailing a short but stiffish haul over the Pennine ridge to the Salford Depot, a mile or so west of the cotton capital.

Work was all but complete by then and Martin left the finishing touches to the three apprentices and the painter, retiring to his littered office, which reeked of a hundred fish and chip suppers, to plan his route, George having told him that he had succeeded in persuading Scottie Quirt to delegate the honour of the first journey to the man who most deserved it. He paid Martin another compliment, the biggest compliment anyone had ever paid or was ever likely to, when he said, with a grin, “Have you thought up a name for her? We’ve christened every other vehicle in service, from pinnaces to frigates to Goliaths, so she’ll have to have a name of some sort.”

Martin said he hadn’t thought about naming her, although the team who had worked on her over the five months period of assembly had called her by a variety of names, all of them unprintable. George said, seriously, “Well, I’ll always think of her as a ‘Fawcett’, so you’d better do the same from now on. And to make it official, get a couple of nameplates stamped out and screwed to the radiator and trailer tailboard.” He hurried off then to catch the London train, for he could see Martin blushing through his rash of freckles. After the shed had closed down for the night, Martin stayed on until nearly midnight, stamping out the name, first in letters four inches high but afterwards, afraid of seeming to put on side, reducing them to three.

* * *

The run was scheduled for December 13 and Quirt advised travelling empty. “If she jibs at some of those inclines at least we can get her off the road and send someone by motor-cycle to gie you a hand,” he said. “Loaded she’ll need towage and a brace o’ waggons to offload.” Martin thought the precaution unnecessary. She wouldn’t jib at any incline and as for descents, there was no metalled slope on the west side of the Pennines that he feared, with his rim block brakes, revolutionary contracting transmission footbrake, and equally novel handbrake controlling internal-expanding units on the rearward wheels of the forward section. There was a further feature Scottie seemed to have overlooked, the speeded up interchangeability of the enlarged driving sprockets, enabling the gear ratio to be altered to match laden or unladen running and varying road conditions. Up or down dale, Martin Fawcett had no doubts at all about his four-ton Fawcett holding the road. He would have wagered all he possessed on this even before the road tests buttressed his faith in the giant.

On the day before he set out, a bulky package arrived for him and was delivered to his lodgings. It turned out to be a handsome present from Uncle George, a heavy leather coat with stylish crossover fastenings, a vizored cap to match, leather gauntlets, and a pair of aviator’s goggles. There was a note attached in George’s handwriting, reading, “‘Rich not gaudy, for the apparel oft proclaims the man!’ Good luck. Uncle George and all at H.Q.”

He was glad then that the spanking new kit had not been sent to the sheds, for he could never have waited to see himself in it, and the result, reflected in the mirror of his landlady’s wardrobe door, did not disappoint him. Cody and Blériot would have envied him the rigout; he looked more like an aviator than an engineer.

He rolled her out into the yard and backed her round facing the double gates, ready for a flying start in the morning. She handled even more easily than he had hoped, as light on the steering as a Swann-Maxie with less than a third of her cubic capacity, but there was no mistaking the chant of her three-cylinder engines. They sang of power and conquest, of even coasting along high plateaux and swift, controlled descents into the valleys. They spoke to him of capacity hauls of over two hundred miles a day, spilling goods into the four corners of the land with a speed and profusion that a fleet of his grandfather’s waggons could not have achieved. They made the latest model from the Macclesfield sheds seem as obsolete as a Roman chariot, and a seat on these leather driving-box cushions was a throne, elevating him to the status of king among road travellers. He climbed down and went round to the bonnet, glancing covertly at the shining letters of the newlyaffixed nameplate, a just reward for all the hours of toil that had preceded this moment of triumph. He said to an acolyte, unable to restrain his exuberance, “My stars, but she’s a beauty! She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever imagined! And this time tomorrow, from here to Salford, she’ll pull in the crowds wherever she rides!”