Ruined City (9 page)

She stood there looking down at him. 'Curious, isn't it?' she said. 'I suppose you'd call it mass hysteria.'

'I might.'

'I might say that it's because they've been born and bred in this country, and they still like it a bit.'

He smiled. 'And you might just as well be right as me.'

Behind her back a steady stream of news, in dulcet tones, flowed from the wireless. 'You mustn't take the unemployment too much to heart, Mr Warren,' she said seriously. 'Things will come right. You're out of a job, and going through a bad patch. Things are bad all over the country, and here in Sharples they're just terrible. But it
is
only a bad patch. The ships in service are all getting worn out, they say. A lot more ships will be needed before long. It can't be more than a year or two before we're all busy again.'

He was silent.

'Things are terribly bad here now, and they're getting worse each year. But there's a limit to it. We haven't got to stick it out much longer. Then we'll all have jobs again.'

He raised his head and met her eyes, and his heart sank. 'You believe that — really?' he said.

'Absolutely.'

From his own knowledge, deep within himself, he said, 'I'm terribly sorry.' But he said no word aloud, and presently the Fat Stock Prices came upon the air; she went to the wireless, turned it off, and took it to another ward, dunking she had reassured him for the future.

Warren lay awake for half the night with mingled feelings. Predominating, curiously, he was deeply ashamed, he did not know of what.

Next day the surgeon on his morning round stopped at his bed, asked a few questions of the house physician, and examined the wound.

'Better start getting him up a bit,' he said to the physician. 'An hour or two each day.'

He turned to Warren. 'Not a Sharples man, are you?'

'No,' said Warren. 'I was on the road.'

'Out of a job?'

'Yes.' .

'Where are you going to?'

'I was walking down to Hull. Then if I couldn't get anything there, I was going on to London.'

The surgeon eyed him keenly. 'You're an educated man. What's your job?'

'I'm a bank clerk.'

The surgeon got up from the bed. 'Well,' he said, 'you won't be fit to walk to Hull for a couple of weeks yet.'

He moved on to the next bed. At the end of his round he walked down to the Secretary's office, and through it to the Almoner's little room. He found Miss MacMahon at her desk.

'That bank clerk in the surgical,' he said. 'He'll be ready for discharge in three or four days — say at the end of me week. But I understand he's walking the roads.' 'That's right, sir. He told me he was walking to Hull.' The surgeon considered for a minute. 'He won't be fit to walk to Hull for a fortnight. You'd better go down to the Labour Exchange and see if he can draw a fortnight's benefit here before he leaves me town. Tell them he's convalescing.'

The Almoner made a little grimace. I'll try it on, Doctor, but I don't know that we'll get away with it. You remember that man Halliday?'

The surgeon did; he hesitated. 'Well, try it on. They can't expect us to support a man when he's fit for discharge. Besides, I want the bed.'

The Almoner nodded. 'I'll go down right away.' Behind their backs the Secretary spoke. 'If he's a bank clerk, I could use him for a fortnight here.' They turned to him. 'With Vernon off sick I'm that behind with my books I just don't know how we'll get through. There's the auditors coming in the middle of next month. Could he check the ledgers, do you think?'

'I don't know,' said the Almoner. 'I suppose he could.' 'Let him come down, and let me have a word with him,' said the Secretary. I'll know if he can help us, then. It might suit both.'

'We'd have to fit him in somewhere else to sleep for that fortnight,' said the Almoner. 'I could see the Matron about that.'

The surgeon turned away. 'Fix it up that way if you like,' he said. 'We can't afford to keep him after he's fit to walk, though. And get him out of the ward by the end of the week.'

By the end of the week Warren was sitting in the Secretary's office totting up ledgers. It was a great many years since he had served his apprenticeship in his father's bank and he had some difficulty with the work; there are few things so difficult to the amateur as simple addition on the scale required for an audit. Miss MacMahon asked the Secretary after the first day:

'How's your new clerk doing?'

He smiled dourly. 'I'm not surprised he's out of a job.'

She was interested. 'Isn't he any good?'

'He's slow — very slow. A good lad of sixteen would do it quicker.'

'I suppose it's not the sort of work he's used to. If he's no good to you we'll have to think of something else.'

The Secretary rubbed his chin. 'Leave him a while. I'd no say that he's no use, only he isn't handy with the books. He was telling me the way they make up the charges in the bank, which is a thing I never rightly understood — no more than anyone else. He was showing me the way we could save half of one per cent on the overdraft. That's over a hundred a year saved — if he's right.'

The girl smiled. 'If he's saved us a hundred a year already we can afford to keep him for the next fortnight,' she said. 'Whether he can tot up books or not.'

'It's no saved yet,' said the Secretary cautiously. 'I must think on it.'

The next afternoon Warren had his first walk in Sharples.

He went first to the Post Office nearby, and sent a postcard to Morgan, giving his address and strict instructions that he was not to be written to except on the. most urgent necessity. Having thus satisfied his business conscience, he set off to inspect Sharples, walking slowly with a stick.

The town was dreary with the sad Northern uniformity of long rows of grey houses on a minor scale. Dreary, he thought, but not so bad as some. The houses were better and larger than those which he remembered on his visits to other similar places on the north-east coast, Gateshead, Jarrow, and Sunderland; he judged the town to have been built more recently than those.

It seemed to be a place of about forty thousand inhabitants; later he found that this guess of his was very nearly right. It stood on the edge of the river Haws, a mile or so up from the sea; behind the town the hill rose gently to the north, crowned with sparse fields and the gaunt slag heaps of an idle mine.

He found the one main street, Palmer Street, near the hospital. Like all the streets in the town this one was laid out with granite setts; there were rusted tram tracks down the middle of the street, but no trams ran. The shops were mostly small and unpretentious; a great number of them were unoccupied, with windows boarded up. He passed by two closed banks. On a fine corner site an extensive store was shuttered and deserted. On the façcade above the windows he traced the outline letters of the sign that had been taken down, and he realized that he was standing in a town that could no longer support Woolworths.

He walked the length of Palmer Street. There were very few people to be seen although the afternoon was warm and sunny; he passed a few knots of men standing idle at the corners, but he saw few women and fewer children. Very few vehicles passed him; for a time he was puzzled to identify an aspect of the town that was familiar and that yet eluded him. At last he realized it was the cleanness of the streets. There was no mud upon the granite setts, no rubbish in the gutters of the road, no smoke in the pale sky. The town was clean as a washed corpse.

'It's like Russia,' he muttered to himself. The empty streets, the shuttered shops, the lean, despondent people put him irresistibly in mind of Leningrad, where he had been some years before.

He very soon grew tired, and was glad to cut his outing short and get back to the hospital. He went through to the Secretary's room to take up his heavy burden of simple addition; he was ruefully conscious that he was not shining as a ledger clerk. Williams was out, but the Almoner was sitting at her desk.

She glanced round as he came in. 'Been out for your first walk?'

He sank down in his chair. 'I've been looking at Sharples,' he replied. 'It's the first time I've seen it.'

She made no reply.

He drummed with his fingers on the table for a minute. 'What's the unemployment here?' he said at last.

She raised her head. 'About seven thousand five hundred drawing from the P.A.C.,' she said. 'I suppose it's about nine thousand, more or less.'

'That's most of the wage earners, I suppose?'

She nodded without speaking
.

He eyed her for a moment
.
'What happened here?' he asked gently
.

She turned to him
.
'I don't know — none of us really know
.
This is a shipping town — Barlows, you know
.
Barlows really were Sharples — everyone seemed to work in Barlows, or in the plate mills, or the mine — and those were all mixed up with Barlows
.
The Yard employed about three thousand people all the time before the War, and in the War, and after the War, it went up to about four thousand, so they say
.
'

She paused
.
'And then about five — no, six years ago, they started to lay off men
.
There didn't seem to be any more orders for ships coming in
.
'

'I know,' he said
.
'That happened all over the world.'

'It was awful,' she said soberly. 'I've lived here all my life. My father was solicitor to Barlows
.
It didn't really matter much to us, because he was thinking of retiring anyway. But first of all they had to lay off the men, and then some of the staff. And then the mine shut down, without any warning at all, and that threw over a thousand out of work at once. And there didn't seem to be any reason for it,' she said. 'It wasn't bad management, or anything like that — so far as we could see. It just happened.'

That was in 1928?' he asked.

'About that time. And then one day, everybody got their notice. They pasted up a placard on the shipyard gates to say that the yard Would be suspending work for a time during reorganization. Everybody thought it would be quite a short time, and it was only a matter of getting a new company going, or something. But it went on — and of course the plate mills closed at the same time. And then, about six months after that, the men started to run out of benefit, and had to go on to the transitional scheme, and then on outdoor relief. And now we've got the P.A.C. and the Means Test.'

He said, 'Has nothing happened to the shipyard since then?'

She shook her head. 'Nothing. They say now that it may never open again.'

He was silent.

'We can't believe that, here in Sharples,' she said quietly. 'Things always do come right, somehow or other. Don't they?'

He did not try to answer that. 'Has there been any attempt to start up other industries?'he asked.

She smiled a little wryly. 'Basket making, and fancy leather work,' she said. 'The Council of Social Service are doing their best, and I suppose it's a good thing to try and get the men to do something with their hands. But . . . I don't know. There were seven Barlow destroyers at the Battle of Jutland — did you know that, Mr Warren? I'd have thought they might have found something better for our men to do than fancy leather work.'

'Nobody's tried to start up a light industry — plywood or wireless sets, or anything like that?'

She shook her head. 'I haven't heard of anything like that.'

He nodded thoughtfully. A year before a man had come to him with quite a good proposition to manufacture a German type of carpet sweeper under licence. He had proposed to set up a factory in a depressed area of South Wales. Ruefully Warren remembered his own words. 'You must cut out the philanthropy.' he had said. 'Nobody's going to give you money for that. You'll have your work cut out to get this thing established anyway, without planting it in an atmosphere of failure.' A little factory had been put up at Slough, and it was doing well.

She said, 'It's a wicked thing to spread a rumour like the one that's going round now, that the Yard will never open again. It takes all the heart out of the people. It makes them feel there's nothing to look forward to — ever. And besides, it isn't true.'

'Why not?' he asked.

'Ships always have been built in Sharples. All the ships are getting worn out. As soon as this depression lifts, a lot of new ships will be wanted, and things will come right again.'

That may be,' he said slowly. 'But you've got to face the

'What do you mean?'

'It seems to me that Barlows is out of the business. No ships have been built here for a long time. Who's going to place the first order?'

She hesitated. 'I suppose somebody will want a ship some day.'

'I know. But put yourself in his shoes. If you were spending fifty thousand pounds of your money on a ship, where would you go to order it? Most probably it wouldn't be your own money. You'd not have that much loose capital; you'd go and borrow most of it from your bank. Would you order the ship from one of the big firms in Belfast, or in Wallsend, or the Clyde? They'd build you the ship in six months, and guarantee delivery to the day. Or would you come and place your order here?'