Theirs Was The Kingdom (93 page)

In a way his presence here was an expression of that same independence, a thumbing of the nose at all that glitter and martial music in the streets of the English capital three hundred miles to the southeast. He had no quarrel with the English but he had never seen himself as one of them. Indeed, he had always considered it his duty as a conscientious stepfather to inculcate into these dark-skinned little Welshmen an awareness of their true heritage. He must have succeeded. The fathers of these boys both spoke Welsh, even though their grandparents had been born on a Caribbean island where nobody had ever heard of Llewelyn. It had seemed to him that Jubilee Week was a unique opportunity to pass the lesson on to the next generation, so here he was preaching the gospel he had preached to their fathers, Enoch and Shadrach, years before anyone had ever dreamed that Victoria would become a legend.

“As I once told your fathers,” he said, “the English took the plain and built their castles there, but they never reached us here. Never forget that. As good Welshmen it is important to you.” It was Shadrach’s boy, the nine-year-old David, who had a pertinent question. “In the villages everyone speaks Welsh, Grandad. But down south, at school that is, nobody does. But where we live is still Wales, isn’t it?”

It was a poser and he had to think about it a moment. Finally he said, “Yes, indeed, Davey boy. Geographically it’s Wales, but that’s as far as it goes. Down south they made their peace with the English long since, having no choice in the matter. Where could they hold out against men better armed, better led, and twice as many? But up here, as I say, they never did more than harry us. We rolled stones down on their columns, and we stuck them full of arrows until they stole our longbows, learned to use them, and started shooting back. But you can’t goad an Englishman into attempting the impossible, boyo. He holds on to the passes and builds his castles close to the sea and there’s a lesson there, too. The sea, to the English, is what the mountains are to us, if you follow me?”

It is doubtful if they did but always they liked Grandad Bryn’s stories, and he had done his duty as a Welshman. He said, opening the straps of his knapsack, “I bought souvenirs for you at that little shop in the village. Here, boys, take them and keep them,” and he gave each of his three grandsons a flag, emblazoned, it was true, with the obligatory legend, “
God Save the Queen. June 21st, 1887
,” but stencilled on a background of the red dragon of Wales.

6

By early evening, beacons were beginning to twinkle up here, those who fed them taking their cue from the thin pillars of smoke already rising from Brecon Beacons, and the rounded hills of Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire. Then, against an orange sunset shot through with heliotrope, the first of them showed in Flint and on across the Dee estuary and the Wirral to the Cheshire plain.

The South Lancashire sky was violet, tinged as always by the vomit of a thousand chimney stacks that today trailed no more than token plumes, this being a national holiday. But they still belched for all that, as John Catesby noticed going his rounds on his barrel-chested cob; “ To see the sights” as he told himself, wondering at the inconsistencies of the English, a nation that could still make a fetish of royal occasions after deposing so many kings and removing the head of one who refused to be deposed.

He poked about all day on his patient, barrel-chested nag, for it was quite impossible to drive a trap through the congested streets. By sundown half the celebrants were tipsy and it needed a steady hand on the rein and plenty of tact to return from St. Peter’s Square where, earlier in the day, he had watched five thousand people eat a public meal at municipal expense. Irish labourers weaved under the cob’s nose and every now and again he had to pull up short to avoid a fight. By dusk, he supposed, the constabulary would be filling their Black Marias, as they often had up here, but with far less tolerance than they would show tonight. He would have liked to discuss the phenomenon of British royalty-mania with someone intelligent and sober. That likeable boy of the Gaffer’s, for instance, who had spent some time up here with him and had, according to the network grapevine, jilted a millionaire’s daughter. But no one with the necessary qualifications was on hand, so he had to answer his own questions and they were many and various, probing deeply into the maw of a society with such a colourful political history, with so many deeply rooted prejudices, and a capacity, matched nowhere in the world, for compromise, for holding on, for adjusting to each new pressure, social and industrial, any one of which would have raised the barricades in Paris, Petrograd, and Vienna.

Barricades had been up here, of course, from time to time, but had always been taken down again, not by police and military but by men persuaded that there were more practical ways of defending their rights. People hereabouts still talked of Peterloo as a massacre, and perhaps it was technically. Yeomanry sabres and charging horses had claimed a few dozen victims on those same setts where, only an hour or so ago, he had seen five thousand Mancunians stuffing themselves with municipal pies and popcorn. But Peterloo was more than sixty years ago, when he had been a toddler waiting to be taken on at a mill for fourpence a day. “Remember Peterloo” was no more than an archaic rallying cry these days— days of craftsmen’s alliances and a Trades’ Congress. They had come a long way since then but not far enough, by God, not by many a mile. Revolution had been averted somehow. The monarchy, deucedly shaky in those days, had survived to become a kind of religion, not merely for those enjoying a living wage and three square meals a day in their bellies, but also for every Jack and Jill in the islands, save a tiny minority of hard-core republicans whom nobody took seriously.

Well, if that was how they wanted it he was not prepared to take issue with them. He had always thought of himself as a people’s man, a majority man, and if that gibbering drunk, propping himself in a corner and waving his penny that Union Jack preferred a hereditary symbol to an elected president on the American style, then John Catesby had no wish to persuade him otherwise. What point was there in doing so, anyway? Old Vicky was harmless enough now, pruned of most of her power, shorn of royal prerogatives, and obliged to suffer an anarchist if one was returned to Westminster. Things were moving in the right direction, and it was time they did. Was it too much to hope the pace of reform would quicken a little in the thirteen years left of the century? Well, hurry along or not, it didn’t concern him much nowadays. He was pretty well used up. Youngsters like Giles Swann would have to take his place if they had a mind to. He pulled the cob aside to avoid a strapping rogue in corduroys waving a bottle of stout and said, genially, “Nay, lad, drink it yoursen, an’ then home to sleep it off. You’ll have a rare head on you in t’morning!”

7

An ageing man standing by a Kentish window, contemplating his own arrogance and that of his tribe, and wondering where both would lead; an ex-gamin, masquerading as a civic worthy, basking in the sun of his own success and seeing, or believing he saw, precisely where it would lead; an ex-chimney sweep, with an eye on the main chance; an ex-highwayman and his wife, deeply in love at fifty plus; a kindly old scholar, instructing coloured grandchildren on a mountain slope; an industrial warrior, riding his cob through a sea of drunks and seeing some kind of progress in the exercise… This was the copper coin of the Golden Jubilee so far as Swann-on-Wheels was concerned. Passed and forgotten as soon as it changed hands. But there was one region of the network that had cause to remember the day with awe and wonder. Down in the far west, Hamlet Ratcliffe was not concerned with small change that blazing June but with all he possessed. And he in his eightieth year.

They brought him the news about midday on the twentieth. Bertieboy, heir-apparent in the Western Wedge, was temporarily out of action, and at a time when his presence on the road was imperative if Swann’s reputation for speedy deliveries was to be maintained.

In the weeks leading up to the Jubilee, Swann’s waggons had hauled a wide variety of goods directly associated with the event. In Northern and Southern Pickings, that is to say between Worcester and the Potteries, where china sold all over the world was manufactured, they had carried hundreds of thousands of celebration mugs to be distributed to schoolchildren in the form of municipal largesse. Similarly, thousands of Imperial flags and a hundred miles or more of bunting, spun and dyed in Polygon mills had been hauled south and east, to float over a thousand town halls and along ten thousand High Streets. But only Ratcliffe’s beat in the West had the privilege of actually hauling a queen. Here, as the day approached, a frantic mid-Devon mayor made a personal appeal to Hamlet to deliver by the twentieth of June, at the very latest, an eight-foot bronze statue of Her Majesty cast to fit into the frontal niche of the town’s new clock tower, a monument upon which mayor and colleagues had staked capital and dignity in order to go one better than their neighbours.

The mayor poured out his tale and Hamlet listened in impatient silence. The statue, he learned, had been cast in Devonport, finished well ahead of schedule, and despatched by rail on the seventeenth. That was cutting it fine, but there had been some inexplicable blunder concerning arrangements for the final stage of the journey from Exeter, a matter of twenty-eight miles up the river valley. Now, unless Swann-on-Wheels was prepared to step into the breach, the Jubilee would pass into history unmarked by the community. Flags draping the new clock tower would be pulled aside to reveal—a clock, a fountain, a horse-trough, and a large, empty niche, so that ever afterwards the monument would be classed as a folly; its sponsors would go down in local history as buffoons.

Hamlet, his rheumy eyes slightly bloodshot, his girth so enormous now that, given his short stature, he looked like Humpty Dumpty in a frock coat that Augusta had twice let out in the last three years, viewed the commission thrust upon him as a confounded nuisance. Most of his waggoners had been given the week off, and he was short of heavy vehicles that would be required to haul such an awkward load over unsurfaced roads. Yet he was still peasant enough to see the mayor’s point of view. An anticlimax on this scale would almost certainly enlarge itself into a legend in the locality. Local wags would set to work manufacturing jokes about it, jokes that would pass from mouth to mouth and generation to generation. Hamlet knew village life and could even conjure with some of those jokes in advance—“Arrr, that was the day ’Er Majesty got left behind in the goods yard, and old Mort Wonnacott (Mortimer Wonnacott was the mayor in question) messed his britches waiting on ’er…” That kind of thing, the heavy, savage irony, of which the Devon peasant is a pastmaster, shamefaced authority having been his favourite target since the days of Norman overlords.

He said, at length, “Vair enough, Mr. Mayor! Now lemme think, will ’ee? For ’ow can I think on it when youm tellin’ me ’ow to run my bizness?” Whereupon Mayor Wonnacott, seeing a gleam of hope in the haulier’s gruffness, clamped his jaws shut and waited, as upon the jury’s verdict in a capital trial.

Hamlet said, at length, “Us c’n do it. But it’d cost ’ee over the odds. A vower-horse team it’d need, over a twenty-eight mile run from St. David’s goods yard to that there clock o’ yours. Well, us’ll have to measure the distance, but suppose us takes your word for it? Twenty-eight mile you say. So what do ’ee zay to twenty-eight pun’?”

The mayor made a sound like a whippet at the receiving end of a welt, but then, noting the baleful gleam in Hamlet’s eye, he changed it to a gurgling sound, signifying virtual acceptance of the quotation. “I’ll have to look vor it in me orn pocket,” he said, gloomily.

But Hamlet replied, steadily, “Ahh, mebbe you will. But that’s your conzern, bain it? You should ’er come to me in the virst plaace, and had no truck wi’ that bliddy railway. For I wouldn’t ha’ left ’ee with your breeches down, and your arse waiting to be kicked, Mr. Mayor! As tiz you c’n leave it to me. I’ll undertake to have that statue off-loaded by midnight on the twentieth. Mebbe before, depending who hauls it there, and whether or no us can lay hands on some heavy transport. Shall us shake hands on it?”

They shook hands. Down here in the far west, money was not often wasted on lawyers and contracts. Westcountrymen diddled foreigners every summer. They did not make a habit of diddling one another.

But then, when the bargain was struck, and a four-horse team had been selected and harnessed to the one serviceable dray in the yard, Bertieboy, chosen as the only possible man on the yard’s muster-roll equipped to deliver such a load at short notice, had to put his foot down on a patch of ground a split second before a Clydesdale hoof descended, pinning it there. His shrieks of agony brought Augusta Ratcliffe running, to proclaim, at the top of her voice, that Bertieboy had broken two toes and was
hors de combat
for a fortnight.

Hamlet viewed the scene of the disaster with pitiless irritation, a kind that had settled on him increasingly with old age. He said, sourly, “On’y a bliddy gurt vool would get between Floss an’ where she’s a mind to put her veet! ’Er’s alwus bin ’andy with ’er favours. A man who bin workin’ ’er as long as Bertieboy should ha’ knowed it! Now us is in a rare vix, bain us? I promised that there statue delivered by midnight the morrow, and it looks as if I’ll ’ave to haul ’un there meself. There’s no one else I’d trust wi’ royalty aboard. Pack me a foo sandwiches, Gussie, an’ dornee forget my flask o’ sloe gin. Then zend the boy round for Doctor Ambrose to make what he can o’ that bliddy vool’s voot. But leave that till last, do ’ee hear?”

It was useless to argue with him. Useless to point out that he was within four months of his eightieth birthday and that this was a job for stronger, steadier hands than his. He rejected the notion that anyone, least of all Gussie, should imply that he was past his work, and when Augusta wailed, “Dornee do it, my luv! Youm not up to ’andlin’ a vower-team. Tiz all you c’n do nowadays to manage a pair…” He snarled, “For Chris’ sake, dornee talk so daft, woman! I’m the Gaffer, bain I? What’s more, I give Mayor Wonnacott my word an’ I mane to keep it!”