Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 19

  “Well, that's so,” the Welshman conceded, grudgingly, “but it's very far from perfect for all that. One would have thought, after six hundred years’ practice, it would have found ways of doing more to help the people it represents, particularly folk in my part of the world. Wales,” he added, quite unnecessarily, so that it occurred to Giles he must be unaware of his warbling accent.

  “Are things so bad there?” Giles asked, more from politeness than a desire to prolong the discussion, and the Welshman said warmly that they were very bad indeed. Most Welsh folk, he said, lived on pittances and were made to pay for a Church and a system of education that was alien to them. They were also, he added in passing, forbidden to kill so much as a rabbit on their own hillsides to make a Sunday dinner. He sounded so resentful about this that Giles said, “It sounds rather like the feudal system, sir. We’ve been revising that at school, you see. We’ve got to that bit about William Rufus turning everybody out of doors to make the New Forest into a hunting ground and cutting off peasants’ hands for poaching.”

  The young man, he noticed, was now looking at him speculatively and at the mention of the New Forest his extraordinarily expressive eyes, that seemed even more volatile than his tongue, blazed up like two bonfires. But then, unpredictably, they veiled themselves in a friendly, almost conspiratorial glance as he said, “That's precisely it! The feudal system. You ask my Uncle Lloyd. He could tell you all about it. But I’ll tell you something else, lad, and you can pass it on to your Dadda with my compliments. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders for a lad of your age, so don’t let anyone addle it at that fine gentleman's school I dare say you attend. Keep at your history. That's the only way to learn anything worth learning. Aye, and don’t forget what happened to that chap Rufus when he got his hunting ground. Someone who knew what he was about shot an arrow through him and they carted him home on a wood-chopper's chariot like a carcase. Now then, before you go, let's shake hands on it, Mr. Swann. My name is George, and I live and work near those quarries where your Dadda hauls slate. A place you won’t have heard about. Portmadoc, it's called.”

  “But you can’t be a quarryman, sir,” said Giles. Mr. George replied, chuckling, “No, indeed. But I’m a quarryman's advocate. A solicitor.”

  They shook hands very cordially as Big Ben struck the half-hour, and Giles recollected that it would take all the time left to him to find his way back along Whitehall and the Strand to Norfolk Street. He touched his cap as he turned and sped away and the young Welshman watched him go, his eyes alight with yet another expression, one that Giles would have identified, had he seen it, with the kind of glance Prodder and his father directed at him when he asked one of his complicated questions.

  3

  That was the beginning of what he later came to think of as the learning time, a phase in his boyhood when he began to make a conscious effort to organise the confused thoughts and fancies that buzzed about in his head, when he began to seek answers to some of his questions in the library of his new school, and in the comprehensive but sadly neglected library at Tryst.

  He took the young Welshman's advice literally, concentrating exclusively on history, and discovering that it was far more absorbing than the fiction prescribed by Phoebe Fraser, or his housemaster, or even his father, whose tastes were wide and who was known to be a great admirer of the late Mr. Dickens, who had also been involved in that terrible Staplehurst crash. He read his way steadily through the works of Macaulay, Froude, Green, and Clarendon, pecked industriously at Lecky and Gibbon, and dipped into some of the heavier biographies. He set himself to make a kind of ground plan of social development within the British Isles, from the mid-sixteenth century, the point he had arrived at on leaving Mellingham, to the famous Peterloo Massacre, that he came to regard as a starter's tape for a marathon on the part of reformers to promote legislation enabling more or less everyone to participate in government.

  Certain points of crisis fascinated him. The reign of Henry VII, for instance, recognisable as a time when power passed from feudal barons to London, with the king as the real head of the State. Or a century and a half later, when Pym and Hampden challenged the monarch's right to govern without parliament. He read at tremendous speed, skipping pages and pages devoted to interminable wars with France and Spain. What interested him much more was the tide of popular opinion that advanced, year by year, to swamp tyrants of one sort or another and wash them down the years, together with their privileges.

  By the time the year ended and Christmas festivities were upon them again, with his brother Alex home from his adventures in Zululand and his sister Stella (who, unaccountably to Giles, was engaged to become unmarried) living at Tryst again, he was entrenched in a world of his own and had become a dedicated if secretive Radical. He would have liked very much to have run against that friendly young Welshman again and discussed matters like the Declaration of Rights, the revolt of the American colonies, and the wave of reform bills that dominated the first half of the present century.

  Many questions, of course, remained unanswered. Others were partially resolved by his father, for whom he formed a different kind of respect after their first real communication had been established during that early morning ride in the Easter holidays. From time to time, diffidently at first but later with confidence, he would approach him with some passage that needed simplification and although he suspected Adam was amused by his earnestness, he was always ready to attempt the translation of a flattish piece of prose into something within the scope of Giles's day-to-day experience, and would sometimes answer a query with a kind of parable. For this reason, if no other, Giles began to invest his father with an infallibility and profundity that had been absent from earlier assessments.

  What puzzled Giles most was the dragging slowness of justice. He would have thought that any man of sense could introduce the precepts of, say, the beatitudes into the everyday life of a nation that never ceased to boast of its regard for freedom and fair play, particularly the kind of fair play prescribed on the football field. The full implications of the word “franchise” eluded him for a long time, and this was one of the topics he brought to Adam towards the end of the Christmas holidays.

  They met one afternoon in the library, whither his father had gone in search of an atlas. Giles, glancing up from a heavy tome dealing with the Chartist agitation, found his father gazing down at him with that expression of affectionate bewilderment that had become the common currency of their relationship over the last few months. Adam said, banteringly, “You’ve become a regular bookworm, haven’t you? Never see you when you haven’t got your nose in a book. What are you reading now?” And Giles showed him, but Adam's expression only became more quizzical as he returned the book, saying, “Odd kind of book for a lad your age,” but then, more seriously, “Tell me honestly, son, what do you make of it so far?”

  “Well, it's not as exciting as the one I was reading yesterday about the machine-wreckers. It's interesting, though, to find out we nearly had a French Revolution.”

  Adam said, balancing himself on a leather armchair and shooting out his artificial leg in a half-petulant, lunging movement Giles had associated with his father all his life, “Aye, we came near enough. I remember thinking that when I came home after seven years abroad and rode the full length of England, to run smack into a regular riot in a mill town up north. Matter o’ fact, they were burning your grandfather's mill at the time. I was lucky to fight clear of it and wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t had a damned good horse under me.”

  It staggered Giles to learn that his father had actually witnessed street riots, of the kind described in the book. Somehow it made him frightfully old, almost as old as the Colonel.

  “How long ago was that, sir?” he asked and Adam, reckoning up, said it would be the summer of ’58, the year he started the business, and met and married his mother.

  “But that was only eight years before I was born! Everyone had been given a vote by then, hadn’t
they?”

  “Everyone? No, by George. Only those with the necessary property qualifications.”

  “But doesn’t everybody get to vote as soon as they’re grown up, sir?”

  “They will, if Gladstone wins the next election. Except the women, of course. Can’t see Parliament entertaining nonsense of that kind. But see here, don’t imagine the vote is the beginning and end of it all, boy. The major reform bills concerning the franchise were law when that riot I saw took place, but they didn’t stop children being worked to death in mines and factories, or one man in every eleven dying a pauper. Can’t hurry these things that way. Once you start hurrying there's no knowing where it will all stop. Main reason we’ve got ahead of everyone else is because we believe in taking our time. Bend rather than break, that is, as we did when the Chartists put their spoke in.” He considered the boy gravely a moment. “Ever hear of a doctrine called ‘the inevitability of gradualness’?”

  “No, sir. What is it?”

  “You could say it's the system we’ve adopted over here. Without acknowledging it officially, that is. The country's wealth improves and with it, bit by bit, the privileges of the people who contribute to it. It's a kind of tug-of-war. The lower class pushing upwards, the class above them pushes the people above them and the chaps on top have to make room or be shown the door. Been happening one way or another ever since the Reformation. Slow? Yes, it is, and a bit of a muddle sometimes, but a damned sight better than the iron fist and then a mob loose in the streets. Read a bit of Russian, French, and German history and judge for yourself.”

  He paused, still regarding the boy with an expression that reminded Giles, improbably, of his last glimpse of the talkative young Welshman he had met at the door of the House of Commons. “You’re an odd one and no mistake. Do you think we’ll make a schoolteacher out of you?” He leaned forward, and Giles saw now that he was addressing him man to man for the first time, almost as though he had been discussing a choice of regiments with Alex. “Seriously, what would you like to work towards? Anything in my line of country?”

  And the boy replied carefully, “I don’t think so, sir. Not unless you wish it, that is. I think I’d like…” and he stopped.

  “Speak up,” Adam said, sharply. “I won’t erupt. Most fathers in trade take it for granted their sons will pick up where they leave off, but I’ll tell you something I wouldn’t tell your brothers. Not yet anyway. Nobody who isn’t dedicated to commerce the way I am can make a success of it. What would you like to do with your life, allowing for the certainty you’ll change your mind in a year or so?”

  “I think I should like to help speed things up a bit, sir. That… what was it… ‘inevitable’ something…?”

  “Inevitability of gradualness.”

  “Yes, sir, I see what you mean, of course, about revolutions and riots, but we really ought to get on with it a bit faster, shouldn’t we? I mean, make laws against throwing those Farthings out, sending them to separate workhouses, and giving those Welsh quarrymen Mr. George told me about a big enough wage to stop them risking being sent to prison for poaching local rabbits.”

  His father must have looked quite blank at this so Giles went on, hurriedly, to explain the gist of the conversation he had with the young Welshman when he visited Westminster. As he spoke, however, he saw the twinkle return to his father's eye, so that he faltered, concluding, “Oh, I daresay it sounds vague, sir…”

  But Adam exclaimed, thumping his leg, “Not a bit vague for a lad your age! It's more than your sister Stella or your brother Alex could have put into words at eighteen, much less thirteen. That new school of yours seems to suit you. Well, now, here's my advice for what it's worth. Follow that Welshman's advice and read everything that interests you and when you’ve read it think about it, and try and put your thoughts on paper some time. I’d be interested to read ’em, and so would your mother. Looks to me as if we’ve got a real radical in our family after all, and maybe it's time—for, as I told you, I’m only half one. Here, what the devil am I doing gossiping to you by the hour? I’ve got a county schedule to work out by lunch time,” and he stood up and lunged off with the atlas under his arm, leaving Giles to reflect that the Governor wasn’t half bad compared with most, for at least he didn’t talk down to a fellow as most governors did.

  For all his passionate love affair with constitutional history, he did not consign Prodder Talbot's poets to the attic. From time to time he still read poetry, finding he had acquired, somewhere along the line, the trick of memorising lines that caught his fancy in a way that he could never remember a method of solving sums, or a conjugation of French verbs.

  His new surroundings on the edge of Exmoor helped him in this respect, for here he inhabited a countryside that seemed to him much closer to the England of Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Gray than his native Kent, where the ancient townships were within hailing distance of one another and the fields, woods, and rivers were, for the most part, tamed, and at a cultivator's disposal. Only a mile or so from the grey Gothic pile on the ridge, the river Bray ran between steeply angled pastures, covered with heath, sown with granite spurs, and tangled thickets of ash and sycamore crowded into the folds and river bottoms forming dark islands in a sea of green and purple moorland. In spring and summer it was a gay, companionable region, a pretty patchwork of primrose, violet, celandine, hawkweed, and foxglove. By late summer, if the season had been dry, the moor lay parched under a sky that seemed twice as tall as the skies over Kent and Berkshire. Shy, unfamiliar birds hovered there, and you could sometimes run three miles between the widely scattered farms without seeing another human being, for the homesteads about here were old and crumbling, and most of the young men and women had moved away to the west, where the land was relatively level and the soil richer.

  With the coming of autumn the woods slipping down the steep hillsides turned guinea yellow, plum purple, and, here and there, russet, as though stained with old blood. The school buildings put on their evening mantle of violet vapour even before the tea bell brought the boys trooping into the covered playground from the football field. The entire establishment, that smelled of boiled greens in high summer and damp cloth under the spring drizzle, seemed to smell of chrysanthemums and dead-leaf bonfires.

  Full winter he had yet to experience up here but he judged it would be a time of tearing winds and flurries of sleet hurling showers of Exmoor-tempered darts against the windows of Big School, where the boys gathered between tea and prep around a fireplace burning a mixture of logs and pungent peat. For all its austerity and remoteness, it had a magic of its own that could absorb you if you let it, and didn’t hanker after the creature comforts of more civilised places.

  The school itself was barely twenty years old but the locale was as old as time, the tiny East Buckland churchyard coming closer to Gray's Stoke Poges than any churchyard about Tryst, whereas the hills and valleys they crossed in the bi-weekly runs might not have been traversed since the day the earth cooled, leaving the countryside as seamed and flawed and crinkled as a twice-baked apple. He felt at home here, as he had never felt at Mellingham, or even at Tryst, where the surrounding countryside was trim and settled, worked over by fifty generations of gardeners, every one an advocate of the regimented bloom and the trim half-moon bed. It was a place to work, a place to think, and above all a place to put a keen edge on one's appetite. By the end of his second term, Giles had put on almost a stone and grown, or so his mother told him, an inch and a quarter in eight months.

  He had developed in other ways, but Henrietta, who could spare him little enough time now that yet another baby had arrived in the last week of October, took no heed of this, whereas Adam kept his observations to himself. Adam made time, however, to write a jocular fortnightly letter about the hubbub surrounding the political issues of the day, notably his old friend General Roberts's march to Cabul and Gladstone's Midlothian campaign that was setting a new style, so Adam said, in Parliamentary elections and would doubtless h
ave Giles's approval, for “it was likely to speed things up a bit.”

  It was on account of this last exchange that Adam felt obliged, in the first days of the New Year, to grant Giles's request to stay overnight in London in order to attend one of Gladstone's monster rallies at Exeter Hall.

  Adam, although interested in overall Imperial trends, had never wasted time attending political meetings, having decided long since that one was more likely to come at the heart of an issue by reading and reflecting on newspaper accounts rather than by subjecting oneself to blasts of platform oratory. Thus he had gone through life without ever hearing Gladstone or Disraeli address a public meeting. Having been beguiled into attending one by his son, Adam found himself enjoying it more than he had anticipated, largely because the boy's enthusiasm was as infectious as measles.

  It began quietly enough, with twelve hundred people jammed shoulder to shoulder, listening attentively to a succession of preliminary speakers—“warm-up men” as Adam informed his son, adding that this was a type the political and boxing fraternities had in common, providing they could coax a Titan into the ring. Having satisfied himself, however, that Giles was impressed by what they had to say about Irish Home Rule, the disastrous errors and injustices of the Zulu War, the extending franchise bill, and various other inflammable topics, Adam surrendered himself to the atmosphere of moral self-righteousness that hovered above the meeting like a cloud of incense. By the time the last warm-up man had said his piece, he actually caught himself murmuring “Hear, hear” when the speaker described the battle of Isandlwana, and the vindication of Lord Chelmsford at Ulundi, as “a needless blood-letting, an outrage against the noble savage by a Christian nation turned pirate.” He wondered, privately, what Giles would make of that now that his brother had returned from the piratical affray, with heady tales of the defence of Rorke's Drift, but his reflections were cut short by a sustained rumbling sound, like a shipload of cabin trunks being trundled down a long flight of stone steps. The distant roar soon enlarged itself into a storm that became, within seconds, a tempest, so that it was with some surprise he identified the cause of the uproar with a movement of the platform. Curtains parted to allow the great man to advance to the centre of the dais and bask, for some five minutes, in the hysterical adulation of his supporters.