Theirs Was The Kingdom (21 page)

Giles could not have said what it was that caused him to concentrate on the young man’s expression rather than on the various features of the empty chamber. He stood so still that he might have been one of the wax figures Giles had seen on a visit to Madame Tussaud’s. In the next minute he had leisure to study every detail of the alert, determined, and rather aggressive face, crowned by a mop of dark brown hair and lit by a pair of lively and intelligent eyes. He was still staring when the young man spoke, as to himself, saying, in accents that were unmistakably Welsh, “Much smaller than one is led to believe. Disappointingly so. Fine buildings, yes, but here—why, man, it’s suffocating. It’s
crabbed
.” Yet he went on looking.

Giles, although a very solitary boy, was amiable enough and could not but assume that the young man regarded him as his audience. He therefore coughed politely and said, “I thought it would be bigger. I mean… considering the tremendous things that happen here…”

And then the young man turned his head and studied him, his eyes lighting up in a lively, mischievous manner, as he said, in that pleasantly sing-song accent of his, “Tremendous? I wouldn’t say that, or not of most of the men who come here. The great majority spout a lot of old nonsense, concerning things of which they know very little at firsthand and can’t be bothered to find out.
I
could tell them. I mean to if I ever get the chance.”

Giles could not have said why the young man impressed him so much more than any of the prefects, cricket-colours, and “bloods” of approximately the same age, who could be observed any day of the term swaggering about the quad and corridors of Mellingham. But he did, for all his patched boots, and a suit that seemed to be homesewn from pieces of tweed.

He said, respectfully, “Do you come here often and listen to them, sir?” and the young man’s eyes twinkled in a way that suddenly made him seem very friendly and approachable.

“No, I haven’t that pleasure,” he said. “ To be truthful, this is my first visit to London. But if I did come here and listen I wager I should find it difficult not to interrupt them sometimes.” And then, as the twinkle died, “You, lad, do you live in London?”

“Not really,” Giles told him, “I live in Kent but my father is in business here.”

The young man looked interested.

“
Here?
In the House of Commons?”

“Oh no, sir… in the City. He has a transport service. It’s called Swann-on-Wheels. It takes goods all about the country.”

The young Welshman did not seem as impressed by this as Giles hoped he would be. “Swann-on-Wheels,” he said, thoughtfully. “I remember. I’ve seen your vans, as far north as Llanberis. They haul slate from there. The best slate in the world comes from Llanberis. And the worst wages paid to the men who risk their lives and health quarrying.”

At that Giles identified him, at least to some extent. He was obviously “Radical,” a term he had heard applied to his father from time to time, although he was not at all certain what it meant, except that it implied a sustained protest against something or someone. He was going to ask, politely, if the young man was a Radical but the Welshman anticipated the question by asking another. “Why do you address me as ‘sir’?” he said. Giles was so dismayed that he stuttered a little, replying, “I… I suppose because you’re older. Isn’t it the polite thing to do to someone a lot older?”

“Not where I come from,” the young man said, grimly, but suddenly he twinkled again and asked if “Mr. Swann” had taken the opportunity to cross the road and look at Westminster Abbey. Giles said no, for he was due to meet his father and mother very shortly and had better start back at once in case he kept them waiting. Instead of using this as a means to shake him off, however, the young Welshman grew more expansive and said, gaily, “You can’t be more than thirteen. Why did you come here by yourself to look at this place?” and Giles said he supposed it was because it was famous all over the world and because his grandfather, who had died a few months back, had told him every other parliament was a copy of it.

“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.”