Kindling

  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 façade above the windows he traced the outline letters of the sign that had been taken down, and realised 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 realised 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 reorganisation. 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 facts.”

  “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?”

  She was silent.

  “The bank wouldn’t let you place your order here,” he said. “They’d be afraid that something would go wrong, that it would be a bad ship and no security for their loan.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “I know that is the difficulty. One must be practical.”

  “It seems to me that it’s the first few orders are the difficulty,” he said. “The goodwill must be absolutely dead.”

  “But that means that the Yard never can get started up again,” she said.

  He had nothing to say to that.

  She rose and faced him, and he rose in turn. “I know that what you’ve said is true,” she said. “And yet I don’t believe it. This is a decent world, and things like that don’t happen. Sharples is going through a bad patch now, but somehow we’re going to get over it. Something we don’t see will turn up, or somebody will come and help us get things like they used to be.”

  He faced her, and his eyes were very soft. “That is what you believe?”

  “I believe that some day we shall get things right again,” she said.

  He smiled. “If there are many people like you in Sharples, you probably will.”

  He turned to his accounts.

  He worked on steadily all evening at his books, making up in length of hours what he was well aware was lacking in dexterity. In the middle of the next morning the Almoner passed through the office; he stopped her as she went.

  “I’m going for a walk this afternoon,” he said. “Is it possible to get into the shipyard? I’d like to see it.”

  “The gates are usually open,” she replied. “Old Robbins is the watchman—he comes up here to out-patients. If you mention me he’ll let you in.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  She considered for a minute. “I’ve got visits in Baker Lane and round that way this afternoon. If you like, I’ll meet you at the Yard. Say four o’clock.”

  “Don’t trouble if it’s out of your way.”

  She turned aside. “I wouldn’t mind seeing it myself—it’s over two years since I went there. I’d like to see how tall the grass has grown.”

  The Yard stood at a bend in the river, a mile or so up from the sea. It covered, Warren judged, about fifty acres of land; there were three large berths for building and two smaller ones, with quays, wharves, and a small graving dock. The Yard had been placed cleverly upon the bend of the river so that the three large slipways pointed down the stream, enabling quite large vessels to be launched in a small river. All this and other features of the Yard were pointed out by the old watchman, as he hobbled round with Warren and the Almoner.

  “Admiralty vessels we built here, too—oh, a many of them,” he quavered. “Seven Barlow destroyers there was at the Battle of Jutland.”

  Warren walked slowly after him, leaning upon his stick and asking keen, incisive questions. He judged the place to be in pretty good shape. The derricks and gantries exposed to the weather had not suffered greatly from corrosion; so far as possible all gear had been removed and put in store, carefully greased and covered with tarpaulins. The woodworking machinery had all been sold; there had been no market for the heavier presses and the plate-manipulating rolls, and these remained in place. The buildings of the Yard were fair; the offices and stores were still quite good.

  He lingered there till dusk. At the Yard gate he turned towards the girl.

  “Thirty thousand pounds for capital re-equipment,” he said. “And then the money to finance the order.”

  She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  He smiled. “I’m sorry—I was thinking aloud. But that’s what it would cost to get it going again.”

  “How on earth do you know that?”

  He turned towards the hospital. “I used to do a good bit of that sort of estimating,” he said. “Over in America, of course.”

  She eyed him doubtfully, but said nothing.

  During the next week Warren wandered widely through the town on his afternoon walks. He went twice more to the shipyard and talked for a long time with the ancient at the gate. He paid a visit to the rolling-mills. He went down to the fish quay at the harbour mouth and listened to the gossip of the boats—to find if there was any silting of the river. In one swift hour of concentration in the hospital he learned the mystery of football pools, which led him to an hour’s talk with a small newsagent that threw a great light on the failure of the Yard. He carried many parcels of washing to the homes of the patients, and for each parcel he was paid in some stray piece of information of the town.

  He gained strength rapidly, unlike the people that he lived among. Before many days had passed he could walk long distances without his stick, and knew by that same token that his time in Sharples was drawing to a close.

  There was one place more to visit before he left the town. He said to the Almoner, working at her desk:

  “I want to see the mine, Miss MacMahon—before I go. Do you think that could be managed?”

  She raised her head. “You can’t go down it.”

  “I don’t want to do that. I’d like to look around about the pithead—see the stores and offices.”

  She glanced at him queerly. “You’ve seen everything else in Sharples? And now you want to see the mine.”

  He smiled. “I’ve seen most things,” he admitted. “Is it possible to see the mine?”

  She stared at him, puzzled. “I know one of the clerks who used to work there,” she said. “He could show you all there is to see. But what do you want to see it for?”

  He smiled. “To satisfy my curiosity,” he said blandly. “It would be so kind of you if you’d give me his name.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I’ll come with you this afternoon.”

  The man lived in
a little house in a row on the top of the hill some way outside the town, not far from the pit-head. He looked white and ill, and very frail. He made no objection to taking them to the offices, and for an hour Warren pored over dirty, dog-eared plans, and talked production costs. He walked through the stores and engine-shops, asking questions that the little clerk found joy in answering, so long it was since he had talked his business with a stranger.

  At last they left the mine, and went back to the house. The Almoner went in with the pale clerk; Warren waited for ten minutes in the road outside. Then she rejoined him, and they strolled towards the town.

  “That fellow’s looking very ill,” he said. “Is he a patient?”

  “Not yet,” she said briefly. “His wife has been attending for a long time.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He isn’t getting enough to eat, by the look of him. I’ve just spoken to him about it.”

  Warren frowned. “Surely the public assistance rates aren’t so bad as that? They’re revised from time to time, aren’t they? You don’t just have to starve?”

  She shook her head. “No, you don’t have to starve. The rates are all right—in theory, Mr. Warren. You can keep alive and fit on P.A.C. relief—if you happen to have been born an archangel.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She stopped and faced him. “It’s like this. There’s really nothing wrong with the rates of relief. If you are careful, and wise, and prudent, you can live on that amount of money fairly well. And you’ve got to be intelligent, and well educated, too, and rather selfish. If you were like that you’d get along all right—but you wouldn’t have a penny to spare.”

  She paused. “But if you were human—well, you’d be for it. If you got bored stiff with doing nothing so that you went and blued fourpence on going to the pictures—you just wouldn’t have enough to eat that week. Or if you couldn’t cook very well, and spoiled the food a bit, you’d go hungry. You’d go hungry if your wife had a birthday and you wanted to give her a little present costing a bob—you’d only get eighty per cent of your food that week. And of course, if your wife gets ill and you want to buy her little fancy bits of things …”