God Is an Englishman by R. F. Delderfield

Author:R. F. Delderfield [Delderfield, R. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-04-29T19:35:45+00:00

3 1 8 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

3

He had looked for torpor in the cotton belt, where he knew most of the looms were silent now that the bales to feed them arrived in a trickle from blockade-runners and a few fast-sailing privateers, like the Liverpool-built Alabama there had been so much fuss about. Lassitude, and an all-round slackening-off maybe, but not this, not a plague that hung over the huddle of towns like a new Black Death that would ultimately carry off half the population and reduce King Cotton to beggary.

The clearest evidence of what was happening was all around him before he had ridden a hundred yards from Exchange Station. The army of workless, sullen, listless, and mostly in rags, stood about at street corners, many of them looking as if they had not eaten a good meal in months. Mendicants, old and young, were everywhere, and down near the Cathedral he passed a soup-kitchen around which pallid children were being marshalled into queues, too dispirited to rattle their cups and pannikins.

Further out the blight was even more obvious. For the first time in his experience the sky overhead was high and clear, and the smell of the great city was not the familiar reek of smoke, but the sour odour of decay under a burning sun, a smell that made him think of alleys and hovels in places like Lucknow and Allahabad.

He went first to his father-in-law in Rochdale, finding Sam sub merged in the general gloom, and this despite the fact that his chim ney was one of the few still sending up a plume of smoke.

“Aye, but it’s a desperate business, lad,” said Sam, when Adam commented on the slump. “You’ll ask me summat I can’t tell you if you ask how it’s likely to finish. In bankruptcy all round as like as not, and half-a-million on parish relief.

Ah’m still running but I’ll be silent come autumn, this road. Living on me fat, you might say, for I saw this a mile off, and stocked up, as well as hoisting my rates. But nine mills out of ten are on quarter-time, and thirty shut bloody gates long since. None of us bargained for a war running to years, and that’s a fact. A twel’month, or half as long again mebbe, but there’s no sign of it finishing yet, or any one o’ the plantation ports opening up and shipping over.”

“It always amazed me why you people crammed all your eggs in the one basket,” Adam said. “Why the hell didn’t you diversify when you had the chance?” but Sam reacted to this as if he had uttered a blasphemy. “Busy oursen wi’ owt but cotton? And city well on t’road to becoming capital o’ the country? Nay, lad, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 318

3/27/09 5:14:17 PM

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