The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Page 4

  Greater ingenuity still was required. Not a year went by but a new, foolproof scheme was heralded – ship canals, floating docks, enclosed basins, lock gates – and then six months later abandoned for want of government support or, which amounted to the same thing, finance. The town’s merchants and mill owners were becoming restless. Belfast had through their industry and application turned itself into one of the foremost towns in the kingdom, rivalling even Cork and Dublin, Liverpool and Manchester, with upwards of two thousand ships annually, and against all odds, entering the harbour; but there was a limit to how far its trade could grow while the port remained in its present primitive state.

  I had not been many months in my position – below Ferris and Bright and a little above the office cat – when the Board engaged Mr James Walker, heralded as “the second greatest engineer in the Empire” (Telford then being still alive, Telford himself having surveyed us in 1814), to devise another scheme. Although he had long been resident in London, Walker was by birth a Scot, like so many of those who were prominent in the commerce of our own town, and our port in particular. Some of them, indeed, he already numbered among his friends and acquaintances. For the evening of his arrival in Belfast the Board had organised a dinner in the Commercial Buildings on Waring Street, to which, it need hardly be said, I was not invited, although my grandfather by virtue of his past service was. His first instinct was to decline, being of the firm opinion that the majority of such occasions were excuses for excessive drinking, dressed up as “toasting”. When they had run out of worthies to toast at the last dinner he had attended, the guests fell to toasting the proposer of the previous toast and then the proposer of that toast, and the proposer of that, and so on till there was not a drop left to be drunk, or a proposer capable of getting to his feet. My grandfather was a teetotaller avant la lettre. The Rev. Dr John Edgar, who stirred the Temperance Movement into life in the town when he emptied the remains of a gallon of whiskey out his manse window, frequently acknowledged my grandfather’s example; as frequently as those who eschewed it lamented that the Reverend Doctor had not given prior notice of his intention to waste good whiskey like that, else they would have been standing beneath the window with their tumblers at the ready.

  That my grandfather accepted the Board’s invitation in the end was, I have no doubt, more for my benefit than Walker’s. The dinner had been the talk of the office for weeks – Ferris and I had been tasked with copying the letters of invitation, all one hundred and eight of them – and had therefore occupied my thoughts and conversation in that small portion of the day that I spent in my grandfather’s company, much to his, and Nisbet’s, evident exasperation.

  Nisbet it was who walked with him to Waring Street on the evening in question and who waited in the news-room of the Commercial Buildings until after the toasts had been made to the King (God grant him a speedy recovery from his most recent illness), the Duke of Clarence (God keep him in good health, just in case) and the Marquis of Donegall . . . and my grandfather felt able to make his exit.

  I had been listening at the door of my room for their return and flew down the stairs to the hallway, but my grandfather was too tired to talk. “It will keep,” he said, and I had no option but to let it.

  I was waiting in the morning when he came into the dining room for his breakfast and waited patiently for several more minutes while he picked every last fragment of shell from the pair of boiled eggs that Agnes set before him. Then and only then did he tell me – pausing to dip the first egg in a little salt – that the Marquis himself had not been present to hear his health being drunk the night before, having had some urgent business in Doagh to attend to, although Lord Belfast – “the older son”, as my grandfather referred to him – did put in an appearance, in the course of which he managed repeatedly to be discourteous to the guest of honour, several times addressing him as “Walters” until Walker offered to write the name down “that he might have less trouble remembering it in future”.

  “Anyone would think Mr Walker meant the town harm,” my grandfather said, and bit the top off his egg.

  Lord Belfast had for the previous ten years been the town’s one and only Member of Parliament, having before that been the Member for the neighbouring borough of Carrickfergus, where he was succeeded, as he would in a short time be succeeded in Belfast (for the King, and the Parliament, did not long survive the toast in the Commercial Buildings), by his father’s cousin, Sir Arthur Chichester, who would in turn be succeeded by Lord Belfast’s own younger brother, Lord Arthur. There was a crude joke, indeed, with which I doubted my grandfather was familiar (I had got it from Ferris), that a visitor to the Donegalls was told that the Marquis was unable to see him at present “being upstairs with the Marchioness making a Member of Parliament”.

  “Of course,” my grandfather went on, “if ever the port is improved the town will quickly outgrow the Chichester family. The Earl might yet have an inheritance, but he will have scant influence.”

  So great had the influence of the Chichester family been historically that its name in the person of the first Sir Arthur (the “Donegall”, like the “Marquis”, was a later addition) was written into Belfast’s very charter. For close on one hundred years their castle had stood at the foot of High Street until, the story went, a servant too enthusiastic in the airing of a room she had been washing started a blaze that killed three of the sisters of the latest Arthur Chichester to reside there, after which he and his heirs preferred to live in London, leaving the day-to-day running of the place to their appointees, the Sovereign and the Seneschal. A portion of the castle’s outer wall stood yet. I only had to look past my grandfather that morning to see it and, beyond, the overgrown gardens, known as Montgomery’s market, currently lashed with rain, where fruit and vegetables were now sold three days in the week.

  The family’s return to the town, in the year after the Act of Union, had been wholly unexpected. The present Marquis had spent his youth amassing debts, many of which were “post-obit”, that is to say repayable when he came into his title, and none of which he had the slightest intention of repaying if he could avoid it. Coming again to live in Belfast in modest circumstances (for a Marquis) on the Flags, nearest the White Linen Hall, was one tactic in the avoidance. It had not worked. Within a matter of years he had been forced to auction the entire contents of the house and flee again to Scotland. In a short while, however, he was back, having sold off the majority of his other holdings in Ireland, at which point, to the amazement, frustration, and finally outrage of his creditors, he diverted the funds into a country estate at Ormeau, scarcely a mile and a half from his town house. (He held on, too, to Fisherwick Lodge at Doagh, some ten miles to the north; it was always advisable to keep a second bolthole from bailiffs, and tiresome dinners.) When his grand plans for rebuilding Ormeau outstripped even these new revenues, “Lord Done’em all”, as he had come to be known, began selling leases all over the town at rock-bottom prices. “The older son” was powerless to stop him, but he appeared to be drawing the line at the port. This was one asset that he would be sure his father did not give up cheaply, if indeed he gave it up at all.

  What my grandfather neglected to tell me at breakfast, or, more likely, did not know – what, then, would have been of much greater interest to me – was that the boy serving Mr Walker as apprentice had been taken ill on the voyage across the Irish Sea, and at the time of the dinner the night before was being visited in his lodgings by Dr Murray, who gave him some of the same fluid of Magnesia solution he had recently given, with marvellous results (marvellous enough that he was being urged to patent it), to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland himself.

  A letter explaining the boy’s continued indisposition was delivered to the Ballast Office a few minutes after I arrived at work, along with a request that some suitable lad substitute on the engineer’s initial tour of the waterways. Sir Clueless descended from his eyrie with the letter in his hand to the room where Ferris, Bright and I were worki
ng, although Ferris, who had earlier carried the letter up, and who in the matter of eliciting information at least was resourcefulness personified, had already shared with us its contents. Shared and embellished somewhat: in Ferris’s version the boy was already boxed up for dispatch back to London.

  Had the weather not been so dismal that morning it might never have fallen out that I was chosen to accompany Mr Walker. Ferris, inevitably, was first with his excuse. He had a bundle of ships’ licences that were to be completed by the end of the day. (The licences, in fact, were to have been completed by the end of the day before and would still be unfinished at the end of the day after.) Bright reminded Sir Clueless that he had already asked him, Bright, to reorganise the Board-meeting minutes, which had had to be moved to a tea chest after silverfish got into the cabinet. My own excuse – that I had never in my short time there, in all my years indeed of living in Belfast, set foot in a boat – was thus trumped before it was played, and out, a quarter of an hour later, I duly went, in borrowed rain cape and muffler, to attend on the latest Pretender to the title of Saviour of the Port of Belfast.

  The rain, mercifully, had stopped, but the wind that had whipped it in off the hills continued to menace. The porters and dockhands I passed were practically bent double at their tasks. Bales of cowhides were being landed, the topmost skins as symmetrical as butterfly wings. A child’s bonnet bowled along the quayside, with no one in pursuit.

  I found Mr Walker in conversation with two other gentlemen of his party, at the top of a flight of steps cut into the quay. He had removed his own hat as a precaution, although he might have been advised to keep it on: his hair appeared to have been blasted to the extremities of his head, and but for a few tenacious strands clinging to the crown would have been halfway to Bangor. His chin fitted neatly, almost mathematically between the wings of his shirt collar, with only a very little remainder for a mouth. A smile would have been beyond it. I waited for a sufficiently long pause in which to introduce myself. And waited. And eventually cleared my throat. “Gilbert Rice,” I said, “sent from the Ballast Office.” Mr Walker nodded in my direction, turned to resume the conversation, then turned back to take in my garb. His mouth contracted still nearer to absolute zero.

  I had been expecting – hoping for, indeed – some kind of floating workshop or laboratory, with at least a modicum of shelter. For this first trip, however, Mr Walker had requested that he be taken in a simple skiff, “the better to understand the opponent”. One of the gentlemen went first down the steps into the boat. Mr Walker went second and I, with infinite care, third, taking my seat, in the only place where I could see to take it, in the prow, facing backwards, whereupon the first man, having addressed some further remarks to Mr Walker, climbed out on to the dock again.

  The boat registered every step of the ballet as a roll, now to this side, now to that, which my stomach took up and exaggerated further. I clasped my hands together between my knees, praying that the turmoil would stop, that the slop of the water in the bottom of the boat would stop. Mr Walker, who had not yet spoken one word to me, consulted a chart folded small in his lap. After half a minute he looked up at me curiously. His eyes under all that forehead had a peculiar intensity, as though they too were instruments of his profession and not attributes of nature. He regarded my hands, idle in my lap. Only then did I realise that I was expected to row. I was about to tell him that there had been a dreadful misunderstanding when he turned and shouted an instruction to the gentlemen on the quay – another chart was wanted, showing the soundings that Rennie had taken.

  “A good thing after all we had not already taken to the water,” he told me before resuming his study.

  While we waited for the soundings chart to be delivered I watched a neighbouring boat detach itself from the safety of the harbour wall. The boat was, at a guess, three feet longer than our own, its lone oarsman possibly the same number of years younger than me. I followed his movements closely as with only a few glances over his shoulder he steered a path through the skiffs and gabbards and shallow-bottomed coalmen. If nothing else I was a quick learner. I placed the oars in the rowlocks and when the chart had been handed down into the boat, the rope untied, I leaned forward, dipped the blades in the water and pulled. The oars jumped back at me. I steadied them, shuffled my bottom, as much as to say it had been the fault of an unfamiliar seat; tried again. We moved. I leaned forward a third time, as close to Mr Walker’s knees as I dared, and back; we moved further, faster. Mr Walker had taken out a stub of cedar pencil and was writing in a notebook as though settled behind the desk of his London office.

  Forward, pull . . . Forward, pull . . . Forward, pull . . . Within a very few strokes I had found a rhythm. If anything, the wind was less bothersome this close to the water. I could do this, provided I did not think too much about the water itself, or the fact that every stroke was carrying me further out of my depth, i.e. the shallows of the Mill Dam at Cromac. I became almost detached from the effort, not an actor, but an observer. It was an extraordinary sensation to leave the town behind, although looking back from the prow the impression was rather that the town, all its rooftops and spires, its two conspicuous clock towers, had come adrift from me. I watched it move in regular stages, further and further south. Soon it would be bearing down on Lisburn, Banbridge, Newry, pushing them before it across the rucked landscape: Dundalk, Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford and – with an almighty splash – off the edge of the island altogether.

  “Port!” Mr Walker said, with the urgency of one who had said it once already without response. “Hard to port!”

  In my confusion I pulled with all my strength on both oars and almost at once felt a jolt run through me from tailbone to gullet. The charts, the notebook and the pencil spilled from Mr Walker’s lap. I had rowed us into the mud.

  “Did you not hear me? I said port, port!”

  I made as though to stand.

  “Sit!” said Mr Walker, holding tight to the gunwales to keep the boat from tipping over.

  I sat heavily. I imagined Sir Clueless in his tower, snatching the glass from his eye in anger. “I am sorry,” I said. “I should have spoken up earlier, I do not know the first thing about boats or rowing.”

  “I had guessed as much. I still hoped you were endowed with basic common sense,” Walker said. He loosened his grip experimentally, one finger at a time. The boat was quite steady. “But we are where we are.”

  He had recovered his belongings (the notebook fortunately had an oilcloth backing) along with his composure. He looked about him.

  “In fact,” he mused, “we are, by wonderful accident, almost exactly where we need to be.” Which was to say at the point, a little beyond Mr Ritchie’s shipyard and the Corporation Docks, where the Lagan made its first sharp bend to the right. Some few hundred yards distant on the starboard or County Down side was the salt works at Ballymacarrett. Nearer to hand, on the port side, and of rather more interest to Mr Walker (I looked, belatedly, over my shoulder to see it), was a timber pond. The green wood formed a shifting, clunking floor. “Here,” he said, and looked down at his chart and then up, “is our first obstruction.”

  He produced from his pocket a small bone-handled knife with which – three deft flicks – he sharpened the point of his pencil and commenced to make a sketch, no longer the great engineer, but the enthusiast intent, you might have thought, on a landscape for his library wall.

  “Now,” he said when he had finished, a matter of five minutes at most, “push back with the left oar on the bank – that’s the way – and quick strokes with the right – and more, and more . . .” The boat came away from the mud, like a spoon from a jelly: slurp. He sat back, pleased with himself, or with me. “And row.”

  I followed the twists and turns of the river, encountering few other vessels, until we were just short of the Pool of Garmoyle, where the mudflats, more waterlogged by the yard, finally disappeared below the surface and the Lagan lost itself in Belfast Lough. The sun had come out a
few minutes before, casting jewels on the surface and silhouetting the ships sailing towards us from the open water. Even at a distance they were vast in comparison to our skiff. I understood then something of the pull of the sea on men’s imaginations; and I felt more profoundly than ever I had in all the church services I had attended how tenuous was our hold on this world of ours.

  Mr Walker’s eyes narrowed and widened and closed and opened in their turn, and when they had imprinted the view on his memory he nodded. “I think that will do for the first day.”

  As quickly as it had appeared the bright spell passed. The clouds building above the hills to the west were again black with rain. It had been an adventure, but I was keen to be back on solid ground. The tide too was on the turn and that, coupled with my urgency, helped speed us home. His work complete, Mr Walker was a little more expansive than on the outward journey. He told me that once as a lad, not much older than I was now, he had made a visit from his home in Falkirk to the west of Scotland. A friend of the family, a clergyman, had pointed out to him the Antrim coast, only fifteen miles distant. Terrible events were occurring in that country and he was to be sure to keep it in his prayers. And indeed Mr Walker had, long after the terrible events had run their course; and now this opportunity had arisen, almost as though in recognition of his remembrance.

  “The river is the key to prosperity,” he said, “and prosperity the key to the common good.”

  I was not obliged to say much, concerned as I was with getting us back to shore, which was perhaps as well, given the chasm in my knowledge of the events in question, always supposing they were the ones that had ended with Henry Joy McCracken hanging from a gibbet in High Street. Still, I signalled my interest and – at the appropriate moments – astonishment and quiet reflection by means of nods and shakes and raised eyebrows, which seemed to satisfy my companion well enough. After I had cast up the rope, at the second attempt, on to the quayside, he shook me by the hand.