Shadow on the Land (13 page)

The sea was as calm as the proverbial millpond, a grey sheet spreading as far as the eye could see, the pale gleams of the setting sun catching the wash of the ship, tipping the white foam with gold. The hills of Antrim were a misty outline, those of Down had already disappeared beyond a light evening mist rising from the cool water after the first warm day of the year.

A strange journey it had been from the quiet of his own home in the early morning with Emily trying hard not to bother him with questions or reminders. First, to the mill, full of the throb of machinery and the stuffiness that the warmth of summer always brought. Then, to Belfast, through the burgeoning countryside, the May blossom already heavy on the boughs though it was still only the fourth of the month. On through the familiar towns and villages of the Bann valley, till suddenly the city lay before him, a haze of smoke hanging on the air from mills
and factories as hard-working as the four he had left behind him.

Above the city to the north, the hard edge of the hills stood out against a brilliant blue sky, gorse blazing flame-yellow set against the rich green of new grass and the snowy mass of the hawthorn bushes. So, on through the city, its streets full of movement and clatter, Army lorries, and cars mixed up with wagons, drays and horse-drawn bread carts brought out of retirement to help save petrol.

The office in Linen Hall Street for which he was bound before his night crossing had not changed since before the first war. Some of its staff he had known for twenty-five years or more, since he had come there with the company’s accountant to make arrangements for the payment of sums of money for materials or machinery so enormous he had difficulty then in grasping them.

Not any longer. He could now speak the language of finance as fluently as he spoke French or German. It was only a matter of familiarity. He sat at the well-polished mahogany table and studied the handsome, gold-framed portrait of the
Titanic
on the wall opposite while a white-haired man in a dark suit went through the sums requested on the Letters of Credit he’d brought with him and handed him discreetly a neat packet of papery notes for his hotel bill and personal expenses.

This was something to which he had never
grown accustomed, the obligation to stay at a particular hotel, to use taxis, to entertain lavishly, or as lavishly as the circumstances of war now permitted. But, however he might feel about such expense, even that had grown familiar.

He was glad to be free of the confining atmosphere of Head Office and to sit back in the obligatory taxi, his car now secured in their own small parking space. He felt even better as he strode up the gangplank to board the Liverpool boat, the prospect of the open sea bringing an unexpected delight.

Clear of the lough, the marked channel far behind, the ship was correcting its course to run east of the Copeland Islands and north of the Isle of Man, its destination Liverpool in the early morning.

Liverpool. He found himself repeating the name to himself like a new word in a foreign language. It felt as if the name meant something quite different from what it had meant back in March, before Hank had written to his mother. He’d known that the boat which took him to Canada had sailed from Liverpool, but any recollection of it was remote and unreal. In her first letter to them his new-found sister Jane had told them she and Alex had come to Liverpool from Manchester where they had lived near a big school.

‘But Emily,’ he’d protested, ‘why didn’t
I
remember that? I must be at least a year older than
Jane, but she says here she remembers Manchester. She even remembers things about the street where we lived.’

‘Alex dear, Jane was a little girl,’ she said patiently. ‘Don’t you remember how worried we were about Johnny, because he seemed so slow compared to the girls, slower to talk, slower to walk, certainly slower when he went to school, until one of his teachers told us it was perfectly normal. Girls move faster at times. They seem to be more aware of what’s going on around them. It’s later on they go dreamy. She said sometimes boys don’t fully catch up till the very late teens.’

‘So you think it’s a genuine memory?’

‘Yes, I do,’ she said, nodding vigorously. ‘And don’t forget,’ she went on, ‘the Ross’s never stopped Jane talking about what she remembered. They only thought she was romancing about her brother, because she’d invented a couple of brothers to replace the one she’d lost. But
they
didn’t know much about little girls, they only had boys. While you, my dear love, were not encouraged to talk about anything, never mind your past. The things we remember best are the things we talk about, the stories we tell most often. You didn’t have that possibility, so the things you might have remembered just slipped away.’

He looked down at the sparkling wash and saw it slip away, rippling outwards until it was finally absorbed into the undisturbed water beyond. Surely
he must have looked at the sea on that long voyage. Prompted by the image before him, he did his best, but nothing came to him.

And then, quite suddenly, there was something, a smell and the sound of fabric flapping in the wind, the deck wet and slippery. Of course, he’d stood on tiptoe, but he still couldn’t see over the tarpaulins that covered the inside of the ship’s rails.

Startled, he stepped back from where he’d been leaning comfortably above the after deck and sat down on one of the wooden benches attached to the superstructure. He had just calculated that the top of the rail was over four feet above the deck when a woman with two children strolled past in front of him. The children paused, their shoes scuffing against the lowest section of the rails, which were covered with fine metal mesh. They poked their heads through to point to something in the water below. Then they ran on to catch her up.

He sat for a long time watching the light fade and listening to the muted throb of the engines. Perhaps there might be something to be retrieved from the dark corridors of memory. At least now, with Emily beside him and his sister returned to him, he had no fear of what might be revealed.

Despite a beautifully-served, if somewhat meagre dinner and the quietest of night crossings, Alex slept badly. He was haunted by bizarre dreams in which
German spies asked him questions he couldn’t answer. It was not that he was being brave and withholding information, as happened in most of the war films he and Emily had seen, it was that he didn’t know the answers. There was just a blank.

He was aware as he woke in the night that he’d had the same dream more than once, but what that dream was he couldn’t recall.

‘Cheat ’em. Cheat ’em,’ the voice insisted, getting more and more irritated with him.

He woke, perspiring and confused, to find the steward standing by his bed saying ‘Tea, sir.’

The tea was good and breakfast much more generous than dinner. Revived and steadied, he made his way around the decks of the ship studying the vessels docked alongside or lying at anchor beyond the harbour entrance, pale fingers of light playing on the grey camouflage of corvettes and cruisers, merchant ships unloading, the quays piled high with timber and sacks of grain, barrels and containers of all kinds.

From the stern of his own ship, the gangplanks had already been run out and soldiers were disembarking, heavily laden with equipment. He watched as an Army vehicle arrived with a senior officer, saw the soldiers form fours on the dock and march off in good order. He thought of Chris Hicks, taking delivery of yet one more bunch of young lads straight from camps in Louisiana or Texas, coming
to train for what had to happen if the war was to be won.

As he descended the gangplank and reached the quay, he was greeted by a former employee of Bann Valley Mills. Roy Ainsworth, who would be his companion throughout his visit had once worked at Ballievy. Sent by his uncle in Manchester, the director of Bollin Valley Mill, he’d wanted Roy to broaden his experience and to work away from home. His nephew had done well and been recalled to a much more senior position.

The morning was fine, the light clear and he studied the very different countryside beyond Liverpool as Roy drove him to the mill on the outskirts of Manchester. He hadn’t made this journey since early in the war and he noted the tangled barbed wire surrounding the featureless, prefabricated munitions factories, dropped down in the flat, green landscape, so different from the little hills of County Down that had long been his home.

An hour later he was standing in the weaving shed of a mill. The only sound the intermittent flicker of a faulty fluorescent strip light and the occasional helpful comment provided by his companion.

He cast his eye over the silent machines, taking in the fine layer of dust that had settled since they last ran, the small personal tokens one always found attached to uprights or a nearby wall. Vera Lynn. Glenn Miller. Tommy Handley. People who sang or
made your feet tap or gave you a laugh.

As he decided that he really must say something to Roy, having been silent for so long, he thought that one of the saddest things he knew was a derelict mill, the motes dancing in the bright light, its life at an end, the sound of voices and laughter faded away.

‘When did you close?’ he asked politely.

Roy seemed relieved and Alex remembered what Emily had said to him so often in the past. ‘Alex, dear, you look so cross when you are thinking, you’d frighten anyone who didn’t know you.’

She was right, of course. Robert Anderson had told him the same thing years later. ‘Yer a different man when you smile, Alex.’

Alex smiled now and listened as the young man gave him an account of the last months of the mill’s functioning and the progressive run down as the orders for rationed goods, like household linens and clothing fabric, diminished week by week.

‘Yes, we’d have had something of the same problem in Bann Valley Mills, but we moved over to war production early on,’ Alex replied. ‘I know its none of my business,’ he went on, with an apologetic smile, ‘but what about your workforce?’

Emily was right. So was Robert. Roy had never known Alex personally during his time at Ballievy. Now, he positively beamed at him and responded vigorously.

‘That
is
good news, Mr Hamilton. You may have seen all the new factories on your way here. They need enormous numbers of workers. Munitions,’ he added, with a quick nod, ‘I don’t think anyone will be short of a job. Not with what will have to happen next in Europe.’

They exchanged knowing glances and began to walk round the machines together in comfortable silence.

The day went swiftly by and at the end of it, when Roy Ainsworth drove Alex to his hotel in central Manchester, he was well pleased with what he’d found. Much of what he’d seen for both spinning and weaving were machines even older than what at present provided the backbone of Bann Valley Mills, though here and there were one or two obvious replacements that were much younger.

Far more important for his purposes than the actual age of the machines was the degree of wear they showed and that was what he’d spent his day examining. Wear was caused by continuous running and poor maintenance, but this machinery had been well looked after and due to the nature of what was being produced, there’d been periods of both short-time working and even full shut down. The progressive fall in demand over the war years had been fatal for the mill itself, but it had left the machinery in much better condition than the more
recent models of the same equipment that Alex and the team of engine-men and mechanics were trying to keep going, especially at Millbrook.

Between the end of the working day and his meeting over dinner with the former directors of Bollin Valley Mill, Alex was preoccupied by the idea of removing the parts he needed on the spot. It would save the cost of transporting bulky equipment. Besides, there were bound to be delays in finding cargo space and he needed the parts urgently. It would be to the sellers advantage to receive payment as soon as possible, so speeding up the process should suit them well enough.

It was only as they sat over coffee, that evening, the negotiations amicable but somewhat slow, that a further inducement occurred to him.

‘If it were possible to do the extraction work over here, you would be left with quite a valuable collection of scrap metal. Enough for a couple of tanks at least,’ he said, smiling.

‘Well now, I hadn’t thought of that,’ said the Chairman. ‘And you’d not be asking for a reduction in the agreed price?’

‘Most certainly not,’ he replied firmly. ‘We will have the benefit of reduced shipping costs, you’d benefit by the sale of the scrap.’

‘And what about the extraction process? Is it a difficult job?’

‘Quite a long one, but not difficult. I could mark
up everything we need in a morning. I could then send a couple of our men over to do the work, or employ some of yours. I noticed your repair equipment was still intact. That’s all that would be needed, though some heavier duty cutting equipment would make the job quicker.’

Alex noted that the second pot of coffee summoned to aid the negotiations was even weaker than the first and not a patch on what they had at home, but the atmosphere grew steadily more agreeable as they consumed it and by the end of the evening there was goodwill all round.

The Chairman of the group to which Bollin Valley Mill belonged, had offered to arrange transport via a subsidiary company of his that had formerly delivered for the mill, but had since diversified and was still operating. He also suggested using labour from two mills now producing army uniforms on whose Board he also sat.

All that remained was for Alex to return to Bollin Valley the next morning and mark up what he wanted removed from the machines.

The sunshine was becoming hazy as Alex said goodbye to Roy outside the hotel. They had got on well together and today over lunch, they’d talked about the young man’s new job in a sister company, about life in Manchester and the changes already planned for after the war.