The Broken Chariot

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The Broken Chariot

A Novel

Alan Sillitoe

Part One

One

Housemartins swooped to neat mud nests under eaves because the young were always hungry. It was unlucky if they didn't trail back every spring. Last year none came, and her mother had died, though in their innocence they were not to be blamed.

Maud looked on with pleasure, fascinated by such graceful devotion, pale and vibrant bellies in curving flight again and again above the window. She could almost hear the sound they made in their passage through the air. It was industry of a Darwinian sort, and the fact that they would still search out the house when all who lived in it were dead was merely a reflection on countryside life.

The gilt-bordered mirror above the fireplace reflected her straight nose and blue eyes, and she did not know whether she liked what was there, though wasn't disturbed that no alternative could be expected. The lines of her mouth showed a determined spirit that had so far found little to brace itself against.

At twenty-one she was tall and robust, with a fine sweep of brown hair descending along both sides of marble-smooth skin. Such a pre-Raphaelite profile had the usual masculine aspect that put off most men except the weakest and those – given her congenital sense of self-preservation – could never be interesting.

The eldest of four daughters from an East Anglian clerical family, her father had wanted a first born son and, rather than not forgive her for having wilfully refused to be one while in the womb, treated her as soon as she left the arms of her mother as if she was. For reasons which would have been laughable if known, she secretly enjoyed trying to be a boy, which pleased her father who, however, expected that she would resume her female identity in time to find a husband.

A year after his wife died the vicar gave up his rattling velocipede and bought a Daimler touring car. How the wish for one came to him when there were so few in the district was hard to say. Perhaps an advertisement in
The Graphic
or
Bystander
had changed from the sketchy drawing and become in his eyes a monument of colourful utility. Or maybe the death had been a liberation, and the motor a consolation in his grief.

The vehicle was brought over from Coventry by two men in long pale dust coats one Thursday morning, and they sat in the study with a satchel of papers, a bottle of Sandeman sherry, and a packet of cigars on the table. The pony was sold, its cart hauled through the orchard by the gardener and left to decay in the paddock.

Maud turned from the mirror and saw her father's surprising acquisition on the gravelled space before the front door of the rectory. The book fell closed, her place in
The Old Wives' Tale
lost at the sight of what couldn't come to life without human hands to move it, the strange agglomeration between four wheels calling to her as if every metal part was magnetized.

After several slow pacings around the pristine machine she knelt to peer at its inner mechanisms, stroked the tasteful leather seats, opened the tool box, dipped her fingers in the petrol container, tried its perfectly fitting doors, ran a hand along the sturdy mudguards, and felt an insane wish to put her lips to the steering wheel. The whiff of oil and fuel excited her, the whole lovely beast in tune with her heart and her future perceptions of the world. A friendly hand at the shoulder signified her father's gratitude for such approval. ‘I've always wanted one,' he said, 'and we can certainly afford it.'

She had regarded him as a cheerful bigot, but should have known he was prone to accept more items related to the changing world since having a telephone installed. She asked if he would call the garage in Yarmouth, for someone to come and show her how to drive about the grounds. She sensed he was half afraid of what might become a Trojan horse brought into his household, and was surprised when he agreed.

In a few weeks she was taking him on excursions to his favourite Norfolk places, becoming more and more competent with each meandering circuit. He took great pains, with a tinge of malice, she thought, in fussing with the map to choose parallel routes and keep her from the better roads on which he said she drove too fast. Yet she noted the faint pleasure in his fear when, along the occasional straight stretch, she wondered at her reckless dishonesty on topping the twenty mile an hour limit.

The sandy highway south of Yarmouth, scattered with loose stones, laid traps for cartwheels and the vulnerable tyres of automobiles. Inclement rain increased the peril and the motor, of which she felt herself the captain, stalled by a hedge. At steam clouding out of the radiator her father went into a spinsterish panic – though she wouldn't dare tell him so – not knowing whether to go for help and leave her at the mercy of straying wayfarers, or send her on alone to face the danger of ambush by uncouth holiday-makers from London while he guarded the machine. He need not have worried, for Maud in her leather driving coat, hat and goggles, could stare down any potential molester.

They sat in the high seats, taut and silent with indecision, she unwilling to speak, and wondering if her father ever would. A light rain drove against them, and with it over the sandbank came a line of men in khaki, advancing towards the road in skirmishing order. ‘We've been for a swim in the sea,' the young officer with his platoon of Territorials explained.

‘Must have been cold,' Maud said.

‘Freezing, actually,' he laughed. Seeing their plight he and his men piled arms and thought it unusually good fun to manoeuvre the motor towards the town. Maud suppressed her chagrin so as to enjoy the encounter, and honour was appeased when after half a mile the handsome young officer suggested that his men empty their regulation water bottles into the radiator, so that she was able to drive the car at little beyond walking pace to the garage, where a mechanic was soon labouring over the trouble.

‘Hugh Thurgarton-Strang.' The dark-haired lieutenant gave his card to the vicar. Maud noted how he had studiously taken in the situation, as well as his easy confidence and humour, unlike the waffling young men she sometimes met with. She also saw that he was taller, which few men were, and how impressed he was with her presence and the proud way she had looked at the landscape, pretending not to notice any of his qualities, hat in hand and hair blowing about her face.

The vicar, who thought it his best adventure for years, asked Thurgarton-Strang to tea at the Queen's Hotel. ‘It's just along the road,' and promised a pint of beer for each of his men at the neighbouring public house.

‘Sorry, sir.' Thurgarton-Strang refolded his map into a neat calico case. ‘I'd jolly well like to, but we can't stop now. We have to surround Blue Force by morning.'

Maud's invariable response to her sisters from then on, when she was asked to do something, was a shake of the head, and laughter as she replied: ‘Can't do it. So sorry. Got to surround Blue Force by morning!' a new catch phrase in the family which recalled the young man's intelligent and amusing features.

She became adept at learning from such breakdowns. Fitting the spare wheel with jack and spanner after a puncture passed an enjoyable half hour. Every part of the frame and engine fascinated her by the obvious way each could be put together if she looked long enough at the manual. After a while she was allowed to drive her sisters to the beach at Cromer.

She waited every Tuesday for the
Financial Times
because Mr W. G. Aston, the well-known motor expert, wrote an article and responded to queries on the problems of the road. Maud wrote him a letter comparing the difficulties of fitting the bolt valve to ordinary valves, and telling what was likely to happen if certain precautions were not taken. She explained the problem cogently and with some wit, under the signature of M. Holt, so that Mr Aston in his printed reply assumed her to be a man, which both irritated and amused her.

A greater adventure for the vicar came about on Maud suggesting that all five should go on a tour to the Continent. They would drive around Flanders and Northern France, and visit cathedrals. His bald pate turned pallid as she spread a map over the library table. ‘We're in the Association, and they'll take any trouble off our shoulders. We'll get the magic triptych fixed up, so there'll be nothing to pay on the motor at the customs.'

The French drive on the wrong side of the road. What about petrol? How would they find their way? Foreign maps weren't the same as English. Then there was the problem of different money, apart from the fact, he concluded, knocking the ash from his pipe on the dogs in the fireplace, ‘that my French isn't proficient.'

‘Well,' Maud said, ‘my French is all right, if I shout it loud enough,' and she convinced him on all issues, though without mentioning the attraction for her of there being no speed limit: gendarmes with stop-watches didn't hide like sneaks at bends in the roads.

Extra tyres were strapped on the footboard, the locker topped up with spare parts and sparking plugs. A leather satchel bulged with maps and documents, a phrase book with Baedekers and Michelins in the glove box.

Maud and her sisters stood on the top deck, and sang most of the way across the Channel, while their father was silent with anxiety and scepticism. When the car was swung off the steamer in Boulogne he suggested putting up at the Hôtel du Pavilion Imperial et Bains de Mer for a couple of days so as to recover from the crossing, but Maud was adamant for driving out of town. ‘We must do at least a few miles today,' and they passed the first night in the Hotel de France at St Omer.

‘Got to surround Blue Force by morning!' her sisters let out in their shrill voices, while Maud paid off the porters for taking in the luggage.

After a minute examination of the church of Notre Dame they struck south for Amiens, so that the vicar could read his Ruskin in the cathedral. ‘You're the captain of the ship,' her happy father said a few days later, ‘so we'll go to Beauvais and then to Reims,' at which place she stood on the pavement to take off her dust coat and said to herself: ‘Not another blasted cathedral!'