Sir Humphrey at Batch Hall

Clem and Humphrey marry - and their troubles begin.

 Humphrey on honeymoon in London, and without the guiding hand of his new wife, tries to buy Tower Bridge - or part thereof. 

Chapter Eight

 

Humphrey, meanwhile, was on his way to buy Tower Bridge, or at any rate a part of it.

     He was strolling carelessly though Westminster, heading for the House of Commons, a sparkle to the morning air from the broad sweep of the Thames, carrying all that history on its shoulders, and Big Ben, obligingly striking the hour above him, black cabs, and red buses shining in the sun like the money box he had as a child, the model of a Routemaster he never saw full, his nickels and dimes never managing to reach the top deck before being raided by his Mom to help with the groceries. On the bus of Humphrey’s childhood, there was always ‘plenty of room on top’.  

     Chomping on an Havana torpedo, and wearing tartan seersucker pants and a shirt with parrots on it, he managed to suggest a visitor from a place far more foreign than either America or Batch Magna, far more foreign even than Hawaii, where his shirt came from. A man with knowledge of a place where everything that one could reasonable want or need did indeed grow on trees, and was there for the picking. Looking with benevolence on London as it hurried past, giving the impression of a man quite prepared to share that knowledge if ever London slowed down long enough to listen.

     He was aware that it here, in Westminster, that the adventure that was the Cluny Steamboat Company had first set sail, when his forebear Sir Cosmo Strange, in London for a much needed discussion about the estate’s finances with his accountants,  returned instead with five paddle steamers.

     The side-wheeler vessels had been part of a fleet plied by London County Council like omnibuses between Hammersmith and Greenwich. And when Sir Cosmo first clapped eyes on one, paddling and puffing her way busily upstream, he was instantly and completely smitten, the thunderous beasts of the London and Birmingham Railway, his erstwhile love, discarded without a second thought for the trim lines and saucy bustle of a Thames paddle steamer. 

     He spent what time he could when in town riding up and down river on their trembling decks, in thrall to their steamy, sooty beauty. To the slap of the wheels and their churned wash, and the gleaming splendours of the engine room, the beating, oiled heart of the boat, hearing, in the clamour of a twin-cylinder compound diagonal engine, the music of the spheres.

     And then on the morning he was due to meet the estate’s accountants, sitting with coffee in his club after fortifying himself for the ordeal with a full English breakfast, he read in the ironed pages of The Times, read as if he were meant to, that, after two years of steadily falling receipts, the LCC had decided to put the entire fleet under the hammer.

    The accountants were immediately forgotten. 

     He was among the first at the public auction on Westminster Pier, coming on all thirty of the vessels tied up along the river there on that mid-December day, his eyes wide at the sight. Christmas, for Sir Cosmo, had come early.

     He bid successfully for five of them, the smallest of the fleet, paying in total nearly six thousand pounds. And could only wonder that money, mere money, could buy such things.

     Not that Sir Cosmo had any money, or none to spare, but scribbling busily on the back of an envelope, he had gazed with satisfaction at the result. Arithmetic wasn’t his strong point, but even he could see that, whatever it came to, ferrying people, goods and livestock between Batch Magna and, say, Shrewsbury, added up to a good deal of profit, whichever way you looked at it.

     He worked out how he was going to pay for them on the other side of the envelope, selling off another slice of his estate there.

     He telegraphed for a team of estate workers to entrain for London, to be instructed with him in the mysteries, the wondrous mysteries, of a paddle steamer, with talk of connecting rods, valve gears, steam and boiler pressures, dampers, crankshafts and pistons, regulators and relief taps, bringing Sir Cosmo to a state of near ecstasy.

     With one of his keepers acting as fireman, he took the wheel of the biggest of the five paddlers, earmarked for his flagship and already renamed the Felicity H after his wife, in an attempt to divert the awkward questions waiting for him concerning accountants and the tiresome business of finance.

     Sir Cosmo’s hand never strayed for long from his very own steam whistle as he led his small flotilla upriver to Gravesend, to the River Medway and dry dock at Chatham, where they were partially dismantled and hauled over to the railhead on steel rollers for the train to Shrewsbury, pulled there by an engine called Progress.

     In Shrewsbury, they were put back together in a Severn boatyard, and their fires relit for the thirty-odd mile journey down that river to Batch Magna and the home waters of the River Cluny, where the village was hung with bunting and the flags of two countries flown, and the Silver Band from Church Myddle, waiting on the hay wharf, soon to become the landing stage of the Cluny Steamboat Company, played them home.

     And Humphrey felt now that he marched with the spirit of Sir Cosmo.

     He decided that one of the bridge’s towers would fit nicely on what used to be a couple of tennis courts in the grounds of the Hall. Like his forebear Humphrey had also done his sums, and if this wasn’t a money spinner in the making, then he didn’t know one when he saw it. A pound sterling entry fee for adults and half price for kids.

     They’ll be queuing up as far as the High Street.

     He frowned. He had to be business-like about this, had to ask himself what use was the tower without one of the steam engines used to power the bascules the guy mentioned to go with it. And then, to go with the steam engine, he’d need a bascule to play with, wouldn’t he, one of the arms that go up and down, and an accumulator, to make the set? Right? Right!

     He’d let the Commander have first go.

     Tower Bridge, he had learned, was hydraulically operated using steam to power the pumping engines, the energy built up by them was then stored in massive accumulators. He’d been given the low-down on it that morning by the guy from Her Majesty’s Bridges, or whatever it was, while Clem was window shopping in the West End. And boy, wasn’t she in for a surprise when she got back!

     Humphrey had met the man earlier, when gazing dreamily up at the bridge, wearing his Yankees baseball cap, a camera slung round the neck of his Hawaiian shirt, and licking a large cornet of knickerbocker glory. He’d visited the Tower of London again after Clem had left their hotel for the shops, for another round of beheadings, torture and dungeons, and then wandered down to the bridge.

     “A remarkable feat of engineering, what?” the man had said at his ear.

     Humphrey started guiltily.

     He hadn’t been looking at a remarkable feat of engineering. He’d been looking at a castle, seeing a castle in the ornate Victorian heights of the bridge, with standards rippling from the battlements, and damsels and jousting and all that, and a story about a knight rescuing a princess from a tower, and men with black crosses on their shields thundering out in pursuit over the drawbridge, licking steadily at his ice-cream and watching it all as if at the movies. 

     He made up for it by not only agreeing that it was a remarkable feat of engineering, but adding with a judicious air that he reckoned it was probably the best remarkable feat of engineering he’d ever seen, and narrowing his eyes at the structure as if making a few tentative calculations, wondered how much it weighed.

     “Well,” the man said on a laugh, “I’m not sure that that’s ever been computed. It’s an interesting question, nevertheless. And not one I have to confess we get asked all that often. What I can tell you is, that eleven thousand tons of iron went in to providing the towers and walkways, which were then clad in Cornish granite and Portland stone, so that will give you some idea.”

     He took a fob watch from a waistcoat pocket and snapped it open. “And if you’re here in roughly three hours from now, it’s scheduled to break-to, to use the terminology, for a freighter. They’ll be opening fully then, that’s to say the bascules, the arms of the bridge, will be raised the maximum eighty-six degrees to allow passage. A procedure which, despite the complexity of the operation, takes, believe it or not, a mere sixty seconds, using the on-tap energy stored in six accumulators. The accumulators, massive affairs, feed the driving engines, you see, which in turn power the bascules.”

     Humphrey had stopped licking his ice-cream and his mouth was open.

     His companion chuckled. “Yes, that’s right,” he said, answering a question Humphrey hadn’t asked, “you’ve guessed it. For my sins, I’m a civil servant. Specifically, a civil servant with responsibility for Her Majesty’s Bridges. H. M. Bridges, as the department, rather more prosaically, is known.”

     He took a slim silver case from an inside pocket.

     “My card,” he said, and Humphrey read that he was being addressed by a Mr Charles St-John Pawsley, Operations Executive for Her Majesty’s Public Works (Bridges Division).

     Mr St-John Pawsley wore a bowler hat and a pin-stripe suit, and carried a black leather document case and a furled umbrella. He was also wearing an Old Etonian tie. Humphrey knew it was an Old Etonian tie because Phineas Cook wore one when on his way to see his bank manager, to go with what he called his overdraft suit. He also knew that in this country, guys who went to that school ended up as the movers and shakers, hotshot politicians, and captains of industry, and all that. Unless of course they were called Phineas Cook.

     “Yes, it’s a great pity,” Mr St-John Pawsley said, taking his card back.

     He looked up at the bridge and shook his head.

     “A great pity. And I certainly shan’t be the only one sorry to see it go. It does, after all, stand large in popular sentiment as the very gateway to London. A landmark recognised the world over. It has strode these banks since 1894, when it was erected under the auspices of the old Corporation of London, the body then responsible for this part of the river. It was designed by Horace Jones, you know, the corporation architect, in collaboration with one John Wolfe Barry. It took eight years and the labour of nearly five-hundred workers to construct it. It was at the time the largest and most sophisticated bascule bridge ever constructed. Bascule, as you doubtless know, is French for see-saw.”

     Humphrey didn’t know, and had anyway been busy thinking about something else.

     “Where’s it going then? You said you wouldn’t be the only one sorry to - ”

     “Yes, yes. Ah, I thought you might have known. It was fairly widely reported last week. The old boy’s going to be pulled down. Replaced with a structure more suited not only to today’s traffic, but looking ahead as one must, the volume of a century and more from now. Not a decision we took lightly, I can assure you. We spent a whole year surveying it before deciding.”

     He pulled back then, as if to get a better look at Humphrey, and frowning enquiringly, asked if by any chance he was an American.

     “Ah, I thought that might be the case,” he said, when Humphrey admitted that he was. “The accent, you know. Well, I’m surprised you didn’t see it advertised for sale over there. We like selling this sort of thing to our cousins in the States. You’ve already got the old London Bridge. As you doubtless know, it now sits on Arizona’s Lake Havasu. It’s that state’s biggest tourist attraction after the Grand Canyon - an absolute money spinner, old boy. So, perhaps some other state will shrewdly follow suit. Otherwise, someone’s going to make a killing buying it for scrap, the sort of price we’re asking. Ridiculous really, but there you are. It’s the royal charter, you know, limits the profit we’re allowed to make.”

     Humphrey looked appalled. “Scrap …? What, junked?”

     “Well, Her Majesty’s Government can’t just give it away.”

     “No, of course not. It’s just that - well, it just seems a heck of a shame, that’s all.”

     “Yes. Yes, it is rather. An inglorious end to an old friend left behind by modern times, by a London that has no further use for it. It has done the capital and its river some service, some service. It has stood steadfast against tides and storm, against Zeppelins and the bombs of the Luftwaffe. It has opened its arms to the trading nations of the world and carried Londoners in their tens of thousands on its back all these years, feeding each morning the beating heart of this great city, and bearing them home again when their day is done. As is the old boy’s now,” Mr St-John Pawsley said, removing his bowler and placing it briefly over his heart. “As is his now,” he added on a dying fall.

     “Still,” he went on briskly, putting his hat back on and giving the crown a business-like tap, “the march of time, and all that, you know. But perhaps someone will put in an offer, turn it into a tourist attraction - after all, the asking price is nominal, a mere token.”

     Humphrey was staring up at the red, white and blue heights of the bridge, his meaty features set and stubborn looking, and as if tears weren’t far away. Both Clem and his Mom knew that look. It usually meant he thought something small and vulnerable was in trouble, not, as in this case, eleven thousand tons of old iron.

     But Humphrey knew what it felt like to be large and unwanted. If he could have done so he would have bought it, all of it, there and then.

     “How much is it, then?” he asked, and wondered where he was going to put it.

     “Mmm …?” Mr St-John Pawsley murmured, also gazing up and as if lost in thought.

     “You said it was a mere token, or something. How much is that?”

     “Well, the figure is yet to be ratified, of course - Her Majesty’s Civil Service, you know,” he said with a chuckle. “But I can tell you that any prospective buyer should think of something in the order of fifty thousand pounds sterling. Yes, sir, you did hear me correctly, a mere fifty thousand pounds sterling. And not only that, if sold to America, a reduction of ten thousand pounds is involved. And if sold to America, then shipping is thrown in - gratis and absolutely free. Although I should add,” he cautioned, “that the cost of re-erection must of course be borne by the purchaser.”

     “Yeah. Yeah, of course,” Humphrey said

     “But, even so, as I say, it’s a snip at the price, a give-away, as I believe you say in your country. Her Majesty’s Government is, as ever, eager to sugar relations with your administration. A state of affairs which some lucky US citizen or corporation is set to profit hugely from. Still, that’s diplomacy for you,” he added, and snapped off another look at his fob. “Well, no rest for the wicked. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.”

     “I couldn’t afford to buy all of it and anyway I don’t know where I’d put it,” Humphrey said in a rush.

     Mr St-John Pawsley frowned.

     “My dear sir,” he said sternly, “I haven’t suggested that you do buy it. Any of it. I daren’t. There are strict rules governing that sort of thing, you know. Very strict rules.”

     He hesitated, and then smiled as if relenting.

     “But, well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you that the official description of sale refers to the whole or part thereof. One of the towers, say.”

     “How much would that be, one of the towers?”

     “Five grand,” Mr St-John Pawsley said immediately, lowering his voice and glancing around. “Five thousand pounds sterling. With, as I say, free shipping thrown in.”

     “I’ll take one,” Humphrey heard himself say.

 

 

 

Chapter Nine

 

And now, after picking up his chequebook from the hotel, he was on his way to the House of Commons to pay for it, plus a steam engine, a bascule and an accumulator.

     He hadn’t worked out yet how to get it all home, or when there how to get it up again - but  boy, won’t Batch Magna be surprised when that turns up on its doorstep!

     They were meeting at the House and not at Mr St-John Pawsley’s Whitehall office because Mr St-John Pawsley was due to brief a cabinet minister, and was likely to be tied up all day there. Humphrey had decided to wrap the deal up first, hand over the cheque and tell the bank afterwards, when it was in the bag. This sort of deal had to be done with your foot down, as they say on Wall Street. Stop for a green light and you’ll find yourself left behind in the traffic with all the other losers.

     He moved the cigar round his mouth, and working on the price Mr St-John Pawsley had put on a tower, came up with a ballpark figure of not more than twenty-five thousand grand sterling for the lot.

     Not that he had twenty-five thousand grand sterling, or even the bargain-basement five grand sterling needed for the tower. But he had the Hall. He’d take a mortgage out on that. He wasn’t entirely sure what taking out a mortgage meant, and had no idea at all how much the Hall might be worth. More than twenty-five thousand grand sterling, he was sure - a lot more, he wouldn’t be at all surprised. It had any number of rooms for a start - he’d never been quite sure how many - and any number of outhouses, and some of its park left still, with peacocks and a boathouse at the end of a creek with boats in it, and lawns running down to the Cluny. It had paddlers sitting on the river, and Phineas, and Jasmine, and the Commander and Priny, and Annie and Owain, and old Tom Parr, and Miss Wyndham, and John Beecher with a cricket bat, and Pugh the Pew in the village shop, and Saturday nights in the Steamer with Patrick on the piano, and …

     He couldn’t go on. He’d been homesick almost as soon as he’d arrived in London, and any more of that sort of stuff and he’d be collecting Clem and taking the next train back. Whatever it was, however much it might all be worth, he could only wonder, as his forebear had done when gazing on the paddle steamers, that money, mere money, could buy such things.

     Mr St-John Pawsley had told him which entrance to use, and when there to ask one of the policemen on duty for the office of the Minister for Transport.

     But when Humphrey arrived he was standing outside, waiting for him.

     Mr St-John Pawsley, with an account set up and waiting in the name of H. M. Bridges, greeted him like an old friend, shaking his hand and telling him how delighted he was to see him again, his eyes gleaming like teeth. After weeks of trying to sell Tower bridge, or part thereof, turning up for it each day as if to the office, he had been about to write off the idea.

     This would be Humphrey’s second visit to the House of Commons. He’d done the tour with Clem the other day, had looked down on the green benches from the Strangers’ Gallery, and been photographed in front of the stature of Winston Churchill, an overweight guy who smoked cigars, and had learned that it wasn’t Guy Fawkes who had led the Gunpowder Plot but another conspirator and that Guy Fawkes had been left holding the matches. The guide at this point had asked him with a pained expression would he please mind not lighting his cigar.

     Humphrey heeled out what was left of his Havana now, and walked in with Mr St-John Pawsley, through the stone hall echoing with the stern business of politics, busy with people scurrying about carrying important-looking papers, bringing the sun in with him and a flight of parrots.

     Calling him old boy, Mr St-John Pawsley said that he was sorry, but the Cabinet minister wanted his office for what he, Mr St-John Pawsley, casually called a bit of paper shuffling with the Prime Minister. He was sure Humphrey would understand, he went on, sitting down on one of the public benches.

     Humphrey mouth was open again. The Prime Minister. He’d said he wouldn’t call himself a hotshot again, not after last time, but if this wasn’t hotshot stuff then perhaps some body would kindly tell him just what was!

     He had made a decision on his way there. He’d come clean with the guy, shoot with a straight arrow - yes, he told him now, he was an American, but no, he did not live over there, so it wouldn’t be right to claim the ten thousand grand sterling reduction. But he might ask for help in the shipping. If only, he added with a laugh, for somebody to point him in the right direction for Wales - the bit, that is, that was in England, and, he added with another laugh, the bit of England that was in Wales.

     Mr St-John Pawsley, taking a sheaf of official-looking papers from his document case, paused.

     Humphrey went on to tell him that his name was Humphrey, but to call him Humph. He was, as he’d said, an American, living half in England and half in Wales, what’s called the Marches, and he was a baronet, going from a short-order cook living with his Mom in a second-floor walk-up in the South Bronx to Batch Hall, the manor house of a place he’d never heard of, after a great uncle he hadn’t known he’d had, died. And he was in London on honeymoon with Clem, his Clem, Lady Strange, as, chuckling about it, Humphrey supposed she was now.

     Behind his faint polite smile Mr St-John Pawsley was busy wondering what he was listening to.

     “So, anyways,” Humphrey went on, “as well as the tower, I’ll need a steam engine, if that’s all right with you, and Her Majesty or whoever, a bascule to go up and down, and an accumulator, please, to make the set.”

     He grinned at Mr St-John Pawsley, his eyes utterly without guile, the meaty openness of his face waiting like a blank cheque.

     And suspicion touched Mr St-John Pawsley like a hand on his collar.

     He glanced casually round and wondered if the American was wired.

     Whoever he was working for should have sent a better actor, and one with a far more convincing script. Nobody, or no adult at any rate, was that naïve, that innocent. The last time he remembered anyone looking at him like that was a nephew, and he was ten or so at the time. Mr St-John Pawsley hadn’t been sure what he’d been listening to, but he knew what he should be looking at, he’d reeled it in enough times - the greed which, as far as he was concerned, made his marks as guilty as he was.

     But this wasn’t the face of a grown-up, rising for the bait of easy money. This was an ten-year-old talking about what he wanted Father Christmas to bring him.

     Which was about the mental age of whoever had come up with his cover story. Far too much unnecessary and confusing detail - and the most outrageously unlikely story outside of an Odeon he’d ever heard. He felt professionally affronted.

     The man had to be a plant, an agent provocateur. He could be working for the American authorities, after him still for selling, as the Senator for New York State, shares in the Stature of Liberty to a group of Japanese businessmen, or maybe Scotland Yard. He was hardly unknown to the Fraud Squad, and he had been concerned that he’d been a little too busy on the bridge.  

     Humphrey said that he was going to put up the bit of Tower Bridge he wanted to buy in Batch Hall’s grounds, and let somebody called the Commander have first go.

     He told him about the other people who lived aboard Victorian paddle steamers that were now little homes, about a river called the Cluny and its village, Batch Magna, with a Miss Wyndham peddling up its High Street on a bicycle. And somebody called old Tom Parr, and Mr Pugh the shopkeeper, and John Beecher, a coalman, defending the honour of his village at a Saturday wicket, and tales of summer jollies, and boating and picnics,  and days when the lamps were lit early on the river and the owls called across the village.

     And while Humphrey burbled happily on, Mr St-John Pawsley sat beguiled.

     He was no longer at all sure that Humphrey was a plant, and no longer much cared. He was taking a holiday from that life. It was such a warm, cosy, safe world he was listening to, like being tucked up and read to again by his old Mum. Like being back in a time when he made a list of things he wanted Father Christmas to bring him. Back in a time when he believed still that there was a Father Christmas. 

     “Anyways, enough of me yapping on, let’s hit a few figures round the ballpark, see where they land,” Humphrey said then cheerfully.

     He was enjoying himself now. He’d been a bit unsure of all this at first, shooting deals with top guns like Mr St-John Pawsley,  using  the  House  of  Commons  like  an  office, with talk of cabinet ministers shuffling papers down the hall with the PM, as he now thought of him, but this hotshot stuff was proving after  all  to  be  right  up  his  street, no matter what anybody else thinks.

     Mr St-John Pawsley, on the other hand, was steadily sinking deeper into a morass of gloom.

     Scenes from his past went by as if glimpsed through the bars of a prison van, the journey from a life that still had Father Christmas in it to the banging of a cell door on his last helping of porridge. The judge who had been like an uncle to him over the years, peering down with disappointment through the curtains of his wig as he handed it out. And his old Mum, sobbing into her handkerchief in her usual place on the public benches.

     His old Mum, who had always been there to greet him when he came out, with his little brown paper parcel and hopes for the future, growing old in her trust of his words when he spoke of how this really would be the last time, honest, and meaning it, then.

     And now here he was again. 

     Even the sight of the chequebook sitting open on the bench between them, with a clean, blank page waiting to be filled in, failed to rouse him from the misery of remorse.

     Humphrey, frowning with concern, asked if he was okay, and wondered if it was all right to give the Operations Executive for Her Majesty’s Public Works (Bridges Division) a shoulder hug. He did that when his friends looked down. Phineas Cook, after such an embrace had left him unable to type for a couple of days, took care, no matter how he might feel, to put a smile on things when Humphrey was about.

     Humphrey looking at him like that was the last straw for Mr St-John Pawsley.

     Stuffing the transfer papers back in his document case, he muttered something on a choked note, and Humphrey’s mouth fell open for a third time that morning as Mr St-John Pawsley leapt to his feet, threw a last, wild look at him, and with a sound like a sob made off in the direction of the exit.

     Humphrey watched him go, chewing on his lower lip and wondering what it was he’d said.

 

 

He was still puzzling over it in bed in their hotel that night. He decided in the end, rather defensively, that it was probably the strain of being a hotshot that had finally got to the poor guy. So maybe he was better off not being a hotshot after all.

     Anyway, tomorrow they’d be back in Batch Magna, and it didn’t matter there whether you were a hotshot or not.

     Although he and Clem had solemnly promised each other that there would in their marriage be no secrets between them, he had decided not to tell her about it. Because if it hadn’t been the strain of being a hotshot but something he had said, then, well, he’d feel a bit guilty about it, about not telling her, but he didn’t want her to know he’d goofed like that, that’s all, stopped them having a real money spinner for the estate.

     And Clem also decided that there were some secrets in a marriage that were best kept just that. He would never hear it from her lips about the dress she had seen in Bond Street, which they really couldn’t afford, and which she had only being stopped from buying because they didn’t have it in her size.         

     She snuggled up to him, feeling virtuous about it anyway. Especially as Humphrey had been rather sweetly at pains to assure her that his only expenditure of the morning had been a large cornet of knickerbocker glory.

     And tomorrow she’d back in Batch Magna, they both would, safely removed from all temptation.

 

 

Author's Note

Glad of any comments you might have.