“Europeans… tend to think in a linear mode, like steam engines running along a set of rails. You may not know what’s around the next bend, but you have no doubt about how you’re going to get there.”
The Window Maker
Dearest Anna,
How could you possibly think the word ‘if’ has any place in a sentence referring to my love for you? I am a man who knows the joy and fulfillment of worship, and I worship you, my dear. Your revelations have only strengthened the vows I made on bended knee in St. Saviour’s. There can be no other woman in my life, because no other could replace you in my heart or in my soul.
There are those, I know, who would rise up on their high haunches and accuse me of damnable blasphemy for having said so. There are others who might consider my avowals the exaggerated ravings of a love-struck romantic. Let them think what they may. I am only concerned with your feelings and opinions, love. And I assure you of this: my avowals for you are in no way disavowals of the duty I owe as an Anglican and a priest, nor are they anything other than promises born of deep contemplation. If you will have me as your husband, you will make me among the happiest of men, duty-bound to make you among the happiest of women.
You have entrusted me with intimate details that could only be shared with one you believe would never betray you. More than that, you haven’t held back information you knew would be painful for me to read. In short, you have shown a faith in me that I daresay equals mine in you; I can only hope your trust is accompanied by a love as deep and unyielding as my own, for if that is the case, we are bound more tightly than the atoms in a molecule of holy water, no matter how great the distances between us.
I will be leaving Barkerville soon, Anna. The recent upheavals, which have separated us, have made my continued tenure here unthinkable, which means they have made our reunion not only possible but something to be ‘devoutly wished.’ Now it is my turn to tell my tale. The record of my life will seem ordinary compared to yours, love. My trials and tribulations have more of an intellectual and spiritual complexion than the emotional and physical traumas you have survived. But in their own way, they have been as deep and transformative.
I can say at the outset of this, my story, that the ending is ‘I love you’, and that I hope it ends the same way for you. I can only think of our reunion as my best chance at gaining earthly paradise.
It’s time
A decade and an ocean separate the time and place of our births. I was born in 1837 in Manchester, England. My father, Thomas Newman, owned—and still does—the Newman Cotton Works in the Ancoates district; my mother, Eleanor, was—and still is—a devout and passionate Anglican of Evangelical persuasion. Father was decidedly High Church, although religion for him was a matter of form as much as faith. One simply couldn’t not be a pillar of the Anglican Church if he wanted to be a fully-fledged member of the establishment, so Father bowed his head on Sundays and carried it high every other day of the week. I don’t want you to think of him as a bad man. In fact, Father went farther than most, providing safe working conditions and reasonable wages for his employees. He was considered a ‘good owner’ by those who worked in his mill; a traitor by those who wanted to squeeze as much profit as they could—along with the blood, sweat, and tears—out of their employees. He would have been even more generous but said, “A man can only be as enlightened and open-handed as the hard world of business permits.”
Mother didn’t hesitate to rebuke this kind of logic. “There’s always room to do better,” she said, “except where excuses are allowed to take the place of duty.” Father’s insolent critics didn’t hesitate to cite Mother as the true architect of his ‘socialistic tendencies.’ There was nothing his enemies would not say or do to undermine the credibility of anyone who questioned their methods or threatened their margins; no one who wouldn’t be considered a target of vicious contumely if he did not parrot the capitalist line with unshakable enthusiasm. Remember that, my dear, as I tell my tale, for it is not my intention to portray Father as a villain or Mother as a saint. They are decent people, leading what they consider decent lives, and they do love one another, although their love has made them sullen and argumentative as often as happy!
When I turned eight, Father said, “It’s time.”
We were seated at the dinner table. Mother, recognizing something momentous in his tone, something obviously pertaining to the family, carefully placed her fork on her plate, daubed her lips with her napkin, and regarded him with one of those cool, penetrating stares that said, I am listening, dearest. I, too, put up my utensils, sensing the ‘time’ father referred to was not an abstract quantity but an abrupt here and now to do with me; not a gradual transition that could be vaguely defined in words like ‘growing up’ or ‘maturing’, but something sudden, like a slapped wrist or snapped bone. We waited as the seconds ticked by, metered in the mechanisms of the grandfather clock behind Father, its minute hand ratcheting forward with a palsied sort of motion with every swing of the pendulum in the glass case below. “Time for what?” Mother said at last, in that precise tone, indicating that she had lost patience but was doing her best to conceal her impatience.
Mother would not be judged ‘beautiful’ by the standards of popular fashion. She puts on the appearance of a plain woman and had done so even in her youth. She believes plainness of dress and demeanour make manifest her unflinching devotion to God and her steadfast ardour for all creation. She cannot abide any degradation of God’s work and judges the arts of ostentatious makeup, coiffure, and fashion as types of vandalism that mar a woman’s natural beauty. I have never known her to accentuate any of her finer features or disguise her ‘flaws’ with pots of paint and dustings of powder. As for wardrobe, hers consists of plain, white blouses with perhaps a filigree of embroidery about the cuffs and collar. Her dresses hang in folds draped over her slight hips, straight down to the tops of her ‘sensible’ brown leather shoes. Her dark hair, she invariably piles into a sort of bun or knot on top of her head, which she will sometimes—if the mood takes her—adorn with a scrap of fabric symbolic of some species of flower. The only other articles of decoration she permits on her person are: a crucifix, always worn on its sliver chain outside her blouse, nestled between the indistinct hillocks of her female anatomy; and a gold wedding band, which matches the simple, pious marker worn by my father on his left hand.
After so severe an introduction, you might think my mother too harsh to be beautiful; you would be mistaken. With one exception, my dear, I have yet to meet a woman as beautiful. And despite the bluff and bluster he sometimes directs at her, Father—if pressed—would admit to complete enthralment. There could never be another woman in his life, and they both know it with a certainty that staunches any of his other aspirations or philosophies. Crass and blunt as he sometimes must be in his business dealings, he could never bargain hard with her. Like a moon, locked in orbit with its earth, Mother rules the tides of Father’s heart and soul. She is the light that guided him through his darkest hours. He could survive any loss, just so long as he can still look up to her. Father puts things differently. He says, “I’m too busy to have an affair with any other woman; I have been and will always remain your mother’s project!”
He sometimes resents her silent, gliding authority, kicking against devotion’s gravitational traces as if they were a form of subjugation. No matter how much he struggles though, he will never overrule Mother’s indomitable spirit; at best, he will sometimes hold out against her with the kind of asperity and vehemence a male robin might display if he suddenly realized he didn’t really want to be in love with his disdainful mate. His case is really quite hopeless.
Unfortunately, I was more often than not the object of their strife. Father wanted me to become a man of business; Mother imagined me a man of the cloth. If she had been more direct, I suppose she might have spared me the worst of his schemes for my improvement, but her resistance to my being raised up in the aristocracy of business was of necessity subtle and politic. Rather than flashes of anger and peels of outrage, her opposition slid between us all like dark, impenetrable clouds, their lightening pent up inside them. Father could grimly endure her silent censure for quite a long time but would inevitably surrender.
Learning the business inside-out
“So,” Mother said, when she was quite sure we were all ready to hear Father’s proposal. “What, exactly, is it time for, darling?” Father coughed, raising his hand to his mouth, then glanced my way, then back to Mother’s fixed, enquiring stare. “I think it’s time Christopher started learning a thing or two about the business, my dear.” When she asked what things, he said, “How a factory works. The processes of manufacturing raw cotton into fabric, ready for market. How it’s all organized and what the various roles and responsibilities of the hundreds who work in a cotton mill are.” Mother frowned, as if she didn’t quite understand. “Do you really think he’s ready for that?” she asked. Father frowned in turn. “Why shouldn’t he be?” he demanded. “Because he hasn’t yet learned the fundamentals of a Christian life,” she said. “You cannot erect a sound building—not even if it’s as seemingly solid and impregnable as a factory—on ground that hasn’t been prepared. You must put down a foundation first, my dear, or eventually your edifice will tilt and topple, killing everyone inside or in the vicinity.” She smiled. Primly, I thought. “Tosh!” Father reddened. “There is nothing mutually exclusive between the ethical operation of a modern factory and Christian principles, and I’m surprised you would raise such an objection in front of our son.” She frowned. “And I am surprised you would make a proposal such as yours over the dinner table without having first discussed it with me,” Mother said in that calm, infuriating way of hers. When Father did not respond, she added, “Wouldn’t that be best?”
Next morning, Father announced over breakfast that I would be going with him to the mill and that it would be our habit from then on for me to accompany him from time to time so that I might “learn the business inside-out.” Mother raised no objection, managing to keep even a hint of a smile from turning up her lips or brightening her eyes. She had visited me the night before to let me know that matters had been resolved just so.
“You will, of course, have to learn the business from top to bottom if you are to manage efficiently when your time comes,” Father was saying. “Your mother and I are agreed that to be a modern man of business, your understanding must go beyond the constraints of boardrooms, charts, and ledgers—you must know the business from the ground up, my son, and that ground does not end at the factory wall or even the perimeter gate.” You must know the people who toil at their machines and benches, too, Mother had informed me. Not just those who report directly to your father. You cannot possibly manage a business properly unless you make yourself familiar with every single person’s point of view. Do you understand?
I didn’t, of course. Until that moment, I hadn’t formed the faintest notion about the destination my father left for every morning. Nor did I know what he did there until he returned home, often arriving after dark during the winter months. That there should be disagreement between my parents concerning my introduction to Father’s world troubled me. I knew beyond doubt that Mother would be steadfast in her opposition to anything that contravened her sacred beliefs. She is not a meddlesome woman and had little interest in the day-to-day operations of Father’s Mill, or so I thought. But anything concerning me and my upbringing she considered within her realm. “Today,” Father was saying, “we shall tour the factory, and you will see how raw cotton, imported from distant lands to this, the workshop of the world…” He allowed himself a little smile and a significant pause. Mother sighed impatiently. “You shall learn how raw cotton is carded, spun, and woven into the finest cloth ever produced anywhere on the planet. You shall see for the first time in your life the kind of enterprise that has made Great Britain the most productive, and I daresay most powerful, of nations.
I want you to truly meet the people in your father’s factory, Christopher, Mother had instructed. Father is a good man—much better than most factory owners—but he is also a man of his times and may not see things as you do or should. I want you to know his factory hands as people, my son, not as notations in a long equation ending in a calculation concerned only with profit and loss. She paused, wrestling with something she wasn’t sure she should say. I want you to see them as more than cogs in a machine and to describe to me what you have learned about them after each visit.
Mother never instructed me not to mention our tête-à-tête of the night before to Father, but I assumed that to have done so would have constituted a betrayal of sorts and would certainly have resulted in tension between them. Concealing our arrangement made me squirm, though. The dilemma gnawed at me as we finished breakfast, a sensation akin to digesting a live rat. We were already late, and Father urged me on. “Our carriage is waiting,” he announced. “We need to push off, son.” So the three of us stepped out into the brick portico of our house, Mother and me in the lead, Father following with his hands clasped behind him, apparently deep in thought. When I turned to her, Mother cradled my head in her hands and stared into me. Then she hugged me. “You shall be a different person when you return,” she crooned. “You will be a boy who has set foot on the first rung of manhood.” She drew back, still cradling my head. “I love you,” she confided, anointing my forehead with a kiss. Then she and Father kissed and exchanged a glance, holding hands.
It struck me then how great the love between them must have been—how they were like planets locked in orbit, resisting the perpetual tendency to fly apart on the one hand; collide on the other. I sensed a willed love, which required constant correction on both their parts and which could not be counted as a given in this life—a force that someday might weaken…
You may laugh, but I vaguely perceived my parents’ love and union as a microcosm of God’s universe then: that, just as He had to will planets into their orbits every living second and perpetuate the wonder of creation through His incomprehensible power, they had to consciously regenerate their love and their union every day, not only because they did love one another but also because it was right and necessary they do so. Imagine, dearest—flawed and ridiculous as my portrayals of both God and my parents were—what it felt like for an eight-year-old to sense he might be the germ that could possibly upset their strained equilibrium.
What makes a scene or a memory maudlin? Does the mere fact that it brings a tear to the eye disqualify a paragraph from being taken seriously? If so, I plead guilty and beg leniency from you, who will be my judge—you, who have led a life that might make any tearful passage I could recount seem trite by comparison. As we pulled away in Father’s carriage that day, I waved to Mother, who stood watching, not raising her hand until we turned out of the drive. Then she was gone, and I was embarked upon a new chapter of my life.
“Well, my boy!” Father sighed happily. “You have a lot to learn.” Then he clapped me on the shoulder with his big hand and smiled.
Men of vision
I am amazed to think it now, but I had never, until that day, been inside Father’s mill. Not really. I had seen the outside, of course, and even been into his oak-panelled office, but aside from glimpses hadn’t seen into the workings. The buildings seemed an impregnable fortress to me, protected by a wall and iron gate fronting Great Ancoates Street and behind by the Rochdale Canal—a sort of moat or slithering River Styx.
Father coughed, sensing my unease. “It will be helpful if you think of what you see today not so much as a place or collection of machines as an idea,” he said. He faltered, glancing through the window momentarily as if expecting to see something out there that might help him express himself more clearly to an eight-year-old. “As much as The Newman Cotton Works are housed in buildings of brick and mortar, son, they are more an idea taking shape than a finished work,” Father continued. “They are a philosophy, the foundation of a greater future being laid in the here and now.”
We rattled past our church, turning onto the main road that would take us through Cleetham Hill into Manchester. “Getting to that future means making sacrifices along the way,” Father said. “We men of vision must insist these sacrifices be made, or we’ll never achieve the future that is our human destiny. Do you understand?” I looked out the window of our coupe as we clopped and clattered along. The shops and houses all seemed solid and real to me. How much more so the massive industrial fortresses of Ancoates? What did Father mean, portraying them as something insubstantial as a dream? Did a million bricks piled up seven stories, impressing the earth with their incalculable weight, not constitute something solid and real? Would the crushing imprint of those mighty bastions not indent and scar the earth forever—at least by any measure of a single man’s impermanence? Would Father not be long dead, and me too, before those bricks toppled to the ground, reducing themselves to powder in the jumbled shock of their own inevitable but unforeseeable collapse?
“The true visionary must never allow himself to be imprisoned by ideas set in stone or sentiments set to popular song,” Father admonished. “He must always go where the facts and his convictions lead.”
His prelude unnerved me. Until that moment, I had never considered what Father and his colleagues were at as some sort of destiny. I had only seen it as business, a sphere as remote from my day-to-day existence as Timbuktu. This notion of the factory system as inevitable and perpetual changed everything, just like the patterns in a kaleidoscope change with a slight twist of its component parts—except what crystallized out of his words was not pretty; it seemed immense and ugly to me.
As we approached the city, the factory smokestacks came into view. They seemed taller and more threatening than the spires of any church—even the thrusting architecture of Manchester Cathedral. They bristled on the back of the land, belching entrails of smoke that drifted northeast on a sluggish, prevailing movement of air—a slow, inevitable progress that shadowed its grimed precincts like the pocked and scarred underbelly of a ponderous leviathan. I had never viewed the city this way before but knew I would never see it any other way again—that its jagged, fragmented imagery had resolved into something too terrible for words. I cringed inwardly to think that this something was being called forth by the very heroes Father alluded to.
Sensing my dread and his own helplessness, Father fell silent as we crossed the black, rancid current of the Irk, an open wound festering amid the tenements of the working-poor—a helter-skelter collection of houses, growing like crooked teeth out of rotten gums. I felt deeply shamed as we made our way along Miller Street, then Swan, toward Great Ancoates and my father’s mill.
The factory lad
Bedlam? The abyss? Hell? Words cannot describe what I experienced upon first entering The Newman Cotton Works. The thumping and clashing of ravenous machinery assaulted me from every quarter, mingled with the shouts of men and boys. Everywhere belts whined and shafts whirred as the spinning mules—attended by their inmates—drew out, twisted, and spooled a million taught threads. Father was shouting too, ebulliently, like a child, it seemed to me, describing his newest, shiniest toy. Perhaps that’s what unsettled me most—Father’s enthusiasm. There was a wildness to his gestures and facial expressions that was tantamount to madness. He jerked me hither and thither amongst the clattering machinery of this industrial hive, extolling the quality of the Newman Cotton Works’ roves, the rapidity with which they were drawn into useful threads, and even the tensile strength of the fabric these threads were woven into. “There was a time, not so long ago either, my boy, when all this was done on hand-powered spinning wheels. Can you imagine it? One operator and one machine for every single thread.” As he spoke, he made a grand, sweeping gesture that seemed to take in not only the Newman Cotton Works spinning room but the world beyond as well. “And the quality of the threads produced in those scattered cottages was nothing compared to what we manufacture today, under one roof.”
Oh Anna! If only I could have shown my outrage then and there—the depth of my despair. These threads being drawn out in my father’s mill might as well have been the extruded souls of the working poor, the human spirit of all England. A crueller, more heartless enterprise I could not conceive of, and it doesn’t matter how cheap and durable these processes made the final product; the price paid for this ‘division of labour’ was too high. His ghastly factory didn’t manufacture cloth so much as turn men, women, and children into automatons, slaves to the machines they tended. And the owners—not excepting my father, who did resist to the best of his ability the fierce efficiencies demanded by ‘the market’—were no better than the taskmasters of Egypt. They treated people with less dignity and respect than they bestowed on their precious, well-oiled machines. I should have shouted above the din, “No!” and refused to ever set foot in that place again. But that’s the conundrum of people who value politeness and kindness above frankness and truth. Until we learn not to smile obligingly in the face of evil, until we learn the love of the she-wolf, who grabs her cubs by the scruff of the neck when they dawdle toward danger… until then, kindness and politeness are merely cowardice in disguise. Young as I was, I failed my father in that moment. I failed myself and every conceivable generation! Even as I recoiled inwardly at the Faustian bargain being forged in that awful place, I did my best to muster something to express the gratitude and wonder expected of me. I breathed in the contagion of its air and let it infect me, all for fear of being judged a nuisance and an ungrateful child. There were side effects, though. It sickened me to think of that chamber where we stood as but one of many, on many floors, in many factories, in many cities.
As Father prattled on about the wonders of modern industry and how the factory system would eventually liberate mankind, I felt myself being snared at the very centre of an immense, three-dimensional web, whose strands were a form of intellectual entrapment as cruel as it was inescapable. Please forgive me for going on about it, but to understand me, my love, you must understand my inveterate hatred for the industrialized world—a world that strips humanity out of every equation and process. That first visit to my father’s mill was my introduction to a horror I could not comprehend. There are moments when a person becomes aware of the slow momentum of the universe, its ponderous spin. I was afflicted by a sort of dizziness, a vertigo twisting my guts and setting my soul a-kilter. And I could feel the sickening rotation quickening by imperceptible increments, faster and faster. How could I—a child—resist the terrible force of the age I had been born into? When would I ever be able to find an excuse for my complicity in its sin?
“Mind, sir! Mind!” A hand fastened itself like a talon to my shoulder, jerking me backwards out of my reverie rudely into the then-and-there of clattering bedlam. Twisting inside the grip of my assailant, I came face-to-face with a spinner who glared at me sternly. “I’ve seen more than one young whelp snatched up by the belt,” he growled, nodding in the direction of a strap, which transferred power from a central axle that ran overhead down to the machines on the factory floor. “It’s not a pretty sight, that, young sir.” Father intervened. “Thank you, Fred,” he said, guiding me out of the spinner’s grip. “He’s right, my boy,” he chided, turning to me. “This is no place for daydreaming.” As Father talked, I felt a presence nearby, watching. Glancing up, I caught the eye of a boy my own age, perhaps a little younger. He smiled in a quick, mocking manner—‘impudent’ is how an adult would have characterized it. My heart skipped, then raced. I blushed and smiled pathetically at this pale, barefooted sprite, who had been darting nimbly about the spinner’s mule, tying broken threads, and making sure everything continued operating as it should.
“What are you gawking at, you jackanapes?” the operator barked. “Get back at it before I give you a clout that will knock that smirk off your face.” The boy’s lips turned up an infinitesimal degree, and I could tell by the brightness of his pale, blue eyes that he was laughing in spite of this threat. “Get back at it now!” the spinner bawled. The boy vanished behind a bank of spindles. I could still catch glimpses of him, a spirit at work in the iron frame of the machine, amidst the thousand threads gathered inexorably onto its spools. He’d become the flash of an eye; a slender hand, its busy, nimble fingers always working; a sudden suggestion of sandy, brown hair; a patch of faded blue overalls… “Christopher?” He was in there, this boy. He would always be, just as a reflection in a mirror lives on, a ghost that will reappear if you position yourself at the right angle to the light. I knew I could not fail to see him again—this imp, toiling at my father’s mill. Knew he could teach me far more about what it meant to manufacture cotton than a whole boardroom full of blathering, plotting shareholders at their polished table. “Christopher,” Father insisted. “Come away!”
Goliath, the engine of industry
I tried not to appear sullen that night. Wanted to avoid the sense of uncertainty that so often afflicted me at mealtimes. Which end of the table should I look to as its head? Father’s to the south, backed by the panelled glass doors that opened into the parlour? Or Mother’s to the north, backed by the curtain-framed windows that looked out over our garden? The dining room table was a four-legged, two-headed beast that watched me jealously from both ends.
“Well,” Mother said, “describe your day at the works, my dear.” Father chuckled. “We shall make a man-of-business of him yet,” he joked. “Is that so?” Mother regarded me with that unfathomable serenity of hers. She’s a crystal-clear pool whose surface remains utterly unperturbed no matter how many stones you chuck into it. The ripples you cause merely demonstrate how futile and quickly spent the disturbances of your infantile tantrums really are. “Is that what you want to be, Christopher? A man of business?” she asked. Father glowered, as if a bit of beef had gone down the wrong way, and he was determined to cough it up without drawing attention to himself. “It’s amazing!” I said. “How big everything is, and how everyone seems to know just what to do.” Father beamed. “That’s the first principle of business, my boy,” he praised me. “You break complex operations down into simple actions that can be carried out efficiently by machines or by men with minimal training. Once you’ve done that, there’s no species of manufacture that can’t be carried out by the factory system.”
As Father discoursed, Mother regarded me intently. I don’t know what, exactly, she was thinking but could feel her eyes upon me and had no doubt they had been calibrated to detect the slightest fluttering of an eyelid or flinching of a cheek muscle. I wanted to tell her how much I hated the cotton mill, all its roaring and shouting and clattering; that most of all, I hated what it was doing to the men, women, and children who toiled within its walls—solid brick walls, as severe in their own way as any prison’s
“There was a boy there, working on one of the machines,” I faltered, then stopped, glancing at Father to see if he would give some sign of approval—or at least permission. “Yes?” Mother coaxed. “He was barefoot, Mother, and he clambered about the machinery as nimble as a monkey.” “Nimbly, dear. The correct usage is nimbly… And?” “I liked him, is all.” I said, deflated. It seemed such a stupid thing to say. I blushed, jabbing at my dinner unhappily, then forcing myself to shovel in and masticate a forkful of mashed potatoes and gravy, which I swallowed as a tasteless lump. Father coughed. His utensils clicked and clacked with a precision that made me feel clumsy. Mother’s end of the table had gone silent. “Does he have a name, this boy?” she asked at last, off-handedly. “I never asked.” Now that I’d brought it up, I wanted to cut short any conversation about the factory lad. I wished I could draw the confession back like an intake of breath, a gasp.
“Thomas?” Mother inquired sharply. Father sighed with a forlorn glance, as if something he cherished had just flown out the dining room window behind her… As if the glass were only an illusion that this whatever-it-was could pass through without the slightest resistance. “I make a point of not getting to know the name of every child employed at the works, my dear. If you get to know one of them, then you really ought to get to know them all. Otherwise, your intimacy might seem like favouritism. It might be disruptive. So, I tend to keep my distance and let the operatives deal with their assistants.” “But you do make exceptions?” Mother said. “If needs be, yes,” he admitted. “But there must be something more than fancy to it, my dear, or you end up creating precedents and raising expectations that cannot be met. The children have their work to do, and it’s best if they’re left to it.”
Mother made no reply, but I knew she was staring directly at Father with her eyebrows raised in that deliberate look of surprise she sometimes used—a look reserved especially for him. Then we all went back to our dinners, munching in silent misery, as if the radiant heat of some hellish chamber was permeating the boards beneath our feet—as if the house was on fire, but none of us wanted to be the first to raise a false alarm.
From then on, it became our practice for me to spend one day a month at the Newman Cotton Works—invariably a Saturday because I wouldn’t miss school, and Saturday was a half-day at the works, a length of time that mollified Mother, who wasn’t entirely sure even half-a-half-day could be suitably spent by me ‘in such a place.’ Although Father made a pretence of my being ‘just another man’ in his employ, everyone doted and fawned over me, seeing that he took such pleasure in their disobedience. And in truth, I basked somewhat in their favour despite my shyness.
Each visit, I went to ‘work’ at a different job. I gained experience of every station in the gigantic factory in this way, filling in the detail—so to speak—of the quick sketches I retained from my first day’s tour. We started at what Father referred to as the ‘engine of the Industrial Revolution’, the plant’s power and boiler houses. My memory of that visit still excites fear, fascination, and awe in me. Father positively glowed as his engineer, Jacobson—a stocky fellow who dispensed with the cumbersome formality of a jacket and went around with his sleeves rolled up—described the mechanics of Goliath, one of the plant’s two engines. “She generates fifteen hundred horsepower, young sir,” he said proudly. “And with her partner Titan, the plant can boast three thousand horse.” He stopped, admiring his chuffing brace for a moment, then grinned. “I reckon that’d be enough horses to pull the parliament buildings from down there in London up here to Manchester, where they belong.” Father guffawed happily. “Leave ‘em where they are!” he chuckled. “Who needs the racket?”
As they hobnobbed, I watched the massive, articulated rods pump back and forth, driven by Goliath’s gigantic piston. The contraption seemed alive to me, a monster conceived in the clanging workshops of Hell, its steel elbows connected to a ponderous flywheel that spun round and round with unimaginable momentum, its iron lung huffing and hissing dangerously as it drove a thousand machines up in the mill through a system of belts, pulleys, and shafts.
Monstrous! I couldn’t say so out loud, but the thing Jacobson had described with such pride and which I couldn’t help but marvel at also struck me as a terrible invention. The engine room itself was meticulously kept, a mausoleum of sorts, dedicated to what I could only conceive of as an irresistible, malevolent power.
Sensing my fascination—perhaps mistaking it for boyish wonder—Jacobson winked and said, “Goliath and Titan must be fed. Would you like to see the boiler room, young sir?” We descended a steep staircase into a dark, infernal dungeon. Half naked men shovelled coal into the glowering maw of a duel set of boilers. They were hardened souls, these men, moving about in the miserly light with grim purpose. None of them looked up as we stood, watching them methodically carry out their duties amid the coal dust, in the gloom… and something else, palpable but undefined that permeated the dank, sweating air. There was no mistaking the role of these men. They were slaves whose sole value was their ability to heave coal into the insatiable maw of the machines that powered Father’s factory. And I understood in a way I hadn’t up to then that everyone in my father’s mill—my mill by inheritance—was a slave to Goliath and Titan, too. The ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ of these devouring, greedy monsters must forever be provided and taken away by an army of dispirited, degraded creatures whose minds and very souls were adapted to the remorseless rhythms of a vast machine.
Over the following months, station by station, we progressed through the Newman Cotton Works until I had seen all there was to see: from the docks, where the canal barges were unloaded; on to the blowing room, where the cotton bales were broken and scutched, the impurities and seeds taken out of them; on to the carding room, where the cotton was teased and combed in preparation for spinning; on to the spinning rooms, where Ephraim worked—for that was The Boy’s name I would learn…
I looked for him amongst the rows of clattering machines, their carriages drawing the rove into threads, then winding the strands onto thousands upon thousands of spindles, ready for weaving. But, whether by accident or design, neither he nor his gruff operative, Fred, worked any of the machines we passed. There were other boys like him—gaunt, pale, nimble waifs, tending the machines like so many ants on a hill. But none glanced back at me with Ephraim’s impish, clear blue eyes, and I found myself missing this boy whose name I did not yet know. I found the drone of Father’s lecturing irritating, a distraction from the things I wanted to see and learn about Ephraim’s environment. He tried. I must give him credit for that. But increasingly, his sermonizing on the wonders and benefits of capitalism and ‘free enterprise’ seemed distractions to me. His proclamations of ‘an enlightened future’ that would make it possible for everyone to see the benefits of the industrial mode of production as ‘plain as day’ annoyed me.
True, he did exert influence and pressure in that direction. “I do my best,” Father always said, but always following up that claim with the reminder that, “It’s a hard-old world, and my going under won’t do any good for the hundreds I employ. They find at least a modicum of consideration for their wants and needs under my factory roof.” Mother scoffed at this plea. She refused to let things rest there, ceaselessly militating for better working conditions for those who were employable, better relief for those who weren’t or who had been thrown out of work. “How can we call ourselves human in any dignified sense of the word if we do not treat our fellows any better than beasts?” she demanded. “Nay, unless we treat every sentient creature with love and compassion.”
These declarations rankled, sometimes even infuriated Father. But Mother never shrank from making them. And if she lives two hundred years, she will still be pestering and hectoring the rich and comfortable, demanding better of them—better of us all. Many’s the time I watched the blood rise in Father’s apoplectic face as he clamped his jaw shut rather than engage in another heated dinner-table debate with his son’s mother. Many’s the time I witnessed him surrender to his outrage and engage her from his end of our dining room’s two-headed table. For her part, Mother never showed even the slightest sign of triumphalism during these clashes—unless you are so jaded as to construe her serene, utterly unshakable faith as inverted bravado. No one who truly knows Mother would ever think such a thing. I note this facet of Father and Mother’s marriage, my dear, because I believe you would have taken Mother’s side had you been in my place, and I want you to know that, much as I admire and love my father, I did not agree with his stance. I took Mother’s side in these debates, too. Silently.
Excuse the preacher in me, but somebody has to speak out against the shrivelled spirits who believe only in profits, never giving a toss or a farthing for the wellbeing of their employees. I can see them now, in their lounges and clubs, sipping expensive brandy and chomping expensive cigars and laughing at men like my father, who at least tried to put a pinky into the balance and shift it ever so slightly toward humanity—and humility. I know what Father put up with; he told me later, when I was a man and a priest, and he felt I needed to understand him better. “Soft.” That was the word they used: “Soft in the head and in the heart.” He bore these insults patiently. They were never uttered to his face, of course, but only came to him through the insinuations of ‘friends’ in the pack. Especially after an incident at the mill that changed everything.
“Hah!” I can hear them sniping. “Just like the fool to risk his own son’s safety for the sake of a careless oaf who got his hand caught in a flywheel!” Later, of course, when the simply unthinkable consequences of Father’s kind impulse had worked themselves out through a provenance we could not have anticipated, their grumbling and innuendo intensified. But I am getting ahead of myself and must funnel this narrative back into its proper course, or I’ll never finish.
Be it ever so humble
As I’ve said, Saturdays were half-days at the Newman Cotton Works, and it was just before shutdown on one of my ‘workdays’, when we were preparing to go home, that the accident happened. As a rule, Father wanted a full report of any incidents that occurred in the factory, and to be notified in person any time he happened to be at the works. So, when he was informed that one of his operative’s assistants had been seriously injured, having got his hand caught between the drive strap and a pulley on a mule, Father didn’t hesitate. “You wait here, Chris,” he instructed. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I was somewhat put out because I wanted to get away, but looking back I am warmed by a glow of modest pride in my Father—that he was one of the few industrialists of his era who gave a tinker’s damn for the welfare of his workers. He was too stiff and formal to ever allow familiarity between himself and his ‘people’, but there was no mistaking the urgency of the situation, and when I thought about it, I understood better the genuine looks of appreciation and kindliness in some of the glances and greetings he received whenever we toured the factory floors. His office staff especially were fond of him. You could tell… at least anyone with eyes to see could. So, for a time I was left to my own devices in Father’s office. It being end of shift, I watched from his upper window as the factory hands streamed out the doors, through the courtyard and into Great Ancoates Street. It struck me how sullen they appeared, shuffling off home alone or in pairs, as if what they had to go to was no better than what they were leaving. In the sunlight they made a ragged sight, pale spectres, their worn, rumpled clothing hanging off them as if they were skeletons made of sticks and twigs, with their garments draped over them… Except for one sprite who darted amongst the herd like a low-flying swift…
Ephraim!
I hadn’t seen him since that encounter my first day ‘on the job.’ Nonetheless I found myself short of breath, and blushing, and craving knowledge about this irrepressible lad who—quite frankly—I wanted as a friend. Without so much as a thought I rushed through the outer office, down the stairs, and out my father’s private side-door from the Newman Cotton Works. I dashed along the byway beside the plant into Great Ancoates, then instinctively turned left, toward the city, weaving through the dispersing crowd of factory hands, making my way forward until I caught sight of Ephraim up ahead, larking still with all and sundry, being rewarded with laughter for his efforts, or feigned clouts by some of the surlier men. Most everyone liked him, it seemed, and those who didn’t—I surmised—were more jealous than truly spiteful, not being able to tolerate an impudence they lacked, but which they all recognized as legitimate, even purposeful teasing. I slowed my impetuous pace to match his, settling into a following gait, staying far enough behind that he would be unlikely to spot me, preoccupied as he was playing the clown. Now that I had him in my sights, a cloud of doubts plagued me. What was I doing there? What if Father returned and found me missing? What would Ephraim think when we did meet, and he realized I had followed him from the factory gate? I blushed again, but pushed on, for in truth I loved him even then, and envied him, as I still do.
Gradually the factory diaspora broke up, small groupings turning down side streets off Great Ancoates, the main herd being left behind by Ephraim’s dog-trotting pace. More than ever I felt exposed, and worried that I would not be able to get back to the works before Father discovered me missing. But something concocted of curiosity, devotion and bloody-mindedness impelled me forward even as inklings of disorientation and fear took hold.
Everything looked different now that I was on foot and not in Father’s carriage: the curious, round bank at Oldham Road; the squat shops with their apartments above; the spires of Manchester Cathedral towering over the frowning brick facades. I had never been in this place, even though I had passed through it so many times. Ephraim stopped to look in a shop window; I froze, certain he must have seen me. But he didn’t look my way. Then he did a curious thing. He rapped sharply on the glass and made a face, presumably at whoever was inside. He continued this jeering pose for a moment or two then dashed away just as the red-faced shopkeeper wrenched open his front door and charged out after him, giving up the chase after a few paces. “Just you wait, you little imp!” he bellowed, shaking his fist. “I’ll catch you yet and when I do!” Then, still in a rage, he turned on his heal and stumped back toward his shop. His glare landed on me. “Are you his friend?” he demanded. “No, sir,” I shook my head. “Don’t lie to me! Tell me who that rascal is and where he lives you little blighter.” “I’ve never seen him before,” I protested. “Honest!” The man eyed me suspiciously, sneered, then retreated back into his store, slamming the door shut behind him. Scurrying past, I looked anxiously ahead. Ephraim was long-gone and, in a panic, I quickened my pace. I knew I would never have another chance to learn more about him, that the strictures separating his world from mine were lofty and inviolable. Left down Corporation Street, right into Long Millgate, then round the corner onto Victoria Station Approach. Where is he? I lamented. Where could he have gotten?…
“Ephraim, you young scoundrel!” somebody shrieked from up above. I spun and looked up, fully expecting to come face-to-face with a sharp beaked harpy flown straight out of Hell. And I wasn’t much disappointed, for there, leaning out the garret widow of a tumbledown tenement was an old crone whose features were even more disfigured and weatherworn than the sooty brickwork that framed her. “Who’s your posh friend,” she croaked loudly. “He’s no friend of mine, Missus,” a voice responded directly behind me, a voice—and I know you’ll think me strange for admitting it—but a voice that resonated sweet as a mocking songbird’s in my soul. I spun round again, and there he was. “I do believe he’s a sharp-suited spy, sent to follow me home from the works,” he grinned, not the least bit surprised at my presence, as if he’d known from the outset that I’d been following him. “What you going to do about it?” the harpy jeered. “Don’t rightly know, Missus, unless I take him home, just to show him I’ve nothing to hide.” “Ha!” she teased. “You? Nothing to hide? Why, I think it would be a sight more accurate to say there’s nothing you’ve hidden that a wet, young pup like that’s ever going to find.” With that she laughed hysterically and withdrew inside. “Don’t mind her,” Ephraim said. “She’s not quite right upstairs.” He pointed to the side of his head and grimaced as if something had come loose behind his eyes. I recoiled at this marring pantomime.
“So, what’s this about?” he wanted to know. Too confused to even understand the question, I stared back at him stupidly. “Why are you following me, Master Newman?” There was nothing for it, so I simply told him the truth. “I wanted to see where you live is all,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to spy, if that’s what you think.” He laughed at the suggestion, then, without another word, turned and trotted on, leaving me to decide on my own what I should do. I knew that in all probability Father would have concluded his inquiry at the mill and would have been looking for me by then. He would be worried, frantic, until he found me; then he’d be furious. But I couldn’t stop there. Not when I’d got so close to what I needed to know.
Sheltered and pampered as I’d been, I wasn’t so naïve as to think the spruce facades along Great Ancoates didn’t have something to hide. After all, the factory workers, whose baggy tattered garments bespoke a poverty I could only imagine, must have lived somewhere. Much as they tried, the shopkeepers couldn’t keep the urchins from running barefoot down the swept avenue, nor could they shoo away the old men, broken down like overworked, obsolete machines, from hawking trinkets and begging for pennies. I followed Ephraim down to the bank of the River Irwell, a feted stream, slithering through the centre of the city with its burden of filth; then we entered a cavernous maw formed by a series of railway bridges. We had only gone part-way down this gullet of steel and blackened stone, when he turned into a serpentine byway that took us away from Victoria Street, under another tunnel, into a hideous warren of crooked lanes and jumbled buildings. We crossed the river, entering yet another neighbourhood… but how can I even use that word to describe the open cesspool we were plunged into, this putrid zone where the detritus of our vaunted civilization accumulated, rotted, festered? My guide, who had not slackened his pace for an instant since the old hag’s mocking, suddenly stopped in the middle of a helter-skelter court, so narrow and confined the light of mid-day barely penetrated to the bottom of it. “Welcome, Master Newman,” he taunted, spreading his arms wide, looking up the dingy shaft and spinning round as if he were an over-exuberant guide showing off the architectural grandeur of Westminster Abbey. “This is my home!” He laughed, seeing my jaw drop and my eyes pried open by his triumphant display. “What do you think on’t?” he pressed. “How does this compare to your humble lodgings, my master’s son, eh?”
My heart pounded, the blood pulsing in my ears with such force I could barely hear his soliloquy. I looked at this glorious boy in his tumbledown world and could barely breathe. “How do you do it?” I wondered. “Do what?” How could he not understand? Not sense my awe? “How?” I repeated, not wanting to utter a syllable more. Ephraim shrugged. Not—I realize now—in answer to my question, but as a gesture of repudiation. The uplifting of his bony shoulders, the turning palm-outward of his delicate hands, the raising of his thin brows did not signify the modest acknowledgement of a compliment tamped down; rather, his gesture spurned my amazement as if to say: What do you care about it? Before I could respond, he was off again, darting past me into a narrow passage between two tenements, perched dangerously on the sloped embankment of the Irwell. I followed, slipping and almost falling on the mucky trail. Half way down this canyon a flimsy wooden door opened into the disintegrating wall to my right. Ephraim shouldered this rickety gate open and entered; I peered in from the threshold, curious, but not wanting to intrude. As I watched, he busied himself at a hearth, rekindling a banked fire and putting a kettle on the grate. He paid no heed to me as he went about this chore, so I stepped into the room, wanting to be within his field of vision—feeling almost that I could not exist unless he saw me and acknowledged me. Despite its dilapidation and infernal gloom there was a sense of neatness and order to the room. Its dirt floor had been swept; the few tins and jars that constituted its kitchen were arranged in good order on a plank shelf; a worn, battered armchair faced the hearth from the opposite wall and between it and a second wooden chair a wobbly table held a candle and a book.
There’s no place like home
“Welcome!” Ephraim said. “We ain’t got much on hand at the moment, but I can offer a cuppa soon as the kettle boils.” He grinned slyly. “I’d invite you to a proper tea, with sandwiches and dainties and such, but our servant hasn’t returned from market yet, and Cook must of slept in!” I smiled, and for the first-time Ephraim regarded me with something more than cruel condescension. He beamed, pleased with his own pantomime, it would seem, and gestured toward the armchair with an exaggerated bow. I chose the wooden chair instead. “Suit yourself, Master Newman,” he sniped. “Christopher,” I insisted. “My name is Christopher.” “Not the saint himself, I presume,” he shot back, and we laughed. “No. And I’m not in the habit of praying to saints—at least not out loud.” “T’aint no use praying to anyone,” Ephraim retorted, flinging himself into the armchair. “It’s not as if fishes and loaves are going to start dropping out of the sky just cause I pray for ‘em. There’s a different sort of preying as some says will get you fishes and loaves, and candlesticks and coin, too.” By way of emphasis he held his hands up in front of his eyes and wiggled his fingers.
I wondered what Mother would have thought, had she been there, listening to this factory lad? What she would have said? And Father? As for me I couldn’t gainsay Ephraim’s truth. “Not that I indulge in such preying,” he added. “I been taught to make do with imaginary loaves toward the end of each week, and to count myself lucky that they might be made real at your father’s pleasure and expense.” This should have stung, but didn’t. Ephraim’s framing of the facts had nothing to do with accusation, I realized. He’d already moved beyond that and was simply stating the obvious—as he always does, sometimes with humour, or mockingly, sometimes in anger, but always with a clarity that discomfit none but a liar.
Again, my heart heaved, and I knew I loved this factory lad of mine in a way that could never be admitted or requited, even if the two of us knew it more certainly than anything we might see in a mirror or read in a book…
Sloshing footsteps preceded a body’s approach down the trampled and churned lane which lead past Ephraim’s door to the bank of the Irwell. “Why’s the door opened, dearest,” a voice called out, then Mrs. Jackson appeared in the frame. As her eyes adjusted to the inner gloom, she sensed first that her son was not alone; then, that his companion was not of the usual sort you would meet in their quarter of Manchester; and, finally, that their guest was me! “Good Lord!” she cried, her hand going to her mouth. “Master Newman! What on earth are you doing here?” “He followed me home, Mother, like a stray puppy.” Ephraim winked at me lightheartedly; Mrs. Jackson’s eyes widened and her face reddened. “This ain’t right!” she gasped. “This cannot be!” For a second she froze, glancing about their apartment as if she expected to find some evidence that she was experiencing an illusion, an impossibility that might vanish in a blink. “Does your father know you are here, Master Newman?” she demanded angrily, recovering herself. I shook my head. “Lord have mercy! He’ll be beside himself.” She fixed Ephraim with a hard stare. “Quick! You run back to the works and find Mr. Newman. Tell him I’m following with his son in hand.” I wanted to object but she flashed an angry glance at me. “I don’t want to hear another word out of either of you. Ephraim, go! Now! And Master Newman, you come with me this instant. Go!” she shouted again when Ephraim hesitated, obviously delighted at the confusion he’d sown.
Never have I seen Father angrier than that day. The office was in an uproar when Ephraim arrived with his news; the factory had been searched top-to-bottom, and the police summoned when it became evident I was not in the building. Ephraim’s mother, whom I would later come to know as Mrs. Jackson and later still as Mariam, marched me back the way I’d come, up Great Ancoates Street and straight into the Newman Cotton Works, without letting go my hand. Despite the awkwardness of our situation, I liked her instantly; she seemed exactly the kind of woman Mother would have become had she been a factory lad’s mother—resolute, always putting others and her ideals ahead of herself. We spoke not a word the whole way, and she maintained such a pace that I had to trot along behind like a reluctant spaniel on a short leash. She had every right to be angry, of course. I realized even then that I had put her and Ephraim in jeopardy by intruding into their lives, but had no idea how serious this situation must have seemed from her point of view. Only later, when we could laugh about it, would I come to understand better the threat she perceived—that, lowly and difficult as their circumstances seemed to me, she and Ephraim were actually better off than many and could easily have slid farther into the abyss. Miriam never once complained about it or railed about the carelessness of a rich man’s son. That’s not her way. For her, I had become a problem that needed setting right, instantly, and cleanly. Talking to me about it could only have complicated matters by making it seem almost understandable I should have so badly misjudged my station, and hers, and Ephraim’s. She needed to make it perfectly clear there could be no other connection between me and them than that of a factory owner’s son toward a lad and mother in his father’s employ. And yet, her hand was warm in mine, and she drew me on with a face as considerate as it was urgent. She couldn’t help me thinking that, had circumstances—our fate—been different, she could just as easily have been my mother as Ephraim’s, and that the things which distinguished us were mostly fabrications. Lies. That in fact, our whole industrial empire has been stitched together out of a fabric falsely woven and dyed, that my family’s wealth and status were as unjustified and pretentious as any monarch’s and therefore as dangerous for the labouring poor—the underlings—to contradict.
Father did not utter a single word to me either when I was presented to him. He thanked Miriam for her ‘troubles’ and for taking time out of her half-day to bring me back; dismissed with a show of gratitude the office staff who had helped search for me; explained things to the constabulary; then bundled me into the coupe for the long ride home. Only then, as we clopped along Great Ancoates, did he say, “What were you thinking? What on earth got into you?” It was my turn to remain adamant in my silence. Mother—for form’s sake—shared in Father’s incredulity when he informed her about my misadventure over dinner. She gasped and frowned. “Whatever were you thinking, dear?” she chided. “Dear!” Father erupted. “For God’s sake, Eleanor! Don’t mollycoddle the boy. He put himself and everything this family stands for at risk.” Mother sighed. “Yes,” she agreed. “But unless we find out why, we shan’t be able to teach him how to behave better in future, shall we?” Father harrumphed. I almost wished Mother had taken his side rather than making him squirm pathetically under her scrutiny. “Well?” she continued, injecting a note of sternness into her voice, utterly discordant with the inquisitive, almost eager glance she turned upon me. “I just wanted to see where the boy Ephraim lived,” I answered sullenly, poking at my supper—beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy, with fresh beans picked from the garden by Missus Barringer, our cook. “Who is this boy, Ephraim?” “One of the hands,” Father said. “His mother also works at the mill; she lost her husband about a year ago.” Mother’s eyebrow raised. “What happened to him?” “Cholera,” Father said grimly. Mother winced. “It’s only one of the risks Chris exposed himself to, wandering about in that neighbourhood.” Mother nodded curtly. “But we still haven’t learned why you were so interested in this boy, Christopher. Can you tell us?”
She watched me intently, coaxingly. The very air around us seemed to expect an answer, something that would make sense of what had happened. But I didn’t have one. “Do you care for this boy?” “I like him,” I said. “Why?” Some things have no reason. Mother couldn’t possibly understand any answer I could make—that feelings aren’t always like cogs in a machine that can be traced back to a driving force in a schematic annotated with logic and facts. Father, even less so. Until that precise moment, I had no idea, either, how devious emotions can be—how they can slither inside and strike from within, like an adder curled up in the breast. “Why?” Father weighed in. “He’s smart,” I said. “Pah!” I reddened, the blood rushing into my face. “And he’s funny.” “And that’s worth risking your life and reputation over and scaring your family half to death?” “I have no friends!” I shouted. Startled, Father regarded me with disbelief, as if he suddenly realized there was a stranger sitting at the dining room table, where he thought he’d seen his son. He then looked to Mother, as if she might have an explanation.
Mother, too, studied me as if something had changed—something she couldn’t quite fathom. “I think I would like to meet this Ephraim,” she mused. “And his mother. What did you say her name was, Thomas?” “I didn’t,” Father grumped. “Her name is Mariam.” Mother offered a quick smile. “I would like to meet her, too. Can that be arranged?” “What for?” Father demanded. “At the very least, to thank her for being so expeditious in bringing our son back to the factory; and her son for being such a congenial host.” “But…” Father made to object. “I think the two of them deserve a day off with pay. So perhaps this Monday you could invite them for a visit on my behalf, and send them back here with Sullivan in the coach. “That’s preposterous!” Father flustered. “The boy goes about barefoot!” “And is that his fault?” Mother bristled. He scowled. “Perhaps we should talk about this later,” he suggested. “Yes, I think we should,” Mother agreed.
Extended family
It would be many years before I would figure out the exact nature of the interview Mother had with Ephraim and Miriam. And I certainly never would have learned the truth from Mother herself or from Father. I’m not saying either of them had anything to hide from me or anyone else, but there are things parents simply do not discuss with their children, no matter how long the secret must be kept—certain things we inherit as sealed boxes.
I would piece together a version of events based on deduction from the set of subsequently known facts; conversations with Mariam; and occasional remarks thrust my way by Ephraim, like steel blades being doused for hardening in a bucket of sizzling water. On the Monday after my misadventure, Mother did meet with Mariam and Ephraim; by week’s end, Mariam had been hired as one of our household servants, she and Ephraim being put up in an attic suite outside the servants’ quarters.
“But what if I don’t really like him?” I worried when Mother informed me what was to happen. “Do you think you might not?” In truth, I couldn’t imagine such an eventuality, and—despite our sometimes difficult, even ferocious relationship—I still can’t. “What if he doesn’t like me?” I wailed. Mother looked at me sternly. In truth, it didn’t matter what Ephraim thought or felt; his hold on me has been stronger than a brother’s from its inception—from that day I first saw him, a barefoot imp working the threads of a spinning mule in Father’s factory. I’ll never be able to explain that, even to myself. But there it is, and there it was.
Ephraim lived under the same roof as me from that day forward, and not as a servant’s son either. The ‘ever since’ has been a working out, a continual jostling of sensibilities, and ideas, and egos. And that ineffable love has been our bane as much as our blessing. We have always been bristling enemy planets, locked in an unstable orbit, getting closer and closer and ever more potentially hazardous, but as necessary to each other as two boxers in a ring. I know this doesn’t sound much like brotherly love, not even the type you might expect between a natural and an adopted sibling. But Ephraim and I do love each other; it’s just that we can never forget our origins and how we ended up in each other’s gravitational field—Ephraim especially, because he hasn’t for a moment forsaken or forgotten his past. No, never! Rather, he has made it his cause—the ground that defines him. And from that patch, I am his enemy—so a tang of hatred spices our love and has so from its formative years.
Anna, I don’t want you to mistake our hatred for the overwhelming strain that eviscerates love and even compassion, leaving nothing but a poisonous residue gnawing at your bowels. Ephraim and I have known from the beginning the knot of hatred in the muscle of love and—despite shouts, taunts, and even fists—have always managed to work things out. Indeed, I have to claim with a degree of pride my own rejection of any inherited privilege as the true-born son of the Newman line. I am smiling now, dearest, because I can hear Ephraim snorting and see him sneering in my mind’s eye, even as I pen these lines. I know exactly what he would say: If it isn’t an issue between us, Chris, then why mention it at all? He would deliver this observation in that most infuriatingly snide tone he has mastered, sitting opposite me in his most snobbishly proletarian posture, and we would have to laugh because that’s a part of the game we play and have become so good at as adults. People hardly notice we’re poking at each other with our dinner knives and forks!
Over Father’s ineffectual—and I do believe pro forma—resistance, Ephraim intruded into every nook and unauthorized cranny of our household. Most of all, he took a place of equal honour in Mother’s affections. He had to be properly educated at the same public school as me, tutored in the arts that would make a gentleman of him, and eventually sent to Oxford to be polished and finished as a ‘fine young man.’ In short, he did become our household’s adopted son according to every measure that could possibly be granted. And no matter what, there is no unadopting a brother who has been anointed in such a manner. Ephraim and I are bound; one of us shall attend the other’s funeral and weep when the time comes, even if we are so old by then that we can barely stand upright, leaning on a cane.
Adulthood? Is there a moment we can identify in our growing up we can point to and say, “There, that was the instant I became a man?” I don’t think so. But there are pre-sentient episodes that, looking back, we can say encapsulate our future the same way a seed can be identified as a future plant. Instances we can claim, in retrospect, contained all the information necessary to predict who and what we must become.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 is that encapsulating instance for me. Ephraim and I were fourteen years old that year, and his being by then a ‘brother’ to me, we both accompanied Mother and Father to the opening, along with Miriam. So enthused was Father by this seminal display of British power and business acumen that he bought season passes—even though we lived 200 miles and a laborious train ride north of London—just so we could be among those attending the opening day. We were booked into a hotel—the Mivart, as I recall—for a week, the intention being that we could take in all there was to see in the gigantic Crystal Palace over the course of seven days. I don’t think I have ever anticipated a public ceremony with more doubt than this immense convergence of the world’s economies; I know I have never been so utterly confused, so outraged by what I experienced there. God, so the Bible says, built the world in seven days; it took only seven seconds for my amazement at the commercial achievements of the world to coagulate into disgust and horror. I will never forget, while everyone else was cheering the opening speeches, my looking down the interminable nave of the Birdcages and thinking, This is monstrous. This is a cathedral raised in the name of Mammon, a house dedicated to the enthronement of greed and inhumanity in opposition to anything like the Christian ideal so imperfectly represented in Westminster Abbey, a mere thirty minutes’ walk away.
In the face of such a colossal lie, what was I to do? I got away from my parents and fled the Crystal Palace as soon as opportunity presented itself, on the pretext of wanting to see some of the exhibits on my own. I suppose the almost instinctive comparison between the Birdcages iron, skeletal framework and the ancient masonry of Westminster Abbey was on my mind, the massy architecture of the cathedral drawing me in with its ponderous gravity. I felt myself moving as if in a trance through the parks and streets between me and the cathedral. You’ll think me mad—and my description is clumsy, my dear—but I could almost hear the chorusing of what I took to be divine voices during that walk. It was as if I knew the angels were there, singing, their voices fluted between the molecules of air, just beyond my range of hearing. I knew they whispered their enchantments to holiness throughout the city, if only we had ears to hear. If only mortal senses could be tuned to the frequency of grace.
It was the shock, you see! My visceral recoil at the Great Exhibition, at the inevitability of it all, rendered me almost senseless, open to any alternative prospect. And there it was, just a stone’s throw away, so to speak, the towering entrance to Westminster. I went in. I will never forget the transition that took place that very moment—I have examined it and relived it countless times since. The imagined vibrations of divine singing in the outer air gave way to actual voices raised in gorgeous chorus, for a choir was practicing within… Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty! The music penetrated now, as if I had become a being transparent as air. I could not imagine these as mere human voices. The choir was an instrument of God’s own anthem. And the cathedral? I was inside the ribcage of an edifice built for eternal praise, and these puny fellow-beings were its lungs. I laugh now to think it, but no matter how imperfect and ill-formed my resolve at that moment, I knew then and there I would become a priest and that my life would be dedicated to anything other than the crass future ballyhooed by the people I had left in the Birdcages, the very people who would be oppressed by the vision they extolled.
Ephraim, of course, sensed the change in me the instant we found each other at the Great Exhibition. “You seem subdued, Chris,” he observed. “Where have you been?” I blathered, tossing out a few exaggerated praises about the exhibits I had seen since returning to the Birdcages; Ephraim studied me like a hawk. “Your parents have been wondering. They wanted me to let you know and bring you to them when I found you. They’ll be in the cafeteria at teatime,” he announced. “I suppose we should be on our way, then,” I said, with as much nonchalance as I could muster. Ephraim glanced at a fob watch he’d taken to carrying with him to ‘official occasions’. “Yes, I suppose we should,” he agreed, “although, by the looks of it, we’re altogether too late, eh?” I asked him what he meant by that. “I think perhaps the Christopher Newman they are expecting has gotten rather lost in all this,” he gestured grandly at the exhibits, confronting us on all sides. “That he doesn’t appreciate the wonders of the modern world with quite the same eagerness and relish as all the other gawkers on the grounds and would rather be gone?”
He knew he’d hit the mark, but I didn’t let on. “You, of all people, Ef, should appreciate the true nature of ‘the wonders’ here and be prepared to pronounce that truth to the world, don’t you think?” I said. “I don’t think along those lines at all, brother,” he scolded. “The truth’s a funny thing. Make it a grand statement, and most people will think you’re either a fool, a liar, or a conniver; I’d rather hide my truths than reveal them.” He patted me on the shoulder, then led the way back through the exhibition to my reunification with Mother and Father.
Responding to the call
“A priest!” Father gasped when, upon our return to Pendennis Hall, I suggested the possibility. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so shocked, so angry. Even Mother seemed surprised at my suggestion. I hadn’t been so stupid, of course, as to outright say anything like, ‘Father, Mother, I have decided to become a priest.’ That would have been bad form and worse judgment. It would have given Father something to shoot at, Mother something to work on, and the prospect of an interminable future with the two of them at me from both sides day-in-day-out made me cringe. So, I raised the subject as a sort of idle speculation, a ‘what-if’ to prepare the ground just as a bombardment prepares the way when an army is about to attack a fortress.
Their reactions told me neither of them was fooled by this stratagem, and that in their hearts they both must have been expecting an announcement of some sort. Father as an uncertainty to dread; Mother, perhaps, as a possibility devoutly to be wished. I made sure Ephraim was nowhere within earshot when I planted this seed. He would learn of it soon enough, and I could only imagine how he would torture me with snide pantomimes and analytics about what it means to be a priest in an age when the earth circled round the sun and science was driven by an irreversible propensity toward equations that defined the mind of God. “Vestments! Pah! They’re nothing but straight-jackets with the straps unfastened,” he would declare much later in life, during one of our heated ‘debates’—a pronouncement that, so help me, I couldn’t help but laugh at for the sheer ingenuity of it… and that, Anna, is the active ingredient of our love—the tang, if you will, in the bitter potion we both swallow. Ephraim isn’t a card; he’s the whole deck!
I won’t exhaust you with the formative chapters of a priest’s autobiography. A novel could, I suppose, be concocted out of the intrigues and battles that ensued, but it would be either boring or contrived, depending on the motives of its author. So, I shall gloss over all that and quickly skip to the outcome. As it became clear to Father and Mother that my chosen vocation was not mere speculation or fantasy but that I had determined to forsake the promised land of my inheritance and become a cleric, a shift in allegiances began to alter the structure of our family—a glacial shift, ponderous, imperturbable, and strangely serene. Father, like a man desperate to keep his options open in a game of chess, began to see Ephraim as his true successor in business. My brother would become manager and de facto owner of Newman Cotton Works; I, the silent partner, was destined to inherit precisely half the family fortune upon my father’s death. Under the circumstances, Miriam could no longer remain a maid but became a sort of aunt to me, just as my mother had become an aunt to Ephraim. As I’ve said, there’s the potential for a good story in all this, my love! A literary nip here, a tuck there, a little exaggeration to heighten the tension, et voila, a corker of a novel to titillate the reader’s fancy. I would probably enjoy reading it myself. But novels leave out so much: the devotion, hours of study, interminable argument, dedication to rituals, prayer, all the effort that, with the help of the ‘living spirit’, moulds a man and shapes him to a willed destiny. It was hard, joyous work, becoming a priest—harder still, not to be at least a little proud while doing so!
What follows, then, is one of those sublime jokes nobody laughs at except the oaf, who fails to see it’s not meant to be funny.
You, my love, have entrusted me with your story. You haven’t left anything out, but have risked all so that I may love you wholly, not some pruned, idealized version of you. I can do no less, bringing myself to the alter. I must say at the outset, however, that my secret life as a priest does not make nearly as compelling a story as yours as a fugitive from your past. Forgive me for saying so, but your story truly contains all the elements of a gripping drama; mine, from here on in, will be more like the theological journaling of a country cleric. I fear it will bore you to death with abstract and abstruse arguments about the nature of God and the relationship of men and women to God. I won’t punish you with the whole story, but I must give away the ending. That is the risk I have to take, dearest, for to understand me completely, you must understand what I have become as a priest, why, and how. What others may think of my theology doesn’t trouble me much; what you do means everything—not that you believe or think the same, but that you see the spiritual adventure in it and accept me as an expression of my faith.
If you’re reading this next line, I am breathing a sigh of relief, because I haven’t put you off entirely. So, before perseverance wavers, I will cut to the chase, and reveal where all this tends: I do not believe in God!
There. I’ve said it. I use the word continually, as you know, and even capitalize it as if it were a proper name. But all that’s a matter of form. The rest of my confession will be an explanation of how an Anglican priest can make such a contradictory statement and how he dares put on his vestments and stand in the pulpit before his congregation each Sunday. Another thing I must tell you is that I will never reveal this blasphemy to another person, and I beg you to keep my secret always. This is not out of my fear of any personal consequences. Nor out of shame. Rather, a public confession would be a betrayal of those I minister to. I know what you are thinking: that keeping this ‘sin’ a secret is the betrayal, not the revealing of it. Looked at from the perspective of a parishioner, that would certainly be the case. But you are not a typical parishioner, dear, and all I ask is that you withhold judgment until the end of my letter; then I will be prepared to accept whatever verdict you render.
I’m not much of a storyteller, Anna. But there are times when a fairy tale can express the truth better than our own life-stories…
The Locket
One day, a young prince was summoned into his father’s room, where the king lay on his deathbed. “Son,” the father said, “I am about to die, and you must now lead your people. Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, Fairness, Courage, Faith, and Service are the virtues we have taught you from the day you were old enough to learn. But has there ever been a man or woman born who could be all those things without help from the Supreme Being? So here, take this locket and put it round your neck as a memento, and never doubt that all you do and everything you accomplish is the spirit working through you.
With that, the father took a locket from round his own neck and placed it round his son’s. “Faith,” he said, “is of all the virtues, most important. Without it, all the rest become like water in a poisoned well; the more you drink, the sicker and more deluded you become. So, if ever you waver and cannot recover faith on your own or with the help of your ministers and friends—if ever you become apostate, truly apostate—open the locket and discover its medicine.”
The prince, who was soon anointed king, wore the locket round his neck from that day on. His faith never wavered. He was celebrated throughout the land as an enlightened king, who led with Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, Fairness, Courage, Faith and Service. But despite all that, every day he yearned to pry open the locket and discover what might be inside. This urge to know became an obsession he had to resist every moment. He would even wake in the middle of the night, pestered by dreams about opening the locket and learning its secret. “Surely I could serve my people better if I not only had faith, but knew the reason why?’ he told himself.
Finally, he could resist no longer, so—an old man himself by then—he rode off to his favourite hilltop, a height of land often visited, overlooking his kingdom’s seat, the surrounding farms, his castle, and the forests beyond, all the way to the sea. Bowing, he took the locket from round his neck and held it in his fingers one last time. Then he pried it open, taking out the tiny scroll within.
“Have faith in your fellow beings,” he read, “for they are the only vessels of spirit. It doesn’t reside in sacred books, or cups, or holy buildings, or sanctified places. It is not to be found in an empty sky. It looks at the world through the eyes of a mouse as surely as through those of a king. It is everywhere and nowhere at one-and-the-same time. It has no name, and is only given one by those who want to usurp its power. Love every living thing, even the maggot that will one day feed on your abandoned flesh.”
It was signed, “Your loving Parent.”
Reading this, the old king laughed out loud. He rejoiced in the knowledge that his horse had heard his laughter, and the crickets in the field, and the swallows swooping over the grassy hilltop. Laughed ‘til the tears rolled down his cheeks, for he knew the locket’s secret was truth, and that the truth had been with him all along, and that his approaching death would not diminish the spirit of the world one iota, and that to think otherwise, or to think he might live forever, was surely a form of insupportable pride.
Replacing the scroll, he snapped the locket shut, for soon he would have to hang it round the neck of his beloved daughter. Perhaps someday she would read its contents too and have the courage to proclaim its truth. As for him, he would take its secret to his grave, secure that he did not need the locket round his neck anymore, except as a reminder of a truth he would not reveal…
Not a story to be told in Sunday school, I’ll grant you, Anna. Nevertheless, it sums up quite nicely the place I have come to with regard to Faith. I don’t need to say anything more on that topic, except that I hope you and I will have plenty of opportunity to talk about this and many other spiritual matters. For I love you, and there’s an end to it. I loved you even before I was prepared to admit it, even as I pretended to myself that my interest in you was purely pastoral. If ever there were two people meant for each other, I believe you and I are those two people. Trust me, I feel not the slightest loss or sense of diminishment in giving myself to you, Anna, nor do I feel an inkling of the need to diminish or change anything about you in the bargain. Love, to me, has come to mean a joyful recognition of our kindredness—if I may coin such a usage. The closer we are in spirit, the more intense love becomes. I can’t imagine a love more elevating than what I feel for you, my dear, and my sincerest hope is that you feel the same.
I will end this biographical sketch now. The rest of my history can be written in a few sentences. Ephraim and I went to Oxford together: I to study divinity; he, philosophy, economy, and history. Even before ordination, my faith was challenged by the exciting discoveries that have been made in the fields of natural history, archaeology, chemistry, and physics. Even as I approached ordination, I struggled, trying to find an interpretation of the Bible that made sense in this changing world view, so I could somehow remain an honest Christian. I clung to my Christian Faith. Accepted that, even though I was incapable of quashing my doubts, there was a unifying truth to Christianity I might eventually comprehend. Eventually, though, I had to abandon even that refuge, and came to the agonizing conclusion that I had to place my faith in a reformed church—that my mission was to be a secret agent of reform. An undeclared, radical priest.
Establishments like the Church of England do not look kindly on such a species. I exasperated everyone from the bishop on down with my implied apostasy, but was tolerated because I wanted to work in the poorest, meanest parishes in London. I tired of the constant tension, however, and jumped at the suggestion of missionary work as a calling when it was offered. And so, I find myself in Barkerville, where arguments on theological themes are not frequent and where I can do good works in my unorthodox spirit without drawing too much criticism.
Am I a Christian in any sense of the word? Can anyone who does not believe in God truly call himself so? All I can say is that I am not an atheist, and could never be a believer in science as the be-all of our universe. Life, consciousness, and the urge to know, love, and experience this world is purely spiritual, Anna. I think of consciousness as the world getting to know itself. But I do not believe in a God we can worship separately from his creation. Spirit looks out at the world through the eyes of every living creature; it listens to the world in forests, dens, apartments, and pews; it sniffs out new knowledge wherever it goes; and feels the molecules of a common water, earth, and air against its skin. That, for me, is the derived meaning of ‘communion’. I’m not trying to convert you, Anna, and I hope you’re laughing at my hyperbole! I’m only saying this is my world view, and I hope we can share it, even if we don’t choose to inhabit exactly the same planet!
Yours lovingly
Christopher Newman
October, 1872
Episodes: Chapter Header | It’s time | Learning the business inside-out | Men of vision | The factory lad | Goliath, the engine of industry | Be it ever so humble | There’s no place like home | Extended family | Responding to the call | The Locket |