Ch 8

“So old man Baird ended up selling the mill to McCallion in what … 1920?” I asked Terry.

“Amazing isn’t it?” replied the Librarian. “He comes home from the war, moves straight in to the office as under-manager and the next thing you know he’s bought the mill.”

Terry knew my next question and swooped effortlessly to provide the answer: “You’re going to ask me where he got they money? The truth is I don’t know and in those days, as long as the bank manager had the readies in front of him, then a man’s business was his own … no VAT sniffers about the place in the good old days.”

“But there must have been …”

“Talk?” interjected Terry, as he nibbled on another Jaffa Cake. “Far less than you’d think. Seems William McCallion practiced good PR long before the yuppies ever thought of it. The men in his mill earned top dollar, their housing was improved and there were Christmas presents for the war widows and the orphans. Old Willie kept the ‘boys’ on his side and they stuck by him through thick and thin.

“McCallion’s story was that he had struck up a great friendship with some rich officer type in the trenches. Hartley was his name. Looks as if this officer bankrolled McCallion for the mill because of some deep feeling of comradeship.”

I sniffed knowingly: “And pigs might fly Terry. That’s some serious cash to hand over to anyone – never mind to a ranker!”

“Whatever,” replied Terry. “That’s the story we know and love.”

I rose from Terry’s revolving chair which I had commandeered while he had waxed lyrical about the joys of the late 19th century ‘carding machine’ which had tripled profits for the magnates who had built the dark satanic mills.

“Just one more thing,” I chided, in a Columboesque manner. “Don’t tell me you never heard any rumours about the old boy?”

Terry raised an eyebrow: “Just once to be honest. An old boy – he was practically doting at the time – told me that Willie McCallion had been confronted in his office on one occasion. There was an argument and Willie threw the guy out.”

“Nowt else?” I asked hopefully.

“Yeah,” said Terry, ambling towards the coffee machine. “The guy was Irish.”

It was time to get back to the humble abode and play the rest of that tape.

‘Swizz’ Swinton kept a close eye on Willie McCallion as he carefully folded the note and slipped it into his chest pocket.

“You’ll be wanting to know how I came to get that then?” he asked.

Willie ordered another bottle of Vin Blong.

When Billy Swinton had marched down to Belfast City Hall to sign up in September of ’14, he’d been full of King and Empire .. and God .. and Ulster.

He’d waited for Sir Edward Carson to give the order for the Volunteers to join the droves flocking to sign on for Kitchener’s New Army. Some of his pals had already taken the King’s Shilling but Billy, and thousands of others, had waited for the big Dublin Barrister to give his blessing.

They’d been itching to show their mettle from the start and it seemed an age before they were sent to France in 1915 as the 36th (Ulster) Division. Now, most New Army Divisions had been created on a city or county basis but none were recruited on the close-knit territorial basis of ‘Carson’s Army’ as the Division had been swiftly nick-named.

The English troops said they could always tells when the 36th had been in a sector.

“How do you knew when Carson’s Paddies have been in the line before you?,” quipped one careless Yorkshireman. “They leave their litter behind - Gospel tracts and spud peelings!”

The same boy had wondered why no-one had laughed at his joke. His face turned white when a former foreman from Harland and Wolff, who had been quietly collecting rations from the ASC, asked him to repeat the jibe. It ended up in a fair old digging match by any standards. But nobody died.

One Saturday morning in July 1916 an awful lot of Billy Swinton’s chums had died. In the gently sloping fields around Thiepval Wood and across the River Ancre outside Beaucourt.

Back home, the people had been enjoying their summer holidays. By the time the casualty lists came out there was little jollity left in local hearts. Then the papers had started talking about their ‘epic gallantry’, their ‘unequalled heroism’ …. Billy Swinton wondered why they didn’t write about Jimmy Stebie, caught up in the wire and screaming for his mother. Or Dick McFlory stumbling back with the blood pumping .. literally pumping, from the stump of his severed arm.

They’d fought hard that day. And died hard too as the Germans counter-attacked up through the rat-run of the Schwaben Redoubt. The papers said the Huns were just slave soldiers, with no initiative and beaten down by the iron discipline of their monocled Prussian officer-class.

The Bottomley’s of this world hadn’t been face to face with the Germans on the Schwaben. Old Fritz had clung on wherever he could and then hit back hard and ruthlessly. And he hadn’t seen any monocled Prussians whipping them on. Billy had a very healthy respect for the average ‘Jerry’.

There had been a subtle change of mood in the weeks and months after the battle around Albert. The Division had been sent off to hold the line in quieter sectors while it was rebuilt and reinforced.

Some of the boys who had been wounded trickled back to their platoons only to find they were surrounded by strangers. But the old hands had learned useful – if bloody – lessons at the Somme. They knew concepts like pride, honour and valour were just words, meaningless to the average man caught up in this war. And they were mostly average men who fought it.

It was those lessons which had kept Billy Swinton alive on August 16, 1917. He’s watched with a mixture of horror and soldierly despair as the young lads from the base tried to run their way out of an artillery barrage.

“Get down, dig into that earth like a mole,” he’d told them. Had they listened? Had they f..k.

“Don’t crouch when your advancing,” he’d warned them. Better than a bullet in the leg than one in the guts. Because the old sweats on both sides had long ago ceased to fire ‘high’ – marksmanship was for target practice, if you want to cause maximum casualties .. aim low.

From the lip of the shellhole he peered periodically to the rear.

“For f..k’s sake,” he swore. “Jesus this is worse than Thiepval.”

And it was just as he was about to crawl back through the slime to his own lines that he heard a Tommy’s voice crying out for help.