Edwin Clayhanger stood on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge,
in the valley between Bursley and its suburb Hillport. In that
neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canal formed the western boundary of
the industrialism of the Five Towns. To the east rose pitheads,
chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists. To the
west, Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and
winding paths, mounted broadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood
Hillport Church, a landmark. Beyond the ridge, and partly protected by
it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fine and ancient
Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin
Clayhanger was now walking home. The fine and ancient Tory borough
provided education for the whole of the Five Towns, but the relentless
ignorance of its prejudices had blighted the district. A hundred years
earlier the canal had only been obtained after a vicious Parliamentary
fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in
canals a menace to its importance as a centre of traffic. Fifty years
earlier the fine and ancient borough had succeeded in forcing the
greatest railway line in England to run through unpopulated country five
miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it loathed the mere
conception of a railway. And now, people are inquiring why the Five
Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterised by a
perhaps excessive provincialism. These interesting details have
everything to do with the history of Edwin Clayhanger, as they have
everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred thousand
souls in the Five Towns. Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of
its sublime stupidity.
It was a breezy Friday in July 1872. The canal, which ran north and
south, reflected a blue and white sky. Towards the bridge, from the
north came a long narrow canal-boat roofed with tarpaulins; and towards
the bridge, from the south came a similar craft, sluggishly creeping.
The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for, in the way of
rain, that year was breaking the records of a century and a half.
Thirty yards in front of each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse
floundered its best in the quagmire. The honest endeavour of one of the
animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven who
heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs. The ragged
and filthy child danced in the rich mud round the horse's flanks with
the simple joy of one who had been rewarded for good behaviour by the
unrestricted use of a whip for the first time.
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