Chapter 3: Chuck growing up

CHUCK- his account

I believe I have referred to Madame Grenouille before. She was the only other inhabitant of the Hartglade to open up to me and help me understand the regeneration I had experienced. Unlike other females, with averted eyes and bowed heads, she was a breath of fresh air, greeting all and sundry and known by everybody. I believe she observed me one day in the presence of Craggs, who was being his inimitable surly self. The next time I came across her she insisted that I take a coffee on the patio behind her premises. Believe me, when Madame Grenouille wanted something she generally achieved her aim.

I think she was astonished I was still residing at Craggs' since my arrival.

"But I'm his apprentice," I set out, as if that explained all.

"And he'll be taking advantage of you, I'll be sure," she responded.

I had to admit that was the case but under his tutelage I was learning so much and I defended him.

When did these conversations take place?

Starting my day's work so early at the bridge, by mid-morning I was ready for a break and often returned to town at about this time. I was there primarily for the purpose of organising new supplies with Craggs and discussing matters with the City Fathers. They were the only breaks I had from a sixteen or seventeen hour day.

Some two or even three times a week, when I returned to town from the gorge, I allowed Madame to distract me and clear my brain of charge-hands' queries and quantities, bridges and baking bricks, kilns and concrete and cranes and carts. I think she provided the only refuge I had and I always emerged into the street once more quite refreshed and recharged.

The gorge construction went on from daylight to dusk. Only then did we stop working on the bridge itself for safety reasons. That did not mean that work did not stop at night. The enormous temporary stockyard sorted out the next day's requirements. One thing I appreciated was that, even in the dead of night, teams of shire horses could amble along, finding their own way from the brickyard or the new cement works as if the route were marked by arc lights.

Before the first day's light, wagons were ready to be hitched up by new teams of horses to take them directly to the gorge site. During the daytime any viewer looking over the lip of the gorge would see that the half built structure was filled with hoists lowering pallets of bricks down to the working levels. Signalmen with flags were there, waving to demand the next load of a particular sort of brick, unmixed mortar or perhaps the ingredients brought for a dry mix of concrete.

Even Craggs stood by me one day and regarded the activity, "It looks as if you've disturbed an anthill down there." And believe me, I recognised the similarity. At the peak I had almost two thousand labourers under my command; on the bridge itself, in the stockyard, at the brickworks, digging clay, at the cement works and also acting as carters. The only way I could succeed in my task was by delegating each little part of the work to responsible senior labourers and following their progress very carefully, day by day, sometimes, hour by hour.

There is no way that such a large construction, particularly without the modern equipment of The Twentieth or Twenty First Century, could have been completed from conception to road surface within eighteen months. I'm sure that no small part of it is due to the willingness of the labour force to do anything that was asked of them.

It is a matter of great disappointment to me that two of them were killed by stupid accidents. Both of them fell to their deaths by meekly obeying the instructions of their supervisor. I was annoyed at the way many of them ignored my instructions to use their safety harnesses when they felt like it. That was always when they were engaged in a most difficult and dangerous bit of work. At one time I was undecided whether or not to withdraw the instruction because they were being disregarded. At another time I wanted to throw off the job, any supervisor who allowed it to happen on his gang. I quickly decided that if I did that, I would not had not have any gang leader left.

The men, themselves, regarded workers on such a large project as being dispensable. They brought with them the ideas induced during their induction. Nothing that happened to them since their arrival dissuaded them from holding Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries' concepts of the cheapness of a worker's life.

We made remarkable progress, finally reaching the top layers of brick on this side of the gorge. I thought I was due for a rest. No such luck. Now, I was commissioned to construct an approach road where the carts would not end up in axle-deep mud after a few months' wear.

I thought I was due for a rest.

The City Fathers began pressing me on another matter, "Once that bridge is open, we're going to have more travellers using the town centre. Main Street just can't cope."

I had read that at the turn of the Nineteen Hundreds one of the largest problems facing large cities such as New York and London was pollution. This was not smoke from coal fired factory chimneys but the product of horses. Horses? Yes, there was the threat of complete gridlock caused not so much by the number of horses and carts and horse-drawn omnibuses but their outpourings. Even though teams were delegated each night to clear the streets, the task was almost impossible to keep up with. Horse muck itself was going to stifle the growth of the cities.

I began to understand. You have only to just stand and watch a large stream of waste being pissed by mares and stallions alike as they waited for their carter or rider, to appreciate the problem. Again, their rear-end effluent just augmented the previous day's shit. Let's be brutally honest here, that is what it was.

I could see the problem. Not only that, but the town had been built up over the years around little more than wagon tracks. Under the smelly slime of urine that lay on the over-sodden mess there was nothing more than untreated mud. Perhaps now and again, over a hundred years, a cartload of stones had filled the worst potholes but the routes were nothing more than original tracks through grassland.

The matter being somewhat urgent, the City Fathers insisted, as if I had nothing else to do, on another project. I couldn't understand why they thought I had so much free time until Craggs commented, "All they see you doing is standing around scribing and scribbling on that paper you insisted that they make available. They rarely see you actually on the bridge as they used to."

"I'm on the bridge each morning at first light as I like to check the previous day's work with the gang masters and charge hands." My argument didn't wash with the City Fathers. It was only later that I understood that they had a bone of contention with me, though they said nothing. They believed that the provision of half a dozen reams of paper was wasteful and expensive. They couldn't see why it had anything to do with building a bridge!

Needless to say I had no choice but to take the matter in hand before the completion of the bridge.

Even so, I designed the next project and delegated almost every part of it. A few labourers were now becoming available as the bridge was in its last stages of completion. These men, I sent out to excavate the roads of the town to a depth of some three feet. I'm sure the top two feet primarily consisted of compacted horse manure.

It was here I co-opted the help of farmers. There was no farmer who would not willingly accept a cartload of horse shit and transport it away free of charge. In return, all the farmers were instructed to deep plough every available field which was not already planted.

Because of the shortage of labour, the girls from the orphanage were co-opted to follow each plough and search for every stone, large and small and throw it into the back of a following cart. If there is one thing about horses and carts that I appreciated, it is that in field work like this, the horse needed no guidance at all. For a slow-moving cart in my previous era, I should have needed the use of a tractor driver. Here, it only needed one fifteen-year-old girl, who was already delegated to pick up stones, to control the progress of a horse. There were but two commands necessary. The clicking of the tongue or the universal, "Gyupp," (short for Giddy-up) commanded the horse to move further up the field and a loud, "Whoa!" was cried out when the cart had progressed far enough to receive more stones.

Full carts could safely be left to the girls to take into town. These girls, I understood, apart from my interrupting their studies, learnt the practical necessities of life on the Frontier in this era. This included aspects of horsemanship, such as saddling, riding horses and harnessing working shires as well as basic horse-riding. They were all versed in driving carts with a pair of horses or ponies but larger teams were left to the men. Life on the Frontier was hard and physical, letting no man nor woman rest.

It was not unusual to see a young girl, I say young but I understand then none I saw outside the orphanage was younger than thirteen. She would be astride a saddled pony or, bareback, on a working shire perhaps returning it to its stabling. It bemused me at first that their skirts were wide enough to provide decency in such a position. Why did they not ride up, the skirts I mean? It was some six months before I discovered the reason. Females wore, not skirts, nor a dress, but some divided-legged item somewhat akin to pantaloons without a lower elastic leg band. I forget what they called them. Ah, 'culottes'! The name comes back to mind. It, or does one say 'they', were a garment that hung like a skirt, but were actually pants.

I discovered they were reason for their being adopted by the women. It was primarily part of the dignified female wear because they did not look like any male attire but enabled the females to ride and climb onto carts and conduct other physical work without revealing more than an inch of flesh above their boots. And that was only if their black socks happened to bunch down.

Ah, can't you tell I am not a writer? Have I said that before? I was about to describe the enormity of the next task imposed upon me by the City Fathers.

Again, according to them, I was nowhere in evidence when they searched me out at the site. Having completed half my day's toil well before they were out of bed, then it was up to the limestone quarry. Here I wasted many a day trying to find a suitable mix for the road surface. The ingredients; limestone and clay and some shales were used as a source for the alumino-silicate. After baking these naturally sourced materials in a kiln, the unfortunate labourers had the task of pulverising the clinkers consisting essentially of hydrated calcium silicates. The resultant powder was mixed with sand reclaimed from the floor of the gorge and the dry mix formed the cambered six inches of the road surface, well tamped down and rolled.

I could not believe the unpopularity that I engendered by closing the road for some four weeks or was it six? And what was worse, once I laid the top six inch course, no pedestrian walked on it if he valued his life. Whilst the road was closed, a couple of drizzle-laden misty days caused the concrete to slowly harden.

This was the same mixture used on the surface covering the bridge and on its approaches. Again, if I had not barricaded off both sides of the bridge to allow the road surface to set I would've had thousands of horses, oxen and carts trying to pre-empt the opening day. No way was I having my bridge ruined just for the sake of four or five days.

Yes, they started to call me, 'Mud Chuck' or 'Muddy Chuck' because I spent so much time assessing mixes of concrete. This to my simple minded critics was simply a mixture of mud. Of course my appearance in town had something to do with that. Invariably my clothes were covered with cement dust and sand. That, when covered with the regular mist of the late afternoon's drizzle, invariably soaked into my clothing like mud.

I was not present at the opening of the bridge. I had been up till five o'clock in the morning ensuring that everything was ready and that the cement-based road surface had hardened sufficiently. I saw that I had made the right decision in leaving a couple of hundred labourers on duty whose prime purpose was to deter the crowd of eager, ahead-of-time gorge-crossers. I had taken a lot of time over that particular mix, rejecting almost half the materials as being unsuitable for one reason or other. Perhaps the gravel was too irregular in size, the sand had bits of debris in it or the cement powder was not ground well enough. I also rejected more than one labourers efforts for not dry mixing enough before adding the water or making the mix too wet.of course nothing was wasted the rejects were used on the approach roads. There, anything was better than rutted mud.

My efforts paid off. That road surface lasted over the bridge for thirty years with little attention. And the repairs that were needed were caused by things like axles digging into the surface when a cartwheel collapsed.

I never managed to get another mix like it, the rest of my working life.

Yes, the morning of the grand opening, I rose at nine o'clock and went to saddle my horse, which was kept at the livery stables. Already most of the townsfolk had departed for the gorge. I simply sat down on a loose bale of straw and was distracted when the straw bale gave way. It reminded me of barn dances and country barbecues of my youth. All the locations had compressed rectangular blocks on which people sat. I took a moment's rest, trying to remember what I could of a baling machine and how it could be horse-drawn and the compressor powered from the turning axle as it moved up the field.

"So that's where you are?"

"The first man to be given the keys of the town and you were here sleeping off some of Carter's homebrew."

I must admit I probably looked as though I had been inebriated, but this was six o'clock in the evening and I still needed more sleep. In fact, the next week, I hardly rose from my bed, much to the annoyance of Craggs who had jobs piled up one after the other.

I couldn't understand the urgency but only later did I realise that it was he who knew my date of birth and my apprenticeship was due to expire when I was eighteen. He wanted to get as much work out of me as possible while I was under his guardianship and control. OK, it was not all selfishness on his part but he enjoyed playing the part of a slave-driver.

The contracts he delegated to me always had a small problem like that at Greenhill Mount Ranch, "Get your horse saddled and find old man Greenhill's ranch. You'll make for Hart Fork. His ranch is signposted just as you turn off on the new wagon trail where it hits the Deer Valley road. They'll be wanting a new crew hut for the wranglers."

Cragg snorted, "I don't understand it. They want to put thunder boxes inside. I don't know what the world is coming to." He'd been happy with the outside privy we used. It was far away from his small dwelling to ensure the odours didn't smell us out, even in the hot weather. I should be envious of those wranglers in the winter months when I had to traipse down on frosty nights for the last dump of the day. What was far worse, I knew, was the first visit of the morning when the temperature was at its lowest! You get out of a warm bed to traipse through icy frost!

He had not finished. Greenhill himself wanted an indoor privy but only after the system has been proved to work in the crew hut, "And then if you can get them working, you put one in the big house." It was a job the old codger would not normally have undertaken but his estimate allowed for an extraordinary bottom line; a scandalous profit! Crags was a wily old beast.

Two months later the Greenhill smelly cesspit, was no more, I had installed a septic tank and included some of the most up-to-date 'green' methods I had studied at College. I said nothing about that but it was simply assumed that I had worked out the systems for myself. I used two plants to eat the hard bacteria. All the outflow of surplus water which was still polluted again ran through reed beds to be cleansed so nothing in the water table was polluted.

While the disposal of the waste had been difficult to work through, I had assumed that the provision of water from a mountain string would be quite simple. The system was proven here. Underground pipes from the source were of slow-fired red clay, the joints sealed by the use of an extract from the marsh gumworzle plant. This also sealed the indoor pipes. The old timers helped here by detailing the correct texture of the gum. They also told me how the bamboo could be hollowed out and used. They explained how it could be bent around corners by being soaked in a complex mixture of local plants. When it was slowly worked to the correct angle, the resultant bend was hardened by the final immersion. This was achieved by dropping saltfennel into a ten minute dip of warmed water after an hour it could be fitted and a day later was as stiff as a rock, too hard in the saltfennel and the bend should crack.

Water never eroded or rotted this readily available 'bog bamboo'. It was used after the almost hollow interiors were cleaned out and drilled through. The straight runs were joined by larger diameter, threaded, bamboo connectors.

Though all these techniques had been used in various ways in the past, it was I who incorporated the known technology into one exercise. The only difference from modern plumbing was that the water was deposited into a holding tank in the cellar of the crew hut and then a simple hand pump raised it up to the ground floor level into the cistern above each thunderbox.

As a result of my success here and in the installation of a thunder box inside the ranch house my services were quickly reserved by the orphanage to install indoor sanitation there. The building was impossible to heat with the perpetual opening and closing of doors as up to three hundred young girls insisted on going for a wee in the coldest of weather. Why couldn't they use a guzunder? As far as I was aware most persons, not just the elderly, had a pot that they kept under the bed. In fact on my way to work, I saw many a man in his nightgown walking to his outdoor privy with a pot stretched out in his hand first thing in the morning.

I was so caught up in my long, tiring days that I have penned nothing here about my private life. My personal life! Working six days and sometimes seven days a week, I had no time for a life of my own. I will, however, give details of the immediate effects of the new bridge. The first was the great impact the influx of labourers had upon the town. Wages paid to Freemen were invariably spent at one of the new two new saloons or bars. I must say that there was a history of low wages but local businesses such as the new clothes' store benefitted from the influx. And it was no coincidence that the clothing shop opened up. Simonstone was not the only new entrepreneur and all appeared to thrive in the vibrant economy.

.

We too began to benefit, I could purchase a new pair of boots either at the emporium where the prices, I noticed, were lower or at Simonstone's who offered a wider choice.

Even before the bridge was open there was a queue of wagons; settlers. south of the River Long wanted to bring their produce in to sell and of course to buy trade goods. There were also a number of wagoner's queuing up with goods that had been ordered by the local traders. Our local saddler needed more paraphernalia in brass, and chainwork for the harnesses, particularly for freight teams. The local boarding houses needed, new supplies, in bulk, of linens and blankets, as did the, now two, hotels.

Small entrepreneurs had set up to cope for the demands of the great invasion of labourers; another saloon and a tent bar had been built. Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the bridge was the Emporium. Its turnover must have increased threefold during the influx. He had a new a second new competitor too, an ironmonger who had arrived attracted by the potential. He had commissioned three full wagons of ironmongery which were amongst the first to cross my bridge so I was told.

At the opening, there were, awaiting the crossing, on the other side of the gorge, eleven of the heaviest bullock carts each pulled by a team of six as well as smaller carts and buggies.

I don't think that the City Fathers were quite aware of the difference the bridge would make. They simply wanted to increase the trade a little. But in due time Hartglade certainly became a new trading centre and market town. In the past, Hartglade had always been by-passed by any ox carts or mule wagons. Traders and pioneers had been forced to make the long detour to cross the Long River.

I examined the map*, that the City Fathers used. It revealed the traditional Deer Valley Road running up the Valley of the Deer River. Alongside this, sometimes next to it, sometimes as far as a mile away, runs the railroad from Lush right up towards the Purple Mountains. Looking at the map, I could never see why Hartglade had been established where it was. If both rivers had not been in a canyon it was possibly an obvious place for a settlement as it was it was not very accessible being surrounded on two sides by the river gorges.

That roughly drawn sketch map showed how the old route of the Grand Trail bypassed Hartglade by thirty miles. This was the wagon trail which came up from Port Prairie or by the Deer Valley Road from Lush. Twenty miles or so to the west of Hartglade all the wagon trains branched off at Hart Fork and had to follow the Long River Valley up until they reached a crossing point. They then had a difficult mountainous trek to the most dangerous crossing of all, the Cataract River. After a very long detour, taking up to a week or more, they came back down the other side of the Long River but then branched off before they reached the Deer Road to take an easier route up towards Goats Croft. Here some wagons took the left fork up to Newland Territory whilst others regained the Deer Valley route, making for the Purple Mountains.