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Warrington and Seddon Moss elders were not afflicted by the evangelical zeal of certain leading Mancunians, being newer converts to the creed of muck and money and having their way to make in the world before they became the patrons of libraries, art galleries, and soup-kitchens.
    Structurally Seddon Moss had been unable to adapt to rapid ex pansion. The houses of the older town still stood in the centre, crowd ing together like a company of beleaguered veterans assailed by naked savages. Beyond them, in an ever-widening circle, the new streets of back-to-back dwellings moved out like the ripples of a cesspit, a hundred or more to a block and sharing, perhaps, six communal privies that gave off a stench in summer capable of vanquishing that of the soap-factory and in winter overflowed and covered the stone setts with ordure. Cheshire farmers noticed something else on market days. The inhabitants themselves were changing. Whereas, not so long ago, they would have been indistinguishable from working folk in Northwich and Middlewich, they now had the manners and appear ance of an army of half-starved, semi-mutinous mercenaries living as best they could in the ruins of a pestilential citadel. Their GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 14
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    Fugitive in a Crinoline 1 5
    faces had grown narrow and pinched, and their eyes were the eyes of men and women who, at any time, and given the least provocation, would erupt and find pleasure in outrage. A proportion of them were not even whole but walked on twisted limbs, clubbed feet, and with hum ped backs. Others lacked fingers and occasionally you would pass a man with an empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder, so that the coun try stallholders found them increasingly alien and quick to take offence, particularly if they thought they were being short-changed. Because of this, especially since the big strike and lockout at Rawlinson’s, largest of the mills, a Seddon Moss market-day that had once been regarded by farmfolk as a weekly jaunt became a sally into an embattled area. Recalling the Manchester erup-tion of eleven years ago, when regular troops had been rushed in by train from London, and Preston and several constables had been lynched, men wondered what might happen if Sam Rawlinson’s obstinacy held out against his greed into the autumn and winter months, when bales of Georgian cotton cluttered every offloading bay and his operatives needed warmth as well as food. Bands of them were already roving the Cheshire hedgerows in search of berries and herbs, and the kitchen gardens, hen-roosts, and orchards of northernmost farms had been the scene of raids and forays. Mercifully, for the present, a brassy July sun beat upon the countryside. Under cloudless skies men could still hope, and starving children were not obliged to stay indoors.
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    About seventy yards south of the house Sam had instructed his Man chester architect to raise an artificial knoll and crown it with a summerhouse. The summerhouse did not face the woods, as one might expect, but the monstrosity that Sam Rawlinson had tortured from the hunting lodge that had stood there for the last century and a half, a two-storey building of red Cheshire brick, with a portico sup ported by two truncated Doric columns and a façade of tall windows, the lower section opening on to a verandahed terrace.
    The original hunting lodge, local men recalled, had been an in offensive building, but Sam Rawlinson, after buying out the last defunct partner of Seddon Moss Mill, had set himself to amend that. The monster that resulted from a marriage of Sam’s notions of domestic grandeur and the fumblings of an inexperienced architect was possibly the most eye-catching structure in the world, not excluding some of the new municipal townhalls that were being run up with cheap, ready-made materials made available by the new railway net work.
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    1 6 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N
    The renovated