The Marbeck Inn: A Novel

CONTENTS


IT falls to some to be born, as they say, with a silver spoon in their mouths, and the witty have made play with the thought that the wise child chooses rich parents.
Sam Branstone lacked the completeness of that wisdom. He was born in one of those disconsolate streets of Manchester down which the stranger, passing by tram along a main road, hardly more delectable than its offshoots, looks and shudders; but was born with this difference from the many—that he was son to Anne Branstone, a notable woman, and wisdom may be conceded him for the discrimination of his choice.
If, however, it was Anne who gave him birth and started him in life, it was Mr. Councillor Travers who set him on his way from the mean street of his birth and started his career, and the circumstance which led to the intervention of Mr. Travers was due, not to Anne, but to the occupation of Tom Branstone.
Sam’s father, Tom, was a porter at Victoria Station, Manchester, and there was just time between morning and afternoon school for young Sam to snatch a meal himself and to carry his father’s dinner to him in a basin tied up in a bandanna handkerchief. In those days Victoria was an open station and a favourite dinner-hour lounge with boys from the neighbouring Grammar School. The attractions were partly the trains, partly the large automatic machines which delivered a packet of sweet biscuits in return for a penny. First one lunched frugally on the biscuits and pocketed the balance of one’s lunch allowance to buy knives and other essentials, then one savoured the romance of a large station from which trains went to Blackpool and to the Yorkshire moors. Often one saw sailors on the through trains from Liverpool to Newcastle. One found secluded ends of platforms and ran races with luggage trucks. One was rather a nuisance, especially when one wrestled hardily at the platform’s giddy edge and a train came in.
Sam, as a porter’s son, was on the other side of the fence. He did not lark at Victoria Station, and took his opinions of those who did from his father, adding, perhaps, a touch of jealousy against these chartered libertines who wore the silver owl upon their caps of dual blue.