Read Online Between Friends by Audrey Howard - Free Book Online

not yet finished.
    ‘I know a lot! I can read, can’t I, and Mr Hale takes all the latest magazines. It’s ten years now since it began so I’ve got to be quick …’
    ‘Tell us about it, Martin, please …’ Meg’s voice was humble, paying homage to his masculine knowledge and he lifted his head arrogantly.
    ‘You wouldn’t know what I was talking about, for God’s sake!’
    ‘Try us, go on, please.’
    They listened carefully, caught up in his own excitement, turning their heads and straining towards him as he explained the difference between steam and the internal combustion engine, talking incomprehensively about fly wheels and crankshafts and horsepower and valves until their eyes began to glaze. It was too technical for them, Martin could see that so he told them of the days, told to
him
by Mr Hale, not too long ago when Timothy Osborne (a gentleman of much power and wealth in Liverpool, related to their own Mr Hemingway) was one of the first to own an ‘infernal machine’ as they were then called and had caused a sensation in Dale Street by driving his vehicle at the speed of two miles an hour which was all that had then been allowed, the machine manned, as the law demanded, by three persons one of whom walked ahead carrying a red flag of warning! Horses had reared and ladies fainted and men had laughed. Yes, men had laughed but not now! Not when every man with the slightest conception of what internal combustion would one day mean to the world, men like himself, were about to launch it in the shape of the motor car and … yes … the flying machine, on the unsuspecting world! Every detail of motoring, it’s past and it’s future was of the utmost importance to him and although Martin Hunter knew he was barely scratching the surface as yet he was quick to see the possibility of the new ideas and his shrewd intelligence, more vital than the slower thinking Tom, had grasped and marvelled at what it would mean to their future.
    Those who owned carriages and rode horses could see no purpose in the ‘automobile’ for had not the railway opened up the country to anyone who cared to travel, providing he had the price of a ticket! They were hostile to the idea of the motor car. Where the railway line went so did people, freight, workers moving from one destination to another so what possible use was a motor car? The roads were not made for them, they said, roads meant only for the horse and carriage, for pedestrians and cyclists. Crops were ruined by the dust the machines raised and even washing hung out to dry in one’s own garden was spoiled! Dangerous, horrid, odious things, frightening everyone within a mile of them! That was the general opinion of most folk, including Mrs Whitley who had been no nearer to one of them than to the wild animals she believed they resembled, but already Germany and France, Italy and America were manufacturing them, taking the lead and surely, young Martin agonised, Britain – and himself – must soon catch up. And only by
learning
could he do it. Learning how to do it. Learning how to design and
make
the machines he loved, and to do that he must go back to school!
    He fell back on his heels and his dreaming eyes stared off into the far corners of the kitchen, to the far corners of the universe or wherever it was he must go to find whatever it was he sought, then he sat upright again and his face was bright, young, hopeful, boyish again.
    ‘Can I go, Mrs Whitley, can I?’

Chapter Four
     
    THE CITY AND port in which Megan Hughes, Martin Hunter and Tom Fraser lived was a flourishing one. It was a city of contrasts as the great merchants whose fortunes had been amassed by their forefathers in the early part of the previous century looked out from the splendour of their homes on Everton Brow across what had once been meadowland and marsh to the teeming streets, the bursting tenements of those not quite so fortunate; across the bustling dockyards and warehouses and the