The Last Train to Scarborough Read online

  The Last Train to Scarborough

  Andrew Martin

  First published in 2009

  by Faber and Faber Limited

  3 Queen Square London WCIN 3AU

  Typeset by Faber and Faber Limited

  Printed in England by CPI Mackays, Chatham

  All rights reserved

  © Andrew Martin, 2009

  The right of Andrew Martin to be identified as author of this work

  has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-0-571-22969-7

  For all the people in the Quiet Carriage

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank, in no particular order: Roy Lambeth of the Durham Mining Museum; the World Ship Society and especially Mr Roy Fenton; Drene Brennan of the Postcard Club of Great Britain; Dr E. M. Bridges of the Museum of Gas and Local History at Fakenham, Norfolk; Tony Harden of the Railway Postcard Collectors' Circle; Andrew Choong, Curator of Historic Photographs and Ships Plans at the National Maritime Museum; Mr N. E. C. Molyneux of the National Rifle Association; Adrian Scales of the Scarborough Railway Society; Sue Pravezer, QC; Clive Groome of Footplate Days and Ways; Rod Lytton, Chief Mechanical Engineer at the National Railway Museum and' Karen Baker, librarian at the Museum.

  All departures from historical fact are my responsibility.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  PART TWO

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART THREE

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  As I awoke the thought came to me:' Where has Scarborough got to?' and it caused me a good deal of pain. I knew I was near coal - too near. I was on it. Or was it a great black beach, for I heard waves too? There was darkness above as well as below, but not quite complete darkness above, for I could make out thin strips of light. Each thought caused me a blinding pain behind the eyes and I did not want any more to come.

  I inched a little way to the left, and the coal smell was stronger. It disagreed with me powerfully, and I saw in my mind things to do with coal and burning as the nausea came on: a locomotive moving coal wagons in an empty station that ought to have been packed with holiday-makers; a man making coal-gas tar at the works on the Marine Parade at Scarborough, and evidently doing it for his own amusement, for he was the only man in the town. A storm approached across the black sea behind him.

  I saw the booklet that gave directions for use of an incandescent oil lamp - it gave sunshine at night through a red shade, one hundred and twenty candles - and I saw smoke over Scarborough, and further general scenes of that sea-side town in the hour before the lamps are lit: the funicular railway closed and not working; the locked gate at the entrance to the underground aquarium and holiday palace. I figured an orchestra locked inside there along with a troupe of tumblers, and a magician who was the wonder of the age but nevertheless troubled by a leaking kettle.

  I saw the harbour of the town with the boats at all angles, as though they'd been dropped in only moments before, and were still struggling to right themselves.

  I saw a public house with a ship's figurehead on the front, a marine stores, the sign reading 'All Kinds of Nets Sold' lashed by waves ... and nobody about. I pictured the great hotel - I could not recall its name and knew it would cost me pain to try and do so. I saw the high, windowless wall to the side, streaked with rain - the place was a prison viewed from that angle. I heard a great roaring of water on the other side of that wall. Flags flew from what might have been flagpoles at the top or might have been masts, and in my mind's eye the monstrous building slid away from the Promenade, and began bucking about on the dark sea.

  These scenes were mainly without colour, but then some colour came, and it was wrong, too bright, done by hand: a red baby in a sky-blue cot set in a yellow room. That baby was on a post card - that was its trouble, and at the thought my stomach lurched fruitlessly while the head-racking pain redoubled. I moved on the coal and the same convulsion came again, only worse. My stomach was trying to do something it could not do. I thought of a short cigar taken from a cedar-wood box. It was a little dry. But what was dry? Box or cigar? At any rate the room containing the cigar was too hot, yet how could it be, for it was part of heaven? No, not quite heaven. A voice echoed in my head: 'It's turned you a bit bloody mysterious, this Paradise place.' Paradise. Somehow, a secret file was involved, a pasteboard folder containing papers that everybody looked at, and yet it was secret. I saw a jumble of razor blades, a fast-turning dial on what might have been a compass, but surely ought not to have been. My mind could hold ideas and pictures but could not make the connections between them.

  I looked up again at the light strips. I raised my arm towards them, and they were a good way above the height of my hand. My arm wavered and fell; it was not long enough, and that was all about it. I was perhaps underneath the floorboards, in some species of giant coal cellar, and this notion came with a new sensation: a fearful sense of eternal falling. Some of my memories were coming back to me, and coming too fast. I closed my eyes on the great coal plain and raced down, down, down.

  Chapter Two

  And there in place of Scarborough was the city of York, or the outskirts thereof: our new house, 'the very last one in Thorpe- on-Ouse', as our little girl, Sylvia, used to say, the house that put off the beginning of open country. It was evening - early evening, spring coming on; a kind of green glow in the sky, and I sat in my shirt sleeves and waistcoat. They had been ploughing in the fields around the village, but I'd not seen the work carried on, for I'd passed all day in the police office in York station.

  I sat on the front gate with Sylvia, and our boy Harry. They both liked to sit up high - well, it was high to them, Sylvia especially, and I had my arm around her to stop her falling, which she didn't like. Not the falling I mean, but the arm. She wanted to sit on the gate unsupported like Harry, who now pointed along the lane, saying, 'Here he comes', and old Phil Shannon, who lit the lamps in Thorpe-on-Ouse and at Acaster Malbis, was approaching on his push bike, with the long lamplighter's pole held at his side. I fancied that it was a lance, and Shannon a sort o
f arthritic knight on horseback. He leant alternatively left and right as he pedalled, like a moving mechanism, some species of clockwork.

  'You could set your watch by him,' I said, as he came to about three hundred yards' distance from us.

  'You could not,' said Harry. 'It's twenty past six. Last night he was here at five past.'

  'Take your arm away, father,' said Sylvia.

  I removed my arm, and we watched Shannon come on.

  'He looks all-in,' said Harry.

  'Well, we're the last house he does,' I said.

  'I know that,' said Harry. (He was a bright boy and it seemed that he knew most things of late.)

  'I think it's ever so nice of him to come all this way,' said Sylvia, who then tumbled forward onto the cinder track that ran under the gate. She was quite unhurt, and climbed straight back up, saying, 'Don't worry, my pinny's still clean.' It was clean on, and she knew she'd catch it from her mother if it got muddy.

  'It's not nice,' said Harry. 'He's paid to do it.'

  'Keep your voice down,' I said.

  'Why?' said Harry. 'It's fact.'

  As Mr Shannon came up, we all said, 'Good evening, Mr Shannon,' and he growled out a 'Good evening' in return, which tickled me. He wasn't over-friendly, except when he'd a drink taken, but even he couldn't ignore a greeting from three people at once. He was an idle bugger into the bargain, and remained on his bike as he lifted the pole up to the lonely gas lamp on the standard over-opposite.

  'Does he bring the flame on the end of the stick?' asked Sylvia.

  'You know very well he doesn't,' said Harry.

  'There's a hook on the end of the pole,' I said. 'He uses it to push a switch. That sets the gas flowing. Then he pulls a little chain with the hook, and that ignites the gas.'

  'Let's watch,' said Sylvia, as though what I'd just said wasn't really true, and needed to be proved.

  We watched, and when he'd done, Shannon circled on his bike in the pool of white light that he'd made, and set off back for Thorpe and, if I knew him, the Fortune of War public house.

  'I love Mr Shannon,' said Sylvia as he wobbled off between the wide, darkening fields.

  'He's quite useful about the village,' I said.

  'That's exactly what I mean,' said Sylvia.

  'He hasn't changed the water in the horse trough for a while,' said Harry. 'It's all green.'

  'How does he take the old water out?' asked Sylvia.

  'Harry?' I said, turning to the boy. 'How does he do it?'

  Harry watched the gas lamp for a while, keeping silence.

  'Not sure,' he said, after a while.

  'Perhaps he drinks it,' said Sylvia, and she gave a quick little smile.

  'That might not be far off the mark,' I said, thinking of Shannon sinking his nightly five pints of Smith's.

  We turned and walked back to the house, across our land, which we called 'the meadow'. It smelt of cut grass just then because I'd gone at some of the taller stuff with a scythe in my work suit only an hour before. The house was a long cottage, half tumbled-down, but it was big, getting on for three times the size of our old place on the main street of Thorpe. You could look at it as a terrace of three with a barn or, with a bit of knocking-through, it would be one good-sized cottage with built-on barn.

  We lived in four rooms at one end of it, but the whole thing was ours, and on the day we'd moved in the wife had turned to me in our new parlour and said, 'Well, Jim, we've got on!

  She was before the house now, beating a Turkey carpet that hung from the washing line. I had never seen that carpet before, but the house had come furnished, and the wife was turning new things up every day.

  'I still can't believe it's our house,' said Sylvia as we came up.

  'Well, you can thank Mr Robert Henderson for that,' I said.

  'He must really like us,' said Sylvia.

  'He really likes mother,' said Harry, and I eyed him as we stopped to watch the beating of the rug.

  It was true enough.

  I watched the wife beating away. With each stroke, a wisp of her brown hair flew forwards, and she pushed it back behind her left ear. But her left ear was too small to keep it in place. You'd think she'd have worked that out after thirty years. As she went at it, the colour rose in her face - not to redness, but a dark brown. I had often wondered whether there might have been a touch of the tar brush in the wife's family, to account for the blackness of her eyes, and the brownness that went all the way down. I thought of Harry's paper, The Captain, which he had on subscription every week, and how one of the stories was 'Tales of the Far West'. There were Sioux Indians in these tales and at odd times a Sioux squaw would appear, supposedly a different one every time. But all of them looked like Lydia.

  'Feel free to just stand there gawping,' she said. 'Harry, you'll take the water up for your sister's wash.'

  Harry went off to the copper in the scullery. He was good about helping around the house. His main job was to look out for his sister. Their bedrooms were both at the end of a long corridor, over the top of the in-built barn, and this made Sylvia nervous, even though it was these two rooms that had decided us - or decided the wife - to rent the house from Henderson at the knockdown rate of seven shillings a week. It was the view over the fields that had done it. There was a gas mantle in the corridor between the two rooms, and Sylvia believed that it was kept on all night. But this was because she had never yet been awake beyond eight o'clock. In fact, Harry was under orders to come out of his room and switch it off at nine, after his hour of reading, which was often more than an hour.

  The children went off through the opened front door, and I said to the wife, 'I'm not sure you should be beating that carpet with washing still on the line.'

  I said that just to see the look she would give me, but she didn't take the bait. Instead, still beating, she said, 'Mr Buckingham has been riding the railway again.'

  'Oh Christ,' I said.

  'On his departure from the station -'

  'Which station?'

  'Any station ... He found that the carriage door had been left unfastened by the company's servants ...'

  'Which company?'

  'You won't put me off... Mr Buckingham endeavoured to fasten the door himself, and...'

  Mr Buckingham didn't exist but I could picture him quite easily. He had pop eyes, a red face, and a thin moustache; he looked permanently put-out and was always ready to fly into rage. He was smartly dressed, in clothes often dirtied by the negligence of whatever railway company had the ill-luck to carry him, according to terms and conditions that might or might not have been correctly set out or somehow indicated on the backs of their tickets. He carried a portmanteau (containing valuable items) which was regularly mislaid or damaged by the company's servants. Everything he did was reasonable, or reasonably foreseeable, or so he said, and everything the company did was unreasonable, or so he also said.

  'In endeavouring to fasten the door,' said the wife, who had now left off beating the carpet and was enveloping herself in linen as she took down the laundry, 'Mr Buckingham injured himself -'

  'Seriously, I hope.'

  'And he is contemplating suing. What are his prospects of success?'

  The wife said that last part with two clothes pegs in her mouth, and she now walked to the laundry basket, which was over by the chicken run.

  'This is something to do with Adams versus the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, isn't it?' I said.

  'It might be,' the wife said, as she dropped the white sheets into the basket. Some of them went in, and some went onto the bit of cinder track that skirted the chicken run.

  'Oh heck,' said the wife.

  She was no great hand at housework, but she knew more about An Introduction to Railway Law by Harold Andrews - in which the adventures of Mr Buckingham featured - than I did myself, which was a bad look-out, since I was the one about to be tested. She picked up a tea towel that had missed its mark, and tried to brush off the muck.

>   'I'd say that was reasonably foreseeable,' I said.

  'I forgot to mention', said the wife, standing upright again, and turning to me, 'that Mr Buckingham attempted to close the door while the train was in motion, and that there was a sign fixed to the door expressly forbidding opening or closing it while the train is moving.'

  'Right,' I said.

  '... which Mr Buckingham didn't see.'

  'Had he been drinking, by any chance?' The wife glanced anxiously down again at the basket, looked up at me, and brushed her hair behind her ear.

  'Come on, Jim,' she said. 'You're supposed to know this.' And her hair fell forward.

  Chapter Three

  Now York retreated at a great rate, and I was back in the coal cellar, which was now rising bodily at speed. I was not rising in it, for the floorboards remained the same distance from my face. I would be sick at the peak of the rise, I knew; but when the peak was reached and the next fall began, I changed my idea: I will be sick at the lowest point of the fall, I decided, but instead I turned my head, finding once again a kind of coolness on the coals, and an easing of the pain in my head as York came back.

  There came first scenes of the kind I'd once seen at the Electric Theatre with the wife: the great cathedral, the gates of the city wall, only the pictures were not moving, just as they had not moved at the Electric Theatre, except for scenes of the river Ouse - or some such moderately wide and dirty river - meant to suggest the passing of time. That had not been enough for the wife, who had leant across to me, and said, 'Two shillings for this, it's a swiz.' But the scenes showed that York was an important place. Important and beautiful, and I ought not to have left it for Scarborough.

  I saw in my mind's eye the mighty station waiting as the trains waited within it, the notable churches of the city, and some of the very old buildings of the centre. I saw a display of the new electric trams, and then I was with the newest of them all, following the newest route of all. The side of it said 'Singer's