The Necropolis Railway js-1 Read online

  Instead of replying, the timekeeper carried on very carefully drinking his boiling tea. Meanwhile, his clock ticked. It was as if he liked the sound of it and wanted everybody else to pay close attention.

  'Stringer?' said the timekeeper, after about half a minute had ticked by. 'Yes, sir,' I said.

  'You're number one hundred and seventy-three,' said the timekeeper, and he stood up, gave me a disk, and sat back down.

  Well, he wasn't friendly, but he'd been expecting me at any rate; he wrote the time next to my name in the ledger while Vincent started booting the fender.

  'Will you be going off-shed?' said Mr Crook, without looking up. 'I don't think so,' I said. He wrote something else down in his book.

  I'm very sorry, Mr Crook,' I said, 'but what do I do with this?' Feeling like an ass, I held up the token. 'You return it to Mr Crook,' said Vincent.

  Thinking this a queer bit of business I started to give the token back to Crook, but as I did so, he cried, 'Not now, for Christ's sake.' 'You hand in the token at the end of your turn,' said Vincent. 'Come on, let's be off.'

  We turned towards the door – the fellow Vincent wanted me out of that spot for some reason.

  'Number one hundred and seventy-three,' said Crook, just as Vincent was pushing open the door. I looked back at him. "That makes you the new Henry Taylor,' he said, and both his eyebrows jumped. 'Who's he?' I asked.

  'Another bloke we had on' mumbled Vincent, who was holding the door open. 'And where is he now, Mr Crook?' I asked the timekeeper.

  'Interesting question, that is,' he said, getting a bag of shag out from under his little desk.

  'Nobody knows what happened,' said Vincent, 'and that's all about it.'

  The wind flying through the open door was playing havoc with the timekeeper's fire but the gentleman himself didn't seem to mind. I looked above the fireplace and there was a noticeboard with details as to special trains, signalling alterations, and an article about the weather torn from a newspaper: 'GOOD PROSPECTS FOR MACINTOSH TRADE,' I read.

  'That Taylor kid,' said the timekeeper, digging his pipe into the shag, 'well, at first – around the back end of August, it would have been – they thought he'd gone home, fearing himself not up to the mark for an engine man, but it's more likely if you ask me that he's gone to the bottom of the river.' 'What river, Mr Crook?' I said.

  The timekeeper looked up at me with a frown while his fire blew back and forth, and I remembered about London, which had a great many of most things but only one river.

  I did know that the timekeeper knew of Rowland Smith, and the peculiar circumstances of my coming to the London and South Western Railway, but I decided to say my piece: 'I'm from Yorkshire, Mr Crook,' I said, 'and this is my second railway start. I was on the North Eastern to begin with – not on the traffic side but portering.'

  But Crook was still thinking about the earlier matter, for he nodded in a vague sort of way, saying, "The Taylor kid… nineteen. Good-looking boy. I've heard the mother's half dead herself over what happened. She'll be crying over him at this present moment, if you want my guess.' And he turned to look at his clock, as if to make quite sure; then he picked up his tea and put it down again. 'It's one for Sherlock Holmes, if you ask me,' he said, and both his eyebrows went up again.

  As the timekeeper began lighting his pipe, Vincent had me out through the door, shouting, 'I'm taking him to the Governor, Mr Crook!'

  We started walking across a patch of sooty nothing between the timekeeper's room and the beginning of the tracks. 'There's a job waiting for that bloke making up shocks on the penny horribles,' said Vincent. 'He's bloody wasted here.' He stopped and looked at me, and said, 'What made you chuck portering up north? Or did you get stood down?' 'I wasn't stood down. I wanted to get on to the traffic side.'

  'I've heard of chaps leaving the railways,' said Vincent, 'and I've heard of a lot more that got the boot, but I never heard of anyone going from one territory to another like that.' Feeling suddenly glum at this, I thought: no, nor have I.

  I remembered how Dad, in high excitement, had gone to Whitby Library to look up Rowland Smith starting with the Peerage, but had not found him there or anywhere else. I had seen Dad that night drinking beer on his own, which was unusual and meant he was anxious.

  We started wandering across the windy greyness, and what met my view was familiar from the pages of The Railway Magazine but at the same time different. Two hundred yards to our right was a broken-down loco shed with about twenty roads going into it: I knew from my reading that engines went into there but they did not come out, for the Old Shed was a locomotive's graveyard. The tracks went into it on either side of something I hadn't read of: a house that must have been a remnant of earlier streets. It made a strange sight because, even though the windows were bricked up, smoke was racing from the chimney.

  Beyond the Old Shed was the New Shed, which was semi-round and a real gobstopper, with twenty roads fanning into it from two turntables. As I watched, two engines were chuffing into the grey haze that was around the shed, and two were chuffing out, heading away towards a horizon filled with black engines, more than anybody knew what to do with, just waiting, like some great army, for the work of the day.

  The New Shed was dark, except for holes in the roof where the daylight came shooting in, and the smell of coal and oil had me worrying about the burning feeling that came with each intake of breath. All around was the sound of coal smashing into locos from above, coal crashing out of them into the pits below. We walked along next to a row of fancy lampposts, all lit, that ran between two lines of engines, and it was like walking along a street except with locomotives instead of houses, and all sprinkled with glittering black. I could hear twice as many men pounding away as I could see, and then I solved the mystery: half of the fellows were working under the engines with candle ends to see by.

  Vincent led me to the top end of the shed, by which I mean the back of it, where there was a kind of black cricket pavillion with a name painted on the door: 'P. T. Nightingale, Yard Master'.

  'Governor,' said Vincent in an under-breath as we went in, 'and Governor's Clerk.'

  It was very bright and warm inside, with two fires going. There was a man in the corner with his back to me. He had an amazing quantity of white hair that looked like fleece, and was sitting at a high desk on a high stool and coughing. I could not help but think that if his desk wasn't so tall he wouldn't need such a high stool. Before me was another man sitting on a normal-sized chair at a normal-sized desk. He was also a more normal-sized fellow. He was wearing a brown bowler with no hair coming out from underneath, and he had a little face but very fiery; his head looked like the top of a match.

  He looked up at me, and Vincent pointed at him, saying, 'Give Mr Nolan the token.'

  Mr Nolan looked at it and called out, 'Number hundred and seventy-three,' at which the gentleman in the tall chair, still coughing, turned around. Mr Nightingale was a boozy-looking sort, and I thought: I'm standing in the red-faced room. But he was handsome all the same, and more of a hawk than a nightingale. Now Nolan was holding the token out towards me again. 'Take it back,' said Vincent.

  I was pretty tired of this token by now, but did as required. Then Vincent said to the Governor, 'I expect he'll be on general cleaning so I'll take him off to Mr Flannagan.'

  Vincent turned on his heel, but the Governor leant forward on his high chair, and it was like a signal moving to stop. His face was all twisted up. 'And who the hell do you think you are?' he said, 'the bloody District Locomotive Superintendent?' 'No,' said Vincent, with no question of a 'sir' to follow.

  I had not expected this kind of thing from Nine Elms men; I had expected them to be all one, like the Brigade of Guards.

  'You take him to stores, and find him a rule book,' said the Governor to Vincent, 'then take him to Flannagan, who can show him about, but his duties are to be set directly by me.'

  'He's not coming onto the half, is he?' asked Vincent, and I didn't kn
ow what he meant, but he said it in a peevish sort of voice that would have got him stood down immediately on the North Eastern.

  There was another long look between them. 'I will come down from here in a second,' said the Governor, 'and I will put you on your fucking ear.'

  This was not the way it should have been; it was not the way at all. Nolan the clerk came in quickly: 'Why do you want his duties to be set from this office, Mr Nightingale? Is there any particular reason for it?'

  'Bampton Twenty-Nine and Bampton Thirty-One,' said the Governor – at which Vincent cursed in an under-breath -'have not been coming off-shed to a standard of cleanliness befitting their special duties.'

  'I've been going at those of late,' said Vincent. 'I've had no complaints.'

  Ignoring this latest incredible remark coming from low to high, the Governor, looking at me, said, 'I'd like to see these two shining like thoroughbreds when they go to work, and I will arrange with the drivers of these locomotives for you to have a number of rides out on them. Is that clear?'

  It was not clear at all, but I nodded a 'Yes, sir' as the Governor began coughing once again. As soon as we were out of there I asked Vincent who Flannagan was: 'Charge cleaner,' he muttered, and I thought again of this Henry Taylor, and wanted to ask how a Nine Elms man could just go missing, but I could see that Vincent was sulking like a camel and not keen to say anything more. As I looked at him, he turned his back on me and began walking away between two lines of locomotives.

  I fished in my jacket pocket for the first of the letters from Rowland Smith, and viewed again the miracle that had brought me to this cold, crashing shed: 'I think I have the power to bring you on without resorting to the usual formalities… Testimonials will be required, however…' The letters fluttered in the icy breeze, looking suddenly very flimsy indeed. Noise was coming from all parts of the shed, like the banging of hundreds of broken pianos, yet for the time being there was not a soul in sight. Any idea that I had made a mistake – and a dangerous one at that – in coming to Nine Elms must on no account be allowed.

  Chapter Three

  Baytown It seems a horror to think of it now, so many years on, but the whole of my life is divided into the times before Rowland Smith came strolling along that platform at Grosmont, and the times after. 'Before' started in 1884, the year in which I was born, my mother died, and the railway came to Baytown.

  Baytown, which the gentry called Robin Hood's Bay, was just a few tall thin houses – a quiver of arrows on the edge of the sea – and if one dog barked, everybody heard it. Dad thought he was the cream of Baytown because he was a butcher and not a fisherman. He told me that the trouble with Baytown wasn't that it stank of fish but that it stank of fishermen, and perhaps that's why I started to like the trains, which called at this funny, fishy little town but didn't have to stay.

  If you stood on the front with your back to the sea you could see the train come across the top of the cliffs from Hawsker in the north, stop at Baytown, then head south to Ravenscar. Only two people watched them with me and the first was Crazy May, who was crazy, maybe because she had one eye lower than the other, and who all day long crushed crabs on the beach for the seagulls and couldn't remember whether it was the trains that were scared of the horses or the horses that were scared of the trains.

  The other was Mr Hammond, who had been a swell in his day but had made a mistake in London which was never to be spoken of, but had put him in Queer Street, so that he could no longer be in business. When I was tiny he took me on the train to the West Cliff marshalling yard at Whitby and we would watch a little 172-class cutting fruit and fish specials. That was the engine for me because it had a name: Robin. As we watched, Mr Hammond smoked cigarettes and told me the differences between a handbrake, an engine brake and a vacuum brake, and so on. He was very amiable considering I was just a kid. "The smoke box is at the front of the engine,' he would say, 'and the firebox is at the back.' He must have told me that hundreds of times before it sank in.

  Later on, Dad and I would ride the train to Darlington to watch the Atlantics flying down the main line. After every one that went past, I would look up at him and say, 'What about that, Dad?' and the poor fellow always had to think of something to say, for I had no mother after all.

  I had no aspirations to a life at sea; I did not want to be a butcher either. I would look at the letters on Dad's shop -'Stringer: Family Butcher' – and wonder what there was 'family' about it. I remember the barrels of ice in the cold room at the back and the fire in the shop at the front – those two always fighting each other, it wore me out to think of it somehow. My ambition instead was to be on the railways. I read everything I could lay my hands on that had for a subject trains, and had The Railway Magazine every month for 6d, which my Dad paid for because he thought it was improving. Not that he wanted me on the railways. Dad wanted me in his shop, but he changed his tune when myself and three other lads from Baytown were offered five bob each to build a bonfire for Captain Fairclough's firework-night carnival.

  Fairclough lived at Ravenhall, and the whole headland was his garden. The fire took a while to get up, but I was told it was still smoking on the seventh, and I expect that's why the Captain sent me a letter, having heard from one of the other lads that I wanted a start on the North Eastern. Fairclough had more connections than York station, and he said that he would be willing to write to the general manager of the North Eastern Railway telling him I was an eminently suitable person to go on.

  Now, if Captain Fairclough, who had done something at Khartoum and got the QMG for it, had suggested informing the Governor of Armley Gaol that I was a very good person for a fifteen-year stretch, then that would have been it as far as Dad was concerned: I would have been off. But he did still want me clerking in some way. 'I would prefer you in a post offering some prospect of advancement to stationmaster,' he would tell me, 'and I do not mean stationmaster at Robin Hood's Bay.'

  'But the fellow up there, Langan, has thirty shillings a week,' I would say, 'and with his coal auctions he does a lot better than that. They're not lawful, of course, but that's all right.'

  I would say things like that so as to tease Dad, and in hopes of making our pretty part-time slavey, Emma, start laughing, because then she was even prettier.

  Dad took to spending evenings in the back parlour with The Railway Magazine, and in the morning he might say, in a thoughtful sort of way, "There are twenty thousand bikes taken into Newcastle station every year.' 'I know that, Dad,' I would say. 'Who do you suppose is in charge of them?' "The bicycle booking clerk, Dad. Who else is it going to be?'

  'He would have to be quite a respectable party, looking after that amount of bikes.'

  I did not want to be a bicycle booking clerk, so I would give no opinion on that. I wanted to be a driver, and I knew I could do it. I'd practised on my safety bike by coming down Askrigg Hill without touching the brakes or without hands on the handles, and without a lamp if it was after dark. I secretly felt that I was built for high speed: my eyesight, I felt certain, was six-six, and I knew I had the lean looks of an engine man. But Dad got his way, and I applied to the North Eastern for something that would lead me into the clerical line all the same. I had my certificates, and my testimonial from that famous gentleman, Captain Fairclough, and my letter was very well greased: 'I feel that I am able to hold my own in a gentlemanly way… I am seventeen years old, and need scarcely say that I am a total abstainer…' (Which was true give or take the odd sip of dad's Sunday night jugs of ale).

  I was called to York by some johnnies in top coats who said there was a chance I could go on immediately as a lad porter at Grosmont, but first I had to answer such out-of-the-way questions as 'What is the difference between up and down?' I got my start the following week.

  Chapter Four

  Monday 16 November continued

  I asked a fellow where I might find Flannagan, the charge cleaner, and he just pointed to a whole row of huts at the top of the shed and walked
on. Then Vincent reappeared, coming around the corner of a long-boilered locomotive. 'All right, mate?' he said. 'You're still looking a bit lost.'

  He seemed in high spirits once again; he was a very changeable sort.

  'Come here, mate,' he said, and he showed me into one of the huts in the line. There was a thin stove, and a seat like a shelf going all around halfway up – and that was it, except for a lad who was pretty much all teeth.

  'This is where the firemen who do the half-link turns mess,' said Vincent. These words came out all of a tangle, and I hadn't untangled them before he went on: 'It's quite a decent spot,' he said, chucking his cap on the bench, 'except for this one thing. Have a good look about, and tell me what's missing.'

  'Well,' I said, 'any number of things are missing,' which made Vincent look put out, and the toothy kid go red and walk out of the door.

  "The main thing lacking in here,' said Vincent, who hadn't said a word to the toothy kid, 'is a kettle, and there is no kettle because there is no place to boil a kettle, are you with me?' Vincent knelt at the stove and flipped open the door, which fell down on its hinge and came to rest sticking out. 'So we put our billies on here,' he said. 'They take at least ten minutes to boil, and we do one at a time.'