The Somme Stations Page 2

  But the story of the owl man had my attention for the present. He had worn the bird on his wrist, ‘like a watch’, and when asked what he was about had said the owl was his companion, and went everywhere with him.

  ‘I told him it was against the by-laws,’ Scholes was saying, at which Flower, who had the Police Manual on his knee, gave chapter and verse: ‘It’s against company by-law number eleven.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Scholes. ‘So the bloke … Which number did you say again?’

  ‘Eleven,’ said Flower. ‘No wait, that’s “Entering or Leaving a Train in Motion”.’ He turned the pages of the book. ‘Here we are: by-law fourteen. “Carriage of Animals in … a Carriage.” Let’s see what he would have been liable for.’

  ‘It makes no odds, since I don’t have his name and address,’ said Scholes.

  ‘Forty shillings maximum for a first offence,’ said Flower, ignoring Scholes, ‘or five pounds if he’s done it before.’

  ‘I never took his name,’ Scholes repeated. ‘I said to him, “You’ll get off at York, and you’ll walk quickly out of the station and you’ll not come back with that thing.” He said, “Will I now?” I said, “Yes, you flipping well will.” He said “Well how do you expect the owl to get back to Leeds?”’

  ‘It could fly,’ Flower put in. ‘It was a bird, after all.’

  ‘It was attached to his wrist by a leather strap.’

  ‘And what happened then?’ asked Flower.

  ‘He got off the train and went through the ticket gate.’

  The interesting part of their conversation was over, so I looked up from the cards and said, ‘Where’s the Chief?’ at which Scholes climbed off the desk. (The word ‘Chief’ was enough to make him do it.)

  ‘Old station, I think,’ said Flower.

  The old station, which was across the way from the new one, had been taken over by the military, and the Chief was very thick with that lot. I looked down at the papers relating to Read. Without paying attention to the detail of the case (he seldom did that) the Chief had expressed surprise that I’d arrested a bloke on this charge. ‘I’ve never run a fellow in for indecent exposure,’ he’d told me, seeming to take a pride in the fact, and the Police Manual did urge that the greatest care be taken in such cases, since ‘the charges are sometimes made by nervous or hysterical females on the most slender evidence’.

  Where Read had gone wrong was in exposing himself to the wife of an Alderman and the sister of the Chairman of the York Corporation Finance Committee, and there’d been nothing hysterical about that pair. They had testified that Read’s member had been clearly displayed but was ‘not in a state of tumescence’, which was an odd thing to say, as though the two were very experienced as witnesses in these sorts of cases, and usually the members were in a state of tumescence. (It was just the right word – I’d looked it up after questioning them.) But then again Read himself, a broken down man in the middle fifties, had had no answer to the charge. He’d left the Gentlemen’s, he told me, in ‘rather a hurry’. ‘Why?’ I asked him, and he kept silence for a long time before replying, ‘I wanted to go to the Post Office.’

  I stuffed the papers back in the pasteboard envelope. Read had exposed himself on the day the war started, and I wondered whether the two events had been related. There’d been some strange behaviour since August 4th, and the numbers of Drunk and Incapables on the station had practically doubled.

  I stood up and took off my suit-coat, which was something Scholes and Flower, being uniformed men, were not allowed to do – which perhaps served to remind them why they didn’t care for my company. Anyhow they both just then quit the office to go on station patrol. Scholes would take the ‘Up’ side, Flower the ‘Down’ (or the other way about), with many meetings for a chat on the footbridge. It was two-thirty on a hot, sleepy afternoon, and I had the place to myself.

  I stood in the office doorway with my coat over my shoulder, and watched a London train pull out of the ‘Up’. As it moved, it revealed the platform across the way, the main ‘Down’, which was crowded with sweating excursionists, shortly to depart for points north. In the first fortnight of the war, the station had been full of trippers returning home, breaking off from holidays because of the emergency, but now folk had started going away again, and the ones who’d come back and lost their holidays as a result felt daft. Buffets in brown paper and bottles of lemonade were being passed out among the excursionists – all adults but they looked like a school party, excited at getting their grub. Half of them didn’t know which way to face to look for the train. As I watched them, I saw Old Man Wright, the police office clerk, moving at a lick through their ranks, making for the footbridge and looking like he meant business. I knew then that something was up; that somebody would be in bother, for Wright fed on the misfortunes of others.

  I turned aside from the door, closed it, retreated back into the office in spite of the heat (I was trying to banish the image of Wright, I suppose). For some reason, I walked over to the office notice-board. A photographic portrait of Constable Scholes had been pinned there. Why? I had no notion. It was not official; he was not in uniform. Perhaps he thought it flattering, and had put it up for swank. Or had someone put it there as a joke? I looked at the face, considering: moustache went down, eyes went down; hair went across, but Scholes had a very droopy face all told. Next to it was a detail of a York Temperance Society meeting and that I knew for a surety was a joke. Below this was a photograph of the new shooting range at the Railway Institute Sports Ground off Holgate. The targets were marked by signs reading ‘25 Yards’, ‘50 Yards’, ‘100 Yards’. Next to the hundred yards target, a man was lying down – ‘reclining’ as they say in photographs. It was as if he’d just scored a row of bullseyes at the hardest target, and had earned himself a good rest. This of course had been posted up by the Chief. He was always trying to get us to take up shooting – and now most of us would be doing just that, whether we liked it or not. A little further down was a card advertising a chamber concert at the Institute: Miss Leila Willoughby would be playing the violin, which took me back to Scholes. This musical notice was his doing; he played the flute. He was ‘artistic’, hence the droopy face. Flower ought to have been the artist, with a name like his, but of the two he was the better man in a scrap, and would bring in the Drunk and Incapables on his own, whereas Scholes would whistle for assistance.

  I heard bootsteps from outside; the door banged open, bringing in the noise of a train whistle, traces of a hot black cloud, and Old Man Wright. I distinctly recall thinking: there’s a bloody great empty space in the middle of this notice-board, when Wright leant over my shoulder and fixed a notice into that very spot with a single pin. I read:

  PROPOSED FORMATION OF A NORTH EASTERN RAILWAY BATTALION

  In order to meet the case of those who would prefer to enlist among men whom they know, application has been made to Lord Kitchener for authority to enrol a North Eastern Railway Battalion of his new Army, and if sufficient support is given it is hoped that sanction will be obtained. The Directors feel that many men who might otherwise hesitate to serve among strangers would be prepared to join such a battalion.

  All trained men 45 years of age and under and untrained men 19 to 35 years of age should apply to their District Officers for full information.

  ‘Bugger,’ I said, and Wright gave out a single bark of laughter. I now did turn about, and he was watching me with a kind of smirk.

  ‘Actually, I’d been hoping the Company would form its own unit,’ I said.

  Wright pulled a face, as if to say: ‘Don’t come it.’

  ‘You’ll be training at Hull,’ he said. ‘They’ve commandeered Alexandra Dock.’

  I figured the docks at Hull, and could picture nothing but rain.

  Wright himself was out of it, of course, being in the middle sixties, as was the Chief. The difference was that the Chief resented the fact. The first Kitchener appeals posted up about York had asked for men aged up to thirt
y, which had put me out of it as well, since I was thirty-two, but the Chief had offered – with no prompting on my part – to write me a special letter of recommendation to get round the difficulty. That would not now be necessary, since the War Office seemed to be raising the upper age limit by the week.

  ‘I must do my duty,’ I said to Old Man Wright, ‘England’s in peril.’

  ‘Too bloody true,’ he said, sitting down at his desk and unfolding that day’s edition of the Yorkshire Evening Press. His head was grey, bald and too small – like a turkey’s head, which he now began moving from side to side.

  ‘A hundred and sixty-three killed …’ he said. Looking up at me, he added, ‘Over four thousand wounded … Peer’s son dies of wounds received at Mons,’ he was saying as I quit the police office.

  According to the Yorkshire Evening Press, we kept thrashing the Germans; they kept reaching ‘the limit of their effort’, and yet our men would keep dying. Something was amiss – the Chief had told me as much himself.

  I decided to scout him out, and as I stepped out onto platform four, a train came in and I caught a small shower of condensed steam. Our little girl, Sylvia, had a word for this: a ‘train cloud’. Not a rain cloud, but a train cloud. She was clever with words. The fireman, leaning off the footplate, gave me a grin, which might have been by way of apology. I gave him a wave back anyhow. Footplate men were in reserved occupations, so he could afford to smile.

  A man sat on a baggage trolley outside the First Class waiting room. His suit told me he wanted to be in there but wasn’t up to the mark. He too read the Press, and I saw: ‘The War Will Not Make Any Difference to Dale and Dalby’s. They Have Started Their Summer Sale’. The London train was unloading on my right side as I walked. A scruffy porter brought down a tin trunk rather roughly from a First Class carriage, and the man standing in the doorway, topper in hand, called out, ‘Be careful with that piece!’

  I knew that porter – name of Bernard Dawson – by reputation. He was from down south. He was evidently fond of a glass of wallop, and his face was crumpled in such a way that you could tell he was a cockney just by looking at him. Also his moustache was famous on York station. It was hardly there. It was as if he’d drunk some brown Windsor soup about a week before and not washed since. The Night Station Master, Samuels, had a campaign against it, said it put off the passengers, that Dawson should either shave or let it grow out. But Dawson paid no mind. He was his own man. That said, he didn’t take against the man with the topper.

  ‘Sorry, guv,’ he said.

  Topper hadn’t heard him, since he was being pestered by his wife in the carriage doorway: ‘But I want a change of magazine’, she was saying.

  Ahead, and to the left of me, two engines stood alongside each other at the bay platforms, three and two. One of the North Eastern’s 4-6-0s and one of Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway’s of the same wheel arrangement. A lad looked on, comparing them. I’d seen him about; I believed he was a cleaner in the North Shed, an aspirant driver as I’d once been myself. The first engine – ours – was not over-clean, whereas the other gleamed.

  I nodded at the kid, saying, ‘I reckon the Lanky’s shown us up there.’

  ‘That’s just what I was thinking,’ said the lad, and he coloured up, being a loyal company servant. Beyond him, I saw two gangers or platelayers entering the station from the south end: two blokes who looked like gypsies – dark, and long-haired; they were railwaymen, but dressed anyhow, in old corduroy suits. That was one privilege of the permanent way men; another was that they could enter a station by walking on the tracks. There weren’t too many besides those.

  I walked through the ticket gate, with hands in pockets. It was something to be able to saunter in and out of the principal traffic centre of the North without needing a ticket; it was something to be a three pound ten a week man set fair for promotion to inspector. It was something, but not enough. I had been growing bored, and the thought of fighting in a war excited as well as scared me. For much of the past few years, I had lived a quiet life under the iron station arches, like Jonah sleeping in the belly of the whale.

  I crossed in front of the bookstall. ‘A Railway Battalion’ I read, on the board advertising that day’s Press. I walked through the booking hall, with the ticket windows on each side. The glass above was cleaner here, there being no engines, and the light was bright blue. This was the clean side of the station – and filled at all times with the echoing voices of the ticket clerks, who had to shout through the ‘pigeon holes’ in the window glass.

  ‘First Class return?’ I heard a clerk calling out to a man in a dinty bowler. ‘That’ll be four pounds ten and six!’

  Dinty bowler turned his head aside, thinking it over.

  ‘Maybe not, eh?’ the ticket clerk yelled through the glass.

  Beyond him, in the hot darkness of the booking office, I saw the ticket office deputy superintendent. I saw him in profile. He was not shouting, but smoking a pipe and staring into the middle distance. He was of an age with me but looked older; a little overweight, freckled, with wavy red hair – and quiet natured, evidently something of an intellect. He’d once said something about Homer, the ancient Greek, and so the ticket clerks all called him ‘Oamer’. I couldn’t recall his right name. Would he be going off to fight? He was the wrong shape for a soldier, and that was fact.

  I walked on towards the booking hall doors, which were all propped open for ventilation. Beyond lay the rushing trams and cabs and the high, blue sky of York. I made for the middle doors, and there I coincided with the Chief, who was coming in, but before I could speak to him, the station runner came up. The runners were generally just ‘The Lad’, but the better – or better liked – ones would graduate to a name, and this one was William, and was famed for the speed with which he charged about the place. He handed the Chief an envelope, and the Chief hardly looked at it, but asked William, ‘You’ve seen about the battalion?’

  ‘Signed up this morning, sir,’ said William, and he was out through the doors. The Chief and William, I recalled, had a special connection, William being in the Riflemen’s League, and an enthusiast for military matters generally, as you could tell by his highly polished brass buttons and his keenness on calling blokes ‘Sir’.

  ‘Isn’t he too young?’ I asked the Chief.

  ‘How old is he?’ asked the Chief, in a sort of daze.

  ‘I believe he’s seventeen,’ I said.

  The Chief now glanced down at the envelope he’d been handed. He seemed miles away, as he frequently did.

  ‘They’ll ask William his age,’ said Chief, tearing open the envelope. ‘If he says he’s seventeen … they’ll ask him again.’

  ‘But what about his height?’ I said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘He’s too small. He’s never five foot three.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said the Chief, looking over the letter. ‘Have you fucking measured him?’ he added, looking up. Which question was immediately followed by another: ‘Can you ride a horse?’

  ‘Who? Me?’ I said.

  ‘Aye,’ said the Chief, thoughtful-like, reading again.

  What in buggeration was he on about?

  ‘I’m signing up for the new battalion,’ I said, although I knew my thunder had been stolen by the news that young William had already done it.

  The Chief nodded as he lit a new cigar. In the past month he’d given up his little ones and moved to a bigger size – Marcellas, one and six a go – just as though he was celebrating the coming of the war, the return to a man’s normal state of existence. In his own day, the Chief had risen to sergeant major. He’d fought in Africa in the 1880s; chasing the mad Madhi and his still madder dervishes across the Sudan, or being chased by them, it made no bloody difference to the Chief. I figured him in the desert: red headed (he would have had a little more hair in those days), red skinned and red coated, picking off the fuzzywuzzies with his Winchester rifle in 122 Fahrenheit.

 
‘If you join the Military Mounted Police,’ said the Chief, glancing down at his letter, ‘they’ll teach you to ride a horse.’

  ‘Is that what the letter’s about, sir?’

  (I would ‘sir’ the Chief occasionally.)

  ‘All railway police are encouraged to go into the Military Police. I’m to report back on the progress of my recruiting,’ the Chief said, tearing the letter clean in two, and folding the pieces into the top pocket of his tunic. I knew that the Chief did not consider the Military Police to be true soldiers.

  ‘You stick with the railway boys,’ said the Chief. Then, ‘Fancy a pint, lad?’ and I knew that was the nearest I’d come to my congratulations.

  We walked out of the station, turned right, and climbed Station Road. On the right was the new station, on the left the old, the connecting tracks running beneath. In the sidings around the old station, the remnants of smoke hung in the heat haze. Some big freight had lately pulled out. A couple of rakes of horse wagons stood unattended, and a long line of wagons of a sort I’d never seen before – a special type of low loader – extended from under the station glass. I saw no soldiers just then.

  ‘What’s going off there?’ I asked the Chief.

  ‘Secret, lad,’ said the Chief. But then he added, ‘They loaded five tons of Lee Enfield Mark Threes this morning for immediate dispatch to France.’

  I looked behind. Oamer, the ticket office number two, was walking up the road in his steady, thoughtful way, with his coat over his shoulder, and puffing on his pipe, like a steam-powered man.