The Blackpool Highflyer js-2 Read online

  The excursionists were coming forwards now: Sunday suits, boaters and caps: faces frowning at having stopped somewhere short of Blackpool. They all wore the white rosettes and looked like supporters of a football team that had no name. Reuben was following behind, and he was reading a book as he came.

  'What's Reuben up to?' I asked Clive, still feeling shaken and not seeing things aright. 'He's never reading a book, is he?'

  'Looks like it,' said Clive. 'I'll tell you what, it must be a bloody good one.'

  But then it came to me that the book must be his guard's manual.

  The excursionists got to us first, hot and dusty from the track ballast. They all looked at the grindstone for a while.

  'Who put that there?' said one of them.

  Clive looked at me and rolled his eyes, before turning to the excursionist. 'Wreckers,' he said.

  'You the driver?' said another excursionist, pointing to Clive.

  'Depends,' said Clive. He was reaching into his poacher's pockets, taking out one of his little cigars. 'You're not going to start yammering on about being given a rough ride, I hope. We had all on to stop in time.'

  'Daresay,' said the first excursionist, 'but Mr Hind's not going to be best pleased.'

  Just then, Reuben came up with his book – it was his guard's manual. 'Stoppage or failure of engine?' he said, looking up from the book.

  You could tell the excursionists couldn't quite credit this, but they shuffled out of the road in any case, to let Reuben see the millstone.

  'Obstruction on the line,' I said.

  'Then it's wrong page,' said Reuben, and there was a bit of cursing at this from the excursionists. Blackpool was waiting, and they were watching an old man read a book in the middle of a meadow.

  Beyond Reuben, Martin Lowther was walking towards us in his gold coat, and behind him came the only man in the field wearing a topper. That had to be Hind himself, or was it Hind's father, for he was getting on in years.

  Reuben licked his finger and turned over a few leaves of the manual. '"Should any part of the train in which the continuous brake is not in operation -" No, that's not it.'

  There were two excursionists at my elbow. One of them was shaking his head, muttering 'Premier Line, they call themselves'. I looked him up and down: little fellow, coat over his arm. Still sweating, though.

  'No sir,' I said, 'that is the Great Northern. We are "The Business Line".'

  Well, they fell about at that for a while, but went quiet as Lowther and Hind came up: first a ticket inspector, then their governor – it could hardly have been a worse look-out for the poor buggers. But Lowther stopped twenty yards shy of us. As soon as he saw the stone on the line, he sat down, just sat right down in the bluebells beside the track, all crumpled inside his gold lace. There would be no more ticket inspecting that day. Beyond him, the bathtub was being passed down from one of the middle carriages.

  But the mill-owner continued to approach at a steady pace. He was a big, stale-looking fellow of about sixty: the younger of the two Hinds. The excursionists shuffled down the track bank as he came near. Hind did not wear a white rosette. As he walked, the dust from the track ballast somehow did not land on his boots. His boots kicked it away, and I wondered what he'd hoped to be up to in Blackpool when all his people were at the dancing platforms, the grotto railways and hot- pea saloons.

  When he spoke, he sounded like the excursionists, but more used to being listened to.

  'I see we've nearly come a very nasty cropper.'

  'Nearly, sir,' said Clive. 'It was seen in good time though.'

  Hind nodded. You couldn't tell if he was angry or not. 'My father, who is ninety-nine, was pitched from one side of the compartment to another,' he said.

  'And is he quite all right?' asked Clive.

  'He suffers with his heart, but has a very strong constitution… which the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway has today tested to the full.'

  Even that might have been a good thing from the way he said it.

  'You'll find it hard to credit,' Hind said, 'but this is Father's first time on a train. He cannot be doing with them, but he'd decided to try the experience once.'

  I thought: Christ, we're for it now. But Hind didn't seem too put out.

  'I'm sure there's been no irregularity,' he went on, 'but I'll have both your names if you don't mind.'

  'Clive Carter,' said Clive.

  'Jim Stringer,' I said.

  'Might we get this stone shifted?' said Hind, 'And then get on? My work-people are to be served with early teas by the Tower Company. And I have most important business to conduct on the seafront at Blackpool in exactly two hours' time.'

  As he turned and walked back towards the engine, Clive said, 'Who does he think he is? King bloody Canute?'

  Reuben Booth, who was still at his book, began reading again: '"When a train is stopped by accident or obstruction, the guard, if there be only one, or the rear guard, if there be more than one… "'

  Hind looked at Reuben for a while, then turned and walked back towards 1418. As he did so, I looked at the crocked engine. A derailment: it had happened to me. It would be in the papers. The Board of Trade would send down an inspector. I felt like the tightrope walker who has fallen off the tightrope.

  'Reuben,' I said, 'we must get the detonators down.'

  'That's it,' he said, but went straight away back to reading his manual: '"Detonators shall be placed as follows: one detonator a quarter of a mile from the train -"'

  'Is it a job for guard or fireman, Reuben?' I asked. 'What do you reckon?'

  'It says here,' said Reuben Booth: '"The detonators should be placed by the guard or any competent person.'"

  Clive looked over at me: 'You'd better do it then Jim,' he said in an under-breath, and it was hard not to laugh.

  'It's all in hand,' said Reuben, 'leave it up to me.'

  We watched as Reuben plodded back to his guard's van, climbed up, stayed up there for quite a while, climbed down with the detonators over his shoulder. They looked like belts with boot-polish tins attached. Reuben dropped one, slowly bent down and picked it up, and set off along the track back in the direction of Salwick.

  'What's that bit of kit he's got hold of?' asked a fellow from the crowd of excursionists that was by now standing about us.

  'Detonators,' I said.

  'Explosives, like?' said the first excursionist.

  I nodded.

  The excursionist thought about this for a while. 'He wants one of them up his arse,' he said.

  Clive was puffing at his cheroots.

  'He'll lay the detonators on the track,' I said, 'so that any train coming up behind us will set them off.'

  'What? And get blown to bloody Kingdom Come?' said the excursionist. 'Can we not just somehow warn it instead?'

  It was hard to believe how Hind's Mill turned out any cloth at all if this was the class of fellow they had working in it, and Clive was grinning so that his little cigar was at a crazy angle.

  They only give out a bang,' I said. 'But there's no need of them really because the signalman back at Salwick won't let another train in this section until the fellow at Kirkham gives him the bell to say we're clear of it.'

  'So your pal's wasting his time?' said another excursionist, and we all watched Reuben in the distance, walking like a clockwork soldier because he would stick to the track and the sleepers, instead of going along the field, which would have doubled his rate of progress.

  'I do hope he is,' I said, and then I asked Clive: 'Do you reckon we can shift the stone?'

  'We'll have a go,' he said.

  Some of the excursionists offered to give a hand, but there was only room for two to grip it. We had to graft but we got it off the rails. It wouldn't have been so hard to get it on, though, for small embankments rose up from the track just at this point. The stone could have been rolled down onto the line.

  We'd no sooner shifted the stone than the bloody motorist from before -1 was sure it was
the same fellow – came skimming along through the field next to us, trailing a great cloud of dust and sand. It looked as if he was driving clean through the pasture alongside the track, but there was a road, although a pretty rough sort going by how much the motorist was chucking up behind him. I looked down at the stone.

  'It was brought here along that road,' I said.

  Clive said nothing. He was again booting the rail, looking gormless.

  A train was coming towards us on the other line, the 'down'; it was shimmering in the heat, so that the train itself looked like steam. When it came close, the driver leant out and gave us a wave, then shouted something that was drowned by his engine and gave us a couple of screams on his whistle. It was one engine pulling seven empty tenders – a water special, coming back from filling the water columns at Central.

  An excursionist called to me: 'What's he carrying?'

  'His train's empty,' I said.

  The excursionist thought about this for a while. 'What was he carrying?' he called back.

  I didn't want to talk about this. All of a sudden, I had no appetite for railway subjects. 'Water,' I said.

  'Where to?'

  'Blackpool.'

  'Don't they have enough?' said the excursionist.

  'No.'

  'You'd think they would,' he said. 'I mean, they've the sea for starters.'

  'The engines need fresh,' I said, 'and country round here dries fast in this weather.'

  Clive came up to me and we started walking back to the Highflyer, which was leaking steam and looking embarrassed at being half off the rails, and walked about by excursionists.

  Clive was saying, 'I like these mill girls in their summer toilettes.'

  About half of Hind's Mill were down on the pasture by now, and they'd taken their boxes, blankets and bottles down with them. The sun was high; it was about dinner time, and the excursionists were picnicking; either that or they were stretched out reading their penny papers, drinking ginger beer.

  I liked mill girls in their summer toilettes, when you could see a bit more of their hair, spilling out from under their bonnets (in the mills it was kept up all the time). The weavers among them could earn the big penny, even the half-timers, and they always had a lot 'off'. They would dash about Halifax, looking always on the edge of opportunity, while the men would sort of mooch along behind.

  We came up to Martin Lowther, who was still sitting by the track, sweltering in his gold coat. He would not take it off, for then he'd be somebody else. 'It goes down as "exceptional causes",' he said, in his morngy voice, looking out at the field and not in our direction. 'A train can only be stopped by engine, by signals, or by exceptional causes.'

  'Did you find anyone in want of a ticket?' I asked him.

  'Not so far.'

  'It probably wouldn't do to carry on looking,' said Clive.

  Lowther sighed. He'd struck a loser with us. He'd have been better off on that Leeds train he'd been after boarding.

  We were back at 1418 by now, watching all the skylarking excursionists. A game of cricket had been got up in the shadow of the half-wrecked engine; somebody was playing a mouth organ. I asked a gang of them who were just lying about: 'Why do you all have these rosettes?'

  'It's the white rose of Yorkshire,' said an excursionist. 'It shows we're from Hind's Mill in Halifax, and that we're to be served a free tea and a parkin at the Tower when we get to Blackpool.'

  'If…' said one of the excursionists, very slowly.

  'Your governor wasn't wearing one,' said Clive.

  'Well,' said the same excursionist, 'don't think that means he won't be getting a free tea and a parkin at the Tower.'

  'Rum,' said Clive, as we walked on.

  'I wouldn't work in a mill for fortunes,' I said, and then I felt quite lost because for the first time in my life, I wasn't sure that I wanted to work on the railways.

  In the distance ahead I could see Reuben making his slow way back to the train, this time by the side of the track. He'd learnt his lesson about walking on sleepers. You could always bank on Reuben to get there in the end. My guess was that he'd be carrying the chit from the signalman that would let us move on. As I watched, he picked up one of the detonators he'd laid a few minutes before, so I swung myself back up onto the engine.

  The fire was in good order, so I picked up the Courier.

  'Hundreds of detectives guard the King of Spain' I read, but couldn't be bothered to find out why. I leant out and looked along the track. Clive was in front of the engine talking to a lass, so things were going on as usual with him.

  How was it, I wondered, that Clive had seen the stone so early? I'd been looking out, my eyes were Ai, and I'd not been able to make it out. There again it had been lying flat on the rails. It might not have tripped us up after all; we might have gone clean over it.

  I opened the fire doors and pitched the Courier in. It fluttered like a bird for less than a second, and was gone.

  You'd read about railway wreckers from time to time: little articles in the corners of newspapers. I had an idea about the death rate on the railways: as a passenger, the chances against being killed were 1 in 30 million. I'd read that somewhere in the Railway Magazine.

  Wreckers… They wanted to make a train jump – for fun. I banged the fire doors shut. They were kids; or drunks. Drunken kids.

  We were a fair distance from either Salwick or Kirkham, so anyone putting that stone on the rails would have a chance of not being seen; there again you'd do well to have a motorcar if that was your programme. And while you weren't likely to strike a great crowd hereabouts, you'd be exposed to the view of the odd individual for a long time. The stone had been put on one of the fastest stretches of line to be found, so it would have been known that any train coming to meet it would be doing so at a lick. Well, they would have known it if they'd any knowledge of railways.

  I stood up to reach for my tea bottle, and saw through the glass that Reuben was playing the gooseberry, interrupting Clive and the woman on the track ahead. Clive was nodding, so I reckoned we'd been given permission to take our train on.

  And then there was a woman, her head below the level of my boots, looking up. Her hat was off. She did not look like a person on an excursion.

  'Will you come along here?' she said. She was crying. She had a face that should have been happy. Should have been pretty too – would have been when she was younger. It was a sharp, small face. She looked like a sort of older fairy.

  'Someone hurt?' I asked, and she nodded.

  I put down my tea bottle on the sandbox. Then, with a guilty feeling, I remembered the first-aid or ambulance box that ought to be in the locker of any engine. I opened the locker door, and there it was: a wooden box with the word 'accident' hand-painted on the lid. I caught it up, jumped down from the engine and went after the woman.

  As she walked, the words were coming between sobs: 'I didn't want her down… didn't want her stifled and jostled in that way… it was cooler up… so I left her on the seat. Well, she was sleeping…'

  As she spoke, I opened the box. There was a bottle of carbolic, a roll of bandage (not over-clean), a tub of ointment of some kind, and a little book: What to Do in an Emergency by Dr N. Kenrick F.R.S.E. etc. Price one shilling. I flipped it open as I followed the woman along the side of the carriages: 'Treatment for the Apparently Drowned'. 'Drowning is a very frequent accident,' I read. Not on the bloody railways it isn't, I thought. But this wasn't a railway book at all. I read on, feeling vexed: 'Cases of Poisoning… A List of Poisons.'

  We came up to the fourth rattler from the engine, and someone was saying: 'Oh she's been terribly bashed.'

  I pulled myself up to the compartment and there was a woman lying across the seats on one side, with three others standing over her, blocking my view of her head and face. They all had the rosettes on; the rosettes were too big, and there were too many of them for this small space. The women shifted, and I got a proper sight of the one lying down: she was very bea
utiful, with green eyes and fair hair. I could picture her, not in a mill, but as the good fairy in a pantomime, and she looked a little like the woman who had come for me. But as I looked, she moved her head slightly and vomit rolled from her mouth. The stuff was pink. It spread across the red cloth of the seat.

  'Oh!' said one of the women, 'and her so neat in all her ways!' She fell to mopping at the vomit with a shawl.

  There was a boy on the opposite seat with a dog alongside him. On his knees was a book: Pearson's Book of Fun. I looked at him for a second. He was staring straight ahead and his white rosette was bent, as if he'd tried to fight it off. The woman who'd come for me was in the carriage too, talking in a low voice to the women around me. She turned to me and said: 'She was reaching for her box on the luggage rack when the great jerk came. It was to get a book down for her boy. We think she's taken a concussion, but she's not too poorly.'

  'Let me see,' I said, 'I have an ambulance box.'

  At which the woman lying down was sick once more.

  She gave me a half-smile as the woman with the shawl began mopping again. She said something and the woman with the shawl replied: 'You are not holding up the excursion, love.'

  'No,' I said, 'there's other things doing that. The engine's come off the tracks,' I added, speaking directly to the woman lying down, but she'd closed her eyes by now.

  'Just you wait 'til you see that ocean, love,' said the woman with the shawl. 'Just you wait until you do. Like nothing on earth, it is. Why, it never ends you know.'

  She turned to me: 'She's never seen the sea, you know. She's a widower, and she's always stayed at home with her boy when we've had excursions in the past. She particularly wanted this compartment because it had views of the sea.'

  Above the seats, there were photochrome pictures of the Front at Blackpool.

  I said, 'I think the boy should climb down… And the dog.'

  'Why?' said another of the women. 'Whatever are you going to do?'

  They all looked at the ambulance box that was in my hand. The rosette on the bosom of the woman lying down rose and fell in an uncertain way.