The Blackpool Highflyer js-2 Read online

  I turned to the lad and said, 'Want to see the engine, mate? She's a Highflyer, one of Mr Aspinall's… quite a beast, you know.'

  The kid just stared back. He had a complicated face, the sort that can frown without trying. He also had too much hair, and his coat was too short, and too thick for the weather.

  As I looked at the boy, I could hear his mother being sick for a third time.

  'Oh, may God help her,' said the woman with the shawl, and I knew this was a bad lookout, with God coming into things.

  The woman with the shawl was mopping again. I thought the boy was about to cry, so I said: 'It's a handsome dog. What sort is he?'

  'A very good sort,' said the boy.

  I looked at the dog, and all in a moment the sun coming into the carriage had turned its eyes to glass circles.

  'He's an Irish terrier,' I said.

  'If you knew,' said the boy, 'why did you ask?'

  'I wanted to see if you knew.'

  By turning his face about an inch away from me the boy made it plain that he thought this a low trick, but he said nothing.

  'Oh, she looks a little brighter now,' the woman with the shawl was saying.

  'My dad had one when I was a young lad,' I said to the boy. 'He was a butcher. All butchers have got dogs.'

  'I know two that don't,' said the boy.

  'Well…'I said.

  'I can think of three that don't,' said the boy, and he added, with a look of fury, 'Most butchers don't have dogs.'

  I turned back towards the woman lying down.

  'First thing,' I said. 'Let's give her some air.'

  At this, one of the women told the boy to get down, and with such meaningful force that he obeyed, taking the dog with him.

  'Now' I said, putting down the ambulance box and the book, 'let's help the lady sit up a little.'

  And I heard a word from the one who'd come to collect me: 'No,' she said. But she said it quietly and I paid her no mind.

  I leant forwards and helped the woman into a half-sitting position. Nobody moved to stop me. Directly I touched her head, my hand was both wet and dry: blood. There was a deeper red stain on the red cushion on which she'd been lying too. There was a sort of bony rumble and the woman with the shawl had fainted. I turned back to my patient. She opened her eyes, and the beautiful, surprising green-ness of them came and went all in a moment. The eyeballs had rolled up and she was white as paper. No human should ever look like that.

  One of the women shouted: 'May God rest her soul.'

  All was confusion after that, with everyone fighting to get to the woman and to bring her back to life, but it could not be done.

  At the end of this scramble, with the compartment filled with the sound of screaming, the elderly fairy, the woman who had come to collect me from the cab and who by rights ought to have had a happy face, looked at me: 'What is your name, Mister?'

  'Stringer,' I said. 'Jim Stringer.'

  'Well, Mr Stringer,' she said. 'You've just killed the sweet- est-natured, most beautiful lass I've ever known, and you've left her boy an orphan.'

  Chapter Four

  The Halifax Parish Church clock was striking six when I stepped out of the Joint station and lit a small cigar. Clive smoked small cigars. They fitted the bill for a fellow of the right sort. A cigarette was too dainty and fashionable, and a big cigar was for semi-swells: the smaller the man the bigger the cigar, my dad – who did not smoke at all – had once told me.

  My way home was along Horton Street, which climbed up from the Joint, and there were many temptations on that cobbled hill, starting with the Crown Hotel that gave 'meals any hour', for although my wife had many virtues, cooking was not one.

  I carried on up. Sugden's ice-cream cart was over the road, with the little white pony that looked as if it was made of ice cream. I hadn't seen him for a few days, for he would often get a lad to hold the horse's head when he went into the Crown for a glass of beer. The lad would get a penny lick for his trouble.

  Sugden saw me coming and called out: 'Weather suiting you?'

  'Champion,' I called back, for that's what I always said to Sugden.

  Next came the works where Brearley and Sons made boots; then the moving crane, which had stopped, then the old warehouse where they posted the bills. There was a new one up there: 'a meeting to discuss questions', I read, just as though I didn't have enough questions on my mind to be going on with. But I read the ones set out: 'Blackpool: A Health Resort?', 'Wakes: Curse or Blessing?', 'The Co-operator… Does He Help?' At the bottom, the poster said: 'Mr Alan

  Cowan, founder of the Socialist Mission, has the Answers', and I wondered what sort of crackerjack he was. The meeting was fixed for 18 July – which would be the Tuesday following Wakes Week – at the Drill Hall in Trinity Street.

  I walked on, past a grand pub called the Imperial. This I had never been in, but you sometimes got the most wonderful prospect if the two front doors happened to be open as you went by. The saloon was jungly inside with twisted metal lights and big plants moving under electric fans. All seemed to go on very smoothly and quietly in the Imperial Saloon, where the waiters crept about in their patent-leather shoes. One pull on the beer pump, it was said, would give a pint of bitter in an instant.

  But I didn't bother to look inside this time.

  Alongside the Imperial was my own haunt, a pub called the Evening Star. There was one room, with barrels on stools behind the bar and sawdust on the floor. Most of this room was taken up with a handsome billiard table with red baize – it was as if one day the shavings on the floor had miraculously flown together to create this marvellous article. I was no great hand at billiards so I never played a game on it, and the queer thing was that nor did anyone else.

  I walked into the Evening Star and asked for a pint of Ramsden's. It was three days after the stone on the line, and we'd been on the Rishworth branch ever since, but late that afternoon some bit of business with a broken ejector end had kept me back in the shed. Try breathing kerosene and oil inside an engine shed with fires being lit all around you, and the glass rising towards eighty – it's the only thing for discomfort and sick imagination, and puts you in sore need of a pint.

  On the billiard table was a folded Courier, left behind. I picked it up, and there at last was the report. It was very short. 'Railway Outrage' in big print, then 'Lady Passenger Killed' in smaller, and 'Who is the wrecker?' smaller still.

  A special Whitsuntide train to Blackpool, which left Halifax Joint station on Whit Sunday, had a narrow escape from utter disaster near Kirkham. With admirable speed the driver applied his brakes on seeing the obstruction, which proved to be a grindstone placed squarely between the rails. Some minutes after the train was brought to a halt, a woman was found to be suffering a concussion after a fall in her compartment. At first she seemed to be merely shaken, with bruises about her forehead, but she fell into unconsciousness and died within a short time of the train coming to a halt. A reward of?5 for information leading to the apprehension of the culprits is being offered by the railway.

  To speak of a 'narrow escape' was wrong – that would have been something else altogether. Clive had been going too fast.

  Then again, was it right to blame Clive for the way things had come out? I knew that I had not shone myself on that day. I took from my pocket the note I had made from the book, What to Do in an Emergency, for I had found the right page half an hour after the woman had passed away, and while waiting for the engineers to come out from Blackpool Central had copied down the important part. It came under the heading: 'About Unconsciousness and Fits', and Dr N. Kenrick had not minced words. 'If the head is not getting its full supply of blood, as you see by the pale face, surely it is only a matter of common sense to keep the head low… I will go further, and say that if it is a delicate person you are dealing with, to put him or her suddenly upright may cost your patient his or her life.'

  That's what I'd found, having looked in the book for reassurance. The woman w
ho'd come to collect me from the engine had been right, and that was all about it. I'd read the passage time and again as the engineers had jacked up the front of 1418 and got it back on the rails, hoping that somehow the words would change, and the meaning bend the more I read it over.

  There was to be a Board of Trade inquiry, and the smash had set the police on the move after a fashion. A constable had come to Sowerby Bridge Shed and questioned Clive and myself. Clive had kept pretty quiet, but I'd spoken up to the copper, talking about how the grindstone might have been got to the line, mentioning the motorcar flying past. I wanted salt put on those who had done it. But I had the notion that the constable wanted as little information as possible, because information meant hard graft for him.

  I folded up the paper. The mill girl who'd fallen had not been named but I'd learnt it while waiting for the ambulance to come along the meadow track: Dyson. Margaret Dyson, weaver. And the boy she'd left behind was Arnold Dyson.

  The ambulance had taken her, and the boy too, rocking over the meadow. We'd started away ourselves then, rolling at five miles an hour – owing to that cracked front wheel – into Blackpool Central. We'd got in two and a half hours late with the 8.36 coming behind, and down by the same amount. The Hind's lot would have missed their teas under the Tower, and the white rosettes would have gone for nothing. But I guessed they would soon have another taste of Blackpool, for any good-sized mill sent its people there at wakes, and the Halifax wakes was in the second week of July, less than a month off.

  I put down my pint pot, and my eye fell on the folded Courier once more, bouncing from the words 'Robbed Another Lady' to 'Giant Strawberries Expected' to 'Excursionists Alarmed'.

  A North Eastern train carrying excursionists from York and district to Scarborough was required to brake with unwonted suddenness before Mai ton yesterday, as a large branch lately fallen from a tree lay on the line ahead of it. One man, who appeared to have hurt his back in the sharpness of the jolt, was removed by ambulance staff to the hospital at York. No other passenger sustained injury beyond a serious shaking.

  The travellers, who were members of excursion clubs at York, were delayed somewhat but nonetheless enjoyed a full four hours to sample the delights of Scarborough before their return.

  This train had been heading to the east coast, we'd been heading west, and it had been on the North Eastern, not the Lanky. But it was an excursion, just like ours: a special train. No connection had been made between the two items. According to the Courier they were not connected. I'd seen the editor of that paper about town: a big chap with a silk beard and a silk hat; I'd seen him stepping in and out of the Imperial, and he looked nobody's mug. But how much thought had he, or the fellows on his paper, given over to the matter?

  A branch lately fallen from a tree… It had a kind of hollow ring to me: words too easily put together.

  I put the peg in after the second pint, as usual, and walked back out into Horton Street. At the bottom of the road, Sugden was sitting on his cart, dreaming of a pint of plain. The dazzle was gone from the day but the heat had not abated. It checked me as I started to walk, and seemed to be slowing down the smoke from the mill chimneys on Beacon Hill.

  Back Hill Street is not far above the Joint as the crow flies. It wasn't the best part of town, and it wasn't the worst. We were more fortunately placed than many working people, as I supposed. I had twenty-five shillings a week. I would have been better dressed on the rates of the Great Northern, but it wasn't bad; and the wife had come into fifty pounds on the death of her father.

  Our house in Back Hill Street was No. 21. It was an end- terrace, but we weren't side to side with the others. Instead we looked outward and down, so we fancied we were like the prow of a ship sailing into the next street, Hill Street, which was like a continuation of Back Hill Street but with houses of a better class: bathrooms, gardens and electricity laid on.

  The house was probably made with the leftover bricks of the terrace: an odd piece, so to speak. There were the two rooms and a privy downstairs and two more biggish rooms up. An outside iron staircase leading to the bigger of the two upstairs made the house more like a place of work than a home, but it was ideal for letting. This was the main reason the wife had wanted the place, although she hadn't said so to the house agent. I used to fancy she was a little ashamed of landladying, even though it was how she'd got her money down in London too.

  The wife called the outside stairs 'the balcony'. I would stand on it with one of my small cigars, which she didn't like in the house, and look out at the backs of Back Hill Street. There would be washing on all the lines. When she'd first come up to Halifax the wife had said every day was like a washday. Now every day was a drying day.

  Back Hill Street… It was just two rows of net-curtained windows to me. One net curtain – at No. 11 – had a fishing rod propped against it. Everyone who lived there had lived there for ever, except for me and the wife, so, while we were pleasant and gave our 'Good mornings' or 'Good evenings' to whoever we passed by, we didn't really 'neighbour'.

  They were a daft lot living there really, as far as I could make out, and seemed dafter still in the light of what had happened to Margaret Dyson. Your typical household in Back Hill Street might be one half clerks, but let down by the other half, who would be weavers. Front steps were likely cleaned at night, in secret, so nobody could say for certain that a skivvy hadn't done it. We were the exceptions over this, for the wife just didn't clean the front step. We had our net curtains downstairs of course, but the wife didn't bother with them up, and we were alone in that as well.

  I let myself in. The wife was in the chair by the stove reading the Courier. I had told her all about the grindstone on the line, but not about my efforts in the carriage. I suppose I just didn't want her to think she'd married a chump; or worse still a killer.

  'Your accident's been reported here,' she said happily, from behind the pages. 'It seems you did very well to stop in time.'

  She turned the pages of the Courier. It was only one article out of many to her. I wondered if she'd clapped eyes on the item about the Scarborough trip. It wouldn't do to let on about it.

  The parlour was painted green. It was meant to be the finished job but always looked like an undercoat to me. Having pushed the boat out for the boiler, we were light on furniture: we had the cane-backed chair the wife sat in, and the red sofa. There was a continental stove instead of a fire, and we meant to have that taken out and the old fireplace brought back into use. The old mantelshelf still stood, and the old Couriers were put beneath it, ready for the far-off day when the fireplace would go back in, and the other far-off day when the weather would be cold enough for it to be used. That was the house in which we were to make our future, and to the wife it was too important a matter to be rushed. We had a tea caddy in the bedroom in which, on the wife's orders, we were saving for all manner of household goods of a superior kind.

  'They ought to give a bigger reward,' she said.

  I walked through to the scullery, and the jug, basin, towel and soap had been laid out by the wife as usual. It was always Erasmic Soap, 'The Dainty Soap for Dainty Folk'. The wife wanted me double clean, for she knew I would always scrub down at the shed after booking off, but she hated the smell of the axle grease and the yellow soap I used to take it off at work. In fact, she didn't want me a railwayman at all, and if I was clean she could forget I was in that line, at least for a while. To the wife, trams were the thing. She was all for things of the future.

  'Cape gooseberries from the stores' the wife called out.

  The store meant the Co-op.

  'Are we to have gooseberry pie?' I called back.

  'They're a delicacy just as they are' she said.

  She always bought things for tea that weren't quite the thing, and she always bought them from the Co-operative Stores. She was a great co-operator, but she liked the idea of it more than the actual buying, so we'd quite often end by going out for a knife-and-fork tea.

>   'Five pounds for information' the wife was saying. 'Twenty would be more like it, but that would be too go-ahead for the Yorkshire and Lancashire Railway. Why, it would be twenty pounds less in the pockets of the directors!'

  'It's the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway' I said. She always got that wrong – on purpose, I believed.

  I ate a gooseberry and was rather knocked. No pips. But I would rather have had a chop.

  I walked back into the parlour, and the gooseberries were at once forgiven. I even forgot about the accident for a second, for the wife was standing and smiling, looking just the size and shape of a person you could put your arms around.

  'Oh yes?' I said, half smiling myself, but a little nervous at the same time.

  'Two items of news' she said. 'Number one. Do you remember that I said I might have let the room?'

  'Yes.'

  'Well, the gentleman called this morning to confirm that he would be taking it.'

  We kissed over that. We'd had all on with this let: adverts in the Courier week after week at half a crown a go. The wife had seen five or six folk over it, and every one she said would turn out a flitter. Unknown to her, I'd also written up adverts and placed them about the Joint in hopes a railwayman might be interested. We were handy for the station, after all.

  'He's coming on Saturday and has sent the ten-shilling deposit. He has even begun getting his mail sent here.'

  We looked across to the old mantelshelf. We had up there the wife's gold crucifix on a chain, which hung across our marriage lines, and a picture showing two kittens playing with a flower, and words along the bottom reading: 'Never a rose without a thorn' – this bought on one of the few occasions that the Halifax Co-op had run to art.

  In front of the picture was the little fat envelope that I knew contained my Railway Magazine, which would have arrived that day, and a letter addressed to 'Mr George Ogden' care of 'Top Floor Apartments, 21 Back Hill Street.' I picked it up.

  'It came by the five o'clock,' said the wife, meaning the 5 p.m. delivery that brought most of our letters and packets.