The Blackpool Highflyer Read online

  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 beautiful, 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.

  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 who'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.