The Necropolis Railway Page 5

  There was a row of coal pens near the coaling stage where all day long the biggest blokes in Nine Elms stood on coal waggons on an embankment and flung the stuff down into the engines that drew up on the lines below. On the first day of this duty - which was really just a way of making a fellow eat dog - I put myself wholeheartedly into the job, but it soon came to me that there was no difference between the bits of coal I'd tidied up and the bits of coal that I hadn't, and I began to spend half my time crowning rats with my shovel.

  I would also kill time by trying to name the engines I saw coming off-shed. There were several 0-4-4 tanks of the M7 Class, many O2s of the same wheel arrangements, and all kinds of 4-4-0 tender engines, including K10s and the T9s, or Greyhounds, which seemed to be the maids of all work about the place. Being so close to these wonderful motors and having prospects of riding out on them should have put me in great snuff, but all I could think was that each had two men on the footplate, and here was I without a mate.

  As to the blokes who came by my coal heaps on foot, I soon gave up nodding at them. They were passing me all the time: riding bikes, pushing barrows or just mooching along close enough for me to smell the smoke from their pipes, but the only one who stopped, apart from Flannagan - who'd stagger up to scold me on the untidiness of the coal from time to time - was a tiny man with a suitcase who said that if I was to have any hope of becoming a passed cleaner, I'd better have some books. It was heartening that he had in mind my ultimate goal, but the books in his suitcase were expensive. I bought Continuous Engine Brakes, though, which he said was very galvanising and was willing to let go at one and six.

  This I would glance at while taking my suppers of fried tatters and bacon alone at a dining room near my lodge.

  I kept myself to my lodge or the dining rooms, for I'd had a bit of a fright on only my second day in Lower Marsh. In the evening, thinking to have a bit of a look about, I had come across three men of the world under the viaduct. Their clothes were rags, but their boots were big and shiny, and the one nearest to me, who had the face of a doll and very glittering eyes, looked down at his boots and up to my face with a grin, as if he meant to bring the two together. I had them down as a kicking gang, and was sure they would have set about me had not a constable come by at that moment - he never said a word, but the three walked backwards away from me as he passed, letting me keep their bootcaps in view for as long as possible.

  I hadn't funked it; it had never come to that, and maybe it had been a put-on from the start. But I was shaken up, for I had never seen the like before. In Bay, the men who built the Eskdale viaduct would have their battles on the beach, but the people in the town were never touched, and though there'd be blood spilt it was more like sport. If it had all happened before my Nine Elms nightmares had begun I would not have believed that any such thing could happen in the shadow of a great railway station.

  Afterwards, I started to get the district of Waterloo right. Yes, there was cleanliness and newness all about: the public baths and the laundry that looked like a great ship were two streets away, and there was high-class this, royal that, advertisements for Beecham's Pills and all those soaps. But these were frauds. The real Waterloo was in the semi-drunks colliding with donkey carts, the shop sign speaking of 'knives, steel saws and choppers', the roaring from the pubs, the shouts I heard from my windows at night, all coming from smashed-up, wrong-speaking mouths - 'I'll put the fixments on you, you bloody rotter!' And the station itself. Too many builders had been at it, and all with a different idea. It didn't look like a railway station at all; it didn't look like anything. But still the trains rumbled in over the viaducts - one a minute or more, it seemed to me.

  I sat wondering whether I should write to Rowland Smith -I had his address after all - to ask whether shovelling coal and braining rats surrounded by unfriendly faces was what he'd had in mind for me when we'd met in Grosmont. I would ask him straight out. Later in the evenings I would think of going to the pub at the end of the road, the Citadel, but the amazing wildness of it and thoughts of Dad, who enjoyed his jugs of Old Six at home but did not hold with public houses, kept me in my lodge.

  This itself was a very queer spot. None of the rooms in the house was locked, but there again there was nothing in any of them apart from the one next door to my own. This, like mine, had a view of the soap works, which at least were always quite silent and sent out no smoke. The floorboards were very bad, and there was quite a big looking glass, so you got a double dose of the empty black fireplace. Looking into it I saw that my face was yellower than it had been before - yellower, and blacker too, in parts. This was what it meant to become a man, but I was not getting the coal in the way I would like, namely, swirling up from a rattling, open firehole door on a happy run down to the sea, with my mate watching the road beside me and a bottle of tea waiting on the drip plate.

  Towards the middle of that first week, I had the notion of taking my twenty minutes in the Old Shed, where I would be free of that pill Flannagan for a while, and I might carry on with Continuous Engine Brakes. It was dinner time on Wednesday when I first stepped into that shed full of crippled engines and walked past the old house, which was like a guard, or a kind of warning.

  The Old Shed was kept in darkness at all times, so I had a bull's eye with me, and with this I picked out the broken engines. They all stood in queues that led nowhere, and the closer you got to the top of the shed the more they looked like kettles. I couldn't put a name to most of them, for they all had parts missing, some even their wheels. The parts that remained had all been scrawled with chalk numbers that I could make no sense of.

  One that caught my eye was a strange 2-4-0 with mighty rim-splashers. It reminded me of a bike. I leapt up onto its footplate and gave a yank on the dead regulator. Then I turned and pointed my lantern tank through the open fire-hole door. There was a nice bed of dry rags in there, so I climbed inside, pulled the door to, and set about making myself a cosy nest on the grate.

  The firehole was of the usual sort of size, by which I mean it would have made a bedroom for one of those half-size people they have in circuses, being perhaps eight feet in length, four and a half foot high, and three and a half wide. All about the metal walls of the firehole hung ghostly grey ash - the place seemed to keep a memory of every fire that had burned in there. For ten minutes I munched on my snap and tried to make sense of a drawing of the Westinghouse Automatic Brake. Once, I heard a clatter from within the shed that fairly made my hair stand on end, but after a second's thought I knew it to be rats.

  The Westinghouse Brake comes with many complications, and presently I fell into a doze. How long it lasted I don't know, but I woke up in the greyness feeling: this is too complete. There ought to have been a circle of light around the firehole door but it was firmly closed, and a firehole door cannot be opened from the inside, for all that is meant to be inside is the fire. I tried to kick the door but my quarters were too cramped to allow it. I tried standing and stretching but could not unbend my body in any direction.

  Then I saw a little twist of smoke coming up through the grate, and I knew that after the Taylor kid it was my turn. I was about to suffocate, then to disappear altogether. I cried out once, 'No!' and as I did so the smoke leapt into my lungs, and afterwards it was all coughing, with the smoke now coming up from all parts of the grill. I could not see the sides of the metal box in which I was locked, but as I kicked and pounded against them they seemed to close in on me. I could not breathe, and nor could I stop myself from trying to breathe. Shaking and dying, and trying to pray, I lay down on the floor of the box, and all at once the smoke changed colour around me. It was streaming freely over my head and away from me, turning like twine, and I found that with my coughs came breaths. I sat up and saw the fire door open once again and the smoke drifting slowly through. I rolled through the doorway and found a pair of shaky legs on the footplate of the engine. The backs of my hands were bloody but I could only feel and not see the blood, since my bull'
s eye was broken. From the top of the shed I could hear the scuffling of boots in ash, and laughter.

  Railway blokes, I knew, were likely to go in for all kinds of japes with a new man on the job, but this little exploit had nearly finished me off.

  Chapter Seven

  Saturday 21 November

  On the Saturday, Vincent rolled up again, once more in the mood for a chat. He settled down with his snap on the top of the coal pen I happened to be at, which was downwind of the coaling stage so my face was black and my eyes were red.

  'I can see you're up against it today,' said Vincent.

  'Clear off, will you, mate,' I said, but in an under-breath. It came to me that I just didn't trust this little fellow; I couldn't say for certain whether he was behind the exploit in the Old Shed but he was top of my list.

  'I'm cleaning a big Birmingham class,' he said. 'Been at it for two days, and the job's nearly done. I'm going at her with rape oil just now.'

  'Coming up nicely, is she?' I said in a weary kind of way.

  'Top hole,' said Vincent.

  That was all tommy-rot, for the engine he was speaking of would be black and you can't clean a black engine in a black shed, but I said nothing, and carried on shovelling while he watched me in a superior way.

  He began eating, and I spotted that his dinner was a clanger, which is a pastry with jam or apple at one end and bits of meat and potato at the other. They'd had them on the North Eastern too - and up there a clanger was an engine man's dinner. There was no law against eating one if you weren't on the footplate, but it was all wrong in my eyes.

  'I could do with some goggles, I tell you,' I shouted at Vincent, as the yard pilot banged another wagon up to the coaling stage.

  'That's a funny bit of kit for a railwayman,' he roared back, as the blokes began chucking down the coal.

  'In France,' I said, 'engine men wear them on the footplates.'

  'Go on!' said Vincent.

  'Honour bright’ I said, and Vincent repeated these words with a sneer, adding: 'You read that in the Boy's Own Paper, I suppose.'

  'Railway Magazine,' I shouted back, but he didn't hear, or pretended not to. 'In France,' I said again, 'they call the drivers ingenieurs.'

  'Give it a bloody rest, will you?' said Vincent, who'd gone moody again. He bit into his clanger, then quickly put it down, and I thought: I know what's happened - the jam's shot through the meat end. Serve him right, too.

  'I suppose you think cab roofs should be all over,' said Vincent.

  'Well,' I said, stopping shovelling because I was desperate for a proper chat, really, 'that would be up-to-date, at least.'

  'Only trouble is, you'd have drivers falling asleep all the time if they didn't get a soaking or a bit of a blow to keep them going.'

  'How could that happen? In America the drivers sit on seats in the footplate, and they don't fall asleep.'

  'Seats? Can you imagine a first-class man like my uncle Arthur sitting down at the regulator?'

  'Uncle!' and I fairly gasped the word out, for Vincent did not look like the sort of happy-go-lucky young fellow that has an uncle, and Arthur Hunt did not seem like the amiable sort of bloke you imagine as having a nephew.

  'I'm wondering how those two ended up on the half-link,' I said. 'Your uncle especially. He looks all right to me, and you don't get taken off the main line just on account of a hard nature.'

  Vincent gave me one of his looks. 'Arthur won't lick the Governor's boots, and Barney's no toady either, but he's easier meat for the bastards on account of being a more obliging sort of bloke.'

  'They were both top-link men at one time, though?' Vincent nodded: 'Lodging turns,' he muttered. He was a

  very suspicious fellow, slow as Christmas at giving out facts. 'So they're both in hot water, are they?' 'Drowning in it.'

  'Why don't they get stood down?'

  'Too popular about the shed. There'd be a bloody riot if Arthur went, especially. Barney's got to look out for himself a bit more.'

  'Why?'

  'Five years back he crashed the express just before Salisbury.'

  'A bad smash, was it?'

  Vincent nodded: 'Made the hills rattle; he was never the same after that.'

  'How do you mean?'

  But Vincent said nothing to that. I looked at him, trying to fathom his face, which was like a white billiard ball, right down to the little blue chalky marks. 'This summer,' Vincent went on after a while, 'they said he ran over in the yard here, and they tried to get him for that.'

  'He went past a stop signal?'

  'That's what somebody said - some little splitter.'

  I asked who, but he wouldn't say. He may have been slow with information but it was coming now, and it was, in a sly way, against Barney Rose. The half-link, it seemed to me, were pretty thick with each other, but Vincent preferred Hunt to Rose. I found I had a great appetite for all that he could tell me, and I wasn't sure whether it was a strength or weakness in me, but it was something altogether new.

  'Barney's all right though,' he went on. 'He doesn't mind the Brookwood runs.'

  Now, he'd mentioned that spot before.

  'Where's Brookwood?' I asked.

  ‘I don't know why you don't look it up in The Railway Magazine,' said Vincent; 'it's sure to be in there.'

  We both turned away at that moment, for an 0-8-2 monster tank was coming up like nightfall. As the coal blokes began to fill its bunker, Vincent stuffed what was left of his clanger under his jacket, but it was no good, because the dust gets you from all sides.

  I put in a few minutes more with the shovel before I spoke to him again. "The Governor said nothing about me shovelling coal on these heaps.'

  'But he's on sick leave just at the moment,' said Vincent, and a little smile sneaked quickly across his face. 'Maybe you should have watched your step a bit with Arthur.'

  'But I've only ever said half a dozen words to him since I've been here.'

  'Maybe they were the wrong half dozen,' said Vincent, bringing his clanger out of his pocket again. 'Or maybe there's a bit of a mystery about why you're here in the first place.'

  'What are you getting at?' I asked, but of course I knew very well because the thing was a mystery to me as much as anybody.

  'I mean, look here,' said Vincent, 'you meet some johnny up in the bloody middle of nowhere.'

  He meant Smith, who was the cause of all my troubles in some way, but I tried to pretend that my thoughts concerning that gentleman came without complications. 'He wasn't some johnny, he's a director of this company.'

  Vincent put his pipe on the coal, and gave me one of the hypnotising looks he went in for. 'No, mate,' he said, 'he's not.'

  With this, all the ground went from beneath my feet; but I tried not to let on. 'Who is he then?'

  'I can't believe you don't know all,' said Vincent. 'You must have had a few chats with the gent.'

  'I've had one chat with him,' I said, 'and some letters were sent.'

  'Smith used to be part of this show,' said Vincent, 'the London and South Western Company, I mean, and he still comes back to cause trouble from time to time, but now he's with another lot.'

  'What other lot?' I was desperate for the answer, which

  might make everything plain, but Vincent first caught up his bottle and had another long go at his tea.

  'Ever heard of the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company?' he said after a while.

  'No.'

  "They run the bodies out to Brookwood Cemetery. Well, they do the ceremonials; we lay on the trains, and the half-link runs 'em.'

  'And I'm to work on this funeral train?'

  'If you ever get off these coal heaps,' said Vincent with a horrible little grin.

  Vincent stood up and put the cork in his bottle. 'You've been sent to work on that show for a reason.'

  I was still too busy trying to imagine 'that show' to be thinking of reasons, but I said in a daze: 'What?'

  He didn't answer, but inst
ead asked, "This fellow Smith ... he's not been in touch since?'

  'No.'

  'And he was helpful towards you?'

  A funeral train. I had heard of a funeral train, but not a funeral train.

  'I say,' said Vincent, 'was he helpful towards you?' 'A proper gent in all regards.' 'Think he might be a Tommy Dodd?' 'A what?'

  'Don't know? Then count yourself lucky. Let's say that you're here because he's got friends who've pulled strings, and now, you see, Arthur doesn't like that because he can think of other people who should have had this start before you.'

  'Like who?'

  'Like friends of his.' Vincent was watching me like a coal rat. 'Friends of his from London. You see, we don't go up there and take your work, poking our nose into your ways...'

  I thought of Grosmont, and how the sun had shone every single day as I worked my notice and the rooks had risen off the trees at dusk like cinders off a fire, and then I thought of Smith, and how he had gulled me from start to finish. He had heard of my liking for high speed, yet had brought me down to work on a funeral train. But why had he done so?

  'Hunt thinks I earn too much money for a new lad, doesn't he?' I said. "That's one of the reasons he's got his knife into me.'

  'No,' said Vincent, 'he thinks you earn too little, and that nobody should agree to come on at that rate. But you did, and so did those other out-of-town blokes - bloody Taylor and bloody Mike.'

  Then I saw a big man stumbling towards us wearing a bowler that was more on his hair than on his head: the Governor. As he began to climb the coal hill, Vincent turned to face him; the two closed, and I thought the Governor looked fit to explode as he reeled back and crowned the side of Vincent's head, roaring, 'Get back to your fucking duty!' For a moment I thought Vincent was going to be up and at him, but he did saunter off eventually, cool as a cucumber, and the Governor led me into the shed to finally start me on the long road to engine driving, by which I mean that he started me cleaning Bampton Number Twenty-Nine.