The Blackpool Highflyer (35 page)

The cigar fellow put his head out of his little office and called: 'I've got a dozen 'A's here.'

We began making for his little room.

'The tickets for the Joint are sent along from Manchester, aren't they?' I asked George.

'That's the idea, old man.'

'The tickets that went missing: were they singles or returns? And where were they for?'

George blinked a few times. 'Can't just remember,' he said. 'Gosh! I'll be forgetting me own name next!'

'Did you hear about what happened to Lowther, the ticket inspector?' 'Fell off one rock and smashed his legs on another, didn't he? Out at Hebden Bridge? In the
mountains
they've got there! Well, I expect the fellow was canned.'

'What makes you think so?'

'The poor fellow's famous for it. How do you think he got to be so glum? It always takes you like that in the end, you know.'

The 'A's were pushed over towards us. George took one of the cigars out of its box, and rolled it under his nose.

'Do you have a light?' he asked the little cigar man.

'No,' replied the cigar man, rather angrily, 'and I don't have the bob you owe me for those smokes either.'

George began fishing in his waistcoat.

'I was at Hebden Bridge with the wife and a friend of the wife,' I said. 'I had sight of what happened, and I thought he was pushed. I chased the fellow I thought did it all the way to Manchester. I couldn't see his face, but I'm sure he must have been connected with tickets in some way. Do you have any notion who it might have been?'

This was the facer.

But George simply turned to the cigar man, saying:
'Two
shillings. I'm paying for this gentleman's half dozen as well.' He paid over the money and turned to me: 'You chased him to Manchester!' he exclaimed.

And now I felt he was joshing, or wanting to seem to be. 'I chased him to Hebden station and got on the same train. But I lost him at Manchester Victoria.'

We'd walked back out into the loading bay by now. 'Well,' said George, 'ain't you the dark horse?'

'Who do you think might have wanted to crown Lowther?' I asked him.

George stopped in the loading bay and his eyes went wide: 'There's absolutely hundreds that would,' he said. 'The fel­low was a regular bastard.'

'He was on the train when the stone was found on the line,' 1 said. 'I wondered whether that might have been somebody's first crack at him.'

He was on the point at once. 'As to that, nobody knew Lowther's movements beforehand. So no wrecker could have guessed he was going to be on that train, and it'd be a damned queer way of trying to kill him, wouldn't it? I mean, talk about going round the houses.'

I knew the first part of this to be true, and the second part seemed the soundest of good sense. 'You know’I said, 'every time I look at the Wakes Outlook, I expect to read, "It is pleas­ing to report that no grindstones have been found on the lines going into the resort."

'I'd say you were becoming rather overwrought about the matter,' said George, who had the cigar in his mouth. 'Anyway,' he went on, 'as I've already mentioned to you, chances are they were going for the train that came along
after
- the regular Blackpool service. Cheerio, old chap.'

I watched him walk away across the empty, sunlit yard that lay behind the cigar factory. I'd not yet mentioned to him about the Socialist Mission telegram to the
Courier.
It came to me that George had described himself as a socialist, but I couldn't see him being in with that show. Besides, I was a socialist myself, of sorts.

Come to that (and this was a new thought), from all that the wife said, Robinson, late of Hind's Mill, might even be counted a socialist, of a toffy kind.

'I'm obliged to you for the cigars!' I called to George, and he raised his hand in a backwards wave.

His going off like that quite took the fun away from having bought the 'A's. Maybe he was just tired after his day's work. He did look jiggered, and seemed to be dragging his large shadow across the wide, dusty yard.

I'd meant to take him along to the Evening Star for a pint, and I decided to head in that direction anyway. On reaching Horton Street, I looked on the old warehouse wall for the Socialist Mission poster advertising the '
meeting to discuss questions'.

It was gone.

'Scarborough', I read in the
Courier
the following midday, is 'delightfully sunny. The town is to be seen in its best summer garb, the variegated blossoms making it a veritable garden city.'

Well, I would be seeing for myself in three hours' time, train wreckers permitting. For I could no longer think of a train line stretching away clear, especially not for the length of time involved in a life of firing and driving. That was a forty-year touch, and nobody's luck holds out that long. I was beginning to wonder whether I had the pluck for the job.

But today I was on show, so I ought to look the part at least.

The engine was number 1008, the very first of Mr Aspinall's radial tank engines, which ought to make a talking point for the Robinson boy. It was lately in from Bradford, and now waited alongside the reserve platform at the Joint, having just come over from York with six carriages. I would talk over a few points about the engine with the boy, and then it would be time for Scarborough. Clive was about, but kept coming and going, 'seeing to bits of business'. He had on brand new boots, laced up at the side, which he couldn't walk without looking at.

Departure time for Scarborough was 10.32, and Robinson and his young son came walking down the spare platform towards 1008 at 9.45, as arranged by the wife over the tele­phone from the Mill.

Peter Robinson was younger than I'd expected - might not have been more than about fifty. He wore round glasses and had a schoolboy look. The other Robinson had the schoolboy look in spades, for he
was
a schoolboy, although on a day off. He was small and also wore glasses, and a loose green suit made from what I took to be the famous light cloth. He looked very free in the get up, and ready to lift off, like a greenfly. It was queer that Robinson should have kitted out his boy in the stuff that had caused his own downfall. His own suit was of the common run: black and heavy.

'Good morning . .. Mr Stringer, is it?' Robinson called up.

He was a little la-di-da. Not an out-and-out toff, though. I gave the lad a hand up onto the footplate; his father intro­duced him to me as Lance.

'Now what do we have here?' said young Lance Robinson, which rather knocked me. He was a very confident lad, as dif­ferent from Arnold Dyson as could be.

'It's one, zero, zero, eight,' I said, 'a tank engine with the two-four-two wheel formation, built by Mr Aspinall - who I'm sure you've heard of - at the company's works at Horwich. You might like a trip to Horwich one day. It's beauti­fully laid out, with a little narrow-gauge railway running alongside the full-sized ones, to fetch and carry all the parts.'

I was yammering on, being a little nervous with the boy's father on hand.

'You're not the driver, are you?' said the boy.

I shook my head. 'Fireman,' I said.

'But I suppose you know all the controls just as well as the driver?'

'It would be a poor show if I didn't,' I said.

The boy looked down on the spare platform at the Joint, where he'd just been standing. His father grinned up at him. The boy turned to me. 'Would you say that "alighting" was getting on a thing or getting off?' he asked.

'Lance,' his father called up, 'you know very well which it is.' Then Robinson called to me, saying, 'I'm much obliged to you for doing this, Mr Stringer. Can I leave you at the boy's mercy for ten minutes?'

'That'll be quite all right, sir,' I said, and Peter Robinson walked away towards the station buildings.

Watching him go, the boy seemed worried. Not about

himself, but about his father. 'He'll be all right,' he said. 'I expect he'll have a seltzer on the station and read his paper. Father takes the
Manchester Guardian,
you know. It's best for business.
The Times
is hardly circulated where we live in St Anne's. What paper do you read?'

'The
Halifax Courier,'
I said.

'My father was in business here in Halifax,' said the boy. 'He was a partner.'

This wasn't lad's talk. 'Yes,' I said, 'but we must get on if we're to learn all about the engine -'

'He had the notion that people would want light suiting -'

'Now this handle', I said, 'controls the cylinder cocks.'

'It wasn't one of his better ideas,' said the boy.

'The cylinder cocks', I went on, 'are most important because -'

'I'm wearing the light suiting just now,' said the boy.

'Well,' I said, 'it does look nice and light. Now if you look here -'

'It's rational,' said the boy, simply.

I nodded, saying: 'Perhaps we'd better start with the fire.'

'But people don't want it.'

'Well, I expect they will in time,' I said.

'But it'll be too late for Dad -1 mean Father,' said the boy.

'The cylinder cocks', I said firmly, 'allow the steam into and out of the cylinders, and you must always remember to open them before moving the engine.'

'And what happens if you don't?'

'Then the piston would push the condensed water, which would knock the end out of the cylinder bore.'

The boy gave a little jump at this. 'I bet you'd catch it if you let that happen,' he said.

'Yes,' I said, 'you certainly would.'

'What
would
become of you if you let that happen?'

'If you were an engine man? And you let
that
happen?'

Lance Robinson nodded, eagerly asking, 'Would you be stood down?'

The kid was stuck on the question of people being sacked.

'It depends,' I said. 'It would depend what other daft things you'd done in the past. The shed superintendent would be down on you like a ton of coal though, no question of that. Now we come to the regulator,' I went on. 'There's a real art to controlling it, and the motto is -'

'What can a driver work his way up to?' said the boy.

'Well, most just stay driving,' I said. 'They like it, you see. But others go on to different things: traffic management in the company offices, engineering. There's lots you can put in for.'

'If a driver came to our house, would he come in at the tradesman's entrance?'

'Why would an engine driver go to your house?'

'Oh I don't know. Dad's train mad as well, you see. He's got hundreds of
Bradshaws'
all lined up in the dining room.'

I pictured again the grindstone on the line. I turned to the boy.
'Has
an engine driver ever been to your house?'

'Oh, I don't know,' said the boy. 'I shouldn't think so. What's that?'

He was pointing at the pressure gauge.

'That tells you the steam pressure,' I said, 'how much
push­ing force
you've got.'

I had a case against Robinson in my head, of course, but until now it had looked rather sick. There'd been a pretty solid row at Hind's that had ended with him being stood down from the company - all just before the stone was put on the line. According to the wife, Peter Robinson owned a car, and a car had been racing along beside us that day. If it was­n't just hooligan's work, then the stone had been put on the line by someone who knew Hind's Mill, or someone who knew the railways, or better still both. And here was Robin­son, coming up strongly on both counts.

The boy, Lance, was looking up at me.

'A working head of steam,' I said, 'on a fair-sized engine would generally be about two hundred pounds to the square inch. Now you need a very hot fire to get it up to that.' 'How hot?' asked the boy.

I told him to stand back, and I opened the fire door. The boy stepped further back when he felt the fire.

'Hotter than
that’
I said, and I closed the fire door.

'Can I take another squint in there?' he said.

I liked the kid. He didn't look it, but he was game. I opened the door once again, and we watched the rolling, orange flames.

'It's just a different world,' said the kid, and whether he meant inside the fire or the engine-driving life I couldn't say.

'I wear spectacles as you can see,' said the boy. 'Would that stop me driving engines?'

'No,' I said. The true answer was 'yes', but it hardly mat­tered. The kid was far too posh ever to be on the footplate.

'Is it dangerous to work on engines?' he asked.

'Very,' I said, and I could not help trying a little fishing. 'There's wreckers,' I said, 'for one thing.'