The Blackpool Highflyer (36 page)

'There was something put on a line at Whit,' said the boy. 'You had to clap the brake on and a lady was killed.'

'How do you know?' I asked, fast, but then I realised he might very
well
know.

'Because it was the mill where Father was a director - it was their Whit excursion to Blackpool.'

I now abandoned the engine-driving lesson. Careful ques­tions were wanted, and I decided I would fare better with the kid if I did not let on that I'd been firing the engine on that occasion.

'Would you mind telling me what else you know about it?'

'It was reported in the Blackpool paper, which we see at St Anne's, being just a little way along the road, and Father cut out the article.'

'Did he point it out to you himself?'

'No, Agnes saw him reading it - saw him cutting it out too.'

'Agnes?'

'Our maid. We used to have two, but she's the only one left. We had a washerwoman on Mondays, and she's had to go

too; and we had a gardener, and he's gone because the gar­den's gone. Well, we're selling the paddock at any rate. My pocket money's been cut down from half a crown a week to sixpence, but Father says there'll be a dividend for good schoolwork.'

I was thinking on. Robinson had certainly been hit hard by losing his place at Hind's.

'I'm fourteenth in Latin,' the boy was saying, and I didn't know whether that was supposed to be good or bad, but I nodded at him and smiled.

'He can do better than fourteenth at Latin,' came his father's voice from the platform. 'But how is he at engines?'

'He's not scared of the fire, sir,' I called down, 'so he's off to a very good start.'

'Call me Peter,' said Robinson, which as we both knew meant that from now on I would call him nothing at all.

The boy climbed down to his father, and I altered my plan. I would just
get
to it. 'I'd like to thank you for taking on my wife at Hind's,' I said.

'Anyone would have,' he said. 'It was one of the last things I did there, and one of the best. Lydia is a very fine young woman. There's a lot of steam in her, you know.'

'I know,' I said. 'It's none of my business,' I continued, leaving a pause where there should have been a 'sir', 'but did you happen to know that I was firing on the excursion when the trip was halted?'

Robinson moved the
Manchester Guardian
from being under his left arm to being under his right arm. 'No, I didn't,' he said, 'because I'd already started my paper war with the other two partners by then, and was cut off from all business. We were quite at loggerheads, Jim, with everything going through the lawyers, so you see I couldn't have gone off on a jolly with them.'

'The Whit excursion was your idea, as I understand it, sir?' And the 'sir' came out of nerves because I knew I was going in strong.

Robinson nodded. 'I can claim the credit for that, I think. There'd always been the Wakes Week trip of course, but I thought: it's fifty-five hours a week in the mill, fifty weeks a year. Why not have a respite at Whit as well, when the weather's warming up and the fun is just nicely getting going at Blackpool?' He smiled and moved the
Manchester Guardian
back to the arm it had been under before. 'Of course it
had
to be Blackpool,' he added.

Lance Robinson was by now holding his father's hand, and for some reason staring directly up at the glass canopy of the station roof.

'Do you have any ideas about the stone that was placed on the line, Jim?' said Robinson. 'I'm rather cut off out there at St Anne's. Nobody's been brought in for it, as I understand?'

'I do have a few ideas’ I said. 'Yes.'

'He thinks it was wreckers’ said the boy, still looking up.

Mr Robinson looked at me, wanting more. He touched his glasses.

'That's it,' I said.

'It puts me in a rage to think of it,' he said. 'What's the penalty for blocking the track?'

'They give it to you hot,' I said. 'It's penal servitude for life at the maximum.'

Now where that came from, I couldn't have said, but I knew it was right. 'And that's only for placing the obstruction’ I went on. 'If someone's killed it's a hanging matter, I suppose.'

'I knew the one that was killed,' said Robinson. 'Well, very slightly.'

'Margaret Dyson?'

He nodded. 'That's it. She was a good sort.'

He was not talking like a killer now, I had to admit. I found myself taking to the fellow, just as the wife had. Like his boy, he looked the milksop, but he had ideas and he put them into effect. He had become an enemy of the two Hinds, who'd pitched him out of the business, but not an enemy of the work people themselves. He seemed to be all
for
them.'Thank you again for giving the boy a tour of the engine’ he said. 'Give my best regards to your wife, and I hope we meet again soon.'

I told him that I hoped so too, and waved to him and the boy, with my head buzzing.

Ten minutes later Clive was walking towards 1008, and the damn carpet bag was in his hand again. He kept looking down at his boots as he got near. Before climbing up, he put his oil can on the footplate, and in my mind's eye it was the Bancroft's Hair Restorer that was being slammed down there.

He pulled himself up onto the footplate. New boots, poacher's pockets (with a copy of the
Courier
sticking out of one of them), kerchief crossed and held in place by . . . what? By nothing. Just like old Napoleon's. 'Don't look old,' said the slogan on the Bancroft's bottles, and Clive didn't, I had to agree.

'Who was the kid in the green coat?' Clive asked, as he stuffed the carpet bag in the locker.

I told him he was the son of a man who used to be a gover­nor at Hind's Mill.

'Oh yes? In fancy dress was he?'

'That was light suiting,' I said, 'made by Hind's Mill. Well, it was for a while, until his old man was stood down over it.'

'I'm not surprised.'

'It's nice and cool to wear in the hot months.'

'What's the point of that?'

'Well, you know, coolness ... in the hot months.'

Clive had finished stowing away the bag. He turned to me and frowned. 'In summer,' he said, 'you get hot, and that's all about it. A light suit's no good. It won't hold its shape.' He reached into his pocket and took out his copy of the
Courier.
But it wasn't the
Courier.
It was the York paper, the
Yorkshire Evening Press.
'It was left on this engine this morning,' Clive explained. He was pointing at a short article, saying: 'Here's a turn
up ...
I don't think.'

'Excursion Engine Driver Killed’ I read, and all the breath stopped on my lips.

Mr Arthur Billington, who for many years had been employed as an engine driver at York by the North Eastern Railway, died yesterday of a head injury sustained while riding to York station on his bicycle. It is not clear what really happened. Some wit­nesses state that Mr Billington's bicycle simply capsized, others that he struck a pedestrian who was nowhere to be found after the event. Mr Billington was on his way to the locomotive shed at York, where he was booked to take a train carrying excursionists to Scarborough.

'It's the fucking wreckers again!' I said. 'They're out to get the Scarborough excursions as well as the Blackpool ones, and any bugger connected with them. There was the tree on the line
before Malton, and now this ...'

Clive, of course was having
none.
'If that bloke Billington rode a push rod in the same way as he drove an engine, he was a liability to himself and others.' He was looking in his leather pocketbook, checking the time of departure.

I said: 'We're taking on a pilot from York, I suppose?'

He shook his head. 'I've just had a wire sent to say we'll do without.'

'But do you know the road?'

I was sounding rather old womanish, I knew, but I kept picturing Paul, the socialist missionary, stepping in front of the bicycle of Arthur Billington.

Everything, it seemed, was now put in my way to test my pluck, and to spoil what, in any other summer, could have been a happy prospect: a pleasant run to Scarborough, with no need to work the engine back, for we were to return 'on the cushions' once again.

We were put into platform four, where Knowles's black­board announcing the excursion waited. The stationmaster himself, I noticed, was on platform three, speaking to one of his deputies and pointing to a weed growing down by the line.

'I would like to see lawnmower applied to that directly,' he was saying. 'And liberally, mind you. And anywhere else you see similar. You know where the bottle of the stuff's kept?'

We coupled up to a rake of six rattlers. I found Reuben Booth in the last one, asleep in his guard's part, which in looks was well below third class. He was sitting in a chair that had one arm broken off - probably chucked into the stove in those far-off days of cold. Reuben's gold coat was hanging over the back of the chair. His face disappeared into the grey- ness of his beard when he slept, but as soon as he heard my boots scrape over the dust on the floor of the van, he stood up, barking out: 'One hundred and fifty souls.'

The vacuum brake was tested, and we pulled away into the sun with half the hundred and fifty hanging out of the win­dows and Clive winding back the reverser, saying, 'There are some very well set-up lasses on this train,' for he'd had a good look up and down.

The sunshine, when we came out into it, was all golden slowness like treacle. We rolled along into the Beacon Hill Tunnel, with the coolness and the happy screams, then swept back out into the brightness.

After Bradford, Clive took an envelope from one of his poacher's pockets and passed it over. Inside was the medal. On one side of it was the company badge that was on the ten­ders of all the engines: the red rose of Lancashire and the white rose of Yorkshire, together with the shields of the Houses of Lancaster and York. On the reverse were the words 'Presented to C. Carter, engine driver, for extraordinary vigi­lance and promptitude in stopping his engine on June nth, Whit Sunday, 1905.'

'It's a bobby dazzler, is that,' I said, handing it back, and thinking: they knocked that out in double-quick time. Clive nodded. 'Mind you’ he said, putting the medal back in his pocket, 'I'd rather have had a day off.'

He'd said that before about the medal. It was as if he was a little embarrassed over it.

It felt lonely to be going beyond York without a pilot, and I almost missed the shouting of the late Billington. We were feel­ing our way, so to speak, across foreign territory, and I had my eye out for every signal from then on, even the ones on Clive's side. The difficult signal spot was the one at Kirkham Abbey, as I knew from the last Scarborough run. And it was here that the branch had fallen. Again the name Kirkham Abbey made me nervous, putting me in mind of that other Kirkham, on the road to Blackpool where we'd come to grief.

We were flashing along at about fifty as we came up to the distant signal at Kirkham Abbey. It was off as before, so we kept on running.

'Now slow for the home’ I heard myself calling out to Clive, which was like something that might happen in a dream - a fireman giving orders to his driver. Clive didn't seem to mind though. That medal had been a real tonic for him, or maybe it was the new boots. He was looking down at these now as he reached up to the brake, but something was amiss with one of the boots - a dab of soot or a particle of coal lodged in the laces.

The broken buildings of the abbey shot into place alongside us: a great and grave thing, a giant tombstone in many instal­ments.

'Brake!' I yelled.

The movement from hand to boot was halted; the hand went up, brushing the brake handle as much as was needed. 'Keep your hair on,' said Clive.

'Sorry’ I said.

The home signal appeared, peeking from the trees. It was off - just as it ought to've been - and we rumbled over the

level crossing, where a motorcar stood waiting at the gate.

'You wait,' yelled Clive as we passed it by; 'it's us that'll be stopping for
them
before long!' He grinned at me, but I couldn't grin back, for I was fretting about whether I was up to the mark for an engine man.

As we crashed and rocked over the Xs into the excursion plat­forms, Clive said: 'You're all of a jump. Shall I stand you a pint?'

'But you've got your bag in the locker,' I said. 'Doesn't that mean you're sneaking off like before?'

We'd come to a stand now. Clive destroyed the vacuum while thinking over what I'd said. Then he decided to grin. 'I've time for a pint beforehand,' he said, eventually.

After a quick word with Reuben, who was heading directly back to the Joint, we ran the engine into the Scarborough shed. There were two fragments of yellow soap in the engine- men's lobby this time, so we were both able to get tolerably clean. Clive kept his carpet bag by him at all times.