The Blackpool Highflyer (9 page)

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.

'He's giving out that he's taken apartments,' I said. 'It's an
apart
ment
at best, and I would have thought it was more
accurate to say that it was a
room,
and a pretty small one at
that.'

'Well it's a very good job
you
weren't put in charge of let­ting it out,' said the wife.

She stood up and smoothed the green sash around her
waist, letting me see her trimness. I liked the way I was not
supposed to notice what she was about in this.

'Would you care for a stroll?' she said. 'And I'll tell you my
other news.'

I never knew what was going forward with the wife, but on
occasions like this I expected her to say that she had fallen
pregnant. One day she had given me a most mysterious look,
and said that we must clear out the foreign stove immediately
because it was dangerous, and I had been ready for it then.

I looked on the back of the envelope for the lodger, and saw
that it had been sent by the 'Institute for the Diffusion of
Knowledge'. 'He's quite a cultural sort, is he?' I asked.

She gave some thought to this, and as she did so a hundred
possible images of this Ogden formed in my mind.

'No,' she said at last. Then: 'Are you ready for off?' She had
her bonnet in her hand.

'What line is he in?'

'He works for your show’ she said.

'The Lanky?' I said, wondering whether he'd seen one of
my notices down at the Joint.

She nodded, saying, 'Come on now, bustle up.'

'Engine man?'

She shook her head. 'Certainly not,' she said. 'He tells me
he has very great prospects.'

'But what is he
now?'

'Ticket clerk,' she said.

There were battalions of clerks at the Joint. I would nod at
the odd one, but they were all in a different world.

We stepped out of the door, and the wife turned to me
before we'd gone three paces along the street. She was hold­ing a folded piece of paper, which she passed to me. It was a
very short letter: 'We have decided,' I read, 'to give you the
situation of office clerk at our mill on the terms named, that is
£1 15s. per week starting wage. We would suggest you com­mence duties on Monday next.'

I would not continue to mope over the accident. I kissed the
wife, saying: 'I
knew
you would do it.'

When I'd brought her up to Halifax just after we were
married, I'd said she shouldn't work, but had soon thrown
up the sponge over that particular battle. In some northern
towns, if a man let his wife take a job, folks would turn up
their noses at him, but in Halifax the women worked
because the mills needed them. And the wife went her own
way in any case. To her, typists were the best thing out
because they were part of the modern world. She'd been
doing a course at the technical school, typing and short­hand, and was up to .
.
. well, a certain amount of words a
minute. A
lot
of words as
far
as I knew. But when she'd gone
to see about any situation there'd always been someone else
who could do more, and the letters sent back had always
begun: 'We have filled up the situation coming vacant. . .'
She'd had dozens of those, and the more she got, the harder
she grafted at her shorthand and typing.