The Blackpool Highflyer (15 page)

'Oh, you know, I do it by accident
. .
. I'm nuts on litera­ture,' he went on. 'I've got twenty-four Everyman's now, and
when I get up to thirty, I'm going to start reading them.'

We had stepped inside the house by now, and the kettle
was screaming. I walked into the scullery and called to
George: 'Cup of tea?'

'Don't mind if I do.' I made a pot, and as it was mashing took George upstairs to
show him to his room; I pointed out the door at the back that
gave on to the iron staircase leading down into the yard. 'You'll
probably want to use these mostly, so you can come and go
under your own steam,' I said. 'The outside privy is yours;
there's use of the scullery, and if you want a sit down in the
parlour from time to time, that'll be quite all right I'm sure.'

The stuff had just been put into the room in any old way,
with most of the plants off their tables and sitting at crazy
angles on the truckle bed. And there were heaps of packets of
biscuits on the floor. George Ogden trooped through all this
rubble towards the door leading to the outside stair, and the
thin window alongside looking out to Hill Street and beyond.
Well, the window may have been thin but as much as possi­ble was trying to come through it. You could see across the
mill tops to Beacon Hill, with its own few mills, including
Hind's, from which this bright morning smoke was dreaming
away to the right; and then, more directly below us on the
hillside, were all the things the factories had
made
: the Drill
Hall, the courts, the hotels, the Palace Theatre, and all the lit­tle houses in between, cluttering the place up like the pawns
on a chess board. I threw open the window for George and
the room was filled with the blaring of a barge on the canal
wharf, and the faint cry, rising up from the Joint, of 'Halifax!',
which a certain old porter set up whenever a train came in.

The wife was at the door of the room; George was looking
at her, and it was strange to think that another man was see­ing her morning self, with a sleepy delay in her eyes, and her
hair tangled. 'Good morning, Mrs Stringer,' said George, and
he bowed. There was no other word for it.

'Halifax!' came the cry from the station once again, and it
was as though we were all just waking from a dream, and
needed to be reminded where we were.

'I hope you will be quite comfortable here, Mr Ogden,' she
said. 'Of course you will always use the stairs at the back.' She
had a paper in her hand, which she gave to him.

'They're good quarters,' he said, 'just what I need to be
going on with.'

'Please remember’ said the wife, 'there's use of the scullery,
but do please knock before entering if the door should be
closed. You must keep to the outside privy. You may use the
paraffin stove for heating water up here if you like but you
are to ask first if that's quite all right. I have taken the liberty
of typing out our agreement.'

I liked hearing the pride in her voice as she said that. I
knew that she had stayed behind at Hind's on her second day
and put in over an hour on this job.

'I will give this my attention very shortly,' said George
Ogden, who took the paper, folded it and placed it inside the
leaves of
Letters of Descartes,
which was a very bad sign from
the point of view of his ever getting around to glancing at it.
He then turned to the window again, and we all looked out.

A lot of pride had been put into the building of Halifax, and
the builders had a powerful liking for columns and domes, so
that to my mind every other building looked like a giant mau­soleum, something built in memory of someone or something
very grand that had gone before and must never be forgotten.
I would always think of Halifax as a town that was down by
one person, and that on account of me. But it looked grand
this Saturday morning.

George Ogden turned to us and said: 'God's in his heaven,
and all's right with the world.'

'It's ten shillings down’ said the wife.

George Ogden took out his pocket book and handed over
the money much as the Shah of Persia might if that gent were
ever called on to pay ten bob for a lodge. 'Brand new
address,' he said, 'and a brand new start.'

And this remark of his bothered me.

I saw that we were down for a Scarborough excursion when I
read the weekly notices the following Monday. It was booked
for the Wednesday - 21 June.

As we were rolling away from the shed mouth on that
day, and heading for the coaling stage with a tank engine
clanking under us, I saw that John Ellerton, shed superinten­dent, was walking alongside. It had been misty when I'd
booked on at seven but that had cleared, leaving the smoke
to battle it out with sunshine. The mills and the houses of
Sowerby Bridge climbed the hills in zigzags, and there were
golden flashes of sunlight coming off certain windows like
messages being sent over the rooftops, across the patches of
rocks and grass, over the horses' heads. There was nothing
much to Sowerby Bridge - it was mostly Town Hall Street -
but it looked fine in the sun, just like its mightier neighbour,
Halifax.

It was the tenth day after the stopping of the Highflyer, and
this was our first excursion since then. The trip was booked
by a show called White's, another Halifax mill.

Of all my particular worries, I'd been thinking of that
report in the
Courier
speaking easily of the 'lately fallen tree'
that had lain on the line ahead of the North Eastern Railway
excursion to Scarborough. We were about to run over those
very metals.

After leaving Halifax, we would make first for York, where
the Lanky territories gave out. The rest of the trip being over
foreign territory - that of the North Eastern Railway - we'd
have to pick up somebody who knew the road.

'I have the name here of your pilot,' John Ellerton yelled
up; 'fellow called Billington!'

We had the board for the Halifax line now, and Clive was
opening up the regulator.

Ellerton stopped trying to keep up, but looked at his watch,
then yelled out: They've given us him before!' he called.
'And he's a right pill!'

'What's he on about?' said Clive as we began rumbling
towards the Joint station.

'He said the bloke we're to take on is a pill.'

As we crawled along, I looked down at a patch of coal, cin­ders and bright weeds - green and black nothing. But there
was a paraffin blow-lamp and grinding wheel there, with a
spare grindstone about the size of the famous one from ten
days ago. I had never noticed either of these items before, but
I somehow knew they had always been there. The question
was: had there been a second spare? I would ask John Eller­ton, who was standing watching us go, with his bowler right
back on his head, pleased at the sight of another engine going
off to be at large in the world. Everybody liked John Ellerton:
he had very honest blue eyes: Irish eyes, as I thought of them
for some reason.

'I believe I know him,' said Clive.

'Who?'

'The pill. They always give you the same bloke at York -
he's like a sort of warning not to come back.'

I was more than a little anxious over the run. Paul, the
socialist missionary, and his governor, Alan Cowan, were
down on excursions. Paul had denied having anything to do
with the wrecking of 1418, but would be hardly likely to say
so if he had been behind it. But no. If you were wrecking
trains to make a point, you
would
own up to it, providing you
knew you couldn't be found.

If the wreckers were after mills then here was another:
White's. Then again, if they were after Hind's Mill only, we'd
be all right.

The wife had settled in there quite nicely, working for her
Mr Robinson and not either of the Hinds. She'd told me they
were trying to discover for themselves who'd placed the
stone. I'd asked her if they knew she was married to me, the
fireman of the engine, and she'd said, 'I don't know. I keep
mum over that.'

Could it be that the wreckers owed a grudge to Highflyers,
or big engines in general?

That was something that had come to me in the Evening
Star, and if it was the case, we were in for a trouble-free day,
for we had under us one of the standard radial tanks of Mr
Aspinall. They were a little longer than your common run of
tank, but were to be counted a close cousin of a kettle put up
against a Highflyer.

Clive, doing his checks, had found dust on the regulator,
on the engine brake - all over the shop, really - but he'd
smiled at it. I fancied that after a few long days on the Rish­worth branch he was feeling light-hearted at the thought of
Scarborough. It was a pretty spot, and something new in that
we'd not worked an engine there before. Also, we were not
booked to do a double trip, so the two of us would be able to
try some of the pubs before 'coming back passenger'.

Our carriages were waiting at platform six at the Joint beside
the blackboard on which Knowles, the stationmaster, had
written '
special train, white's mill
', and so on, with all
the fancy underlining, even for this little tank engine. He was
just finishing off as we came in. He could have farmed out this
job, but he had a better hand than anyone in the Joint, and he
knew it. As we floated up alongside - Clive had got the cut-off
just right, as usual - Knowles looked up fast, then away. I
looked at Clive, but he was miles away, holding his leather
book and staring at the pressure gauge, even though it was at
the right sort of mark. It struck me there and then that I'd never
seen Clive pass a single word with Stationmaster Knowles.