The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (3 page)

“I stayed the night
before in Liverpool, which was never so full of strangers. All the inns in the
town were crowded to overflowing, and carriages stood in the streets, for there
was no room in the stableyards.

“Thankful was I to stay
in a tiny garret in the Ade1phi hotel thanks to the generosity of my friend,
Miss— the renowned actress, of whom I was a guest that day, and of whose
company of course my poor Father quite disapproved. It didn’t help that Father
had been one of the most fervent opponents of the new railway in the first
place, for he saw it as a threat to his own livelihood — and mine, for in the
future, as I was an only child, I would inherit the Toll Gate Lodge which was
our home, and my Father’s source of income. How right he was! — though, aged
but twenty, I scarce saw it at the time.

“In the morning we all
made to the railway yard. The engineers had assembled eight strings of
carriages, with special colours to match the passengers’ tickets, and eight
locomotives to pull ‘em, all steaming and panting like mighty horses. I peered
at the engines, trying to pick out the bright blue flag that I knew would be
borne by the famous
Rocket
itself.

“Of course no carriage
was allowed to upstage the Prime Minister’s! It had Grecian scrolls and
balustrades, and gilded pillars that maintained a canopy of rich crimson cloth.
The interior had an ottoman seat. It was like a perfect little sitting room,
except that it was a peculiar oblong shape, four times as long as it was wide,
and it ran on eight large iron wheels!

“At precisely ten o’clock
the Prime Minister himself drove up to the yard in the Marquis of Salisbury’s
carriage, drawn by four horses. He was greeted by clapping and cheering, and a
military band struck up
See the Conquering Hero Comes.
His train was to
be pulled along by a locomotive called the Northumbrian, which was adorned by a
bright lilac flag, and would be piloted by George Stephenson himself. The train
consisted of just three carriages, in the first of which would ride the
military band, the second the Prime Minister himself and his guests, and the
third the railway directors and their guests — one of whom was me!

“I cannot describe my
excitement as I clambered into the carriage, which was decked with silken
streamers, a deep imperial purple. I admit I was callow enough to use my nail
scissors to snip off a few inches of a pretty streamer which I tied up in my
hair . . .”

I fingered the bit of
ribbon that had bound up Lily’s manuscript, and wondered.

I grew up in a quiet
cul-de-sac in a little outer-suburb village a few miles from Liverpool city
centre, on the road to Manchester. The cul-de-sac emptied out southwards into
the main road.

Behind the houses ran a
railway embankment. It cut straight past the northern end of the road, running
dead straight west to east, paralleling the main road in its path from
Liverpool to Manchester. We kids were strictly banned from ever trying to find
a way to the railway embankment, or to climb its grassy slopes. But we did know
there was a disused tunnel under the embankment behind one of the back gardens,
from which, our legends had it, robbers would periodically emerge.

When I was small, steam
trains still ran along the line. Great white clouds would climb into the air,
and my mother would rush out to save’ her washing from the soot. The trains
were always a part of our lives, sweeping across the sky like low-flying
planes. Their noise didn’t bother us; it was too grand to be irritating, like
the weather.

As a kid you are dropped
at random into time. That embankment, covered by grass and weeds, was there all
my life, a great earthwork vast and unnoticed. I didn’t know we were living in
the shadow of a bit of history.

For the railway line at
the bottom of my road was George Stephenson’s Liverpool
&
Manchester
Railway, the first passenger railway in all the world. And, seven years before
Queen Victoria took the throne, Miss Lily Ord, great-great-grandmother of my
old friend Albert, attended the railway’s opening — and so, maybe, did a much
more famous figure.

“Soon all was ready. The
Prime Minister’s train was to run on the southerly of the two parallel railroad
lines, so that he might be seen from the other trains, which would all run on
the northerly line.

“At twenty minutes to
eleven a cannon was fired, and off we went! Enormous masses of people lined the
railroad, cheering as we went past and staring agog at such a sight as they
never saw before in their lives.

“As we left Liverpool we
passed between two great rocky cliffs. Bridges had been thrown between the tops
of these cliffs, and people gazed down at us, so distant they were like dolls
in the sky.- I marvelled that all this was the work of man. But the hewn walls
were already cloaked by mosses and ferns.

“Inside our carriage,
crammed shoulder to shoulder, we talked nine to the dozen as we glided along!

“My friend Miss — the
actress was a guest of Mr —, one of the railway directors, though what their
relationship was I was never absolutely clear. But as the panting iron horses
gathered speed, Miss — became distressed. I was forced to exchange seats with
her, so she could sit well inside the carriage.

“I found myself sitting
next to a charming gentleman who introduced himself as M. Pierre Venn (or
perhaps
Vairn).
To my surprise he was French! – he was a lawyer from the
city of Nantes. It seemed M. Venn had advised one of the railway directors
regarding investment from wealthy individuals in France, many of whom have an
eye on the railway for a replication in France itself, depending of course on
its success. I admit I was surprised to learn that Frenchie money had been used
to build an English railway, even so many years after the downfall of Napoleon!
But Money has always been ignorant of national rivalries.

“M. Venn was with
another Frenchman, a dark, rather sullen man whom M. Venn introduced as a M.
Gyger, but this gentleman had not a word to say to me, or anybody else – quite
unlike the voluble Frenchie one expects. He did little but glare about rather
resentfully and I quickly forgot him. (Of course I remember him well now! –-
but I run ahead of myself.)

“M. Venn was also
accompanied by his pretty wife, and their child, their first-born, a little boy
of two or three they called Julie, and they were much more fun. That scamp of a
boy was decked out in a pretty sailor’s costume, for Nantes is evidently near
the coast, and the child was already obsessed by the sea and all things
nautical. But he had also discovered a new passion for Mr Stephenson’s railway;
I am not sure how he managed it, but even before we set off he was already a
bundle of soot, which got all over our clothes and hands! The little boy
laughed so much, his joy at the experience of the journey almost hysterical,
that I think all forgave him.

“M. Venn offered me some
profound thoughts on the meaning of the marvellous experience we were sharing.
`Never has the dominion of mind more fully exhibited its sovereignty over the
world of matter than today,’ he said, `and in a manner which will surely
beneficially influence the future destinies of mankind throughout the civilized
worlds.’ And so forth!

“However as well as his
interest in the Future of Man M. Venn also seemed intrigued by the Presence of
Woman. He complimented me on my accent, which he said sounded Scotch, and the
rosewater scent I wore, and the purple ribbon in my hair, before moving on to
the colour of my cheeks and the suppleness of my neck. That is the way of the
Frenchie, I suppose. Or it may be that Mme. Venn did not understand English.

“It wasn’t long before
we emerged from deep beneath the ground to fly far above it. Over a high
embankment we bowled along, looking down at the tree tops and drinking in the
fresh autumn air . . .”

Somewhere among those
trees was the site of my future home. And perhaps Lily was able to make out the
line of the toll road from which her father made his living.

The history of my home
village has been determined by the fact that it lies on a straight line drawn
between the centre of Manchester and the Liverpool docks. As the Manchester
cotton trade grew and the port of Liverpool began to expand, it was an obvious
place through which to build a road.

A hundred years before
George Stephenson, a consortium of Liverpool merchants petitioned for an act to
set up a turnpike road, the first in Lancashire or Yorkshire save for the
London trunk routes. They installed one of their gatekeepers at the Toll Gate
Lodge, where my old friend Albert was born, and indeed died. The turnpikes were
a smart social invention; by making those with the strongest vested interest in
the roads, the users, pay for their upkeep, the British road system was
massively and rapidly improved.

The new road was a huge
success, and it galvanised the local economy. But by the early 1800s the thirty
miles separating Liverpool and Manchester, by now two engines of the Industrial
Revolution, were traversed daily by hundreds of jostling horses, wagons and
stagecoaches. So the local land agents and merchants began to conceive of
schemes for a railway. They were fortunate enough, or wise, to choose George Stephenson
as their chief engineer. The success of the railway was a calamity for the toll
road, though, and the gatekeepers who made a living from it; Lily’s father had
been right.

The geographical logic
endured. In my lifetime yet another transport link, a motorway, was built
through the same area. So within fifty yards or so of my front door there were
marvels of transport engineering from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.

The trains stopped
repeatedly, so that the notables could admire views of cuttings and viaducts
and countryside, and lesser people could admire the notables. At one stop, twenty-year-old
Lily managed to talk her way into a ride on the footplate of the Northumbrian
with George Stephenson himself.

“I was introduced to the
little engine which carried us all along the rails. She (for they call all
their curious fire-horses mares) goes on two wheels, alike to her feet, which
are driven by bright steel legs called pistons, which are propelled by steam.
All this apparatus is controlled by a small steel handle, which applies or
withdraws the steam from the pistons. It is so simple an affair a child could
manage it.

“The engine was able to
fly at more than thirty miles an hour. But the motion was as smooth as you can
imagine, and I took my bonnet off, and let the air take my hair. Behind the
belching little she-dragon which Mr Stephenson controlled with a touch, I felt
not the slightest fear.”

I envied Lily; it must
have been the ride of a lifetime.

“Mr Stephenson himself
is a master of marvels with whom I fell awfully in love. He is a tall man, more
powerfully built than one of his engines, with a shock of white hair. He is
perhaps fifty-five.” (Actually Stephenson was forty-nine.) “His face is fine,
but careworn. He expresses himself with clarity and forcefulness, and although
he bears the accent of his north-east birthplace there is no coarseness or
vulgarity about him at all. He told me he is the son of a colliery fireman. He
learned his mechanicking working on fire engines down the mines. He was
nineteen before he could read or write, and his quest to build his railway was
frustrated by the linguistic contortions of the `Parliament Men’ who had
opposed him. But this was the day of his triumph.”

Stephenson built his
railway, all thirty miles of it, in just four years. It was a mighty
undertaking, with cuttings and viaducts engineered by armies of navvies.
Stephenson had to build over sixty bridges, including the one behind my
neighbour’s back garden. My embankment was three miles long, forty-five feet
high and amounted to half a million cubic yards of spoil removed from cuttings
miles away.

“The train passed over a
very fine viaduct, and we looked down to see the graceful legs of his mighty
bridge striding across a beautiful little valley. I heard a gruff voice which
could only have been the Prime Minister’s, emanating from the carriages behind,
as he called the spectacle, ‘Stupendous!’ and ‘Magnificent!’ — for so it was.

“But, it is a strange
thing for a man who had proven himself so brave, I thought the Prime Minister
didn’t much enjoy the ride. He said that he could not believe sensible people
would ever allow themselves to be hurled along at such speeds! And later I
heard him say that if Mr Stephenson’s railway caught on, it would ‘only
encourage the lower classes to travel about.’ A good thing too I say! . . .”

Near a station called
Parkside, Stephenson again halted the Northumbrian. And it was during this
brief stop, as Lily wrote in her girlish hand, “that calamity struck.”

“I returned to my
carriage, where I comforted my friend Miss —, who became a little less queasy
now that she could hear the birds sing again. Everybody started to get out of
the carriage to taste the air and stretch his legs.

“Now, you must remember
that we were travelling from Liverpool to Manchester, that is west to east, and
that the Prime Minister’s train was on the southerly of the two parallel rail
lines. So the safest place to alight from our carriage was to our right, for to
go left would be to step on to the other track which, though it was clear at
the moment, was surely not guaranteed to remain so! Thus M. Venn and his wife
alighted safely to the right, M. Venn carrying little Julie on his shoulder.
Miss — and I followed.