He began eating, and I spotted that his dinner was a clanger, which is a pastry with jam or apple at one end and bits of meat and potato at the other. They'd had them on the North Eastern too – and up there a clanger was an engine man's dinner. There was no law against eating one if you weren't on the footplate, but it was all wrong in my eyes.
'I could do with some goggles, I tell you,' I shouted at Vincent, as the yard pilot banged another wagon up to the coaling stage.
'That's a funny bit of kit for a railwayman,' he roared back, as the blokes began chucking down the coal. 'In France,' I said, 'engine men wear them on the footplates.' 'Go on!' said Vincent.
'Honour bright' I said, and Vincent repeated these words with a sneer, adding: 'You read that in the Boy's Own Paper, I suppose.'
'Railway Magazine,' I shouted back, but he didn't hear, or pretended not to. 'In France,' I said again, 'they call the drivers ingenieurs.'
'Give it a bloody rest, will you?' said Vincent, who'd gone moody again. He bit into his clanger, then quickly put it down, and I thought: I know what's happened – the jam's shot through the meat end. Serve him right, too.
'I suppose you think cab roofs should be all over,' said Vincent.
'Well,' I said, stopping shovelling because I was desperate for a proper chat, really, 'that would be up-to-date, at least.'
'Only trouble is, you'd have drivers falling asleep all the time if they didn't get a soaking or a bit of a blow to keep them going.'
'How could that happen? In America the drivers sit on seats in the footplate, and they don't fall asleep.'
'Seats? Can you imagine a first-class man like my uncle Arthur sitting down at the regulator?'
'Uncle!' and I fairly gasped the word out, for Vincent did not look like the sort of happy-go-lucky young fellow that has an uncle, and Arthur Hunt did not seem like the amiable sort of bloke you imagine as having a nephew.
'I'm wondering how those two ended up on the half-link,' I said. 'Your uncle especially. He looks all right to me, and you don't get taken off the main line just on account of a hard nature.'
Vincent gave me one of his looks. 'Arthur won't lick the Governor's boots, and Barney's no toady either, but he's easier meat for the bastards on account of being a more obliging sort of bloke.' 'They were both top-link men at one time, though?' Vincent nodded: 'Lodging turns,' he muttered. He was a very suspicious fellow, slow as Christmas at giving out facts. 'So they're both in hot water, are they?' 'Drowning in it.' 'Why don't they get stood down?'
'Too popular about the shed. There'd be a bloody riot if Arthur went, especially. Barney's got to look out for himself a bit more.' 'Why?'
'Five years back he crashed the express just before Salisbury.' 'A bad smash, was it?'
Vincent nodded: 'Made the hills rattle; he was never the same after that.' 'How do you mean?'
But Vincent said nothing to that. I looked at him, trying to fathom his face, which was like a white billiard ball, right down to the little blue chalky marks. 'This summer,' Vincent went on after a while, 'they said he ran over in the yard here, and they tried to get him for that.' 'He went past a stop signal?' 'That's what somebody said – some little splitter.'
I asked who, but he wouldn't say. He may have been slow with information but it was coming now, and it was, in a sly way, against Barney Rose. The half-link, it seemed to me, were pretty thick with each other, but Vincent preferred Hunt to Rose. I found I had a great appetite for all that he could tell me, and I wasn't sure whether it was a strength or weakness in me, but it was something altogether new.
'Barney's all right though,' he went on. 'He doesn't mind the Brookwood runs.' Now, he'd mentioned that spot before. 'Where's Brookwood?' I asked.
'I don't know why you don't look it up in The Railway Magazine,' said Vincent; 'it's sure to be in there.'
We both turned away at that moment, for an 0-8-2 monster tank was coming up like nightfall. As the coal blokes began to fill its bunker, Vincent stuffed what was left of his clanger under his jacket, but it was no good, because the dust gets you from all sides.
I put in a few minutes more with the shovel before I spoke to him again. "The Governor said nothing about me shovelling coal on these heaps.'
'But he's on sick leave just at the moment,' said Vincent, and a little smile sneaked quickly across his face. 'Maybe you should have watched your step a bit with Arthur.'
'But I've only ever said half a dozen words to him since I've been here.'
'Maybe they were the wrong half dozen,' said Vincent, bringing his clanger out of his pocket again. 'Or maybe there's a bit of a mystery about why you're here in the first place.'
'What are you getting at?' I asked, but of course I knew very well because the thing was a mystery to me as much as anybody.
'I mean, look here,' said Vincent, 'you meet some johnny up in the bloody middle of nowhere.'
He meant Smith, who was the cause of all my troubles in some way, but I tried to pretend that my thoughts concerning that gentleman came without complications. 'He wasn't some johnny, he's a director of this company.'
Vincent put his pipe on the coal, and gave me one of the hypnotising looks he went in for. 'No, mate,' he said, 'he's not.'
With this, all the ground went from beneath my feet; but I tried not to let on. 'Who is he then?'
'I can't believe you don't know all,' said Vincent. 'You must have had a few chats with the gent.'
'I've had one chat with him,' I said, 'and some letters were sent.'
'Smith used to be part of this show,' said Vincent, 'the London and South Western Company, I mean, and he still comes back to cause trouble from time to time, but now he's with another lot.' 'What other lot?' I was desperate for the answer, which might make everything plain, but Vincent first caught up his bottle and had another long go at his tea.
'Ever heard of the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company?' he said after a while. 'No.'
"They run the bodies out to Brookwood Cemetery. Well, they do the ceremonials; we lay on the trains, and the half-link runs 'em.' 'And I'm to work on this funeral train?'
'If you ever get off these coal heaps,' said Vincent with a horrible little grin.
Vincent stood up and put the cork in his bottle. 'You've been sent to work on that show for a reason.'
I was still too busy trying to imagine 'that show' to be thinking of reasons, but I said in a daze: 'What?'
He didn't answer, but instead asked, "This fellow Smith… he's not been in touch since?' 'No.' 'And he was helpful towards you?'
A funeral train. I had heard of a funeral train, but not a funeral train. 'I say,' said Vincent, 'was he helpful towards you?' 'A proper gent in all regards.' 'Think he might be a Tommy Dodd?' 'A what?'
'Don't know? Then count yourself lucky. Let's say that you're here because he's got friends who've pulled strings, and now, you see, Arthur doesn't like that because he can think of other people who should have had this start before you.' 'Like who?'
'Like friends of his.' Vincent was watching me like a coal rat. 'Friends of his from London. You see, we don't go up there and take your work, poking our nose into your ways…'
I thought of Grosmont, and how the sun had shone every single day as I worked my notice and the rooks had risen off the trees at dusk like cinders off a fire, and then I thought of Smith, and how he had gulled me from start to finish. He had heard of my liking for high speed, yet had brought me down to work on a funeral train. But why had he done so?
'Hunt thinks I earn too much money for a new lad, doesn't he?' I said. "That's one of the reasons he's got his knife into me.'
'No,' said Vincent, 'he thinks you earn too little, and that nobody should agree to come on at that rate. But you did, and so did those other out-of-town blokes – bloody Taylor and bloody Mike.'
Then I saw a big man stumbling towards us wearing a bowler that was more on his hair than on his head: the Governor. As he began to climb the coal hill, Vincent turned to face him;
the two closed, and I thought the Governor looked fit to explode as he reeled back and crowned the side of Vincent's head, roaring, 'Get back to your fucking duty!' For a moment I thought Vincent was going to be up and at him, but he did saunter off eventually, cool as a cucumber, and the Governor led me into the shed to finally start me on the long road to engine driving, by which I mean that he started me cleaning Bampton Number Twenty-Nine. The Bampton tank was green. It looked somewhat like an M7, being thirty-five tons of muscular-looking side tank, but there was something not right about it. The dome was too big, like a big, ever-growing bubble rising out of the boiler, threatening to burst.
I spent the rest of that Saturday going at it with paraffin rags on the motion and frame, and tallow on the boiler, and thinking about the private war I'd struck. The missing man, Henry Taylor, was to do with it, I was sure, and so was Mr Rowland Smith. When I was not thinking of that I was revolving in my mind funerals and trains, and how the two might go hand in hand.
For all my troubles, I was glad to be cleaning at last, and I would like to have set to with Brasso on the controls as well, but a fire-raiser came onto the engine at four o'clock and ordered me off the footplate. He didn't seem to mind, though, that I watched him about his work as best I could from down on the tracks. The lights were all lit and the shed was almost pretty – quieter than usual, too, for there didn't seem to be many blokes about.
After a while the fire-raiser looked up from the firehole door, where he'd been spreading out the coal, and shouted, 'I hear you're from the North Eastern.'
'That's it,' I said, and I was glad he was willing to chat, but anxious as to what he'd heard about me.
'Some good running up there,' he said, and his voice came out with an echo to it, as though his head was half in the fire-hole.
'Our first Rs', I shouted back up at him, 'did almost a hundred and fifty thousand miles between Newcastle and Edinburgh with no valve-wear to speak of.'
But by that remark I had somehow killed the conversation, for there was no answer.
Having no other duties, I hung around that funny little hunchback, Twenty-Nine, sitting on the buffer bar drinking tea until late in the evening, and watching the fire blokes come out of their mess at the top of the shed, which must have been a pretty uncomfortable spot, as it had a great fire burning at all times inside it. They were off to raise steam in the engines going out on 'dark days', which is what nights were called at Nine Elms, and they carried torches or sometimes buckets of burning paraffin held on wooden spars. They never used the engines' proper names but called out nicknames instead, and the talk was all of Jumbos, Piano Fronts, Town Halls and the like. As the evening progressed they were shouting about the Turnstile too, the pub near to the Nine Elms gates. I had seen it, of course, but that was all.
I was just thinking this was a bit of all right, that maybe things were looking up, when Arthur Hunt came out of the darkness with a black-bearded fellow. One nightmare glance went shooting between us, then he and his mate leapt up onto Thirty-One, and he took her off somewhere – I did not care where.
That night the streets were full of girls, and I suddenly knew how they got their living. From my lodge I saw washing flying on the line in the yard. There were three pairs of my landlady's knickers and three of her blouses, and they were all lit up by the light on the soap works wall. But there was no sign of the lady herself.
Chapter Eight
Tuesday 24 November
The following Tuesday I walked in on Crook, bent over his board. He seemed to be playing a game of chequers against himself, but then there came a fearful shriek; he glanced out of his window, and what he saw galvanised him into speaking.
"The Bug!' said Crook, and his eyebrows jumped, giving me high hopes of a conversation.
'What's the Bug, Mr Crook?' I said, for I had stopped siring him.
'A four-two-four tank,' he said after a while, looking over my head as he spoke. 'Anything special about it?'
'It contains at all times Sir Roger White-Chester.' He was back at his chequers game now. 'An important gentleman, is he, Mr Crook?'
'Board member,' said Crook, who was now back to mumbling, 'and more important than the locomotive superintendent, Mr Drummond, who was meant to have that thing to himself.' 'What does Mr White-Chester do?' 'Comes in weekly to inspect the shed.' 'To inspect it for what?' 'Slackness,' said Crook. 'Slackness of what kind?' 'Your kind would do,' he said, looking up at me. 'Standing about talking when you should be on the job.' And he went back to his tokens.
Walking out of Crook's place, I saw the Bug directly: a little squashed-up tank revolving on one of the turntables with a lot of smoke twisting out of its chimney in a spiral. I walked into the shed and found the Governor coughing outside his office with papers in his hand. He was walking me over for another cleaning turn when there came a second shriek from the Bug. It was pounding up towards the shed now, with us directly in its sights.
The Bug lurched to a stop and a johnny in a top hat and frock coat leapt out of the side and started striding along the very road on which we were standing. At first I thought there was something the matter with his face but this turned out to be his moustache. 'Sir Roger,' said the Governor in an under-breath.
The arrival of Sir Roger White-Chester had an electrifying effect on the shed. He came in shouting, 'Very good, very good!' and yet all the blokes in the shed had disappeared from view. He caught one poor bloke who was pushing a barrow-load of rags, though, and quizzed him about something before setting off again with his 'Very goods!' which echoed all about in what you'd have thought was an empty shed.
'What does any man who's up to the mark have to fear from talking to him?' I asked the Governor. 'Do you want me to introduce you?' he said.
It was fortunate – for I certainly did not want to be introduced – that White-Chester turned around at that moment and walked back towards daylight and his Bug. The aim, I supposed, was not that he would see others but that others would see him, and stop their slackness as a result. At three o'clock or so I was sweeping the footplate of Bampton Thirty-One – which was like Twenty-Nine, only red – when Barney Rose came for it. I first spotted him coming through the shed towards me with the Governor and Mike, but when I looked again there was only Mike with him, and that toothy fellow leapt into the cab while Rose called out, 'Fancy a trip?'
'I'm sure I do,' I said, and straight away went bright red. This was very unexpected after all the surliness of earlier days. Alone of all the cleaners in the shed I didn't work in a gang, and I was desperate for company.
After we'd coupled up to two blank, black carriages and two passenger carriages, neither of which I got a proper look at, and finally got ourselves untangled from the Nine Elms sidings, I felt as if I'd been living in that shed around the clock for years. I had forgotten how blue the sky could be. As we rolled along the top of the black viaducts, we were level with the roofs of the houses, among which great factories squatted, like giants sitting down among pygmies.
Rose took it pretty easy on the footplate, never looking at the fire, not seeming too bothered about steam pressure, saying hardly anything to Mike. Seeing a fellow like Barney Rose at the regulator was like marvelling at a ship in a bottle: you couldn't understand how it had come about.
I realised that very likely I was only on this trip because the Governor had ordered it, but Rose was pretty friendly towards me, just as he had been on my first day – friendlier than he was towards Mike. He said that he couldn't believe anybody who came from Yorkshire was not a great hand with bat and ball. He wouldn't look me in the eye, though, I did notice that.
Mike was amiable too, but all wrong about the footplate. As he shovelled, he spilt coal everywhere – kept stumbling on the lumps like a drunk – and he just kept piling the stuff on, sending the steam pressure through the roof. He wasn't right in his looks, either, which is probably why I couldn't stop staring at him. With most people, you never see the teeth; with others you see nothing but. Mike
was one of the others.
I left off staring with Rose's next remark: 'We're off up to the Necropolis station at Waterloo,' he said. 'What we've got on here are two hearse waggons and two passenger carriages, which will make up a funeral set for tomorrow.'
At last I was seeing the work of the half. 'Are there bodies inside the funeral carriages?' I said. Rose grinned at that.
'We don't run the stiffs into the Necropolis station. We run them out. The trip is from the Necropolis station to the Necropolis itself, which is at Brookwood in Surrey.' He knocked his pipe out on the regulator, sprinkling the baccy over his boots in his unparticular way as he asked: 'Now, Necropolis is a Greek word, and it means what, Mike?' He looked at his mate for the first time, who gave a sort of shrug. 'Boneyard, I expect,' said Mike.
'It's a terrible thing, this Board School education,' said Rose, as I tried to place Mike's accent. It was certainly not London. 'Necropolis means city of the dead,' he continued, 'and that's what we have at Brookwood: the biggest cemetery in the world.' 'What locos are commonly used on the run?' I asked.
Rose shrugged. "The Bampton tanks: Twenty-Nine and this one – also known as the Green Bastard and the Red Bastard.'
I said, 'They are a pair of beasts, really, aren't they?' but I knew I could never call an engine a bastard, and didn't think a chap of the right sort ever would. (I was wrong about that, however, along with many other things.)
"They're not fast,' said Rose, 'but that doesn't matter because the funeral trains never go above thirty, unless Arthur's at the regulator.'
'He's still on the expresses to Devon – inside his head, I mean,' put in Mike. 'You've not lived 'til you've been put off a footplate by him.'
He smiled after saying this – it was an odd smile, because of the need to cover up his teeth – and then went red. Rose looked at Mike again but said nothing, and I thought Mike had gone a bit far in poking fun at Hunt, even though he was a pill.
'Would Henry Taylor ever have been on this Necropolis run?' I asked Rose, for I seemed to have more in common with the missing man than I would have liked.
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