The Blackpool Highflyer

by Andrew Martin

  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 apartment 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 m
e 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.

  Shortly after she'd started I had bought her an India rubber, and she'd said, 'Thank you very much,' while opening the window and shying it all the way to Hill Street. 'I will never get on with one of those in the house,' she'd said, to which I'd replied, 'Well how will you remove your mistakes?' 'By not making them,' had come the answer.

  I had never seen anything bounce like that India rubber.

  For weeks afterwards, I would find half-done letters about the house that she'd brought back from the technical school. 'Dear Sir, My directors wish me to convey to you . . .'; 'My directors wish to inform you that the matter you name . . .' - all with imaginary directors named and supplied with hundreds of initials. Or: 'Replying to your letter of the 5th inst, our reqxxxxmentx .. .' And then might come a long line of bbbbs or !!!!!s, for there was a lot of ginger in the wife.

  It had not been easy for her to come to Yorkshire from London, and at first she had seemed in a daze, and, when not in a daze, blue. The rain was like prison bars. She told me she thought that Halifax and places around were like Red Indian villages thrown up all in a moment on the side of a hill. To her, coming from London, they were fly-by-nights, not real.

  Slowly, she had begun to make her corner. Through ladies at the parish church - to which we went most Sundays, the wife to pray, me to guess the engines coming into the Joint (which was just over opposite) by their noises alone - the wife had joined the Women's Co-operative Guild, which had suited her philosophy to a tee. Equal fellowship of men and women in the home, the factory and the state: this was their line, and it was all quite all right by me, except it meant I would frequently miss my tea, for the wife would be off to some talk on 'Cheaper Divorce', or 'The Air We Breathe', because they were not afraid of tough subjects. I would then go off to the Evening Star or to the Top Note Dining Rooms, which was where the two of us seemed now to be heading.

  We walked on through the little streets between our house and the middle of town. It was very hot, but there was nothing in these streets to catch the gleam of the evening sun. You'd see children in all the back alleys. The poorer sort were barefoot, and the wife would say, 'Poor mites, I don't know how they manage to live.'

  They seemed to me to manage all right, going all out to make a racket as they did so: rattling the marbles in empty glass alley bottles, skipping in the sun and counting endlessly, or echoing about unseen.

  The wife was always pleasant to the kids, and told me not to speak of a child as 'it', which I was in the habit of doing, but I noticed she would always walk fast until we got out of the back streets, which happened when we struck the Palace Theatre at Ward's End. This was all Variety, and I would usually stop to have a look at the bills. I'd been inside twice, but never with the wife. She preferred lonely sounding ladies at the piano, of the sort they sometimes put on at her Co-op evenings. She'd once said to me: 'What's funny about a little man in big boots?' and I said, 'Well you must admit, it's funnier than a big man in big boots.' But no. There was no funny side to boots at all as far as the wife was concerned.

  Looking quickly at the Palace bill for that week, I saw the word 'Ventriloquist', and resolved to go along later. After comedians, ventriloquists were my favourite turns; there'd been one on at the Palace just recently, and I'd meant to go along. A good show would be just the tonic I needed.

  Next to the bill, another of the advertisements for the 'MEETING TO DISCUSS QUESTIONS' had been pasted up. I pointed it out to the wife, and she said, 'Why do they ask: "The Co-operator ... Does He Help?'"

  'How do you mean?'

  'Why "he"', said the wife, 'and not "she"?'

  'Well,' I said, 'it's mankind, isn't it?'

  The wife snorted, and turned away from the poster, saying: 'They don't like excursions.'

  I stopped and looked again at the poster. 'Blackpool: A Health Resort?' I read. You could tell they had a down on the

  place. I wondered what they thought of Scarborough, for that was the same thing on the other side of the country. 'Wakes: Curse or Blessing?' I read once more. 'Mr Alan Cowan, founder of the Socialist Mission, has the Answers.'

  'Mr Robinson,' the wife was saying a moment later, as we waited for a gap in the traps and wagons racing along Fountain Street; 'that's the gentleman at the mill who gave me the start... He said that he would prefer me a little faster at the keys, but that I was the only one he'd seen over the position who knew what worsted was.'

  The wife looked at me, but I was miles off, thinking of Mr Alan Cowan and the Socialist Mission.

  'What?' I said.

  'Mr Robinson’ she said, 'who interviewed me for the job, said I was the only applicant who knew what worsted was.'

  'Doesn't say much for the others’ I said.

  'How do you mean?'

  'Well, they must have been a lot of blockheads if they didn't know what worsted was - and them living in a mill town, too.'

  'What is it then?'

  'What's what?'

  A tram was coming along Fountain Street, keeping us pinned to the kerb. The driver standing in his moving pulpit - for that's how it always looked to me - had been burned by the sun.

  'Worsted’ she said.

  'Worsted?'

  'Worsted, yes.'

  'Well... it's a sort of cloth.'

  'Cloth made of what?'

  'Wool.'

  We were dodging through the traffic now. Happening to glance backwards I noticed that all the little high back windows of the Palace were open on account of the heat - a sight I had never seen before.

  'What sort of wool?' the wife was saying.

  'Well, you know ... sheep's wool.'

  'Long staple’ said the wife. And she looked away, and then she laughed. 'Eh, you daft 'aporth,' she said. She was practising her Yorkshire. 'You wear it every day but don't know what it is,' she said, straightening her white bonnet with her thin, brown hands.

  'You could have said something quite clever there you know,' I said.

  'I believe I did,' she said, smiling at me. The hat was righted now.

  'You could have said you'd worsted me over worsted -' I said.

  'You're loony,' said the wife.

  '- if you really had done of course.'

  We were now outside the Hemingway's Music Shop in Commercial Street. It was the wife's favourite shop, along with the Maypole Dairy at Northgate, where they had very artistic cheeses, kept cool by fans, like the drinkers in the Imperial Saloon. The Maypole could draw quite a crowd in the evening, although whether it was the cheeses or the fans that did it, I never knew. At Hemingway's, the wife always liked to look at the Hemingway's Special Piano they had in the window that was £14. She wanted to have only the best items in our home, and the Special Piano was on the list and some money towards it was in the tea
caddy. Meanwhile we had no items, or very few. Whenever we struck this subject of furnishings I always pictured the shop in Northgate that had the sign in the window saying: 'HOMES COMPLETE FROM £10 TO £100'. It was the ten pound part that interested me, but the wife would have none of it. 'I will not equip the house from a cheap john,' she would always say.

  'The marvellous thing’ she said, still looking in the window, 'is that it looks just like any other piano.'

  'That's one of the things that worries me,' I said.

  'But for fourteen pounds’ she said.

  'That's nigh on three months' wages,' I said. 'There'll soon be two of us earning’ the wife reminded me, 'and now that the room's let...'

  'But what about the extras . . . tuning it, and the two of us learning to play the piano.'

  The Top Note Dining Room was two doors up from Hemingway's Music Shop, which might have explained the name. Nothing else did. The tables went the whole width of a wide room, and the people eating at them looked like workers in a mill. But they would give you ice in a glass of lemonade without waiting to be asked. The wife and I took our places. We both had steak and fried onions with chipped potatoes. It was the first good meal I'd had since the smash, which had put me off food in lots of ways.

  'You see it's not that I don't like Cape gooseberries,' I said, 'I just don't want to eat them for tea.'

  'Well,' she said, 'it's just that I've had so many interruptions.'

  'I would be willing to make my tea for myself,' I said, 'I would . . . almost.'

  'Oh, we can't have you living on Bloody Good Husband Street’ said the wife, 'you the dolly mop!' Then: 'Would you like to see the mill where I'm to go on?'