The Blackpool Highflyer

by Andrew Martin

  It was one of those lonely ones up on Beacon Hill. The trams couldn't get up there, so we took one as far as the Joint, sitting on the top for a bit of a blow. The sky was a greenish pink with the sunlight leaving it only slowly, and the smoke still coming out from the mills, snaking into the sky, adding to the heat and weirdness of all as they made their slow S's. The smell in the air was twice burnt.

  We passed Thomas Cook's excursion office in Horton Street. It was still open for business. The people of Halifax could not do without their outings. I couldn't imagine for a minute how they'd got on before the railways and the excursions started.

  'I could make a stew at the start of the week,' the wife was saying, 'and it would keep. Do you like stews?'

  'Yes,' I said firmly.

  'What kind? What do you like in them?'

  'I'm not faddy. Anything at all. You should buy the meat on Saturday night.'

  'Oh’ she said suspiciously. 'Why?'

  'It's cheaper then.'

  She said she'd think it over.

  The wife was smiling. She had taken off her hat, and as we came to the tram halt, I thought: she looks still more fetching without it, and will look more fetching again when she puts it back on, and so on for ever. She was wrong over trams, however, which were forever either racing or jerking to a dead halt. They seemed to go on by jumps, and I found myself - for the first time ever - a little anxious riding one.

  We got off at the Joint, and as usual the wife paid no attention. She did not like railway lines, partly because her house in London had been underneath one. When I first took up lodgings there (for she was my landlady before she was my wife) I used to say: 'What do you expect, living in Waterloo?'

  We took the little stone tunnel that went under the platforms of the Joint, and under the canal basin, and under the Halifax Flour Society mill, and a good deal else beside. We came out and began climbing the Beacon, going by the one zigzag lane - half country, half town, with rocks lit by their own gas lamps, and sometimes black thin houses like knives along the way. There was one mill above us all the time as we walked, and this was our goal.

  Just then a bicyclist came crashing along. 'Evening!' he called, which was gentlemanly of him because by the looks of things he had all on staying alive. I thought his lamps were going to shake right off his machine, and he did look worried, but he wanted to keep up the speed. All my work started and finished down in that groove he was racing towards. There was too much life down there, and too much death too, because that's what the smoke was, and the black smuts floating along: that was your death certificate coming towards you. One in thirty million passengers might be killed on the railways, but your chances of coming a cropper if you worked on the railways, or anything that moved, were a good deal higher, and you could not avert what was coming.

  The black mill was right above us now, made up of three buildings chasing each other in a circle, like a castle in a child's story book. A fellow in a gig was waiting outside in the darkness. As we looked on, a small door within the main door opened; light came out like something falling forwards and just stayed there for a while.

  Presently, an old man emerged from the door, walking with two sticks. Well, he was practically a spider, or a little rickety machine. The man in the gig climbed down, and he didn't help the old man, but walked alongside, looking on very closely. He did give him a hand up into the gig, though. The old man was wearing a heavy black coat in spite of the heat, a high white collar that shone like moonlight, and a black necker. He looked all ready for death. His face was small and crumpled, almost a baby's again; he had one lock of no-colour hair going across the top of his head and, as he took his seat in the gig, this fell forwards like the chinstrap of a helmet or the handle of a bucket.

  'What's the name of this show?' I asked the wife.

  'Did I not tell you?' she said. 'It's Hind's Mill.'

  I looked at the wife, but decided to hold my tongue for the time being.

  'That must be Mr Hind Senior,' said the wife. 'He's the chairman and founder.'

  As we watched, the manservant leant across to put the old man's hair straight, like somebody training a vine. Then the mill door closed and the light went. A moment later, the trap rattled off into the hot night.

  Chapter Five

  The rest of the week I spent dreaming back and forth on the Rishworth branch, and trying to read a book by a fellow called Rider Haggard, for I was out with the Railway Magazine, having developed a strange fear of coming across an item about obstacles placed on the tracks.

  Most of the time, the stone on the line was on my mind, and I had made my little speech to the wife after explaining that she had been taken on by the mill that had suffered the smash: 'You go and work at Hind's Mill if you like, but you are not to go on their summer excursion.' 'Why ever not?' the wife had said, and my words had seemed completely daft in an instant. But I had not taken them back.

  The Board of Trade had come to Sowerby Bridge Shed. Rather, Major Terence Harrison had come, late of the Royal Engineers. Clive had said the Board always took its inspectors from that show if possible. The major had worn a very good, very tight suit. He was not a full inspector, but a sub- inspector, yet all the fellows in the shed gave him a very wide berth, fearing he was trained to detect ale on a railman's breath at fifty paces. He had talked to Clive in John Ellerton's office, and Clive had come out laughing. Then it had been my turn. Speaking to Major Harrison, I did not sound like myself. I kept saying things like: 'I jumped down from the cab to see whether I could render any assistance.'

  He had not wanted to know about my medical attempts, but was concerned only with the engine, the track, the stone and other things not living. He told me he would write a draft report, and that this would be properly finished off when the police investigation was completed. I told him I thought the culprit would most likely be someone owing a grievance to the mill, and Major Harrison said he was sure they would turn out to be from Blackpool. 'It's a damn strange town, you know,' he said.

  Well, I thought he was a blockhead, but he did pass on two handy pieces of information after I'd got up the nerve to question him a little. The train before ours over that two-line stretch had been a Blackpool to Preston. It was an ordinary train, not an excursion, and it had gone between Salwick and Kirkham a full hour before we'd arrived there. Nothing out of the way had been seen on the opposite line. So the stone had been placed an hour or less before the smash.

  As for the North Eastern train that had hit the branch on the way to Scarborough, he said that to his knowledge no investigation would be held, because the engine had not left the tracks.

  He asked me why I'd asked, and I said: 'Well, perhaps it was put there on purpose.'

  'You can't drag a great branch down off a tree, you know,' he said, and it was as if he'd tried.

  No, you clot, I thought to myself, but you can shift one that's already fallen.

  ------- ---

  Come the Friday, knowing that the wife was off to a meeting of the Women's Co-operative Guild, I fixed on the idea of going up to the Palace directly after booking off, but I was all in, and it seemed to take an eternity for me to walk up Horton Street in the late hanging heat. Sugden was there, with his ice-cream barrow and his little white pony.

  'Weather suiting you, chief?' he called.

  'Champion,' I said, and it was then that I saw a long-haired man, halfway up the hill, handing out newspapers. He was not one of the Horton Street regulars. He wore a cap on top of his long black hair, so that his head was somehow very crowded. I walked towards him, and he put one of the papers in my hand.

  'Cop hold, guv,' he said.

  The paper was called the Socialist Mission, and there were no more than about four pages to it.

  'Take it,' said the long-haired bloke. 'Gratis.'

  I looked at the front page. At the top of one column were the words: 'Speech by Alan Cowan at Hull Dock Gates'. The rest of the page repeated all the questions that had been on t
he poster - for it was the same show - but with words beneath: the answers, I supposed. The answers according to this Alan Cowan.

  'Are you Alan Cowan?' I said to the long-haired fellow. He took off his cap and brushed his black hair back with a shaky long white hand. He seemed quite surprised to be addressed.

  'Me?' he said; 'no, though I keep in touch with him by telegram and letter. We're in the Mission together, the Socialist Mission.'

  I looked again at the paper, and the words: 'Blackpool: A Health Resort?'

  'Where is Alan Cowan just at present?' I said.

  'Dunfermline,' the long-haired fellow said instantly. He was thin and white, like a plant kept out of the light. All the energy and life that might have gone into giving him a bit of colour had instead been directed into the growing of his hair. 'He's at a speaking engagement.'

  I nodded.

  This fellow could have taken the bottom ends of his hair, and put them in his mouth. But the hair was something forgotten about, like his suit.

  'Do you work for him?'

  'Publicity Officer,' said the long-haired fellow. 'Mr Cowan pays me fair wages.'

  I knew I'd already missed Early Doors at the Palace Theatre, but I said: 'I've a couple of questions of my own, if that's quite all right?'

  The long-haired fellow said, 'Aye', though he looked a little anxious.

  'What's he, Alan Cowan, I mean . . . What's he got against folk going to Blackpool?'

  'Well,' said the long-haired fellow, 'I'd better start at the beginning of you're asking that.'

  'Will you step in here for a pint?' I said, nodding towards the Evening Star.

  The long-haired man shook his head. 'Don't drink,' he said.

  'Would you not have a lemonade or something?' I said, and his eyes fairly lit up at that, so we stepped into the pub.

  'It's been so hot out there today,' said the long-haired fellow, putting his hat and his papers down on the edge of the red billiard table. But it was no cooler in the pub, of course: just a different heat, with beer smell and cigar smoke mixed in.

  Looking across at the papers, my eye caught the words beneath 'The Socialist Mission'. They read, 'Formerly "The Anarchist Dispatch'".

  I had a glass of Ramsden's for myself, and the socialist missionary took his lemonade, which he drank off in one. Then he fell to looking at me, sideways, like, half trying to see round his hair, and half hiding behind it.

  'You're anarchists as well as socialists, are you?' I asked. I was talking as if there were many, but before me was just the one fellow.

  'The two go along a little way together,' he said, and then he was off, talking at me, but not looking at me once.

  He started, as threatened, from the beginning. It was all about how the liberal-labour men had not improved the condition of the working man as they had promised, and nor had the trade unions, and so a new type of organisation was wanted. What was needed was the socialisation of the means of production. 'We must have a straight-aiming struggle,' he said, and 'Alan Cowan believes that class war is its most efficient locomotive.'

  Well, at that word I cut in: 'Where do you stand on the railways?'The long-haired fellow moved his hair about for a while, steeling himself to say something. He had rather long, fine fingers, and I thought: he's never done a hand's turn. He was not part of the working life himself, but a kind of shadow, or echo of it.

  'Railways ...' he said at last: 'Run by crooks, and should be nationalised.'

  'And as to Blackpool and wakes and holidays, and so on?'

  'Blackpool?' he said. 'Well, I don't call that a very worthy holiday place. The working people go there and what happens? They loiter on the sands by day, suffocate in some cheap place of amusement by night.'

  'Been to Blackpool yourself, have you?'

  The socialist missionary gave a kind of shrug, as if he didn't knozv whether he'd been to Blackpool. 'What's that got to do with it?' he said at last, and with a little more of the brass neck to him.

  'If not Blackpool, where might they go instead?' I asked him.

  'Well, they might get out into the country once in a while, but that's not... I do wish Alan was here because he puts it all over so much better than I ever could, but the question is: does Blackpool help the working class fight or does it hinder?'

  'I don't know,' I said.

  'Take this town, Halifax,' said the long-haired fellow. 'It's like a bottle with the stopper in. Fifty-one weeks of the year, everyone's cooped up in the mills, prisoners of the wage slavery. Then for one week - wakes - the stopper comes off and it's the mad dash to the seaside. Now if that didn't happen there's a fair chance the bottle would explode.'

  'Why?' I said. 'Why would it explode?'

  He sighed, looked down sadly at the empty lemonade glass. 'I forgot to say the bottle is a bottle of selzer, or maybe beer. Something volatile, any road. Something likely to explode. Alan has it right but I can't remember exactly how he puts it.'

  'Selzer will not expand in the bottle in any circumstances,' I said, finishing my Ramsden's.

  'Well,' said the socialist,'... we'll see about that.'

  I put down my pint pot. 'So you're dead set against Blackpool because folk like it?'

  'In a way yes,' said the long-haired fellow, who now brushed his hair right back from his face as if he'd suddenly lost all patience with it. 'Everything that increases the dissatisfaction of the working man must push him in a revolutionary direction.'

  'And what do you think of Scarborough?'

  'That's another . . .' And here he muttered something I couldn't catch.

  'Another what?' I said, and he came out with it this time, for he was a fellow who warmed up by degrees.

  'Another latrine,' he said.

  'Well then,' I said, 'would you blokes in the Socialist Mission ever stop a train that was carrying working people to Blackpool or Scarborough? Would you ever wreck it, I mean?'

  At this, he walked over to the billiard table and took up his newspapers again. 'Why do you ask that?' he said turning around, the newspapers once more under his arm.

  I told him.

  'Well,' he said. 'You must come along to our meeting to know more, and you must speak to Mr Cowan himself. But I'll tell you here and now that one difference between us and the standard run of liberal-labour idiots is that we understand there is a fever for action in the mills and factories of all the working towns in the country, and if the workers won't rise of their own accord they must be pushed to it.'

  I stared at the fellow, with the happy ringing of the till in the background. Had he just owned up to murder?

  'But no,' he went on. 'We didn't wreck your excursion.' He half smiled in a way I didn't much like; I'd seemed in a funk, and that had galvanised him in some way. The smile changed as I watched, though, becoming something a little pleasanter. He was only a kid; good-looking, in a way; and Clive Carter

  would have killed for that hair of his. He should have been out courting on a Friday night like this.

  'What's your name?' he asked me.

  I was tired of being asked for my name, for I felt I was being written down in all sorts of bad books, but I gave it him anyway. 'Jim Stringer,' I said.

  'Jim Stringer,' he repeated. You felt he wasn't given a name very often, and that when he was, he made the most of it.

  'What's yours?' I said.

  'Paul,' he said. And he nodded to me before walking back out into the street.

  I took up the paper he'd passed to me and read it over a little. It was all a lot of big, windy promises: 'There will be a general expropriation of vast proportions'; 'All distinctions between classes and nations will be lost', and so on. Half the articles were headed: 'Alan Cowan writes', others were 'by a comrade'. I knew there was something queer about it from the outset but for a little while I couldn't say what. It was like looking at a night sky and slowly working out that there was no moon. Somewhere or other, there should have been a little complicated dull part where you were told who it was printed
by and where, and how you might get in touch with the editor. But there was no such thing to be seen.

  Chapter Six

  I was too late for Early Doors at the Palace, and too late for the start, come to that, but I was let in after the first turn.

  I was put into the one seat left, which was in the stalls and directly in front of the orchestra. As I sat down, I knew I'd made a bloomer in coming, for I could hardly breathe. There were too many hot, red people in the theatre and not enough air to go round.

  The sweat began rolling off me as a board was put up announcing a dog circus. The fellow in charge of the dogs wore a tailcoat and high collar. He had long hair flattened to his small head by Brilliantine and sweat. He stood still and sweated, swaying slightly as his dogs jumped about him. He looked like a tadpole, and his dogs would leap and hang quivering in the air like jumping fishes. At the moment that any dog made a jump, the fellow with the big drum, who was about four feet away from me, would hit the biggest of his cymbals, worsening my brain ache by degrees. Why can't those damned mutts keep down, I began muttering to myself. And why would the old fellow next to me not keep still?

  After the dog circus came six men who were a German or Hungarian band. Oompah music. As they played, the orchestra played along, doubling the noise and doubling the heat; there was a lot of cymbal stuff from the drummer, and I would have liked to belt him with one of the bloody things. The band played against a painting of a pale-blue mountain; the colour dazzled, and I could not look at the mountain top, which was blinding white.

  The bill-topper was the ventriloquist, the one I'd come to see, but he turned out to be the sort I don't like: the kind with a walking figure.