The Blackpool Highflyer

by Andrew Martin

  He kept a dozen paces behind Paul, and I thought: they don't want to be seen together. I couldn't go up to him, for I didn't know the fellow, so I ran past him and stopped Paul at the foot of Horton Street.

  'Remember me?' I said. 'I stood you a lemonade at the Evening Star,' and even as I spoke, I thought it was a pretty poor beginning.

  He put down his portmanteau. The long hair, coming out from under the bowler, made him look old-fashioned, and then it came to me from childhood books: Richard III.

  I pointed back down Horton Street, and said, 'Would that fellow be Cowan, because if so ...?'

  But even as I looked, the man in the brown suit was stepping into the Crown, looking just as though he was after a spot of dinner, and I knew I was wrong.

  'Who?' said Paul.

  'Sorry,' I said, 'made a bloomer.'

  And the nasty smile went crawling across his face.

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

  'Piccadilly Circus,' Paul said, instantly. 'Well, that's where he was speaking at midnight last night. Meeting of the unemployed.'

  If they're unemployed, I thought, why must they wait until midnight to hold a meeting? 'Keep pretty close tabs on him, don't you?’ 'I'm not the only one,' said Paul. 'He's a world-class ideologue, is Alan.' 'Would you take another drink with me?' I said.

  Nasty smile as before. 'All right,' he said, and he picked up the portmanteau once again.

  In the Evening Star, he left the bag with me at the bar and went off to the Gentlemen's. As the barmaid came up, I was torn between looking into the bag and another plan, and it was the second that won out.

  I ordered a Ramsden's for myself, a lemonade for Paul, and a tanner's worth of gin, which I dashed quickly into the lemonade. The concoction was surging up as Paul came back and threatening to overflow the glass, but he didn't seem to pay any mind, and just drunk the stuff down at once as he had done before.

  'You've been to York, then?' I said.

  'No,' said Paul, and he smiled.

  I thought: damn, the drink's taken him the wrong way.

  'Why Piccadilly Circus?' I said. 'Why was Alan Cowan speaking at Piccadilly Circus?'

  'It's one of the usual propaganda patches,' said Paul. Then: 'You laid hands on your train wrecker yet?'

  'No,' I said. 'The whole of the company's on the look-out for the culprits,' I continued, 'and there's a retired army officer leading an investigation.'

  Paul gave a snort: 'Let me guess. Stumped, is he? We have plans for his sort, I can tell you . . .' He looked at his empty glass, maybe with a bit of curiosity. 'We mean to make very short work of that class of gentry, and the coppers, and all the upholders of law without order.'

  'But they have the guns,' I said.

  The smile once more. 'Oh we have available to us certain chemicals and clever mechanics, certain lead patterns for the manufacture of certain items.'

  'Did you pitch the stone through the excursion-office window?'

  He turned away from me to look through the door of the pub, which had been propped open on account of the heat.

  'We'll make a bonfire of this place’ he said, looking out at Halifax; then he picked up his portmanteau. 'Take my advice,' he said, 'and leave the railway slavery. It'll be worse for you if you don't.'

  'What's your game exactly, mate?' I said.

  'Propaganda,' he said, already turning away. 'Propaganda by deed.'

  A tram came clattering past the door of the Evening Star, and the fellow was out and on it with bag in hand, all in a moment.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was the following Monday, but only just, it being three o'clock in the morning. George had been moving about upstairs in the night. I'd already been awake, and the wife had stirred after a while, saying: 'What about him. Do you think he's flitting?'

  'I wouldn't think so,' I said.

  'He was late with his first week's rent.'

  'But he did pay it?'

  'He did.'

  'Well then.'

  We talked for a while about a subject first raised the evening before: about how she might compose a letter to the Crossley Porter Orphanage asking whether I could see the boy, Arnold Dyson, to return his book.

  'It'll be neat enough,' she said. 'As to the wording, we have a book of letter forms at the mill, but it doesn't include writing to an orphanage about the child of a dead employee.'

  'No,' I said.

  'It should do’ she went on, 'with the number of folk put into an early grave by the work.'

  Then she said, rather slowly and carefully: 'Mr Robinson, who took me on at the mill, has been stood down.'

  'The one who asked you about worsted?'

  She nodded.

  'Why?'

  'Over a new line of suiting. At first I thought he was on leave, but he's definitely left. It's all solicitors' letters now.'

  'Just out of interest,' I said, 'was he on the excursion?'

  'I don't know.'

  'So you're now at the mercy of Hind, father and son?'

  The wife sighed: 'Looks like it.'

  'How are you going along with old Hind?'

  'Do you mean old Hind or really old Hind?'

  'Really old Hind, I mean.'

  'Old Hind barely moves, let alone speaks to the likes of me. The other one's all right, though I don't like the way he carries on with some of the lasses.'

  'How do you mean?'

  'I'm not saying.'

  At this, the wife rolled over and gave me a kiss.

  'The next excursion,' she said, 'the Wakes one . . . It's all fixed. It goes on the Sunday of Wakes, comes back on the Friday. The mill starts up again on the Monday.'

  'You're not aiming to go on it yourself though, are you?'

  'The office must keep going, so I'm to work that week,' she said.

  'Good,' I said.

  'But I do have the Sunday off, so I'll make a day trip of it. I'll go with the lot of them on the train, and come back by myself in the evening.'

  'You bloody won't,' I said.

  'Why ever shouldn't I?'

  'You're itching to see a train wreck at close quarters, are you?'

  'There won't be another outrage,' she said. 'That's why they're called outrages, you know, because they don't come along so often.'

  The wife then went downstairs for a cup of water.

  It was two weeks 'til Wakes. But I had a Blackpool excursion before then - an evening go, coming up in just about fourteen hours' time. Paul had smashed the windows of the excursion office, of that I was sure. He was out to get the excursions. That was his mission, which he called socialism. He was a nutcase, him and Alan Cowan both, but just because they were crackers, it didn't mean they weren't dab hands at killing.

  When the wife returned she was fretting about the Standard typewriter, which she had at the mill but which they wouldn't give to another office girl, which she thought was unfair. 'The Standard is a very superior typewriter’ she said, climbing back into bed.

  'Then they should call it the Superior’ I said. 'What is the advantage of it?'

  'The keys go down quicker, so it's much faster.'

  'Well then’ I said, 'it's only making you do more work.'

  The wife thought about that for a while.

  I said: 'Would this other office girl be so worried on your account if you were the one without it?'

  'I don't know,' said the wife. 'And what's that got to do with it anyway?'

  She then asked me why the Co-operative Society should not be allowed to use the royal crest. I said 'Why would you want to?' and she said 'We jolly well don't want to.'

  I put a stop to this subject by starting a bit of love-making, after which she went off again: this time to do something I knew to be connected with a little booklet she had called How to Check Family Increase. At first this had stayed at the bottom of the wooden box at the foot of our bed, and I'd thought it was being held in reserve, because doesn't there have to be an increase before an increase c
an be checked? But since she'd started at Hind's I'd seen it half hidden in several places about the house, and guessed it was being read. The wife had passed on no instructions to me concerning checking family increase, and it was an embarrassing matter to speak of, so I had carried on as normal.

  When she came back, I wondered whether to tell her about George Ogden being on the fly, but it would only bother her. Instead, I said: 'George told me something I never knew: all railway tickets come in runs of ten thousand, they all carry four digits only, so you can guess the number of the first one in a run.'

  'One,' said the wife, sighing.

  'No’ I said, 'nought, or rather four noughts in a row.'

  Her interest was not picking up.

  'Can you imagine why it's nought?'

  'I'm sure there's some perfectly good railway reason which is perfectly idiotic’ she said.

  'It's because if you started with number one you'd get to number ten thousand.'

  'So what?'

  'Well, ten thousand is five digits, isn't it?'

  Talk of railway tickets sent the wife drifting off to sleep, but I lay awake fretting. Blackpool was a dangerous place. It was just because it was such fun. There was no reason for Blackpool except fun.

  I don't recall whether I then slept for a little while, but I know that I was awake at four and staring at the bedroom window as the hour chimes floated up from the parish church. It was a second after the fourth one that the stone came bursting through the window and, as if kept in the air by the wife's scream, sailed over the bed and crashed directly into the mirror on the opposite wall.

  I moved straight to the window, but checked myself, for there was glass all over the tab rug we kept beneath the sill, and I was bare-footed. Hill Street - where the stone had been pitched from - had the look of a place somebody had just left. The warm air rolled up and in through the broken window.

  I moved to the bedroom door and saw across the corridor that George's door was half open. He was peering round the edge of it. 'What the blazes was that, old man?' he said. He had on a nightshirt, and his hair looked wild, which made me think he must wear something on it by day.

  'Stone,' I said. 'Came through the window.'

  'Christ on a bike’ said George. 'Drunks, was it?'

  'Happen,' I said.

  'Anything I can do, old man?'

  I shook my head, and George closed his door.

  I walked downstairs but thought better of going out.

  Instead, I caught up the brush and pan and a couple of old Couriers. When I got back upstairs, the wife was already picking up glass. She gave me a look, and it was one big question.

  What to do in emergencies.

  'It was two fellows,' I said. 'They were canned. I just got a glimpse as they scarpered.'

  'Did you?' she said.

  'Yes,' I said, and I reckoned she didn't believe it any more than I did, but she wanted to.

  We picked up the glass together, wrapped it up like fried fish.

  'What did they look like?' asked the wife presently.

  'Two swells,' I said, and I began to see them in my mind's eye: a pair of Champagne Charlies like in the music halls. 'They were a pair of proper chumps,' I said. 'One fell as he ran off, and had to be helped up by the other . . . The trouble is, you see, we had the gas up, and we've no curtains ...'

  The wife was back in bed now. There were little particles of glass in my hands from picking the splinters out of the tab rug. I walked over to the gas and looked at my finger ends: it was like a kind of frost. I climbed up next to the wife. I couldn't touch her because of the glass in my hands.

  We sat back on the bed, both wide-eyed and not saying much, but listening to the sounds of Halifax that came in through the burst window.

  At five we heard the clattering of the milk cart, then came the rattle of clogs - a sliding, shuffling, slithering - as the weavers of Back Hill Street set off to their mills, which was followed by a noise of metal fighting against stone: the first tram of the day coming down Horton Street.

  'It's odd that anybody should be drunk at four in the morning,' said the wife at one particular moment. 'I mean, midnight, yes. But not four.'

  'It's quite possible to be drunk all night,' I said.

  'Well you'd know,' said the wife, and gave a grin. She didn't seem too downhearted. Perhaps my story had taken, after all.

  'We'll pay for the new glass out of the tea caddy’ she said, as I thought: if this is the work of Paul, why does he not go off and smash a boss's window instead. Old Hind's would do - any one of the hundreds he had to his name.

  Presently, the sunshine came spreading, and then, when all the cobbles were quiet and the hands were inside the mills and fit to be baked or roasted, came the heat, which sent the wife off to sleep for a little while. She woke at seven to go off to Hind's Mill, very sadly removing a ten-shilling note from the tea caddy and saying, 'This puts Hemingway's Piano further off than ever.'

  She said she knew of a glazier up on the Beacon near the mill, and she would call in on her way to work. She said she would be back from work at the usual time in the evening, and I told her that I would be late back because of the evening run I had coming up. I told her it wouldn't hurt to lock the door from the inside when she got back; she asked why, and I couldn't think of a way of putting it. Then I gave her an extra special goodbye kiss, for I knew I was about to come a cropper on the Blackpool line.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Beginning shortly after dinnertime, I spent a lonely three hours in the shed fettling up 044 tank engine No. 7 (not one of Aspinall's but one of Mr Barton Wright's) for an evening cruise to Blackpool. It would be the first Blackpool Special from Halifax Joint since the occasion of the stone on the line.

  As I bundled the paraffin rags into the firehole and afterwards the baulks of timber, the same thoughts revolved endlessly. The stone could only have been thrown by Paul. He'd followed me home on the night after we'd first spoken, so he knew where I lived. He wanted to make news over the stone on the line, whether he'd put it there or not, and the stone through the window was another push to get the whole matter in the papers. Then again, the poster advertising 'A MEETING TO DISCUSS QUESTIONS' was still in place on the wall of the old warehouse. That was pretty brass-necked of them, if they really had turned terrorists. You either fought or you held meetings. You didn't go in for both.

  Why didn't I tell the papers? Then the Socialist Mission might leave me alone. And why didn't I tell the coppers, which would come to the same thing? But what was there to tell?

  As I lit the fire, my mind moved on to the bigger matter, the question of wrecking.

  The odds were that any engine man would meet no more than one attempt at wrecking in his life. But what good were the odds? One out of thirty million had been killed on the railways in the previous year, 1904, but what good was that to you if, like Margaret Dyson, you happened to be the one?

  I thought of her again. It was crazy to go through your life without seeing the sea: seeing it only in photographs. Margaret Dyson was not down-to-date. She had not caught up with the railway world. But then it had caught up with her.

  Question after question came as I lit the fire, and one of the big ones was this: Where had Clive disappeared to beyond the Valley Bridge at Scarborough?

  That gentry swung his snap-bag, followed by himself, up onto the footplate at 3 p.m. He just grinned at me, and began checking the oil pots as I fettled the fire.

  We came rolling out of the shed in the bitter blackness of our own smoke, which broke and cleared as we came into the light like blackbirds appearing one after another out of nowhere and rising off our chimney top. I looked up into the little valley town of Sowerby Bridge, at the blue shining sign: VAN HOUTEN'S COCOA. It should have been a sign for seltzer or dandelion and burdock; better still, ice. Some fellows were skylarking in the open-air water tank on top of the coal stage as we took on coal. It was strange to be in an engine underneath men swimming. They were get
ting cleaner by the second, and we were getting filthier as the coal smashed into the bunker. The coal would always come in like an accident; I could never get over the din.

  As we rolled on, readying to go off shed and make for the Joint, I knew why Clive had been swimming in Scarborough. He'd done it to get clean.

  Just then, I looked back and saw John Ellerton coming towards us from the shed, waving his hands. He wanted to see us in his office, so Clive braked the engine and we climbed down.

  John Ellerton's office was full of light and full of paper. It was built onto the front of the middle of the shed, like a sort of toll booth. The engines went in and out on the roads either side, and the office was three-quarters glass, so John could see all the comings and goings. He stood behind his desk and passed papers to Clive and me. It was the draft report into the smash by Major Harrison, sub-inspector of the Board of Trade. It started: 'I have pleasure to report...' Then the facts of what had happened were set down. Next came the write- ups of the interviews with Reuben Booth, Clive and me, and finally the conclusion, which I jumped straight to. Skimming it over, I read: 'It is found that no want of caution was shown in the operation of the engine. The fireman is a young man of twenty-two, only recently put up to the job, but the driver is experienced, and appears to me deserving of commendation for preventing a far worse disaster.' And this was the last word of Major Harrison: 'It is not possible to say how the obstruction came to be placed on the line.'

  'Well I don't reckon much to that,' I said.

  'I think it's first rate’ said Clive, grinning all about his head.

  I said nothing, but the report was wrong even as regards the known facts. Clive oughtn't to've had to use the reverser. It was throwing on the reverser that had done for Margaret Dyson. That, and me not knowing what to do in emergencies.

  'There's one other matter’ John Ellerton was saying.