A Station In Life

by James Smiley

  Seeking shelter myself I settled beneath the ‘up’ platform canopy and there watched the rain sweep down. It much reflected my mood, for I could not understand how a station as remote as Upshott could spawn such tumult. I had observed more tranquillity in a mainline terminus.

  Borne upon a stiffening breeze the downpour veered and swept under the canopy. Driven from my sanctuary by the storm’s fickle behaviour I tilted my hat lugubriously and abandoned myself to the deluge, surrendering at last to Upshott’s insistence upon unbridled disorder. Truly I was doing my best but on my first day here, a day which proportioned itself as a year, I was responsible for flooded platform excavations, damage to the squire’s new carriage, complaints about there being no market special, arriving late to introduce myself to my staff, ignorance of the telegraph apparatus, loss of composure over a sticking safety valve, and quite severally succumbing to romantic diversion. Thankful that my woes exceeded my capacity to recapitulate them, I smiled groggily. When startled yet again by rock blasting in the squire’s quarry, sending a swarm of drips flying off my hat, I confess that I uttered a profanity.

  For the first time in my career I regretted not having a secret supply of, shall we say, something stupefying from which to take the occasional nip. Indeed, had I done so, my bottom drawer would not have been the first in a stationmaster’s desk to chink with a bottle and glass. I could see now that I had been hasty in my condemnation of men of responsibility who seek solace in alcohol.

  Afraid of my limitations I formulated a remedy. From now on, in all things, I would press ahead mindlessly. The man who fears consequences, it seemed to me, risks not pressing ahead, and only in pressing ahead lay the possibility of success. Having decided that the bottle comes a poor second to pressing ahead I enlarged myself upon the workmen and instructed them, against all their protestations, to re-lay half the slab-stones.

  “You may dig up no more than half a platform at a time,” I told them sternly. “Passengers must be able to navigate safely.”

  Having heard this, the disgruntled labourers stared up at me with dripping noses and dared not move. I reactivated them by flipping open my fobwatch and tutting.

  I reflected gratefully that no London & South Western excursion trains were due until next month and consequently I had three hours to recuperate between trains. During this time I would be at liberty to seek the identity of the ‘belle in white lace’. Whilst frequently reproaching myself for being prone to romantic fabrications I am bound to confess that the ladies of Exmoor were particularly difficult to exclude, especially the one whose fleeting presence upon the ‘down’ platform had dizzied me with her perfume and lace. Nevertheless I had no doubt that here, as with everywhere else I had been, I would find no advance beyond fantasy. Unless, at last, the attentive Rose Macrames could save my soul.

  Before making enquiries, however, I needed to write two letters to Headquarters. In the first I would urge the company to lay on a regular mid-morning passenger train for the casual visitor to Blodcaster’s cattle and yarn market each Monday, and in the second, doubtless with shaky handwriting, I would request the services of a telegraph instructor.

  Having written these two letters and tucked them in the Giddiford dispatch pouch I found myself somewhat depleted for that hour of the day, so I tarried in my office for a while and gazed at a map of the London and South Western Railway system mounted on the wall. This pastime ever induced a pleasant trance. The ‘belle in white lace’, I felt sure, would not leave the country while I was in this rejuvenating state of dormancy.

  My nerves eventually calmed, I summoned Messrs Wheeler and Troke and had them lift my Bloomer to the mantelpiece, placing a short length of track there first to accommodate it. While the two men struggled with the engine I opened a book that I had recently acquired and turned to Chapter One. It amused me to think how my literary taste would have baffled Doctor Bentley, for the volume was Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘The Two Nations’ in which the Tory MP reproved our country for having divided into rich and poor. Never was so much ink wasted upon the obvious I thought.

  Thus absorbed I lost awareness of time and did not refer to my fobwatch until some while after Wheeler and Troke had left. Snapping the timepiece shut in a state of shock I stood up and chanced to glimpse a lady passing my office window. My heart missed a beat and I was compelled to close my book with a thud, for although my window distorted all seen through its glass, and the lady passed very quickly, I recognised the green dress and enchanting white lace that had been haunting me. The belle had returned! I sped out to the platform to introduce myself.

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” I hailed. “Do you wish to speak to me?”

  When the lady turned, swinging her lime green umbrella into the slanting rain with an ugly squint, my gusto deflated, for this was not the face I expected to see. Nor, come to that, was it a face I would have elected to see. Rendered speechless, I doffed my hat with a sickly smile and prepared to withdraw.

  “I think you are mistaken,” she reprimanded me frostily.

  Feeling utterly ridiculous, I bowed. Then, compelled to do so by a perverse fascination, I became fixated upon the vainly decorated woman. This caused her to stare back at me sourly. There were a considerable number of years accumulated upon her face, all of them bad, and I sensed that by loitering in the vicinity I would take the blame for them. Yet still I could not disengage. My stupefaction ended only when she bared her teeth and clucked like a nutcracker.

  “Begging your pardon for the intrusion, ma’am,” I apologised briskly and returned to my cloister.

  Assisted by Disraeli and proximity to a finely engineered Bloomer I blotted out my unease until the Market goods train returned from Blodcaster. The sound of its approach was accompanied by a knock at my door. It was Jack Wheeler with, by the look of him, a weighty problem.

  “Ah, Jack, come in and sit down,” I parried the clerk before he could bother me. “You have a comprehensive knowledge of local people and their affairs, perhaps you can unravel a mystery for me. I am trying to trace a lady who was on Platform One this morning.”

  I went on to describe the belle as best I could then asked Jack if he had seen anyone fitting the description.

  “Brown ’air, ’ad she?” he replied with a puckered grin.

  This reaction was promising, for I had said nothing of her hair.

  “Did you see her too, Jack?” I asked enthusiastically.

  Jack sought further details before confirming.

  “Of about your years?”

  “So you did see her,” I concluded joyously.

  “No,” the clerk replied, shaking his head vehemently. “But I reckon I know who she is, though.” He cast his eye about my office shiftily and hissed through his teeth. “Is this important, Mr Jay, because I was wondering if…”

  “Not particularly,” I interrupted him. “Well?” I jumped. “Who is she?”

  “I reckon you saw Mistress Goadby,” he announced with lofty confidence.

  “Mistress Goadby,” I repeated the name slowly, then slipped into a pensiveness gape.

  While in this state I decided that it mattered little if the ‘belle’ was married, for I harboured no silly notions of wedlock and possessed not even a rudimentary understanding of the successful, two-way relationship. No, admiring this majestic lady from a distance would suffice.

  “She’s the pig killer’s wife,” Jack proffered unnecessarily. “She lives in the ’igh street near ’arvey’s farm.”

  To this day I have no idea why I decided to call upon Mrs Goadby but I did. Somehow it seemed necessary to know the boundaries of my secret worship. After all, there was evidence that she wished to speak to me. Accordingly, therefore, I instructed the clerk to take charge of the station in my absence.

  “Foremost, Jack, I would like you and Mr Phillips to deal with the Market goods,” I said. “And see to it that young Diggory Smith is dispatched promptly with the Blodcaster baton.”

  Jack gave me a
hollow look as if I had suggested something improper.

  “Mr Maynard always rides that one ’imself,” he said. “The passenger train follows close behind, sir, so it requires a very fast turn of speed back to Blodcaster.”

  “Has Diggory no horsemanship?” I enquired. “I was given to believe he could ride well. I certainly gained that impression this morning.”

  “Oh, ’e can ride well enough, Mr Jay, but the company nags all ’ave broomsticks for legs,” the clerk enlightened me plaintively. “Mr Maynard rides ’is own ’orse, see. Called Hildebrand.”

  “I see. And does Mr Maynard expect payment for the use of his personal mount?” I asked.

  “You can pay ’im if you like, Mr Jay,” Jack mused. “But he’s a skilled ’orseman who rides for cups, not money.”

  “Well the company awards no cups, Jack, so tell him to go carefully over the downs,” I cautioned the clerk. “The bridleways hereabouts are boggy and I would rather have to explain the late running of a train than a dead railway employee.”

  I cast an eye through my window towards the distant hills. Looking like textured velvet, they were actually course grass and heather concealing deep fissures in spongeous peat. The incautious rider could be thrown to his death.

  Having dismissed Jack I set off towards the village to call upon Mrs Goadby, pondering but one question.

  ‘How can this be the woman haunting me with her loveliness, with a name like Goadby and a husband who hires himself out to kill pigs?’

  I concluded that since I was almost certainly doomed to become a distant admirer of someone then why not a Mrs Goadby? Being fated to the condition, such was my lot in life. However, if on this occasion my luck was cruel enough to be kind, perhaps Mrs Goadby would fail the test of close scrutiny and effect upon me no further thrall.

  Close scrutiny changed everything. Mrs Goadby turned out to be the woman I had apprehended upon the platform and of whose face I had not been enamoured. Our second meeting did not even merit a reprimand, for when, as a result of sheer surprise and lack of ready wit, I asked her once more if she wished to speak to me, she took fright and bolted her door in my face. When a stationmaster’s enquiry is terminated with the clunk of a snib and a nutcracker cluck, he hurries back to his station to recover. Somewhat dazed by my inability to learn I contemplated my good fortune that the pork butcher had not been at home, otherwise I might have been cured.

  In riddance of the whole affair I toured the platforms and pondered more refreshing matters, such as the South Exmoor company’s imperspicuous method of running a railway, as exemplified by its adherence to the curiously outdated practise of using horse riders to transfer batons to and fro between stations. The Board of Trade had approved an alternative system known as ‘staff-and-ticket’ which allowed perfectly safe operation of ‘up’ and ‘down’ trains over a single-line railway but this would never be installed while a gentleman called Benjamin Crump held sway.

  Mr Crump, the General Manager, maintained that while the staff-and-ticket system prevented head-on collisions it could not stop one train from smashing into the rear of another, his spouse having been maimed in just such an accident at Toadgrinton on the Great North Junction railway, leaving her confined to a bath-chair. He regarded the horse and baton system as the very safest if not the most efficient. It was certainly the cheapest option for a line like the South Exmoor, given that the weekly overhead of Mr Maynard’s horses did not amount to eleven shillings each. Nevertheless I did not envisage baton horses surviving the London & South Western’s takeover, even if the shunting horses did.

  Returning to my office I noticed a message written upon my memo pad, the pad being positioned to attract my attention. I had forgotten to lock my door and someone had taken advantage. Judging by the delicate handwriting the author was not a member of my staff, a conclusion which was reinforced by the salutation ‘Dear Horace’. The note was signed ‘Rosie’ and expressed thanks for my assistance in looking for the missing parasol.

  Rose’s handwriting was hypnotic and I spent an agreeable few minutes studying it. Beguiling curls and serifs tickled my mind as disarmingly as had the feathers of her hat tickled my face, and I admitted to myself that the woman’s attentions stirred me. In just one day Rose had established herself as firmly in my mind as a lifelong friend and I wondered how I should behave towards her.

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  Chapter Nine — The handless stranger

  The afternoon Blodcaster train steamed into Upshott on time at 5.03pm, hauled by Briggs, but its departure was delayed six minutes by the late arrival of the Giddiford train. Mr Maynard had indeed found the going rough over the downs and kept Lacy waiting for the baton at the far end of the line. That same length of engraved wood was now back at Upshott and, with vaudeville inevitability, Driver McGregor was handing it to Driver Hiscox to carry with him back to Blodcaster! How unique it was that a collision should be avoided by the relentless passing to and fro of a piece of wood.

  The baton pantomime would last until the LSWR company fulfilled its obligation to double the line, and while rejoicing in this prospect I pulled Rose’s note from my pocket and settled another gaze upon it. Such was my indulgence that I fancied her words written upon personal note paper, which I imagined to be pink with floral embossing. Alas I had become a letter fetishist! Thinking I heard a porter coming, I returned the slip to my pocket.

  To look busy I stared authoritatively towards Giddiford. When the porter had passed I looked the other way pessimistically towards Blodcaster, for in this direction no spare track-bed had been constructed for a second line, the boring of a second tunnel through Splashgate hill being regarded as too expensive. Consequently I doubted that the upper end of the line between Upshott and Blodcaster would ever be doubled, even though the Board of Trade viewed a single-line railway as incomplete.

  With no further time for whimsy I returned to my office and dropped Rose’s note into the waste paper basket.

  By Six o’ Clock the rain had ceased and in the prosecution of his duties the village Postmaster, Mr Peckham, arrived at the station whistling passionately a home-spun melody. As if hypnotised by his own trilling he exhibited an uncanny facility for ignoring everything and everyone. As he wheeled his precariously stacked handcart across the line to Platform Two, not once did he shift his eyes from Her Majesty’s mail. I would come to know his normal behaviour only after every canvas bag in his charge had been stowed safely aboard the Mail train. It was a picture of dedication that would become as familiar to me as the trains themselves, twelve postal visits a week being necessary.

  On this occasion Mr Peckham’s whistling ceased abruptly and filled the station with an unnatural silence, a silence accentuated by the absence of the labourers digging up slab-stones. The gang had departed by the last Giddiford train, presumably preferring the comforts of Third class travel to a jury car.

  Such blessed relief from digging and relentless whistling prompted me to greet the ‘up’ Mail in the company of the postmaster, my society intended to quell further chirping. Mr Peckham was short and thick set with silver hair and a pink face decorated with bushy white eyebrows angled upwards like wings. His most striking feature was a perpetual smile which one might well have mistaken for a frown. All in all, Mr Peckham had the ambience of a man of substance. I could tell that he knew answers, and notwithstanding his infernal whistling I took a liking to him.

  The level crossing gates swung open with their familiar clatter and the ‘down’ disc signal rotated clangorously. Soon afterwards, as if in approval of these measures, a prolonged whistle tumbled from the hills like the toot of an impatient flautist. Mr Peckham and I hearkened to the rhythms of a locomotive and its faithful carriages, and mused over a herd of deer taking flight across the Squire’s estate. The Mail was coming.

  At precisely 6.15pm, London & South Western locomotive number ‘One-Seven-One’ squealed discordantly to a halt beside us issuing foaming rapids of steam in deafening sibilation
. But Mr Peckham and I stood our ground, drifting in and out of the racing lumps of whiteness until we had thrown all the sacks aboard the mail van. After tossing in the last of the misshapen sacks, Mr Peckham padlocked the doors and with all the priority deserved of such a cargo the London bound mail resumed its journey. I should not have minded talking further with the Postmaster, for he was a very informed fellow, but without further ado he bade me farewell and went off duty. For my own part I would not sign off to test my new bed until after 11.30pm.

  My next concern was to see Diggory away safely to Blodcaster with the baton from the Mail train, and I did not like the look of the weather. Across the valley, lingering above the now sombre hump of Widdlecombe hill, were the vertical streaks of a downpour. A few minutes later that downpour had reached Upshott and driven my platform staff into their oilskins. Cloistered inside these cumbersome company waterproofs was a parade of faces squinting at me meanly as if I were to blame for the storm. Perhaps my porters were envious of the somewhat more commodious capes issued to stationmasters.

  Diggory, wearing a vastly oversized oilskin that I imagine he had borrowed, emerged from the station house and was met by Mr Maynard leading a company horse. Mr Maynard steadied the beast while the boy mounted it, then stood aside as the lad rode to the signalbox to collect the baton from Mr Hales.

  Hunching against the vitreous squalls, Signalman Hales scurried down the wooden steps of his gas-lit cabin and imparted the baton to Diggory with minimal ceremony. On his dash back to his cosy shelter he unhitched an oil lamp and urged Diggory to carry it with him as a marker. Unwisely the lad declined the offer, so I advanced hastily to revise his answer, hampered by deep puddles and a domesday umbra.

  “I’ll be alright, Mr Jay,” he assured me brightly, pointing yonder. “See, the sun’s breaking through!”

  I squinted into a shrieking gush of rain and saw that the optimistic youth was referring to a silvery pool of light that had momentarily glazed the railway cottages. As the ephemeral puddle of daylight dissolved into a blur under the sable sky, the lad turned his horse towards the village, applied the spur undaunted, and galloped away.