A Station In Life

by James Smiley

  “I should reach Blodcaster in time to return on the Eight-Forty-Seven,” he called back, barely audible above the tumult.

  It was indeed customary for the rider carrying this baton to return on the 8.47pm train, and since the train could not leave without it, Diggory’s remark was either witty or daft. I had no idea which.

  In due course, with glistening rods still occluding everything beyond ten yards, it was with great relief that I observed Diggory stepping off the 8.47pm ex Blodcaster. Humphrey approached me in his huge oilskin and appeared indifferent to the waterfall flowing from a carriage roof.

  “Bain’t natural, her bein’ so dark,” he remarked solemnly with water pummelling his hood. “E mark my words, Mr Jay, her’s goin’ to come down in pitchers.”

  Nonplussed, I stared at the porter without comment. With a bruised and sagging sky barging overhead like the vault of judgement day, what did he think it was doing now? I thanked the fellow for his uplifting outlook and suggested that he carry someone’s trunk.

  As it turned out, Humphrey’s forecast was wrong. After a short while the rain eased and I was able to observe operations from my favourite location. Standing aloft and alone upon the footbridge, listening to the steady patter of drizzle upon my top-hat, I stared through a curtain of drips at the two trains in my station.

  Directly beneath me was Lacy simmering at the head of a Blodcaster train, its sibilations scarcely audible above the cackle and gurgle of water running to earth, upon its footplate Driver MacGregor and Fireman Jones ever raising their voices in vexation. With a humourless Welshman stubbornly proud of ‘dry steam’ coal sharing a small space with a Highlander of testing dry wit, the firebox was but a secondary source of combustion.

  I descended the footbridge and braved the far end of Platform Two to have a word with the more equable crew of the ‘up’ train. Here I recognised the silver hair of Driver Hiscox down at track level where he was assiduously lubricating his engine’s link motions. Having finished with the oiling can, taking shelter leeward of his charge, the fellow straightened up and lit his pipe. Refreshed by a satisfying puff he pulled a forage cap from his back pocket, unrolled it, and donned it squarely as if going on parade.

  Hiscox realised that he was being watched and peered upwards with a brief, sagely nod. Embarking upon another vital task he took a small mallet from a toolbox and began tapping Briggs’s axles, cocking his ear to each metallic ring.

  “Hear that, Mr Jay?,” he hushed. “One dull clunk and we’ve a fracture.”

  I knew this, of course, but I acknowledged him studiously nevertheless.

  “Are MacGregor and Jones always at variance?” I asked, wondering what kind of atmosphere prevailed in the engine house. Driver Hiscox, presumably preferring not to judge his colleagues, pretended not to hear.

  “I think you’ll find the signal lamps need lighting, Mr Jay,” he grunted with the cadence of a man struggling against himself.

  I summoned Diggory to perform the task and the boy arrived swiftly clutching a can of lamp oil, his face arched with delight.

  “You’ll not think the duty so fine when we go over to semaphores,” Hiscox addressed him. “Do you know what a ‘Distant’ signal is, lad?”

  The porter shook his head with a cascade of drips.

  “It’s a signal they put a quarter of a mile outside the station,” Hiscox told him with a mock peer through the steady drizzle. “Not quite so much fun in this weather, eh?”

  This forecast did not even dent Diggory’s enthusiasm, for servicing remotely located signals would place him outside my jurisdiction for a while each day. It would take more than driving rain to dampen his spirits in such circumstances, a fact which was evident upon his face, especially as modern signals were fitted with removable lamps to make refilling them easier.

  “A young man enjoys his freedom,” I told Hiscox with a wink, and together we watched the boy shin effortlessly up a forty-foot signal post.

  Such was the downpour that Diggory could not strike a lucifer to light the lamp’s exposed wick, and having tipped more oil down the wooden post than in the reservoir, when he finally got a light it was only the rain that prevented a fire.

  “These life expired discs jam,” Hiscox told me, pointing upwards miserably while Diggory slid downwards gleefully. “We got this one second-hand from Vauxhall after the London and South Western declared the type obsolete.”

  Being by nature a gentleman, this was the closest Percival Hiscox would ever get to criticising the South Exmoor’s obsession with economy.

  “A typical penny-saving job lot,” I concurred briskly.

  “Things will change, Mr Jay. You’ll see.”

  With this prophecy, Driver Hiscox took the ‘right away’ and eased open the regulator. I watched his train recede beyond Fallowfield common until it was no more than a flickering red tail lamp in the blustering rain where the engine’s sulphurous grey fog finally dispersed, then watched the ‘down’ train woof into the striated gloom of Splashgate. Once again the station fell quiet.

  It seemed unlikely that full daylight would return this day so I set Snimple the task of lighting the platform lamps. Until many years later, when fitted with incandescent mantles, these gas lamps were woefully dim producing only a fluttering, naked flame no better than a well maintained oil lamp.

  About Nine-Thirty this evening a most peculiar thing happened. I was seated in my office reading Rose’s note, which like a besotted schoolboy I had retrieved from my waste paper basket to review, when I spotted an unfamiliar gentleman wearing a black cape and top-hat. Standing beneath the canopy upon Platform One, he was dithering as if in need of directions. When I went to him, having stuffed the note in my pocket, the stranger bade me good evening with a most peculiar stridence which bordered upon mockery. In addition to his disagreeable conduct I detected in his lineaments a condescending smirk of recognition, as if he knew me from somewhere but chose not to say.

  Before I could utter a word of enquiry the objectionable fellow pulled out his fobwatch and asked me a question. It was a simple enough question but delivered in the oddest fashion.

  “Have you the means hereabouts to record the passage of time, sir?” he asked.

  Suspicious that the boor was of making sport of me I expressed my disapproval by way of a raised eyebrow and nothing more. In response, the clown flipped open his silver timepiece to demonstrate that it was unserviceable, its vigorous ticking comically negated by the absence of hands!

  Taken aback by the antic I revised my opinion and supposed the fellow to be foreign. Experience had taught me that Johnny Foreigner could be quite offensive at times, albeit unintentionally. For which reason I decided to give him a lesson in British civility. Matching his gesture deed for deed I showed him my own fobwatch and offered no explanation as to why it was losing time. Unfortunately Rose’s note stuck to the timepiece then spiralled downwards to a puddle, much like a wounded butterfly, and when I stooped to recover it my hat fell off. With the bounder laughing openly I placed the soggy slip of paper in my trouser pocket and summoned Jack Wheeler.

  The clerk sauntered over and asked what was wrong. I introduced him to my mocker, intending our strange conversation to be witnessed, then stood back. Alas, Jack did nothing. He just stared. And very soon he was as perplexed as I by the cove, whose next remark was particularly impertinent.

  “Good heavens, sir, that will not do.”

  The blighter, audacious enough to ridicule a railway timepiece, was aiming a long, bony finger at my fobwatch. This robbed me of my composure and I raised my stick to him, a prod from its studded silver cap being likely to hurt, but was now unaccountably afflicted with a peculiar sensation; a growing distance from reality. With Rose’s note forming a damp patch in my trousers I was placed at a further disadvantage and compelled to retire, inviting Jack to fight my corner for me. It took only a wink for him to realise that, for once, I expected no tact when dealing with the public.

  It was now that I b
egan to fear for my sanity.

  “E’s right, sir,” Jack suddenly agreed with the objectionable stranger. “Watches and clocks don’t record the passage of time.”

  “At last, someone who comprehends!” the stranger reciprocated stridently.

  I knew of my Booking clerk’s fondness for second-hand science books but, until now, had assumed him incapable of understanding them. The stranger nodded towards Jack encouragingly and presumed upon him to explain:

  “You take anemometers, Mr Jay,” the clerk began. “They measure the wind by using paddles that get turned around by it.”

  “I say, Mr Wheeler, you do take my meaning well,” the stranger put in, leaving me to wonder how he knew my Booking clerk’s name.

  Continuing the science lesson in Jack’s stead, the stranger added:

  “It is the same with electricity, sir. A galvanometer measures electricity by detecting the current flowing through it, does it not? But what, I ask you, drives the hands of a clock? Certainly not time. It is a fact, is it not, that a clock has to feign measurement because its inventor could find nothing to harness. And the cause of the inventor’s plight, if you have not guessed, is that time does not exist.”

  With characteristic verve, Jack added his weight to this spurious assertion.

  “It’s true, Mr Jay. Clocks only tell you that a spring is unwinding.”

  The stranger held his handless fobwatch aloft and sneered.

  “Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  I wondered if I was in the company of an asylum escapee, and attempted to study the imbecile’s face so that I could report him to the Blodcaster constable, but all I could see of him was his silhouette. No matter what angle I adopted to observe the fellow my attempt was thwarted by poor light, twisted shadows, or the accumulation of rain upon my eye-lashes. My patience expired.

  “Scientific twaddle makes me dizzy,” I halted my tormentors and drew the stranger’s attention to the long-case clock upon the platform. “If you wish to know the time, sir, there it is.”

  When I turned back to bid the stranger good day I found Wheeler standing alone.

  “Pooh, now the bounder withdraws without so much as a by your leave,” I erupted. “Perhaps the squire is right about the railway bringing unwanted strangers into the valley. And I will thank you to show better style in future, Mr Wheeler. I do not expect my staff to drag me into ridiculous conversations about clock springs with every Tom, Dick and Harry who passes this way.”

  “What ’ave I done now, Mr Jay?” Jack rebounded defensively across my desk. “You were talking to yourself so I came in to see if you were alright.”

  Rose’s note was in my hand again. Being dry, I hid it in a drawer.

  The confusion caused by my bizarre dream took a while to overcome, mainly because I did not realise that I had fallen asleep. It was the ethereal pelting of another cloudburst upon the platform canopy masking the clatter of the evening Giddiford train coasting into the station, and the sudden trembling of the floor which finally aroused me to my surroundings. I stepped outside to the station’s creamy orb of gaslight and greeted the little carriages taking refuge from the charcoal landscape beyond, and noted from the station clock that the train was running two minutes late at 9.37pm.

  Something was amiss. The driver sounded the engine’s whistle lengthily, piercing the night with its shriek to attract attention, and my eyes were drawn to the absence of those darting, yellow squares that had come to escort all night trains since the introduction of carriage lighting.

  The engine hissed through the gloom and came to a stubborn halt, revealing the full extent of the irregularity. The First class passengers were in revolt over their compartments having no artificial light while, expecting no such luxury, the Third class passengers jeered them for their spiritless whingeing over such a minor taste of deprivation. Someone, it appeared, had fitted pot-lamps in the First and Second class carriages but not lit them.

  It was time for Diggory to go climbing again. The pot-lamps would have to be removed from their rooftop receptacles, passed down to Snimple to be filled with oil, their wicks lit, then returned to their receptacles. With rain bouncing off every surface I could see that the higher fare payers would get wet where they sat while this job was in progress, for pot-lamp receptacles were simply large, round holes in the carriage roofs.

  I donned my cape and set off across the yard to acquire from Stores a set of pot-lamp plugs to fill these holes while the lamps were being filled. This was when I learned that Tom Turner’s sleepy spells were followed by fits of stubbornness. The Stores clerk had released a drum of lamp oil but was refusing to issue plugs because, he complained, they were not readily accessible.

  Diggory tried to service the pot-lamps in situ but found that on SER stock it simply could not be done. During his gallant attempt atop a First class carriage I was horrified to see him crouching over a roof receptacle shrugging off both torrent and tirade while a fold in his cape channelled water into the lap of a lady sitting below. Imagine my pride, however, when he redeemed himself by acquiring a towel and a foot-warmer to comfort the soggy passenger, first filling the foot-warmer with hot water from the locomotive. Prompted by this scene of bedlam I returned to Mr Turner post haste.

  “I am the stationmaster here, Mr Turner,” I beseeched him, shouting against the storm thundering upon his hut roof, “and all I require are three pot-lamp plugs so that each carriage may be serviced in turn without passengers getting wet.”

  “Someone was supposed to light the lamps in Blodcaster,” he rumbled with glazed indifference. “I’ll not turn my shed upside down to accommodate other people’s sleepiness. That’s it and all about it.”

  Mr Turner may have been grappling with his own sleepiness but I could not allow his sluggish tenor to take precedence over passenger comfort so I rounded upon him squarely.

  “Pot-lamp plugs are company property and the company needs them,” I drubbed him. “It is not within your remit to decide when and to whom they shall be issued. Now fetch me three plugs at once.”

  To my astonishment the fellow ignored me. His face seemed to lose all its coarse features and turn blank. Unnerved by this I resorted to a new approach.

  “Tom, if you will not do this for me then at least do it for young Master Smith,” I pleaded softly.

  Still nothing. I tried yet another approach.

  “If your indifference to colleagues stands in the way then I suggest that you do it for the sake of your continued employment here,” I menaced him.

  This threat finally galvanised Mr Turner into action. His bushy black eyebrows reappeared and converged miserably as he strode away. A while later, when he did not return with the plugs, I came to realise that I had been left to continue our conversation alone. Concluding that the clerk was ill, I resolved to have him submitted for a medical examination at some convent juncture. Of the first moment was the Giddiford train and its rebelling passengers, so I hasted back to the platform to promulgate an apology.

  With tempers so frayed my apology rang hollow, but I was spared a great deal of invective by the dry passengers who, God bless them, deflected much of the wet ones’ anger by making sport of them. While bowing contritely to someone I noticed Humphrey having a word with Mr Turner outside the Stores hut, after which they both went inside. Although puzzled by this development I could not disengage to investigate because of Diggory’s precarious situation.

  Affairs were verging upon riotous when Humphrey, smiling like a lucky tramp, returned from the Stores hut pulling a baggage trolley. Aboard the trolley were three new pot-lamps. The porter approached me to explain.

  “I reckons pot-lamps themselves be as good as blanking plugs,” he chirped.

  The solution being obvious, I was ashamed of myself for not being the first to think of it. I took the fellow to one side discreetly to thank him.

  “Oh, don’t thank I,” he broadcast loudly. “Twer Jack’s notion. Ol’ Wheeler done it again, eh?”

 
; I lowered my eyes in private disgrace.

  I had been hiding in my office no more than a minute when Edwin Phillips knocked upon the door. Having dealt with the day’s goods invoices he was leaving for the night, but an unexpected encounter had brought him to my sanctuary.

  “There’s a gentleman in the Booking hall to see you, Mr Jay,” he boomed delicately.

  Sensing urgency, I went there immediately and beheld in the pallid light the silhouette of a gentleman wearing a cape. The visitor removed his dripping top-hat and stepped out from the shadows to reveal a severe face angled at one cheek to support a monocle. His hair was so receded as to be little more than a black film upon his head, its colour contrasting starkly with a thin, grey moustache trimmed to a precise, upturned ‘V’. With my eye cast towards the puddle of rainwater forming at his feet I waited for the stranger to introduce himself, praying that he was not another oddfellow. But this time there was no handless fobwatch and I was not dreaming.

  “I am Mr Albury,” he whirred, removing his eyepiece to wipe it.

  In view of the cabriolet saga a visit from the squire was to be expected, but I was incapable of wrangling at this late hour so I merely bowed deferentially and hoped for leniency. Alas, to wrangle was the dignitary’s intent, he probably having chosen late evening to launch his offensive because he knew that a stationmaster’s day was more exhausting than his own and I would no longer in possession of my wits.

  My sin, of course, was to have taken a goose in payment for a service poorly rendered. To make matters worse, I could not return the goose because I had given it to a widow of the alms houses. Scant recompense though this would have made.

  “I am here to register my dismay at your handling of my property,” he declared.

  There was a rich, almost mesmeric quality to the squire’s voice, but the harmony of it was ruined by the clicking of artificial teeth, probably made of wood or porcelain.