A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  Tom hesitated, then began to push his way through the crowd who stood below the northern bank. He climbed slantwise up the steep chalk until he stood a little below Bertie.

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’ he asked.

  ‘Teach them a lesson.’

  ‘You must let them go as soon as we’re through.’

  ‘I’m in charge here.’

  ‘If you don’t, I’ll let on who you are.’

  A brief pause.

  ‘We’ll let them go,’ said Bertie drily.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to say thank-you?’

  ‘No.’

  Tom turned and let himself tumble down the bank in a controlled rush. Horace came towards him holding his jacket. Tom put it round his shoulders and walked across to Donovan, who was now standing at the edge of the ring talking in a low voice to one of his friends.

  ‘I think it’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Provided you do what they say. Nobody’ll get hurt.’

  Donovan glanced at him and nodded. Tom started to walk along the track with Horace beside him. Only now, as the last urgencies of the fight seeped away from his muscles and mind, did he take it into his head to be amazed that Bertie and his army had arrived on the scene at all.

  ‘I say,’ Horace kept repeating. ‘I dashed well say.’

  By mid afternoon Tom’s fingers were so fat with bruising that he found it difficult to turn the pages, but at least no bones seemed broken. His whole body ached, seemingly less from the fight itself than from the juddering rush down to Hull, and then the weary business of backing up along unfamiliar urban tracks, stopping at every lot of points to make sure of their setting, until they had worked their way round the outskirts of Hull to Paragon Station, two and a half hours late. The buzzing remains of unused adrenalin still trembled through his body. Lucan seemed weary stuff, each call to heroism before action wholly unreal. You never knew what action was going to be like until you were in it, but afterwards . . . Tom’s inherited rules of conduct, the deprecation of one’s achievement, the embarrassed acceptance of praise, seemed very unsatisfying. The body itself demanded something more—something like Beowulf’s ritual boasting—to lay the demons of battle back to sleep. Tom was conscious of having managed things well in the cutting, thus making up for his idiocy in letting the lad at the junction deceive him. Father would certainly have approved, but how was Father ever to know? Tom himself could hardly tell him.

  ‘I say, Tom . . .’

  Horace’s voice was hushed and urgent. Tom, sitting on the footplate of his engine, in the smutty sunshine of the sidings between the Hessle Road and the river, looked up from his book. The air smelt vaguely of the sea, but more of smoke and coke.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Horace. ‘I know you want to swot. But there’s something rummy happening back there, where they’re loading. Dampier sent me.’

  For the return journey Tom was to take two goods trucks back to Bradford, tacked onto his four coaches.

  ‘What is it?’ said Tom.

  ‘Four fellows have just turned up with a lot of boxes. Their papers are in order, Dampier says, but they don’t look like our chaps at all. They’re so deuced sullen. I can’t get a word out of them. They look like dockers to me, but aren’t all the dockers supposed to be on strike? I wish you’d come and take a squint at them.’

  ‘All right.’

  As they walked back beside the coaches Tom said ‘Horace, that business in the cutting this morning . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You won’t tell anyone about that, will you?’

  ‘Oh. Why? But it’s such a spiffing yarn!’

  ‘I don’t want any of those chaps to get into trouble. Blocking the track, you know—they could be sent to prison. I don’t want that.’

  ‘Oh but . . .’

  ‘Did your bookie pay up?’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘I suppose so. If that’s what you want . . . Look, there. The other two are in the truck. One of them looks the most frightful Bolshie. You wait till you see him.’

  Tom stopped half way up the ramp of the loading platform and pretended to be studying the coupling of the first goods truck to the guard’s van. Up on the platform two men were heaving a series of small crates off a hand-trolley. The crates were obviously pretty heavy.

  ‘Dampier thinks it might be guns,’ whispered Horace. ‘Or explosives.’

  ‘He’d better look and see, then, as soon as he gets the chance.’

  ‘He’s not allowed to. But if I say you said so, Tom . . .’

  At that moment the two men on the platform heaved the last of the cases in and straightened up. One of them noticed Tom, and spoke to the other, who turned and came striding forward. He looked the very opposite of ‘deuced sullen’, a small man, quite elderly, the round face pink and pop-eyed under the flat cap, the mouth smiling and eager, the whole head cocked sideways like a robin’s.

  ‘You’re the lad fought Tinker Donovan?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right, but . . .’

  ‘What’s your name, sir?’

  ‘Tom Hankey.’

  ‘I’ll shake your hand, then. Eh, but you haven’t the weight of Tinker. I’ve known the lad fifteen years, and he’s a fine boxer still. I’d have thought he must have been playing with you.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He was a bit cautious because of the way he cuts, but when he hit me it hurt all right. He’d have nailed me in another couple of rounds. How did you hear about it? It was only this morning.’

  ‘One of the women was on that train, she told her man and he told me. Any sort of match, they know I like to hear.’

  ‘Oh. Look, I really don’t want it talked about. I don’t want anyone to get into trouble, you see?’

  ‘Aye, there’s that. Was it true how it ended? Men with masks on and guns.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  The man shook his head, half disbelief and half disgust.

  ‘Aren’t you on strike too?’ said Tom.

  A reserved air crept into the man’s hitherto straightforward glance. At the same time the men who had been stacking the boxes inside the truck stepped out onto the platform. One of them—a tall man, gaunt-faced and with a shock of jet-black hair—saw Tom, took a pace or two along the platform, then stopped.

  ‘Give us a hand with the side-gate, Ned,’ he called in the mildest of voices.

  The little man smiled and nodded at Tom, then turned away.

  Momentarily routine resumed. The train became the normal 4.00 pm from Hull to Bradford. No doubt by the time it reached Leeds, and perhaps even earlier, it would need a new description, but now it waited under the handsome wide girderwork of Paragon Station for the last hurrying passengers. Tom leaned from the cab and saw Horace coming down the platform. He had something tucked secretively under his jacket, but looked a little down-cast.

  ‘Not revolvers or bombs, then?’ said Tom.

  ‘Only beastly Bolshie pamphlets.’

  Horace drew his prize forth and handed it to Tom. It was crudely printed, some twelve pages long. On the cover were the words ‘THE SICKLE’, and a coarsely-drawn cartoon of a scythe labelled ‘Revolution’ sweeping through a crowd of fat men in top-hats and women in long dresses.

  ‘We could stop and sling them in the river at Selby,’ said Horace.

  ‘Better not. Tell Dampier to take a note of the name and address of the consignee and report it, Mind if I keep this one as a souvenir?’

  A whistle blew. The green flag waved. He moved the regulator to begin another journey.

  6

  Oxford, 16th and 17th June, 1926

  ‘WOFFLES SAYS HE SAVED your life in the strike.’

  ‘He’s exaggerating a bit. What else did he say?’

  ‘He was awfully mysterious. Woffles being mysterious is like . . . I don’t know what it’s like . . .’

  ‘A hippopotamus hiding behind a lamp-post?’<
br />
  ‘Sort of. No, not really . . . What happened, Tom? Do tell.’

  He laughed. It was too late now. There had been a time, just after the event, when he had felt that he would have given anything to spend an hour with her, just that she should know what he had done. Though for weeks after the strike was over the papers and magazines had been full of trivial anecdotes about the doings of the volunteers, there had been nothing about his adventure. A police inspector had interviewed him, very gingerly, in his digs in Bradford, but had seemed relieved when Tom had said he could not name any names and was unlikely to recognise even the man he had fought, though in other districts charges were being pressed against men who had caused far less serious interruptions of train services. On his return to Oxford he had found Dick Standish hostile and Woffles surly, but this had not really worried him while he submerged himself in the flood of Finals. After a while it had only seemed important that Judy should know.

  And now even that longing was gone. He realised that the episode in the cutting had become remote and unreal. It felt like a school play in which he had suddenly been asked to take a leading role because of the illness of one of the other actors, and had stumbled through the part without making a fool of himself—had even inwardly relished the posturing and braggadocio—but within a week of the last performance had forgotten all his lines. If he’d been asked to play the part again it would have been a nightmare. Certainly it now had only the quality of dream.

  But then so in a sense did the present moment, strolling with Judy on the crunching gravel paths of the President’s Garden with her arm through his and the night at last a true soft summer after weeks of wet, a night for moths with the white syringa reeking of June and the dance-band wailing and thumping in the marquee beyond the high brick wall.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I do want to know.’

  ‘I was driving a train . . .’ he began.

  ‘Where? Don’t leave anything out.’

  ‘It was supposed to be the stopping train from Bradford to Hull via Leeds and Selby, but . . .’

  ‘That goes right past our front door, almost!’

  ‘Yes, I know. I used to look up at the hills and wonder what you were doing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, that morning some strikers tricked us into diverting onto a branch line at a place called Eastrington . . .’

  ‘That’s the Wold Line! Don’t tell me . . . Oh, Daddy will be positively emerald with jealousy! He’s never been allowed to, though he’s wangled and wangled. Go on.’

  ‘They ambushed us in a place called Drewton Cutting.’

  ‘Terribly romantic. A great gorge. What did they do?’

  ‘Blocked the line with a tree and trapped us. Then somehow or other we made a bargain that if I boxed one of their chaps and won they’d let us through. But we’d hardly begun when Woffles and some of his friends turned up with guns and made them let us through anyway.’

  ‘Oh . . . You make it so . . . At least Woffles was mysterious about it. Why did he say he’d saved your life? Wouldn’t you have beaten the man hollow?’

  ‘He was pretty good, and much stronger than me. I think he’d have nailed me.’

  ‘But for Woffles. And that’s another thing. How did he . . . In my experience Woffles has a genius for turning up at the wrong moment.’

  ‘He’s probably lurking in those bushes.’

  ‘Don’t!’

  She giggled like a shop-girl. Her finger-tips, slightly cold, caressed the back of his hand. Suddenly he longed to suggest that one of the shadowy nooks in the garden might be what she called a ‘between-place’—though they’d be lucky to find one, as all such corners were already full of whispers and laughs and the paths held several more strolling couples, no doubt each man with a thought like his in mind. So far this evening he and Judy had been playing her ‘rules’ with care, in fact with a skill that had made them enjoyable. There had been five other couples in their dinner-party at the Randolph, besides Lady Fitzpeter whose presence in Oxford provided a token chaperonage to appease absent mothers. In the early part of the night he had done his duty dances with all five girls, behaving as though Judy were merely his official partner for the evening; but now, with frightening suddenness, her slight and chill caress loosed energies inside him that raged without any outlet. His throat tightened, and the muscles of his arm ached with the effort to hold it still, merely supporting hers and not dragging her body crushingly against his own. He and she were not strangers. They had lain sleepless together in one bed, all through a sighing, whispering, tingling night. And now they had to walk on gravel paths and talk about Woffles. He particularly didn’t want to do that, as Bertie had sent a request, by way of Dick, asking him not to tell anyone more than that his rescuers were out rabbit-shooting, had heard the noise in the cutting, and had come down through the woods to see what it meant. (In fact during their single uncomfortable interview in Tom’s rooms Dick had claimed that the rescue had been almost as fluky as that—the ambush had been planned in Leeds by a hot-head group of strikers meeting in the back room of a pub; the landlord’s son had listened at the door and passed the news on to his scoutmaster, who had told a friend of Dick’s—not, as Dick had rather shiftily admitted, a very reliable chain of communication.) His frustration erupted into a futile snort, which he half-contrived to convert into a laugh.

  ‘What was that about?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing. You haven’t told me what you did in the great strike.’

  ‘Oh, we had colossal fun. You know Mummy owns this shipping line—well, she doesn’t exactly own it but she’s the main shareholder and anyway all the other directors are too scared to argue with her—well, we filled the house up with lots of chaps from Cambridge and they drove down to the docks every day and loaded and unloaded things and then the cars came back for us and we went to the docks too and became canteen girls and gave them luncheon on the quay and then we came home and made ourselves into ladies again and I bought an extra gramophone and a pile of new records so we could dance all night.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d have been much good for the loading and unloading next day.’

  ‘Oh, we made them work shifts—at the dancing, I mean. When your partner fell asleep in your arms you’d push him off to bed and go and wake up a fresh one. There were about forty of them, you see, and only seven of us. The cars would come round to the front for them at the crack of dawn and we’d stagger off and sleep until it was time to become canteen girls again.’

  ‘Good training for Commem. week, by the sound of it. What did your parents think?’

  ‘That was interesting—you’d have expected Mummy to be absolutely horrified, but . . . I suppose it was a bit like war-time for her . . . everybody relaxes their standards a bit . . . we were keeping the troops happy, sort of . . . Of course Daddy hardly noticed.’

  ‘Too busy going for night runs?’

  ‘Oh no, there wasn’t any of that, not with you amateurs barging up and down the line—it would have been incredibly dangerous, and he’s absolutely mad on safety. He always rings up the crossing-keeper at Broomfleet to tell him to pass the message along to the other keepers and signalmen. That’s why it’s got to be a dock strike, not a rail strike. No, he went down to the docks and did a lot of shunting, so he was perfectly happy. But you must get him to take you on a night run when you come to stay.’

  ‘Oh. When’s that?’

  ‘We always have a house party for the York races—I expect you do too.’

  ‘We used to until my mother died. Father doesn’t care for racing.’

  ‘I hate it—it’s the most boring way of losing money anybody ever invented. Would I like your father, Tom?’

  ‘Why don’t you come and see? He’s always complaining that 1 don’t bring any pretty girls to Sillerby.’

  ‘I could drive over. I’d love to see the house, anyway. Oh, it’s absolute ages till York, and I’ve got to go to Scotland before that—tell you w
hat, I’ll try to wangle Mummy into having a house party next month. Shall we go back and dance?’

  ‘If you like . . . Or would you like to see the river by moonlight? I managed to get a punt hidden away, in case . . .’

  ‘The chap who asked me to the May Ball at the other Trinity took me out in a punt. He was one of our volunteer dockers. He’d behaved awfully well while he was with us, but I’m afraid he got a bit tiddly at Cambridge and tried to sing gondolier songs while he was punting and then he fell in and left me floating away in the punt. Somebody rescued me, of course, and David swam ashore, but he couldn’t understand why nobody wanted to dance with him any more. He hadn’t got anything to change into. It would have been like waltzing with a drowned man. He just sat in one corner grinning like a fool and smelling like sheep in the rain.’

  ‘Poor blighter. I promise not to fall in. Or sing.’

  ‘Let’s dance for a bit. You’re pretty good, Tom, especially at waltzes. You’re full of surprises, really.’

  ‘You didn’t notice at Hendaye?’

  ‘Hendaye was different.’

  There was no special emphasis on the words, but yes, Hendaye had been different—trying to dance on the pink-and-white marble of Bertie’s tiny terrace, with Bertie the only one who could tango to a decent standard and so insisting on playing nothing but tango records.

  ‘I absolutely loathed my dancing lessons,’ he said. ‘Pennycuick used to drive me over to York. I suppose I was about fourteen—I know all the other boys were younger than me but the girls were all ages . . .’

  ‘I bet they fought to dance with you!’

  ‘A bit. That made it worse, because they’d lose their rag if I got it wrong, and Miss Owlish would tonk away at the piano and suddenly leap up—she’d go on singing the music for the others—and snatch you from your partner and push you round the floor, still singing—da doodle, da doodle, da doodle, like that—but breaking off to yell at the others because they weren’t swaying enough—she was a terrific swayer, a bit like our old Daimler, really, almost made you car-sick and smelt like the Daimler too, sort of leathery—and then she’d toss you back to your partner and tonk away again . . .’