A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Course it is. Even a try’s worth it, show what we think about them keeping those trucks up there, dangling like a carrot in front of a donkey. The men have been really resenting that. Oh yes—they’ll come and unload if I tell them the trucks will be there.’

  ‘Will you have to tell your friend?’

  ‘You don’t want me to?’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘I’ll see . . . after all, you’re not telling Mrs. Tarrant . . . what’ll you say to her, Tom, if she cottons on it was you after all?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll mind—it might even be a good thing—provided Judy agrees, of course. I’m pretty sure she will, but I haven’t had a chance to talk to her yet—she took her parents north last night and doesn’t get back till this evening. I think she’ll say yes. I hope so. She’s got a funny relationship with her mother. If she doesn’t, though, I’m afraid it’s off.’

  Tom had ten minutes to wait for his train at Paragon. Rather reluctantly, no longer strongly interested in the matter, he went to a telephone booth and leafed through the directory for the letter H. There was almost a column of the name he was looking for. Nothing under A.R. He ran his finger down the addresses and found it near the end. Hutton, Mrs. W.B., Summerlea, Danube Road. The old lady, now deaf and bed-ridden, who had fought and fought for her son to be allowed to become a gentleman. Tom came out of the booth and stood under the wide vault of grimy glass, remembering the strange interview in the smoking-room at Brantingham, the soft voice and the pale, considering gaze. He felt an extraordinary pang of sympathy for his enemy, knowing how he himself must symbolise all that birthright of which the other man believed he had been defrauded. Ah, yes, and that was the chain by which Bertie had known what was happening in Drewton Cutting—the Bradford Bolsheviks had known, had told Hull, who had told Ricardo. Bertie had told Mrs. Tarrant his aims, and she had told her trusted wharf manager. The clash was deliberate, the further turning of the screw of class hatred, all manipulated, all foreseen, apart from the accident of the fight with Donovan, the absurd event which had caused the screw to slip and release the pressure . . . But why should Hutton have taken the quite uncharacteristic risk of telling Tom there was a man who called himself Ricardo? For quite different reasons, Tom guessed. Tom was the personal enemy, and must be fully humiliated. How could Tom be made to grovel in the failure of his search if he did not know the name of his quarry? Poor fellow, a life for destruction. A.R.H. on the hair brushes. No doubt his middle name was Richard.

  13

  Brantingham, Selby, Hull, 2nd, 3rd September, 1926

  ‘REALLY, I DO NOT KNOW WHY I’m doing this,’ said the Reverend Cyprian Tarrant.

  Disembodied in a beam of orange light from a crack in the fire-box door, his spread hands caressed their fingertips gently against each other, as if he were about to embark on a refinement of the concept of the homoiusion.

  ‘I’m very glad you are, sir,’ said Tom warmly. ‘We’ve got a much better chance with you helping.’

  This was a mild exaggeration but it seemed to satisfy Mr. Tarrant. ‘Don’t forget,’ Judy had said, ‘he isn’t used to being admired. Butter him up, Tom.’ Tom was doing his best, within the bounds of honour.

  Half in the moon-shadow of the sandpit shed they waited for the midnight mail to pass up the main line. Apart from the quiet hiss and creak of the old engine the level meadows imposed a quietness that seemed deeper than mere night-time. Though still a mile from the estuary the shed stood only a few feet above high-water mark. Moonlight and flatness gave the illusion that vast distances were visible, right to the Lincolnshire shoreline, though in fact it would have been hard to pick out a man standing fifty yards away. Mr. Tarrant turned and craned out over the step, listening, as if he might change his mind if the signal was not given soon.

  Tom still had no real grasp of how Judy had persuaded her father to join the adventure. The only help he had planned for had been to bring Pennycuick’s son Derek down to stoke for him. Apart from that, all circumstances seemed to have conspired together to make the absurd enterprise possible, as though the immaterial world was determined that it should be done. But then the luck-god, ironic to the last, had set Judy in his path.

  ‘No, you can’t possibly . . .’

  ‘Darling . . .’

  ‘You don’t understand. It’s something he’s always been longing to do, take his engine over the Wold Line. Ever since I was tiny. Honestly. I simply can’t let you do it without him.’

  ‘In that case the whole thing’s . . .’

  ‘You’ll need his help anyway.’

  ‘I don’t think so, really. Besides, he wouldn’t dream . . .’

  ‘Yes he will.’

  ‘And it’s got to be now or never. He’s in . . .’

  ‘I’ll take the Morris up and fetch him.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘No, Tom. Listen. This is important. You remember what I told you in the old coach at Rokesley, about me having a witch-mother?’

  ‘Judy, this isn’t . . .’

  ‘I’m going to break her power.’

  ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘It really is important, Tom. More important than anything since . . . since I met you, I suppose. I’ve been waiting for a chance like this for years. If I can make him do something Mummy is dead against, and he knows it, and still he does it because I want him to . . . Darling, I don’t expect you to understand. It’s between me and her. You’ll just have to believe me. But I promise you, if I don’t do it now I’ll never get free, not even when she dies. Do you want that?’

  ‘No, of course not, But . . .’

  ‘Oh, I can make him. I think. He wants to get free too, you know. Before he’s too old. He’s been simmering up to it—even this food train. It’s perfect. You see, he’s not at all happy about it. Did you realise that the food actually belongs to our churches?’

  ‘No. How . . . ?’

  ‘I heard them rowing about it. They have horrid kinds of rows. Daddy bleats and Mummy whispers. She always wins. As far as I could gather, the food is supposed to have been bought by all the churches for them to dish out as soon as the strike’s over. But really quite a lot of them wanted to dish it out now, and anyway the others haven’t got any money, but our churches have got The Fund which Grandfather set up. Mummy can do what she likes with that so she simply went ahead and bought the food without telling anyone. Daddy was furious. He’s serious about his religion, you see. He couldn’t stand having it used as a weapon in something like this. Of course Mummy had no idea what he was bothering about. Everything’s so simple for her. The strikers are wicked for striking, so God would want them to be punished until they change their minds and repent, and then it’s all right to reward them. She actually quoted the Bible at him—the bit about the fatted calf. He was bleating so loud that the dogs had started yapping and I’d come down to see what the row was. I’m a great listener at doors, Tom. You’ll have to get used to that.’

  ‘Do you really think . . .’

  ‘I don’t think, I know. Don’t ask me how, but I do. I realised when I was listening to his bleats that he was absolutely ripe, and what I needed now was something I could make him stick in his toes about. I was thinking of getting him to marry us with Mummy still saying no, but that was going to be messy. We’d be married, you see—there for Mummy to nag on at. I really wanted something that would be over and done with, This is perfect.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘It’ll be pie, darling. If I start at four tomorrow morning I can be there at ten. Mummy will be out fishing by then. Daddy’ll be all alone in the Library, working on his book. I can park behind the stables and creep round through the knot garden and in at the French windows. Suppose I take an hour to persuade him, I can get him back here by supper. He always sleeps in the car, so he’ll be quite fresh for the night. You can have the Lagonda if you don’t mind driving with its door roped up, but you won’t need to fetch Derek. You could use it to go and
look at level crossings and things. Honestly, darling.’

  ‘I feel like bleating.’

  It was true that Judy, sitting on the hearthrug in the morning-room at Brantingham with her legs folded beneath her, had dropped her voice to a whisper, monotonous but emphatic. Now she shrank back and stared at him as though he had spoken obscenities.

  ‘Never say anything like that again!’ she croaked. ‘Never!’

  There were neat rounds of scarlet on her cheeks that were not make-up. Her neck was tense and quivering.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry . . .’

  She shook her head violently, then struggled into a smile.

  ‘I suppose everybody has their sore places,’ she said. ‘I think you might have guessed that was one of mine. I am like her in some ways. But I’m not her. I’m not going to become her. That’s what she wants, and you’ve got to help me stop it happening.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Then I’ll go and kidnap Daddy, and you look after everything else.’

  Mr. Tarrant held up a hand, fine and silvery where it caught the moonlight. Tom pricked his ears. The intrusion on the silence was far and faint, but unmistakable. It faded.

  ‘The line curves round Redcliff Sand, you see,’ said Mr. Tarrant at his most scholarly. ‘It points directly towards us for about five hundred yards and then curves away again. I have no idea of the scientific explanation, but the sound of a locomotive seems to carry further in the direct line of its motion. She will pass the spur points in four and a quarter minutes.’

  ‘Shall I fire now?’

  ‘Hm. Let me see.’

  Mr. Tarrant took the shovel from Tom, flicked the fire-door open and reached with it into the back of the box, holding it upside down and moving it from side to side so that he could see the surface of the coals reflected in its metal. Tom craned beside him, screwing his eyes up. It was hard to recognise any differentiation in the wavering glare.

  ‘There, you see,’ said Mr. Tarrant. ‘A slight darkening, hm? That’s the trouble spot. It would do like that for twenty minutes or so, but after that you would begin to burn the floor through. It is always the same place, so an extra half-shovel of coal from time to time . . . Yes, she could certainly do with a feed now, if you please.’

  It was not that Mr. Tarrant became a different person when he was driving an engine, indeed the process seemed to exaggerate his characteristics; his voice and tone remained precise but timid-sounding, and he had peered into the fire-box with the same rabbit-like tremor as that with which he studied the big Bible on his lectern before starting to read the lessons. Despite this he clearly knew what he was doing. Even a rabbit, presumably, is confident in its rabbithood. Tom wondered whether a different history might have made Mr. Tarrant a different man. There were strong emotional powers there, leashed tight. The discovery that Judy not only understood but loved her father had altered Tom’s view of him. As Father had implied, he was something more than a holy worm, and perhaps no less interesting than Judy’s remarkable mother.

  Tom straightened from his shoveling and booted the fire-door shut. At once he was aware of the approach of the mail-train, driving with a breathy regularity into the eighteen-mile straight across the Humber meadows. Mr. Tarrant was listening with his head cocked slightly to one side, as if appreciating a subtle passage in a string quartet. The rhythm faltered as the train took the points at Brough. Soon. Now . . . All Tom saw of the train itself, six hundred yards away to his left, was a hummocked band of glittering silver erupting eastward where the smoke was thrust into the still air and hung there in the moonlight.

  Mr. Tarrant took the old engine gently forward. Tom poised on the step, jumped as the wheels slowed, and ran to the points lever.

  ‘Jacta est alea,’ said Mr. Tarrant as Tom climbed back after closing the points behind them.

  ‘Much less than an empire for us to conquer, sir.’

  ‘Yes, thank goodness.’

  The first Broomfleet crossing was normally left open between the passing of the midnight mail and the milk train. The second would have been closed but for Mr. Tarrant’s telephone call. As they flashed through Tom saw the keeper leaning on the gate in his shirt-sleeves, and giving a perfunctory wave as if to acknowledge a perfectly common routine. There was little for Tom to do, apart from occasional bouts of firing. He spent most of the twenty-five minutes to Selby peering ahead along the glimmering track. Mr. Tarrant drove with professional calm, not ceaselessly fiddling with the controls as Tom would have done, fretting for some imagined perfect setting. Still, his manner was slightly different from Harry Hackby’s; though Harry loved his engine it was still the tool of his trade, a device for getting a dead weight from one place to another; to Mr. Tarrant it was an instrument in the sense that a piano is one, rather than in the sense that a hammer is.

  At first he did not speak at all. The noise of the locomotive—lighter but also louder than those Tom had driven during May—would have made his normal tones inaudible, and it was difficult to imagine how he could raise that particular voice to a shout. Only when they approached the Eastrington junction he eased the regulator down, reducing the clatter and rush to a milder rumble. As the lit turret that was the signal-box slipped past he leaned from the cab to peer backwards along the other line, then turned and cupped his hands to Tom’s ear.

  ‘I have never driven the Wold Line,’ he hooted. ‘It will be interesting to see how she takes the gradients.’

  Without waiting for an answer he opened the regulator and steamed for Selby. Tom was amused. Mr. Tarrant’s voice, though utterly different in quality, had held exactly the same excitement as that with which Woffles used to announce the latest speed trial for his Bentley along the Bicester Road, That men so apparently dissimilar could have a least one element in common was, if you thought about it, an encouraging phenomenon.

  Nothing else happened all the way to Selby. The line ran endlessly straight and level, all the gates were open, all the signals were up to show that the mail-train had cleared the section. They flicked through the cutting at Cliffe. A minute later Mr. Tarrant closed the regulator decisively. The urgency of onward movement changed to a sliding drift, with the loudest noise the bang of the rail-joints. By the time they reached the points of the Beverley branch line they had slowed to a walking-pace. Mr. Tarrant barely needed to brake to let Tom jump down and open the points of the mill spur fifty yards back.

  He closed them as soon as the engine was past, ran to it, reached into the cab and took the lamp, boltcutters, chain and padlock from where he had laid them ready on the floor. The points outside the gates were already open. The chain on the gate itself was a poor rusty thing and sheared with little pressure He slipped the new chain ready through the bars, swung the gates open and waved the white lamp. The trucks were still lined up where he had seen them two days back. He ran to the sidings points, heaved both levers over and waved the lamp again. With dream slowness Mr. Tarrant brought the engine up against the buffers of the first truck so gently that the clank of touching might not have been heard twenty yards away. As the buffers compressed Tom slipped under, hooked and locked the couplings, ducked out and ran down the line of trucks. Only the last one had its handbrake set. Tom loosed it, hung the red lamp at its tail, trotted back to the gates to switch the points outside them and waved for the final time. The first noise that could have told the old nightwatchman, dozing in his shed at the far side of the mill, that anything was up was the bang and bang and bang of the couplings as the eight trucks jerked into movement. Tom closed and fastened the gates with the new chain and padlock, tossed the keys over for someone to find in the morning, and scampered along to open the points onto the main line to Hull.

  ‘Seven minutes twenty seconds,’ said Mr. Tarrant as Tom climbed panting back into the cab. ‘We appear to have gained eight minutes already. I wish I could study the faces of the signalmen as they watch us go through with eight trucks behind us.’

  ‘It’s the fellow at
Eastrington I’m worried about.’

  ‘I shall speak to him firmly and that will suffice.’

  He sounded so confident that he roused an obstinate element in Tom, as though this was no way to treat the luck-god.

  ‘Almost too easy so far, Sir?’ he answered.

  ‘Indeed we should by no means count our chickens, hm hm. Now fire her well up, my boy, for those gradients.’

  As they moved off Tom discovered that the nature of the adventure had changed. Perhaps it was partly that they were now moving backwards, peering along the line across the coal-tender; perhaps partly that with the addition of trucks the old locomotive seemed to have altered her nature. Coming up the line she had almost bounced along, as though it would be no problem for her to forsake the rails and steam lightly across the mist-banded levels. Now she moved seriously, ponderously, hauling the kind of load she was built for, eight full trucks, not carrying material of real mass such as coals, but still inertia enough to mean that they had barely accelerated to a decent speed before they passed the crossing at Cliffe. Tom, straightening from the fire-box, saw the crossing-keeper’s goodnight wave falter and his whole body straighten as he became aware of the trucks. Then he was gone. Mr. Tarrant nodded happily. Tom guessed that but for the racket of the engine he would have heard him actually chortling.

  For the next six miles the line crossed only lanes and tracks; many of the crossings had no gates, and those that had were left open for the milk train, due in four hours time. They steamed quietly along at about thirty miles an hour, a perfectly safe speed on such a clear night and that far-reaching track. Travelling backwards, though a quite normal procedure, was greatly enjoyable, with the night air streaming into their faces unmixed with the reek of their own smoke. The world was full of natural odours, cattle and the dried mud of the dykes and autumn grass and fainter river smells. Tom worked at his fire, banking it up bit by bit to a glowing mass, ready for the climbs ahead. He was bending to this task when he heard the note of the cylinders soften, then the brakes suck and sigh. He swung the fire-door shut, rose, and turned, steadying himself against the deceleration. Some way down the line a red lamp was swinging slowly from side to side. The signal lamp beyond it was red too. Mr. Tarrant brought the train to a halt between the platforms of Howden. Tom heard him muttering as the noise of movement stilled.