The Blackpool Highflyer js-2

by Andrew Martin

  'He's giving out that he's taken apartments,' I said. 'It's an apartment at best, and I would have thought it was more accurate to say that it was a room, and a pretty small one at that.'

  'Well it's a very good job you weren't put in charge of letting it out,' said the wife.

  She stood up and smoothed the green sash around her waist, letting me see her trimness. I liked the way I was not supposed to notice what she was about in this.

  'Would you care for a stroll?' she said. 'And I'll tell you my other news.'

  I never knew what was going forward with the wife, but on occasions like this I expected her to say that she had fallen pregnant. One day she had given me a most mysterious look, and said that we must clear out the foreign stove immediately because it was dangerous, and I had been ready for it then.

  I looked on the back of the envelope for the lodger, and saw that it had been sent by the 'Institute for the Diffusion of Knowledge'. 'He's quite a cultural sort, is he?' I asked.

  She gave some thought to this, and as she did so a hundred possible images of this Ogden formed in my mind.

  'No,' she said at last. Then: 'Are you ready for off?' She had her bonnet in her hand.

  'What line is he in?'

  'He works for your show' she said.

  'The Lanky?' I said, wondering whether he'd seen one of my notices down at the Joint.

  She nodded, saying, 'Come on now, bustle up.'

  'Engine man?'

  She shook her head. 'Certainly not,' she said. 'He tells me he has very great prospects.'

  'But what is he now?'

  'Ticket clerk,' she said.

  There were battalions of clerks at the Joint. I would nod at the odd one, but they were all in a different world.

  We stepped out of the door, and the wife turned to me before we'd gone three paces along the street. She was holding a folded piece of paper, which she passed to me. It was a very short letter: 'We have decided,' I read, 'to give you the situation of office clerk at our mill on the terms named, that is?1 15s. per week starting wage. We would suggest you commence duties on Monday next.'

  I would not continue to mope over the accident. I kissed the wife, saying: 'I knew you would do it.'

  When I'd brought her up to Halifax just after we were married, I'd said she shouldn't work, but had soon thrown up the sponge over that particular battle. In some northern towns, if a man let his wife take a job, folks would turn up their noses at him, but in Halifax the women worked because the mills needed them. And the wife went her own way in any case. To her, typists were the best thing out because they were part of the modern world. She'd been doing a course at the technical school, typing and shorthand, and was up to… well, a certain amount of words a minute. A lot of words as far as I knew. But when she'd gone to see about any situation there'd always been someone else who could do more, and the letters sent back had always begun: 'We have filled up the situation coming vacant…' She'd had dozens of those, and the more she got, the harder she grafted at her shorthand and typing.

  Shortly after she'd started I had bought her an India rubber, and she'd said, 'Thank you very much,' while opening the window and shying it all the way to Hill Street. 'I will never get on with one of those in the house,' she'd said, to which I'd replied, 'Well how will you remove your mistakes?' 'By not making them,' had come the answer.

  I had never seen anything bounce like that India rubber.

  For weeks afterwards, I would find half-done letters about the house that she'd brought back from the technical school. 'Dear Sir, My directors wish me to convey to you…'; 'My directors wish to inform you that the matter you name…' – all with imaginary directors named and supplied with hundreds of initials. Or: 'Replying to your letter of the 5th inst, our reqxxxxmentx…' And then might come a long line of bbbbs or!!!!!s, for there was a lot of ginger in the wife.

  It had not been easy for her to come to Yorkshire from London, and at first she had seemed in a daze, and, when not in a daze, blue. The rain was like prison bars. She told me she thought that Halifax and places around were like Red Indian villages thrown up all in a moment on the side of a hill. To her, coming from London, they were fly-by-nights, not real.

  Slowly, she had begun to make her corner. Through ladies at the parish church – to which we went most Sundays, the wife to pray, me to guess the engines coming into the Joint (which was just over opposite) by their noises alone – the wife had joined the Women's Co-operative Guild, which had suited her philosophy to a tee. Equal fellowship of men and women in the home, the factory and the state: this was their line, and it was all quite all right by me, except it meant I would frequently miss my tea, for the wife would be off to some talk on 'Cheaper Divorce', or 'The Air We Breathe', because they were not afraid of tough subjects. I would then go off to the Evening Star or to the Top Note Dining Rooms, which was where the two of us seemed now to be heading.

  We walked on through the little streets between our house and the middle of town. It was very hot, but there was nothing in these streets to catch the gleam of the evening sun. You'd see children in all the back alleys. The poorer sort were barefoot, and the wife would say, 'Poor mites, I don't know how they manage to live.'

  They seemed to me to manage all right, going all out to make a racket as they did so: rattling the marbles in empty glass alley bottles, skipping in the sun and counting endlessly, or echoing about unseen.

  The wife was always pleasant to the kids, and told me not to speak of a child as 'it', which I was in the habit of doing, but I noticed she would always walk fast until we got out of the back streets, which happened when we struck the Palace Theatre at Ward's End. This was all Variety, and I would usually stop to have a look at the bills. I'd been inside twice, but never with the wife. She preferred lonely sounding ladies at the piano, of the sort they sometimes put on at her Co-op evenings. She'd once said to me: 'What's funny about a little man in big boots?' and I said, 'Well you must admit, it's funnier than a big man in big boots.' But no. There was no funny side to boots at all as far as the wife was concerned.

  Looking quickly at the Palace bill for that week, I saw the word 'Ventriloquist', and resolved to go along later. After comedians, ventriloquists were my favourite turns; there'd been one on at the Palace just recently, and I'd meant to go along. A good show would be just the tonic I needed.

  Next to the bill, another of the advertisements for the 'meeting to discuss questions' had been pasted up. I pointed it out to the wife, and she said, 'Why do they ask: "The Co-operator… Does He Help?'"

  'How do you mean?'

  'Why "he"', said the wife, 'and not "she"?'

  'Well,' I said, 'it's mankind, isn't it?'

  The wife snorted, and turned away from the poster, saying: 'They don't like excursions.'

  I stopped and looked again at the poster. 'Blackpool: A Health Resort?' I read. You could tell they had a down on the place. I wondered what they thought of Scarborough, for that was the same thing on the other side of the country. 'Wakes: Curse or Blessing?' I read once more. 'Mr Alan Cowan, founder of the Socialist Mission, has the Answers.'

  'Mr Robinson,' the wife was saying a moment later, as we waited for a gap in the traps and wagons racing along Fountain Street; 'that's the gentleman at the mill who gave me the start… He said that he would prefer me a little faster at the keys, but that I was the only one he'd seen over the position who knew what worsted was.'

  The wife looked at me, but I was miles off, thinking of Mr Alan Cowan and the Socialist Mission.

  'What?' I said.

  'Mr Robinson' she said, 'who interviewed me for the job, said I was the only applicant who knew what worsted was.'

  'Doesn't say much for the others' I said.

  'How do you mean?'

  'Well, they must have been a lot of blockheads if they didn't know what worsted was – and them living in a mill town, too.'

  'What is it then?'

  'What's what?'

  A tram was coming alo
ng Fountain Street, keeping us pinned to the kerb. The driver standing in his moving pulpit – for that's how it always looked to me – had been burned by the sun.

  'Worsted' she said.

  'Worsted?'

  'Worsted, yes.'

  'Well… it's a sort of cloth.'

  'Cloth made of what?'

  'Wool.'

  We were dodging through the traffic now. Happening to glance backwards I noticed that all the little high back windows of the Palace were open on account of the heat – a sight I had never seen before.

  'What sort of wool?' the wife was saying.

  'Well, you know… sheep's wool.'

  'Long staple' said the wife. And she looked away, and then she laughed. 'Eh, you daft 'aporth,' she said. She was practising her Yorkshire. 'You wear it every day but don't know what it is,' she said, straightening her white bonnet with her thin, brown hands.

  'You could have said something quite clever there you know,' I said.

  'I believe I did,' she said, smiling at me. The hat was righted now.

  'You could have said you'd worsted me over worsted -' I said.

  'You're loony,' said the wife.

  '- if you really had done of course.'

  We were now outside the Hemingway's Music Shop in Commercial Street. It was the wife's favourite shop, along with the Maypole Dairy at Northgate, where they had very artistic cheeses, kept cool by fans, like the drinkers in the Imperial Saloon. The Maypole could draw quite a crowd in the evening, although whether it was the cheeses or the fans that did it, I never knew. At Hemingway's, the wife always liked to look at the Hemingway's Special Piano they had in the window that was?14. She wanted to have only the best items in our home, and the Special Piano was on the list and some money towards it was in the tea caddy. Meanwhile we had no items, or very few. Whenever we struck this subject of furnishings I always pictured the shop in Northgate that had the sign in the window saying: 'homes complete from?10 to?100'. It was the ten pound part that interested me, but the wife would have none of it. 'I will not equip the house from a cheap john,' she would always say.

  'The marvellous thing' she said, still looking in the window, 'is that it looks just like any other piano.'

  'That's one of the things that worries me,' I said.

  'But for fourteen pounds' she said.

  'That's nigh on three months' wages,' I said. 'There'll soon be two of us earning' the wife reminded me, 'and now that the room's let…'

  'But what about the extras… tuning it, and the two of us learning to play the piano.'

  The Top Note Dining Room was two doors up from Hemingway's Music Shop, which might have explained the name. Nothing else did. The tables went the whole width of a wide room, and the people eating at them looked like workers in a mill. But they would give you ice in a glass of lemonade without waiting to be asked. The wife and I took our places. We both had steak and fried onions with chipped potatoes. It was the first good meal I'd had since the smash, which had put me off food in lots of ways.

  'You see it's not that I don't like Cape gooseberries,' I said, 'I just don't want to eat them for tea.'

  'Well,' she said, 'it's just that I've had so many interruptions.'

  'I would be willing to make my tea for myself,' I said, 'I would… almost.'

  'Oh, we can't have you living on Bloody Good Husband Street' said the wife, 'you the dolly mop!' Then: 'Would you like to see the mill where I'm to go on?'

  It was one of those lonely ones up on Beacon Hill. The trams couldn't get up there, so we took one as far as the Joint, sitting on the top for a bit of a blow. The sky was a greenish pink with the sunlight leaving it only slowly, and the smoke still coming out from the mills, snaking into the sky, adding to the heat and weirdness of all as they made their slow S's. The smell in the air was twice burnt.

  We passed Thomas Cook's excursion office in Horton Street. It was still open for business. The people of Halifax could not do without their outings. I couldn't imagine for a minute how they'd got on before the railways and the excursions started.

  'I could make a stew at the start of the week,' the wife was saying, 'and it would keep. Do you like stews?'

  'Yes,' I said firmly.

  'What kind? What do you like in them?'

  'I'm not faddy. Anything at all. You should buy the meat on Saturday night.'

  'Oh' she said suspiciously. 'Why?'

  'It's cheaper then.'

  She said she'd think it over.

  The wife was smiling. She had taken off her hat, and as we came to the tram halt, I thought: she looks still more fetching without it, and will look more fetching again when she puts it back on, and so on for ever. She was wrong over trams, however, which were forever either racing or jerking to a dead halt. They seemed to go on by jumps, and I found myself – for the first time ever – a little anxious riding one.

  We got off at the Joint, and as usual the wife paid no attention. She did not like railway lines, partly because her house in London had been underneath one. When I first took up lodgings there (for she was my landlady before she was my wife) I used to say: 'What do you expect, living in Waterloo?'

  We took the little stone tunnel that went under the platforms of the Joint, and under the canal basin, and under the Halifax Flour Society mill, and a good deal else beside. We came out and began climbing the Beacon, going by the one zigzag lane – half country, half town, with rocks lit by their own gas lamps, and sometimes black thin houses like knives along the way. There was one mill above us all the time as we walked, and this was our goal.

  Just then a bicyclist came crashing along. 'Evening!' he called, which was gentlemanly of him because by the looks of things he had all on staying alive. I thought his lamps were going to shake right off his machine, and he did look worried, but he wanted to keep up the speed. All my work started and finished down in that groove he was racing towards. There was too much life down there, and too much death too, because that's what the smoke was, and the black smuts floating along: that was your death certificate coming towards you. One in thirty million passengers might be killed on the railways, but your chances of coming a cropper if you worked on the railways, or anything that moved, were a good deal higher, and you could not avert what was coming.

  The black mill was right above us now, made up of three buildings chasing each other in a circle, like a castle in a child's story book. A fellow in a gig was waiting outside in the darkness. As we looked on, a small door within the main door opened; light came out like something falling forwards and just stayed there for a while.

  Presently, an old man emerged from the door, walking with two sticks. Well, he was practically a spider, or a little rickety machine. The man in the gig climbed down, and he didn't help the old man, but walked alongside, looking on very closely. He did give him a hand up into the gig, though. The old man was wearing a heavy black coat in spite of the heat, a high white collar that shone like moonlight, and a black necker. He looked all ready for death. His face was small and crumpled, almost a baby's again; he had one lock of no-colour hair going across the top of his head and, as he took his seat in the gig, this fell forwards like the chinstrap of a helmet or the handle of a bucket.

  'What's the name of this show?' I asked the wife.

  'Did I not tell you?' she said. 'It's Hind's Mill.'

  I looked at the wife, but decided to hold my tongue for the time being.

  'That must be Mr Hind Senior,' said the wife. 'He's the chairman and founder.'

  As we watched, the manservant leant across to put the old man's hair straight, like somebody training a vine. Then the mill door closed and the light went. A moment later, the trap rattled off into the hot night.

  Chapter Five

  The rest of the week I spent dreaming back and forth on the Rishworth branch, and trying to read a book by a fellow called Rider Haggard, for I was out with the Railway Magazine, having developed a strange fear of coming across an item about obstacles placed on the tracks.r />
  Most of the time, the stone on the line was on my mind, and I had made my little speech to the wife after explaining that she had been taken on by the mill that had suffered the smash: 'You go and work at Hind's Mill if you like, but you are not to go on their summer excursion.' 'Why ever not?' the wife had said, and my words had seemed completely daft in an instant. But I had not taken them back.

  The Board of Trade had come to Sowerby Bridge Shed. Rather, Major Terence Harrison had come, late of the Royal Engineers. Clive had said the Board always took its inspectors from that show if possible. The major had worn a very good, very tight suit. He was not a full inspector, but a sub- inspector, yet all the fellows in the shed gave him a very wide berth, fearing he was trained to detect ale on a railman's breath at fifty paces. He had talked to Clive in John Ellerton's office, and Clive had come out laughing. Then it had been my turn. Speaking to Major Harrison, I did not sound like myself. I kept saying things like: 'I jumped down from the cab to see whether I could render any assistance.'

  He had not wanted to know about my medical attempts, but was concerned only with the engine, the track, the stone and other things not living. He told me he would write a draft report, and that this would be properly finished off when the police investigation was completed. I told him I thought the culprit would most likely be someone owing a grievance to the mill, and Major Harrison said he was sure they would turn out to be from Blackpool. 'It's a damn strange town, you know,' he said.

  Well, I thought he was a blockhead, but he did pass on two handy pieces of information after I'd got up the nerve to question him a little. The train before ours over that two-line stretch had been a Blackpool to Preston. It was an ordinary train, not an excursion, and it had gone between Salwick and Kirkham a full hour before we'd arrived there. Nothing out of the way had been seen on the opposite line. So the stone had been placed an hour or less before the smash.

  As for the North Eastern train that had hit the branch on the way to Scarborough, he said that to his knowledge no investigation would be held, because the engine had not left the tracks.