The Blackpool Highflyer js-2

by Andrew Martin

  'Of course she is, old man,' he said. 'Don't mind me at all.'

  A tram was stopping outside Victoria Hall, and George Ogden suddenly made a run for it. It was an unnatural sight, George running. It was like a man having a fight with himself while on the move, and it seemed that half the street came to a halt in order to marvel at the spectacle. He jumped onto the tram then jumped directly off with the conductor bawling at him. There were post boxes on the trams, and George had just posted his letter. You weren't supposed to do it like that though. The boxes were for fare payers only.

  As he strolled back to me, the conductor was giving us the evil eye, but luckily his tram was carrying him further off by the second.

  'You want to watch he doesn't open the box and take your letter out,' I said.

  'How will he know which is mine?' George said, and then he smiled and then he frowned.

  'It's a letter to my best girl,' he said.

  'Where does she live?'

  'She's out in Oldham,' he said.

  'Do you get over there very often?'

  'Not so very… It's a fair way, you know.'

  'Matrimony on the cards, is it?'

  George, who had wandered onto the road, now had to scuttle out of the way of a delivery bike and was nearly flattened in the process. His legs were too short. He was all brain and belly.

  'That's… it's never quite settled,' said George. 'Your Mrs Stringer,' he said. 'She's got her own mind, hasn't she?'

  'It's all the woman's role, and so on,' I said. 'She's ardent for freedom.'

  'Bit hard on you though, old sort?'

  'Well, she wants better conditions for all.'

  'What about lodgers?' he said, quite sharply.

  'How do you mean?'

  'It's just that I'm in rather low water in present, financially speaking, and -'

  'If you want a rent cut it won't wash, George,' I said. 'You've only been in a week.'

  'But with all her beliefs about fairness -'

  'No,' I said. 'As far as all that goes… You see, a part of freedom for her is being able to charge you five shillings a week rent.'

  'Oh,' said George, and he stopped dead on the pavement, looking quite abashed. 'Anyway, it's quite all right,' he said, starting to walk once again. 'I'm a socialist myself, you know.'

  'Yes,' I said, 'so am I, but I will not go to lectures on the minimum wage on Saturday afternoon.'

  And I will not put grindstones on railway lines on account of being one either, I thought, and it came to me that I hadn't seen Paul, the socialist missionary, hanging about Horton Street since our conversation of eight days ago.

  'There's just nothing to be done about it,' said George, who was still thinking of his rent. 'I shall have to reduce my savings.'

  'Well you could stop going out for knife-and-fork teas every night,' I said. 'You do have use of the scullery, you know.'

  'I do not have knife-and-fork teas,' said George, 'I have damn good suppers.'

  'And I suppose you'll have a bottle of wine too?'

  'I will take a carafe,' said George, and he said that last word with very great care. 'That would be nothing out of the way.'

  'What is a carafe?' I asked him.

  'It's a sort of small jug,' he said, and then he stopped and smiled: 'But not too small.'

  We walked on, skirting past People's Park, where all the benches were full. I was trying to spy the rainbow in the fountain, while thinking violently about George and money. He either had too little or he had too much.

  'Where did you lodge before, George?' I said.

  But he ignored this question completely.

  We were by now at the Albert Cigar Factory, whose two chimneys did look like cigars puffing away, but nothing had been made of this for advertising purposes. I took George round to the back of the factory, where there was a small blue door with a broken metal sign on it. The only words remaining read: 'always delightful to inhale'.

  I knocked, saying to George, 'You sometimes have to wait a while.'

  But the door was opened straightway by a young fellow in a dust coat. He was standing in a kind of shop – a take-it-or- leave-it kind of show, not out to please, where the goods were just left in crates and kicked about as needed.

  'What ho!' shouted George, and the cigar man sprang back. For a minute I thought he was going to crown George.

  "A's or 'B's?' the cigar man asked.

  "A's for me', said George. 'Take a dozen.'

  "B's for me,' I said. 'Half a dozen.'

  Mine were two shillings, George's four, and they came to us in boxes without lids.

  'Do you have any tubes?' said George to the cigar man.

  'What sort of tubes?' came the reply.

  'Cigar tubes,' said George.

  The man turned to one of the crates and George turned to me, muttering, 'Extraordinary fellow!'

  George got one tin tube, gratis – which he thought a great thing to bring off – and as we walked away he took a little clasp knife out of one of his dozens of pockets, chopped the end off his 'A', and lit it. It was more than twice the size of one of my 'B's.

  'Sound smoke,' he said after a while, and he carried it off pretty well. Folk looked at him as he walked by. Then he stopped, and with the smoke racing into his eyes, unlaced his watch from his waistcoat: 'Fancy a stroll down to the Joint?'

  I said that I did, and we set off down Horton Street, carrying our cigar boxes.

  'You really ought to get 'A's, you know,' said George.

  'Why?' I said, even though I'd been thinking the same thing myself.

  'They're bigger,' he said, taking a puff, 'and better. You're an Ai fellow, so have an Ai cigar.'

  'Thank you,' I said, because there didn't seem much else to say.

  After a few paces he turned, with a flaring match in his hand, saying 'Won't you join me, old man?'

  So I bit the end off my 'B' – which George frowned at – and started smoking it.

  I might have taken two draws on the cigar when we came alongside the Thomas Cook excursion office in Horton Street. They were queuing out the door as usual, but the window was boarded.

  'Hey!' I called to George. 'That's been smashed.'

  George didn't even stop walking; didn't even remove his cigar from his mouth. 'Friday night, old man!' he called. 'High spirits!' Then he added: 'I've no use for that place myself. I won't go in for your whirligig holidays. Besides, the trains can be dangerous from all I hear.'

  'It's not the trains,' I said, staring at the boarded window. 'It's the loonies with the bloody millstones.'

  Without a word to George, I stood on my cigar, crossed over Horton Street and began pushing towards the front of the queue of excursionists, apologising as I went. As I did so, I realised that George was behind me, not apologising, but saying, every now and again, 'Step aside there', and the funny thing was that his big cigar allowed him to get away with it.

  There were three clerks inside the excursion office, all looking very hot and bothered, and surrounded by posters of people standing at the seaside in golden sun, and grinning fit to bust under straw boaters. There were some Lanky posters up there as well, and two or three of the same one: a poster showing a steam packet, and the words: 'step on at goole for the continent'.

  'Who smashed your window?' I asked one of the clerks, who was in the middle of serving an elderly party in a dinty bowler.

  'Mr Bloody Nobody,' he said, and then, after a quick glance at me, 'It wasn't thissen, by any chance, I don't suppose?'

  George was right behind me, smoking into my ear. 'Bloody sauce,' he said. 'Why, it's slander, is that.'

  The clerk now turned to George: 'And will you get out of here, and leave off poisoning us all with that dratted great cigar.'

  'That was slander as well,' said George, when we were back outside in Horton Street.

  'Come here,' I said, and I led him back across the road to the wall of the old warehouse. The poster was still there: 'a meeting to discuss questions'.


  'I reckon it was that lot that smashed the window' I said. "Ihey want to stop all excursions, and they want to frighten the railways off.' And I told George all about Paul, the socialist missionary-cum-anarchist, and how there might be a connection with the stone on the line.

  'Anarchists…' said George, when I'd finished. 'There's a lot of those blighters in Germany, from what I read in The Times. Bomb-throwing's meat and drink to them, you know. Then there's the bloody Fenians too.'

  'Well, that puts my mind at ease, I must say,' I said. 'Why do they do it?'

  George puffed on his cigar, using it to think. 'Get in the newspapers' he said.

  We walked on, heading for the Joint, and George said, 'Do you care to know my theory on your little bit of bad business?'

  'Go on then,' I said.

  Walking down a hill didn't suit George Ogden any more than walking up a hill. With every step the breath was knocked out of him, escaping with a little whistle, which was sometimes accompanied by a jet of smoke from his 'A'.

  'It was wreckers' he said.

  'I know that' I said.

  'But this is what you don't know,' he said, quite sharp: 'they were going for the next train.'

  Above the station, the flag of the Lanky and the flag of the Great Northern slept side by side in the great heat.

  'Why would they be doing that?'

  'Beats me.'

  'Well, what makes you think they were?'

  'Simple,' said George. And the next speech he made standing still in Horton Street, with his fingers in his waistcoat pockets and his cigar always in his mouth: 'The next train was knoivn of. The Blackpool Express. Runs every day, even Sunday: eight thirty-six. Famous train, and the only timetabled one of the day from Halifax to Blackpool. It was in the timetable, do you see, there to be found by anyone picking up the month's Bradshaw. Yours -' Here he took one hand out of his waistcoat, to point at me,'- yours was an excursion, and a late-booked one at that. Some excursions get into the Bradshaw's, those known of long in advance. Yours didn't. Some – those known about a little less in advance – get into the working timetables. Yours didn't. Some get into the fortnightly notices, but yours missed that as well. The first we all knew of yours was in the weekly notices.'

  'Do you fellows in the booking office get the same weekly notices as us engine fellows?' I asked.

  'Wouldn't be much point in having different!' said George.

  That was true enough.

  'Wreckers are sometimes just kids out for fun,' I said. 'They want to make the train jump. They wouldn't be particular as to which train they tripped up.'

  'No,' said George. 'But another sort might be. If they had planned to send one particular train galley west, odds on it would have been the second.'

  'Yes,' I said slowly, 'unless they had seen the weekly notices, and they knew of our train.'

  'Yes' said George, even more slowly.

  'But that's half the Lanky,' I went on. 'Every stationmaster and signalman from here to Blackpool, and everyone who reads a stationmaster or a signalman's notices, which, since they're pinned up all over the shop, is hundreds.'

  'Thousands!' said George.

  We now carried on walking towards the station, with me wondering where this conversation had got us, but thinking very hard over it, and over the broken window of the Thomas Cook office.

  Chapter Eleven

  There were two booking offices at the Joint: one for the Lancashire and Yorkshire, one for the Great Northern. That's why it was called the Joint. They were on a sort of wooden bridge, in a building that was like a pier pavilion and went over the tracks and platforms. You climbed dark dusty steps which smelled exciting in some way, and fanned out to left and right, depending on whether you wanted the Great Northern ticket window – which you would if you wanted a connection to London – or the Lanky side.

  Between the ticket windows was a door, which I supposed was as good as invisible to passengers, for it was through this that only the ticket clerks came and went. Once through the door, things split into two again. To the left, small letters on a door said 'gn ticket office'; to the right, small letters on another said 'l amp;y office'.

  As I prepared to follow George through this second one, I asked him: 'Have you ever been through the other door?'

  'Wouldn't care to,' he said, shaking his head.

  'Why not?'

  'Because it's exactly the same as this show, except with different printing on the tickets.'

  As he said the word 'tickets', that's what I saw. The walls of this big wooden room were made of them, and they muffled any noise. I could hear the station below but it might have been a mile away. All around the walls were dark cabinets with wide, thin drawers, and above the cabinets were racks in which the different types of tickets stood in columns. The tickets, thousands upon thousands of them, were imprisoned in their long thin racks. They were dropped in through the top and could only be slid out from the bottom.

  In those few wall spaces where there weren't ticket racks, there were pictures. One was the famous Lanky poster that had been in the Thomas Cook excursion office, 'step on at goole for the continent'. I thought of holidays, and again of the broken window at the excursion office. Had Paul done it? Or even Alan Cowan himself?

  There were two other clerks in the office: one sitting at the ticket window, another leaning against one of the racks. George introduced them as Dick and Bob, and as he did so, all of their voices sounded lost, as if they were outnumbered and beaten down by the tickets on all sides.

  I had seen this pair before and secretly thought them a very medium pair of goods. They might have been in any line of business. There was nothing railway-ish about them. They both shot me funny, complicated looks, because they knew me for an engine man, and an engine man does not wear a stiff collar. But he does start at the head end of the train, and that's the important thing. Or so I'd believed until the smash. Being at the front end put you in the way of trouble. I had struck trouble, and been found wanting.

  I shook their hands, and then they fell to staring at George and his cigar. 'Better not let Dunglass or Knowles see you with that thing in your mouth,' Dick said.

  Dunglass was the chief booking clerk.

  'Smoking's only allowed in the general room,' added Bob, rising from the seat at the ticket window. The ticket office had the wooden, empty smell of a cricket pavilion.

  'Nonsense,' said George, who now took Bob's place at the ticket window.

  In front of George at the ticket window was a great wooden guillotine that could be dropped down at the close of business, or, as I was to learn, at any time that suited. George also had a money drawer, and at his elbow a date stamp which looked like an iron head with a thin mouth for the tickets to go in.

  There not being any passengers to be dealt with, George swivelled around in the chair, which was set on wheels, and, using his cigar as a pointer, indicated the racks, saying very loudly: 'First-class singles

  There were lots of these.

  'Second-class singles…'

  More still of these.

  'Third-class singles…'

  Yet more – a good two dozen racks of these.

  'Heaps of Thirds, aren't there?' I said.

  'What?' said George, sitting back, taking a pull on his cigar. 'Well, nine out of ten passengers go Third. It's a third-class world, I'm afraid… except for some of us.' At this, George swivelled right round in his chair, with his boots lifted up off the ground, and the face of a kid riding a whirligig. Bob and Dick looked at each other and smiled. George was the star turn of the booking office.

  'First-class returns,' George continued, putting his feet down to stop the chair and pointing to another part of the booking office, 'Second returns… Third returns, policeman- on-duty tickets, clergymen tickets, staff privilege, angling tickets, market-day specials, platform tickets.'

  He was going on rapidly now, his cigar jumping about; I couldn't make out where he was pointing.

 
'Now,' said George, 'your first-class singles are white, your second-class singles are red, your third-class singles green. Your first-class returns are white and yellow, your second- class returns are red and blue, your third-class…'

  'Tell him the interesting stuff,' said Dick, or Bob, very timidly.

  'What do you think I am doing?' said George, quite indignantly.

  'No, the really interesting stuff.'

  'Is there any way of recalling who's bought a ticket on any particular train?' I asked the office in general.

  George frowned. 'You can say which tickets have gone,' he said, 'but not who's had 'em.'

  'Unless you happen to remember the person,' said Dick.

  'Or the ticket they get,' said Bob. 'A notable ticket number might do it. I sold a ticket for Todmorden this morning: third- class single, number one, two, three, three. That's a highly interesting ticket.'

  'Why?' I said.

  George answered for him. 'Because the next one's going to be one, two, three, four, see? Collector's item.'

  If George was right, and the wreckers had been aiming at the 8.36, the regular Blackpool express, the train after ours on that day, it might be handy to know who was riding on it. But I would not find out here.

  Just then, somebody tapped on the ticket-window glass and George swivelled around to face the customer.

  'Good afternoon, Doctor Whittaker,' he said, thrusting his cigar-holding hand down below his counter. 'Second-class return to Bradford?'

  At this he gave a sudden kick with both legs and his chair went flying backwards so that he was level with second-class returns to Bradford, or so I supposed. Bob and Dick gave me silly smiles as he did this. George reached across to the rack, and suddenly the ticket was lying in his hand. He had the trick of flicking it from the bottom of the rack. Then, by means of a strange, sitting-down walk, he dragged himself and his chair back to the ticket window, sliding the cigar into its tube as he did so.

  'Ninepence, Doctor Whittaker,' he said.

  But then he had to lean again towards the window, for the doctor – evidently a regular customer – had further requirements.

  'Cycle ticket in addition?' said George. 'That'll be one sixpence, Doctor Whittaker.'