The Necropolis Railway

by Andrew Martin

'Well,' she said, ‘I suppose I do. If I have to go to Bournemouth then I wish to go in a hurry.'

  'You've been there?' I said, 'On excursions?'

  She nodded.

  "The Greyhounds can do it in two hours,' I said.

  'Well, ours took four on the last occasion,' she said, walking rapidly towards the door as though I personally had been responsible for the slowness of her journey to the sea.

  'High speed is my passion,' I said, to try and stop her going.

  'But you are presently retained ... not as a driver?'

  'As a cleaner,' I said eagerly, 'but cleaning is the way to driving, did I not tell you that when I arrived at this lodge?'

  She nodded quickly, and said, "The subject of trains is of great interest to some people - or so I would imagine.'

  And then she was gone, but the puddle was still there on the floor.

  Chapter Eleven

  Monday 30 November

  For the following week I had the worst turn of the lot: the five o'clock in the morning go-on. On my first day of early turns, which was Monday 30 November, there was more coming and going in the shed than I had seen at any later hour, with 200 locomotives under the roof, and the fires were being started on all sides. The men were stoking up the whole of London, setting the world turning for another day, and by their looks they seemed to say they could manage the job quite well without me.

  I went in to see the Governor first thing. As Nolan scribbled away, the Governor said he was giving me a rest from Twenty-Nine and Thirty-One for a while, for there weren't enough funerals. This was no great shock: those two only went out three or four times a week in any case. He put me on to general tidying and making straight, and as I was leaving he called out, 'Watch yourself off-shed today. It's thick as a bag out there.'

  I walked back to the mouth of the shed, and saw that the dawn had come but it had been one of those frauds, where too much blackness makes way for too much whiteness. I couldn't even make out the turntables. A bell was being rung behind me, echoing in the shed. A couple of engines were coming off-shed, rolling out on the tracks to either side of me, big as black clanking houses on the move and giving me a sheer blank fright as they swept strangely past, proving the power of the fog, which swallowed them in an instant. A minute after, I heard an explosion.

  A man to my left threw off his cap and began to run. On Filey Beach when I was twelve, my dad offered me a sporting challenge: first to touch the spars of Lighthouse Pier from a hundred yards off. For the first time my father did not let me win, and I saw what a man could do, even a little, sometimes-silly butcher in a brown billycock. This fellow was faster than my dad. He was leaping the rails, flying across the front of the fog, then disappearing diagonally into it. A crowd was coming up behind me to watch, and I turned around and saw Crook. It was a shock to see him away from his clock. 'Detonation,' he said to me, and his eyebrows did their little jump.

  Detonators were put on the tracks as a back-up for signals on foggy days, and an explosion meant an engine had struck one. I didn't breathe as I awaited the sound of a smash, which was like waiting for death itself, because there was curiosity and horror too. I believed smashes came as the sound of a great bell being rung, and now I was about to find out for myself. But thirty seconds went by and we heard nothing, and I felt I ought to be doing more than standing there and waiting, so I stepped away from the shed.

  I knew, once in the middle of the fog, that the bad business wasn't over. There were shouts, lamps swinging, the sound of people scrambling forward, then stopping. I was hard by the locomotive now, and I saw it was an engine commonly called a Jubilee, one of the two that had rolled out of the shed beside me. There were men all around it, with more crammed onto the footplate. A man was being moved around in there, propped up, turned about, and I could see the little ambulance box being passed across from one fellow to another. Then I saw the head of the man being moved: it was Mike's, and it was all wrong; blue, like a bad potato.

  The body that was connected to the head flopped - the legs were for a second forgotten, and dangled from the cab - and it seemed too small, although in fact it was the head that was too big. But it scarcely mattered either way: the two could not remain connected for very much longer, since the one would henceforward want nothing to do with the other.

  Now there was a fellow coming up from behind who said, 'Did you hear the barker?' Somebody else I didn't know said,

  'That's what we all heard.' 'No,' said a voice that could have been the first one, 'we heard the shooter and the fog bomb blowing off together.' Another said, 'There was no shooter. He just came off the bloody engine.'

  I looked up. Arthur Hunt was leaning against the Jubilee's tender and staring at me as if he'd never left off doing it from that time I'd first seen him in the half-link's mess. The dirty business done, the fog was clearing all the time, racing away. Barney Rose was at the other end, next to the cylinder casing. He had his pipe going, but looked rattled all the same, and I knew I should have left him alone, but I couldn't. I had come to a place that was full of hatred. One man had disappeared and another had died, and this last was a good deal more popular than myself. It wasn't bravery that made me walk towards Rose; it was something like what they call the life force itself.

  The fog may have been lifting but the Jubilee was giving out whiffs of steam, and there was Rose's pipe smoke to add to the morning ghostliness. When he spoke he looked away from me. 'I was under orders from the Governor to let Mike take her off-shed,' he said, 'just while I walked along her and took a good look at the motion . . . something a bit queer about the noise it was making ...' He left a long pause, then he started again, still looking away: 'He was like Taylor and like you: a very ardent lad.'

  He gave a funny little sideways smile that made me feel ill, and I said, 'What do you mean?' I suppose I was shouting, but the fog seemed to require it.

  'No holds barred,' said Rose, shaking his head and seeming nearly to laugh. Another bloke came up to us, and Rose carried on talking, still with that hateful half smile. 'Well, Mike being new to the regulator, and a little heavy-handed with it, I got left behind. I never saw him hit the fog bomb, only heard it, and when I got nearer he was flat out by the track, with the engine heading away for bloody Bournemouth at ten miles to the hour. He'd come off the footplate and hit the next rail.' He looked up at the two of us, then down again. 'Talk about beginner's luck,' he said.

  Beyond and above us, on the footplate of the engine, I could make out that they were still holding Mike, still turning him this way and that as if he might somehow come back to life if they got him at the right angle.

  'How did he come off?' said a voice.

  'Tripped on coal, if you ask me’ said Rose.

  I remembered that I had seen Mike's messy ways with the shovel for myself.

  A lantern was coming towards us; behind it was a man coughing - the Governor. 'It's Florence fucking Nightingale’ said a sharp voice - the voice of Arthur Hunt. Mike was being brought down off the footplate, and somebody was shouting, roaring angrily. The Governor yelled something to Rose, then leapt onto the footplate of the Jubilee. Rose followed him up more slowly, looking completely all in. Two minutes later the engine began rolling backwards towards the shed. Rose was at the regulator, and the Governor was looking out at all the blokes. "The impedimentia of illusion are being removed from the stage!' he roared, by which he meant get back to our duties.

  A shout went up - many intemperate words, and all against the Governor. I wasn't one of the shouters but it made me feel good to be part of the crowd. For the first time I was a Nine Elms man. Well, I mean ... it was for once not myself but another who was the object of hatred. 'Get that fucking slave driver off there’ said a voice from the crowd of men, which could have been Hunt again, but I could not be sure. Then I saw the swinging bulls' eyes of the constables coming up, and I thought: it is very like the end of the shows in the music halls with the chuckers-out coming in, and I remembered Mike's le
gs hanging off the side of the cab, and how they were like Mr Punch's little broken legs that would sometimes flop over the front of the small stages in the seaside booths, making you sorry for him in spite of all. But Mike was a good fellow to begin with, in my eyes at least; Taylor had been another by all accounts, and maybe that was part of the killer's programme, to get the nice ones, in which case I had better stop playing the milksop.

  The coppers took the numbers of the blokes around the loco, and asked everybody what they'd seen. Two hours later a detective with a white beard who looked like a sea captain, accompanied by the Governor, came to see me while I was ripping rags on my own in the rag store, and I told them everything I knew and nothing of what I thought - because I could have given them quite a bit to chew on.

  The Governor called me a good lad, and started coming on strong about the half-link blokes right in front of the detective. He said that Rose was not up to the mark, that there would be an inquiry, and it would be the finish of him. He also said that Rose had overrun in the yard at the start of August, which I'd already heard from Vincent, who'd said somebody had split over it, and now the Governor, working up to boiling point in the rag store, came out with the name. 'It was that poor sod Henry Taylor who spilled the beans to me - it was his job to do it, but look what happened to him. He was a good lad too - would have been up on the footplate in double-quick time.'

  By now his colour had reached the danger level, and he started coughing, as the detective, who seemed to know of all this anyway, smiled, and told him to calm himself.

  I had one question burning to be asked: 'Where's Vincent today?'

  'On leave,' said the Governor.

  'So he's not about?' I said, and the Governor said nothing, but looked across at the detective.

  As I went back to tearing rags, I fell to thinking - because I had to think about everything - how Mike was careless with coal. On the footplate, he was one of those clumsy fellows whose boots always seemed too big. But it did look as if he'd been jacked in, and with him went the best hope of finding out what had really happened to Henry Taylor. Why would Barney Rose not look at me? And why had Arthur Hunt been off-shed with no engine underneath him? And then Vincent, who was certainly no friend of Mike's ... that mysterious little fellow had five days holiday a year, and had taken one of them on this foggy November day . . . And then why had Arthur been off-shed with no engine underneath him?

  One thing seemed certain: with Mike gone, the half-link was left with nothing but relief firemen. Vincent would have to go up. At the same time, though, there were 500 men at Nine Elms Loco Shed, and any one of them could have been the killer. Come to that, there were thousands of fellows in London who were off their boxes, and the wall around Nine Elms was low enough to let in any of them. Bob Crook, after all, was no sentry - you did not need to see him unless you were booking on.

  When I'd finished thinking all these things - all destined for the back of the diary, to be mulled over for hours - my mind emptied for a while, except for the small part of it needed to keep me tearing rags. I did not quit the work but in due course a feeling of stark terror came over me, and with it thoughts of the shadows in the courtyard, moving and growing.

  I had seen the devil of violence and yet I knew it was only the start.

  Chapter Twelve

  Thursday 3 December

  I did not see Vincent until that Thursday. He was in the cleaners' mess eating his snap, and as I entered he walked out straight away, leaving some onion skins behind. That was probably because he'd heard I'd been on the footplate of Thirty-One, or because he was still not firing on the half despite the death of Mike; or just because he had his knife into me the same as everyone else. I didn't have the opportunity to tell him what I thought about Mike, which was just as well, because Vincent was the fifty-face man, and you couldn't tell him your innermost thoughts.

  At the end of that day I kept a new promise I had made to myself (for I had nobody else to make it to): I went into the Turnstile, the pub just outside the engine-shed gates, and I dare say I was one of the few fellows ever to have stepped in there alone and with no prospects of a chat. It was a bare, blank place with two bars separated by a screen: there was no difference between the two, but one was for footplate men, the other for all the rest of the blokes. I don't know why, but I liked it; I thought it was the heart of something - and it was packed out.

  I had only seen pubs from the jug-and-bottle doors, where Dad would send me from time to time, but as I said, he did not hold with taking a drink inside a pub. He wasn't church and he wasn't chapel or anything at all in the religious line; I suppose it came down to this: that a pub was a place where smart boots cut no ice.

  I had stepped into the part that was for 'the rest'. Fighting my way to the bar, I got myself what the fellow in front had asked for: a glass of 'half and half. I didn't know what either half was, but after one sip I knew I'd better go carefully with it. The engine men, on the other side, took their ale in pewters. I looked all about me, watching the blokes chat, and wondered how it had come about that I was watching these revels but not joining in the fun. Presently I spied Flannagan, the charge cleaner. With his funny legs, this fellow was made for leaning up against a bar and that's what he was doing. As he talked to two young fellows I'd seen about the place cleaning, fetching tea for Flannagan and so on, I thought that perhaps one of my troubles - when it came to understanding all the exploits going on about me and getting myself some pals, which probably went hand in hand - was that I had not yet stood a drink for any Nine Elms man. The fact was that I had not stood anybody a drink anywhere, but I knew it was a manly sort of thing, and this was the place to start.

  'Two gallons of linseed oil,' Flannagan was drawling, 'one gallon of paraffin, about a pint of bloody Brasso . . .' As I moved towards him with a weird sort of smile fixed onto my face, his talk gradually got slower as though he was a clockwork toy winding down, and when I was right alongside him, he stopped completely, with nothing but a look of disgust left on his face.

  I had forgotten that the fellow to be bought a drink had to want to have one bought for him. So I turned away, and it immediately seemed that Flannagan got wound up again. 'Half a ton of rags, about a mile of bloody emery paper -'

  'You're exaggerating now,' said one of the lads near him.

  'I'm fucking telling you,' said Flannagan, 'and it still comes off black as night. That fucking engine was built dirty.'

  'Get away, Mr Flannagan,' said one of the young fellows -but in a scared voice.

  Back at the bar I tried to steady myself after this latest calamity. Looking up, I spotted Arthur Hunt in the drivers' part. Vincent was on one side of him, Rose on the other. Vincent shouldn't really have been in there, since, although he was passed, he hadn't gone up. But he was Hunt's nephew, and what Hunt said went.

  Hunt was smoking a cigar, his sharp nose going forwards and his hair swept back. Vincent was quiet, just watching his uncle as though he was a god.

  Barney Rose was looking semi-drunk, but Hunt was a different person altogether in the company of another engine man, even one as slack as Rose. I put my anxieties about the pair of them aside, and saw two engine men enjoying a drink after their turn, picturing them both on express rails, slamming down the lawn to Bournemouth.

  'Dear old Teddy?' Rose suddenly said to Hunt, and it was evidently a great crack because they both laughed a good deal. It was strange to see Hunt do this because his face altered out of all recognition. Rose said, 'Chamberlain.'

  'Joseph Chamberlain?' said Hunt in a thoughtful sort of way, rising as he did so and walking towards the bar. 'Now if that gentleman had not had all the advantages this world has to offer,' he called back to Rose, 'then I think -'

  'I've got it,' called Rose. 'Plumber!'

  Hunt purchased two more pewters of beer. 'I'm not so sure,' he said, going back with the ale. 'I mean to say, there's a fair amount of skill in that.'

  Rose took a long pull on his beer. 'Plumber's m
ate, then,' he said after a while.

  'What are the duties of a plumber's mate?' asked Hunt.

  'Carrying spanners,' said Rose. 'Brewing up for the plumber.'

  Hunt nodded. 'And do you need certificates for it?'

  'I'm sure that a couple of testimonials would suffice to get you a start in that line.'

  'But where would a clot like Chamberlain get a decent testimonial?'

  'Mr Balfour might give him one?'

  'Mmm,' said Hunt, and I hoped he was going to smile again, because I liked to see what happened to his face when this novelty occurred. But thinking better of this, I finished my drink and left before he could look up and see me and have his evening spoiled.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Saturday 5 December

  On the Saturday, I booked off at four-thirty and turned my back on Nine Elms, which was full of rumours and coppers, and walked back to my lodge along the riverside. Along the Embankment, which was as busy as any road, I watched the black water sliding up and down the hulls of the rolling, smoking boats. Waterloo was a stranger place than Nine Elms, with a stranger smell, and the god of it all was the stone lion watching the black river from the top of the Red Lion brewery. The sun was going down, but that smoke was still going up, and the traffic and the people were all still going strong as the sky turned pink.

  I turned away from the river into York Road: hundreds and hundreds of people were coming at me under hats. I stopped under my coffee viaduct and there was yet another new person - a young woman - standing behind the stall.

  'Money in the tin?' I said.

  "That's it, love,' she said.

  Her eyes were very blue, and very white around the blue-ness. When I'd paid she tipped her head and stretched out her arms like a dancer, pushing her bosoms to the front of her semi-clean white dress. It's not often, I thought, that you see anyone so very beautiful do anything so strange. I moved along Lower Marsh with my coffee feeling ashamed of my thoughts. I bought some Vianola soap from the Vianola Soap Pharmacy over the road from my lodge, because I had planned an extra good wash for myself before taking a pint down at the Citadel. I had found myself quite galvanised by my drink at the Turnstile, despite the difficult circumstances; several things had become clearer in my mind, although I had found, when I came to put them in my Lett's diary, that they amounted to nothing much. The thoughts were along the following lines: that although Barney Rose was under the gun at Nine Elms, he had a better friend in Arthur Hunt than I had first thought.