Everyman's England

by Victor Canning

  Have you ever wondered how a truck of coal from Durham finally reaches a coal merchant’s siding in Dorchester? I never had until I went to March. And it is March which is mainly responsible for the truck getting to Dorchester and not Doncaster. A goods train comes puffing down from Durham with trucks consigned to various towns. It reaches March and there the trucks, with hundreds of others, are shunted up on to a high embankment in ‘runs’ of about fifty trucks. The end of the embankment slopes towards the yards and splits into a number of separate lines. Imagine your arm to be the high embankment with a railway line running along it towards your wrist and then imagine your fingers to be the duplication of that one line into many others. The truck from Durham for Dorchester runs down the arm, bumps across the points at the wrist, which are controlled by the men in the tower, and glides away down your little finger into the bay for all Dorchester trucks. Behind it is a truck for Bath which shoots down into your thumb, which is the bay for Bath traffic. And so the shunting goes on all day and all night at March, hundreds of trucks passing down the incline and into their respective bays. The bays are not always for separate towns. Sometimes they are for districts, like the West of England, or London; but all goods traffic coming from the North for the South passes through a sifting process at March. It is a keen railway brain that controls goods traffic. Loudspeakers boom instructions over the yards to the brake men (and sometimes send out unofficial information about the winner of the four-thirty), arc-lights pick out the thin weft of steel lines, signals clank up and down, and the passing furnace of an engine shows driver and stoker like a couple of unfortunates in a tiny hell of their own… Wherever you go in March you cannot escape the sound of hissing steam from locomotives and the distant clank of trucks, and after a time you forget the noise and are surprised when someone draws your attention to it.

  I stood beside the controller in the tower; before him was a little map of the yard with red and green lights that twinkled as the running trucks passed over points. There was a crackling of atmospherics from the loudspeaker and a voice boomed out:

  ‘Ready to take the strawberry run, Dick?’

  ‘OK,’ shouted the controller into his mouth-piece and, as he turned round, he saw the mystified look on my face. It was still winter almost and strawberries were a long way off.

  ‘Strawberries?’ I asked.

  He laughed. ‘Not real ones. You see we have nicknames for the regular loads that come in, and we always get a trainful of trucks about five each evening from the brickworks up Peterborough way. We call the bricks strawberries.’

  As I left the tower the trucks of bricks were thundering down the incline, automatically being braked as they passed over the points, and then sliding away into the dusk where the waiting truck-men jump upon them as they pass and, sitting precariously on the long brake-handles, ride with them for a while braking the speed to prevent one truck from bumping too violently into its fellows in the bay.

  I met an old friend in March, an old friend of many of us. I wonder how long it is since you have seen him? You may never see him again, and I shall always remember March for the pleasure it gave me in that meeting with the past.

  I went into a cinema, there are two in the town, and I felt at once that something unexpected was going to happen. It was Saturday night, the place was packed, and although the lights were up and a drop-curtain covered with inartistic advertisements of local traders was the only thing to look at, the audience, especially those in the rows near the stage, were lustily helping out the amplified music of a gramophone record.

  Provincial audiences may not be so eclectic as the more sophisticated assemblies that politely applaud London shows. They do not criticise their entertainment – they enjoy it on the principle that having paid to be entertained they are going to be entertained whether the film is good or bad. Any deficiency in the film they make up with their own enthusiasm.

  This audience clapped everything. They clapped the newsreel; they thundered at a short comic strip; they alternately clapped and wiped their eyes at the principal film which concerned the lives of strangely unhuman men and women. But at the end of the film, before their eyes were dried, they rose to their feet and burst into such a cry of exultancy and approval that I feared for the roof. The tumult echoed all about me and must have been heard miles away. I crouched beneath the blast of voices and saw that the reason for their cries lay in a small notice which had just been flashed upon the screen. In a second I was back to my boyhood, sitting in a small cinema in Ebrington Street, Plymouth, and my voice had joined the general acclamation. The notice was a very simple one. It went straight to every heart in the place, including mine:

  Episode Nine of the Invisible Death-Ray.

  ‘Dynamite Between Decks.’

  Last week we left Dick Fairbright struggling with the

  half-caste Lope Chica at the top of the mast of the San

  Pedro, which is conveying an illicit cargo of munitions to

  the rebels in Montelegrad…

  I can guess what happened last week. Dick pursued the villainous Mexican up the mast and there was a struggle. What the struggle was about doesn’t matter much. These film heroes and villains fight in the same instinctive, mute way that a dog leaps for a rabbit. The film ended, I am sure, at the tantalising moment when the Mexican hit Dick a treacherous blow with a belaying-pin and made him loose his grip on the mast.

  I was right. The film opens, to an accompaniment of cheers, whistles and shouts, as Dick, spinning like a top, drops towards the sea. A spout of white foam, a flash of dirty teeth from the Mexican and the waves close over our hero’s head. The proud ship San Pedro ploughs her way towards ill-fated Montelegrad where Professor Campbell, in his hacienda, surrounded by rebels, is being forced to hand over his invention, the invisible death-ray, to the rebel leader who is contemplating a worldwide empire. For a time I forget everything but Dick and the professor, and the Mexican. Dick is not drowned. Swimming under water he reaches the stern and climbs aboard. Stealthily he unfastens the professor’s daughter, where she is tied to the mainmast in the glare of the sun. They tiptoe past the crew, sleeping the sleep of the cinematically drunk, to the hold where they make a raft… Everybody knows what he is going to do. He is going to make a bold bid to save Montelegrad by blowing up the ship. He sets a fuse, giving himself and the girl, who hampers his movements by clinging to his neck, five minutes to launch their raft. The audience stirs with apprehension. Oh, why did it have to happen? The ever-wakeful Lope Chica catches them as they struggle with the raft by the stern. The crew awake, throwing off their stupor with miraculous ease, and there we all are – for each one of us is now on board that powder mine – wasting time by talking, while that fuse burns nearer and nearer to the powder. The camera darts from the burning fuse to the group on deck, and back again.

  Nearer, nearer – only half an inch to go before the big bang – and then – the film finishes, a rustle of appreciation goes up from the audience who will be able to come and see what happens next week, and a growl of discontentment from myself, for I shall miss it. Never shall I know what happened to Dick and the girl, and the San Pedro.

  I walked out into the busy street, wondering if it would be foolish to make a special journey to March next week… The scene in the main street helps me to forget.

  Saturday night! Gala night in March. Into the small town have come a jostling crowd, the streets are packed with a slow-moving, joking, flirting, healthy mob; labourers from the fen farms and hamlets, their good wives… in they come to forget the toil of the week, the farm-carts piled high with sugar-beet, the loneliness of hamlets, where rain is the only drinkable water supply, to seek colour, warmth and laughter.

  They have come by car, by omnibus, by train, on cycles, in pony-carts, and walking… farmers’ sons, red of face, their checked caps tipped at jaunty angles, girls with complexions that need little cosmetics, housewives bulging with parcels and good humour, and burly labourers, their hands grained
with work and soil, and their hair rising rebelliously from the slavery of brilliantine.

  From the lighted windows of the inns come the tinkle of pianos and the sound of songs – ‘Lily of Laguna’ and ‘I Won’t Dance,’ for these people, loving the old so well, are not so narrow-minded that they scorn the new.

  And they are not all so bent on pleasure that they have not an eye to a bargain. Crowds cluster round the stalls in the square by the town hall, listening to the ballyhoo of the hawkers, watching the butcher as he smacks his red and yellow carcasses with a familiarity the beasts would never have tolerated in life, smiling at the loud-mouthed humourists on the sweet stalls as they shout their wares and keep a smart eye on small boys whose acquisitive instincts are stronger than their ethics – and only when they think the price is fair do these people buy, for they have little money to spend and none to waste.

  At half-past eleven I stood alone on the river bridge. The streets were almost deserted. The cinemas were closed, the shops dark and the inns silent. One by one the cars and cycles had departed. The last omnibus rumbled down the street, over the bridge and into the darkness.

  In the square a few people remained, gossiping groups of stallholders who had just finished packing their unsold wares into their vans. Soon they were gone. The river reflected a feeble light from the star-smothered sky and a cold wind ruffled the dead grasses along its banks. A cat sat reflectively in the roadway, making up its mind to some feline purpose, and then disappeared into the shadows.

  Above me the illuminated face of the clock in the tower of the town hall hung in the darkness like a genial moon and a silence settled over March, a silence broken now and then by the sibilant chatter of locomotives from the railway and marshalling yards that give so many March men employment and yet remain apart from its real life.

  As I turned away a last car dashed over the bridge, the white column of the war memorial gleamed for a moment in the glare of its headlights and then March, the weekend Mecca of the fen-workers, slept as deeply as the rich encompassing fenlands.

  CHAPTER 9

  ALL THE WAY, PLEASE

  The fare on a London General Omnibus from the Oxford Street corner of Tottenham Court Road to the end of the Number Twenty-four route at Hampstead is threepence. I know of no other journey so cheap and so interesting, and although at one time I travelled the route often and at those hours when the working crowds were packing the buses in their hurry to get to their homes, I never felt able to sit the whole while and read my evening paper. Those who travel much on buses, tubes and trains over the same journey, begin to develop a fine sense of their whereabouts at any moment during the journey, although their eyes have never left their papers. There must be some sense of combined sound, speed and time which enables a man infallibly to rise at the right moment and walk swaying down a tube compartment to step on to his correct platform, all the while reading the evening paper. To some degree I must have developed this sense. I could always feel when the bus passed certain points of the route and at those moments I would down my newspaper and let my eyes confirm my growing sense.

  There is little opportunity for conversation on a bus. Even if there were, there would probably be as little of it as there is on our trains. We are not a talkative race, we are too self-conscious, and while we may long to ask questions ourselves of strangers, that does not stop us from privately condemning those who ask them of us. The result is that train travel, especially, becomes a book-guarded monotony which must be endured that we may earn the epithet ‘reserved’ from foreigners who mistake our absurd shyness for something much finer and less blameworthy. To sit in a tube compartment, surrounded by silent people, some reading, and most just staring blankly before them pretending to be unaware of each other’s existence, is to be irresistibly, but not altogether unaccountably, reminded of cows. On buses this strangeness is less obtrusive. Conversation is wisely left to the conductor.

  There was always a scramble for the Twenty-four. We would watch for it as it came up the Charing Cross Road, spy its number amidst the mass of traffic held up by the lights and then, as it came sailing across, run beside it along the pavement, jostling, elbowing and fighting in a friendly way to get a place by the step. Some of the more daring travellers would board it before it came to rest and – if the conductor were not about – get a seat, while we were still struggling in a silly way to get aboard and effectively blocking the way for those unhappy people who wanted to disembark and let us take their places. Intelligence is not the predominant quality of those London bus crowds, though individually, no doubt, they are all quite sane and rational. In this scramble umbrellas were often effective weapons; parcels, no matter what they contained, unless it was fish, were no help. Fish in a paper parcel had a magical effect. I once saw a man walk, like an immortal, through a milling crowd about a Twenty-four by the virtue of a pair of haddocks, whose tails flapped menacingly from the end of a parcel. Later I saw him sitting in a coveted seat at the front of the bus, quite alone.

  That was my favourite seat, and if some day you want to spend threepence happily on that route, try to get the front seat on the top deck. It is the next best thing to actually driving the bus. You forget the people behind you and become one with the spirit of the route you travel and the crimson monster that carries you. Argosies, caravels and stately liners, dirty tramps and wallowing coasters have all had their praises told in poetry and literature. Someday someone will write of London’s buses and people will wonder why it has not been done before. Kipling would have done it well. The modern motor car is probably content with obituaries for its poetry, but the omnibus – an ugly name for a lovely thing – should have genius to proclaim its joys.

  Recently, having the time to spare, I waited for the Twenty-four with the intention of making the journey again. It was long since I had gone up Tottenham Court Road, northwards to Hampstead Heath, and I was eager to discover whether my sense of whereabouts had died from lack of exercise.

  It was late in the afternoon and the streets shone wetly from a recent storm, the air was full of rich, unnameable smells. People packed around me at the stop. With some selfishness, and a great deal of pushing, I got my coveted seat, which was important enough to me to excuse my conduct.

  The bus started along the road which once led out to the Tottenham Court Manor House, which later became the Adam and Eve Inn, a happier fate than that which has overtaken some manor houses. Today the road has lost its rural character and as Harley Street is famous for doctors, Wardour Street for films, Great Portland Street for motor cars and Charing Cross Road for bookshops, Tottenham Court Road is the home of the furniture shops.

  I knew when we were passing Heal’s and Maple’s, but my paper did not drop for me to eye their splendours. It dropped as we breasted a much smaller shop than either of these, a shop I can never pass without a loving glance.

  It is small, wedged between two large buildings, and presents a dark, cool mouth to the hurry of the road. From its shadows comes the gleam of furniture that shines with age and in its long cavern I have often spent many hours pulling out the drawers of bureaus that once held the love-letters of ladies who wore patches and powder and bit the end of their quills over their spelling; rubbing the dust from the lacquer of occasional tables with a wet finger; fumbling with those nests of boxes that travellers brought back from the East to decorate the drawing-rooms of Berkeley Square. That little shop attracts me more than any of the opulent stores whose windows show to all the glories which adorn the homes of the rich.

  Once I had bought a chair there. The dealer had sold it reluctantly, for it had been with him for a long time and he had come to love it. A few furniture dealers are like that. They hate to part with their treasures and they are capable of belittling, and even lying about the piece on which you have set your heart. They are to be preferred to those who would prevent your examining a piece by their torrent of words and laudatory gestures. It was a bishop’s chair, with a wide, tall back and arms that
were flanged to take the weight of elbows. The main struts, which were of elm, were worm-eaten, but the worms had not passed to the rails and seat, which were of a different wood. The dealer told me that they would never leave the elm, for worms do not spread into wood different from their own. They must remain in the wood of their birth. Over the seat was a cushion of delicate green brocade, marked with a pattern of hunting dogs and birds, which he had handled gently as I made my purchase. As I passed on the bus I thought of his look of reproach as the chair was carried from the shop to find a new home.

  At Euston Road my paper fell again. It was pleasant to think that not far away were Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross Stations, and that if I were minded I could run down the stairs and hurry along the road to Euston Station and be seated in an express for the North. The people around me in the bus, clerks, typists, business men in bowlers and tired-looking women, never showed any sign that they were thinking this too. But they may well have been.

  There was, as always, a busy stir of traffic at this crossways, and it was pleasant while we waited to watch the crowd moving in and out of the Warren Street Underground Station, and to smile at the studied leisureliness of the young lovers who waited there.

  Warren Street Station must be a great meeting-place for lovers. At one time I had known by sight quite a number of the young men and women who waited each night. There was a young man with a slightly humped shoulder who always carried a rolled-up paper and, because of the length of his face, appeared to wear soft hats of absurd height of crown. He was always slightly agitated, nibbling the end of his paper, as he eyed the weaving stream of passengers pouring from the station. Once I missed two buses deliberately in the hope that, arriving later, I might see his sweetheart. But I never did. And there was the young girl with the face and figure of a goddess.