‘But won’t I lose my job in January?’
He frowned slightly and said, ‘Perhaps initially, yes. You must trust us. If you find Magdalena, let us know. If the contents of that letter are revealed, there will be no answering for it. There will be no Goslings ever again. Probably no trains at all. We need to find Magdalena. We have to hang her. Do you see?’ He released my arm. ‘Keep it under your hat, there’s a good chap. And love your true mother, the one from whose loins you sprang: England. Now is the hour of her need. Do not desert her like your flesh and blood one abandoned you.’
We watched him enter the club. Mr Sturridge drove off without a word and then once in the stream of traffic said, ‘May I ask where you live, sir?’
‘Devil’s Curtsy, but really you can drop me at the bus stop.’
‘I’m sure it’s quite all right, sir.’
In the passing light of a streetlamp I saw something resting on the seat next to me, left behind by Lord Apsley. It was a Chinese newspaper.
‘I think Lord Apsley has forgotten his newspaper.’
‘Don’t mind that, sir, that’s mine. It’s for my boy . . . my son. He’ll be seven this February.’
‘Surely he doesn’t read Chinese?’
‘Oh no, but he likes to pretend he does.’
‘Young boys have a wonderful imagination. I met one the other day who wants to drive a rocket in outer space.’
‘I wish mine did. My boy wants to be an engine driver. He dreams of it every night. I tell him it’s a lot more pleasant firing a steam engine while snug asleep in bed. In truth, it is a hard, back-breaking job, and filthy dirty. But what do boys understand of dirt? They like getting dirty.’
‘It’s certainly a hard life from what I hear.’
‘I hear the same. Freezing cold and scalding hot at the same time. But he met a driver once, you see. Filled his head with all sorts of fine pictures. He told the boy how the smartest people in the land walk up the platform at the journey’s end to shake the hand of the driver and his fireman.’
‘It’s true, I’ve seen it.’
‘He told him a man can bear a lot of hardship in return for such a handshake. He told him about driving at night, when you pass through all the sleeping towns, when all is calm and only the snoozing dogs cock half an ear in their sleep to mark your passing, he told him that in all the bedrooms in the houses where young boys sleep, they are dreaming of one day being an engine driver.’
‘I’m sure it’s true.’
‘Yes, if you are the driver of a mainline express. But hardly any man rises so high, do they? I say to him, “Would you like to be the man who empties the ash tray under the train?” You see, sir, everyone sees the driver and his fireman and queue to shake their hands, but no one gives a thought to the ashmen, covered in soot like chimney sweeps. I don’t know whether you have seen it, sir, but the ash and clinker has to be removed with shovels with handles fourteen feet long. The ashmen have skin on their palms like leather, so thick they can pick up hot coals with their bare hands and smile as they do it. They wear rubber boots because leather ones would catch fire, and wear overalls that are never washed, for how could they be washed? When they reach the end of their life the overalls are burned in the firebox. Every boy who joins the railway dreams of firing the Scotch Express, but for every one who drives there are twenty to clean and scrub. It’s not like you get any choice in the matter.’
‘And I fancy, Mr Sturridge, he doesn’t take a blind bit of notice.’
‘No, indeed. All he can think of is those gentlemen shaking his hand and pressing a sixpence on him.’
Mr Sturridge ignored my request to be dropped at the bus stop and insisted on taking me home. When I gave him the address on Devil’s Curtsy it seemed from his face that he was familiar with it and regretted having been so expansive to me on the subject of the railways. A lot of railwaymen live up here, he said, and I agreed.
‘Mr Sturridge,’ I said, ‘I hope this does not strike you as intrusive, but would I be right in thinking that this man who filled your son’s head with wonderful pictures of life on the railway was your good self?’
He smiled. ‘Indeed, it was. I lost my position on the railway. I’m not able to see him as often as I’d like now. He lives with his grandmother. So when I do see him, I give him the newspaper. I tell him I’m driving the train to China these days. Hence the long absences.’
I shook his hand and pressed a Gosling’s Friend badge into his palm.
‘Next time you see him, please give him this and wish him luck in achieving his dream.’
THE BOY’S OWN RAILWAY GOSLING ANNUAL
Vol.VII 1931 Price: 1/-
Replies to our readers’ letters
S. G. P., INVERNESS—We know of no correspondence course that might instruct you and if we did, in view of what you said about your sister, we would certainly not tell you.
M. SCHOFIELD, MARGATE—It all depends on whether you wish to be hanged or shot.
A. BARLOW, CHESTERFIELD—There are no instances of two goods trains carrying dynamite colliding head on.
THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF RAILWAY GOSLING CADBURY HOLT – ON THE TRAIL OF THE MISSING NUNS!
More Wimples than Heads
For seven days in a row, we kept to the centre of the stream. Even at night, Gape preferred to take our chances drifting with the current, rather than risk tying up to the river bank. In all that time, he refused to speak to or look at me, instead grasping the wheel with both hands as if it were a lifebuoy and he a drowning man. He was so scared, for a while he didn’t even drink. For my part I could do nothing but pray, and stare with wonder at the river, which changed colour during the course of the day like a salamander. At dawn it glowed lemon, later it turned green and then cocoa, before finally catching fire at dusk with flames of rose madder. By the eighth day, Gape was satisfied we had passed through the territory of the Segembwezi. He became more relaxed, returned to his gin and finally spoke to me.
‘The land of the Segembwezi was where we lost Sister Gertrude,’ he said without turning to look at me, still staring fixedly at the far horizon. ‘All they found of her was her head.’
‘Good Lord! Her head?’
‘It was hanging from a tree. In contrast to her custom while alive, she was smoking a pipe – a calabash containing a sweet aromatic tobacco that gave off the scent of cherry. We still had some porters with us, hired in Port Bismarck. The news that one of the holy sisters had been decapitated did not seem to bother them much, but the sight of the pipe filled them with terror. They all recognised it, you see. It had been a distinguishing feature of the German consul in Port Bismarck who had been reported missing six months previously. The German consul had been much feared in the district. He used to sit on his veranda taking pot shots with his rifle at anyone with a dark skin who happened to pass by the house. He once found a leaf on his lawn after the maid had swept it and had her given fifty lashes of the chicotte, which is a whip made of rhinoceros hide. They say that more than fifty lashes will kill a man but even half that is enough to break him in a way that Time can never mend.’ Suddenly, as if his trance had been broken, he turned to me and stared with an intensity that was unsettling. ‘I was given fifteen lashes once in the gaol at Port Bismarck. I was in a delirium for a month afterwards.’
Behind us the sun had slipped below the canopy of trees and the jungle came alive. A monkey screeched, and a chorus of those insects the natives call karishka-karishka began the dusk chorus, making the noise that gave rise to their name. Men say the sound is caused by the demented rhythmic scraping of the insect mandible over its exoskeletal eyelid.
‘Tell me, Mr Gape, there is one aspect of your marvellous tale that strikes me as odd. You claim that you journeyed with the holy sisters up the Sulabunga in the German U-boat. But when I came to find you I was obliged to undertake a day’s march from Port Bismarck on account of the famous staircase of cascades that no boat can pass. So how, then, did the U-boat negotiate them t
o reach the navigable part of the river?’
‘Porters. How else?’
‘You mean to tell me they carried the U-boat?’
‘Pushed mostly, on rollers. Not so very difficult with a team of good men. But of course our team didn’t come anywhere near to deserving that epithet. They were hired from the prison and since the enterprise was considered suicidal no one in his right mind would have volunteered. Since that time I have spent many years in the sorts of seamen’s dives along the western seaboard where the customary greeting to a stranger is to cut his throat. But I never saw a more hopeless bunch of wretches than that team of porters. Monkeys would have been better.’
‘Is it not greatly surprising that such a crew did not simply murder the nuns in their beds and run off into the jungle?’
‘They would have done, but for one thing. Sister Clodagh turned out to be a wily old bird. When they brought her Sister Gertrude’s head, she did not throw the pipe away, as we expected. Instead she cleaned it out and attached it to her rosary. She said she wished to present it to the German authorities, but no one believed her. You should have seen the gleam in her eyes when she counted her beads that night. It made my skin crawl. Mojumbha told me the verdict of the porters: the spirit of the Great Mother was sick. But perhaps there was a method in her madness too. The next morning when we rose an unusual silence filled the camp. There was not the customary melee of preparation, no breakfast had been cooked. It was a mutiny: the porters refused to continue unless they were paid in full now and revised terms agreed for the remainder of the journey. The other sisters were remonstrating but the men refused to budge. But then a collective gasp went up. Sister Clodagh appeared from her tent smoking the German consul’s pipe. The men looked on with horror and instantly went to work. There was no more talk of mutiny after that.’
Chapter 14
I was far too agitated to consider sleeping. I kept hearing the words of Cheadle echo through my mind, that I should find Jenny this very evening and apologise. I borrowed a bicycle from the shed. I wasn’t sure exactly whose bike it was – most of the chaps in my digs had one, and they all looked the same in the dark. I just hoped whoever it belonged to would not be a driver or his fireman due to clock on in the middle of the night. There was no more grievous sin than a footplate team arriving tardily and making the train late. It was unforgivable. This was why they sent a boy round to knock them up in the small hours. I pushed the possibility from my mind, gripped the handlebars with a grim determination and rode downhill in the direction of the gas works. I knew from the index card she had filled in at the milk bar that Jenny lived in Moreton Crescent. When I arrived, the house was in darkness and my attempts to rouse the occupants succeeded initially in waking only the dogs of the neighbourhood. Soon there were five or six of them bellowing in chorus. It was as if they were overjoyed to be given this opportunity, that barking angrily in the middle of the night was the thing they liked doing best of all, even more than going for walks or fetching sticks. After a while, a sash window in Jenny’s house was thrown up with an angry squeak and a man leaned out to demand to know what the devil I thought I was doing. He threatened to come down and give me a knuckle sandwich, and I told him I would be quite content for him to do that just so long as he first informed Jenny that I was here. He ducked back in and a minute later reappeared to say she was not at home. Then he closed the window and extinguished the light.
My eyes smarted. This was madness, the second time that evening that I had disturbed the sleep of respectable people in a manner that would have filled me with contempt a week ago. The contempt would have been for what I had always regarded as a weakness of character. I had encountered it many times in my working life, the lack of self-respect and discipline that was characteristic of the behaviour of ruffians. Many such men acted in ways that were quite desperate and I had always wondered how it was that they could permit themselves to lose control like that – didn’t they know how despicable they appeared? And now tonight I was struck with a piercing revelation of understanding. Of course they jolly well knew how despicable it appeared! They weren’t blind. But such considerations were utterly beside the point to them, such was the nature of the passion which gripped them. I returned home and lay wide awake for hours, staring at the ceiling and listening to the far-off moans and cries of the trains that passed through Wildernesse. It is, of course, a frequently observed irony attendant upon such restless nights that sleep finally comes when it is time to rise. Some time after six I dropped off and so, for the first time ever, I was late for work that morning.
I arrived shortly after ten to find a man with his back to me rifling through the papers on my desk. I turned the light on. He froze. ‘A common thief in the night, eh?’ I said. ‘We’ll see about that. Raise your hands very slowly and then turn round so I can see you.’ The intruder complied. It was a woman.
‘Please, sir, I am not a thief.’ She was thin and bony, wearing a drab khaki coat and a headscarf. She looked to be between sixty and seventy.
‘Well, you are behaving rather like one.’
‘Please don’t shoot.’
‘How could I do that? I don’t have a gun.’
‘But you told me to put my hands up.’
‘More fool you then.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had walloped you over the head with a Great Western Railway fireman’s shovel. I have one, you know.’
‘You wouldn’t hit a lady.’
‘Is that what you think? Well, it just so happens I punched a countess on the jaw not two days ago.’
‘You are a fiend then.’
‘Perhaps you would like to sit down and be so good as to tell me what you are doing here.’ I removed my coat and draped it over the hatstand. ‘You can take your coat off too, if you like.’
‘I’ll keep it on if it’s all the same to you. I feel the cold something terrible these days.’
She sat down. I went to the hearth, picked up the poker and stabbed at the embers, then placed some more lumps on from the scuttle. I returned to my desk and sat down. ‘What are you doing in my office?’
‘I’ve come to say my piece.’
‘You were looking for something on my desk.’
‘I was just tidying things up. My name is Iphigenia Gape. You have been making inquiries about my late husband, Mr Clerihew Gape.’
‘I can assure you I have done no such thing.’
‘In that case I have arrived just in time to stop you making those inquiries. I expect you will be wanting to offer me a cup of tea.’
I left Mrs Gape with the admonition not to pry into my belongings and went to make the tea. When I returned she sat with the air of one striving hard to look innocent.
‘I eloped with Mr Gape when I was seventeen in 1910. He was a vagabond, common thief, inveterate card sharp and all-round confidence trickster who would turn his hand to anything provided it was against the law. You will wonder what a young girl could possibly see in such a degenerate man and I will answer you this: if you knew him, you would not need to ask. For Mr Gape was dashing. Devilishly handsome, although he would have been even more so if he could have contrived to forswear alcohol until at least after sunset. My father was an elocution tutor who had fallen on hard times. For a while he made a good living teaching members of the mercantile classes how to improve their speech in order to pass for their betters. A pleasing diction is the key to the doors of opportunity, he used to tell me; well, as with most things in life, he was wrong about that. He fell from grace when a lie was circulated about him and, no longer able to find the work the Lord had prepared him for, we became fishing-net repairers.
‘We lived with seven other families in a tenement in Hull that bore a great resemblance to the shoe in which the old woman in the fairy tales lived, although our life was no fairy tale. In short, Mr Wenlock, we were poor and even at the young age of seventeen I could see there was very little prospect of m
y achieving anything in life much more exalted than the lowly position of my parents, unless fortune would smile. This was in Hull. I met Mr Gape one day when he came to collect a net, and one might say Fortune had at least winked because he was just then doing an honest day’s work and this was the only time that I ever knew him to do such a thing. As soon as I set eyes on him I was utterly consumed with passion for him. Even if I had known about the full extent of his rascality, it would have made no difference. I would gladly have followed him through the Gates of Perdition. We started to meet in secret and in the course of these trysts I fell from Grace in a manner that was hardly without precedent in this world. This left us in a sorry situation. Mr Gape had no money and no prospects and nothing to offer me except a heart the size of a whale. That was more than enough for me and I gladly accepted his offer of a seat beside him on the coach travelling pell-mell to Damnation.’ Mrs Gape reached over, lifted the lid of the tea pot, and gave the leaves a stir. Then she poured the tea, and after a making a noise in her throat to indicate satisfaction, returned to her story.
‘My father, of course, saw things in a different light. He beat me black and blue, making me deaf in the left ear and knocking out my front tooth. The night after the beating I eloped with Mr Gape to Grimsby. It would be many years before I saw my father again, and that was when he was in his coffin. We were married the following day after first bribing the priest: it took a whole bottle of whisky and two slices of Dundee cake to convince him I was twenty-one. That same afternoon Mr Gape acquired some funds by pawning various items of silverware that looked very similar so those which had lain on the altar of the church. Our wedding night was spent in a dockside drinking establishment popular with Swedes, Latvians, Lascars and rats, where my new husband played cards for the boat of Captain Brig who had been looking for some time for a means to retire from the arms of his erstwhile mistress, namely the North Sea. The boat was called the Laura Bell; named, I believe, after a notorious nineteenth-century strumpet. The game went on long into the night during which Mr Gape staked more stolen silver, numerous other items in his possession and a final crowning bid that I found out later was none other than my maidenhead. Well, Captain Brig and Mr Gape were both excellent cheats but my new husband finally prevailed. Before the week was out, Mr Gape had negotiated a stipend from the coastguard to enter his boat into employ as a lightship, anchored to the north east of Lindisfarne Island. Mr Gape reasoned that being paid a modest sum to do nothing but sit at anchor and shine was as near as one could hope to get to the good life. And so we lived together on his lightship and most agreeable it was too. The money for shining was rather modest, and so Mr Gape supplemented this stipend by acting as a seaborne warehouse for illicit traders in guns, whisky and on occasion white slaves. This proved to be a very successful addition to the household economy and I had to admit that for all his lowly beginnings Mr Gape was a man of enterprise. But alas he got greedy and in pursuit of an especially large reward decided to collect a shipment of whisky from the Isle of Moira himself, and this necessitated him abandoning our anchorage and sailing north. We might have got away with it but Mr Gape forgot to turn off the light. We were apprehended by a royal naval corvette and my new husband was sentenced to ten years in Wormwood Scrubs with hard labour. I returned to Grimsby where I was taken in by the Salvation Army and given a tambourine which I banged in return for my keep. I visited Mr Gape as often as I was able and found him in disconsolate mood. Then the war broke out and Mr Gape’s fortunes changed.’ Mrs Gape stood up and walked to the door. She looked out into the corridor and, after assuring herself that there was no one in a position to overhear our conversation, returned to her seat and continued.
The Case of the 'Hail Mary' Celeste Page 18
