The Baghdad Railway Club

by Andrew Martin

  Another sentry stood at the door marked ‘Telegraph Office’, and this showed its importance. He inspected my identity card, my chit authorising me to send from this office, and opened the door for me. Most messages from the Hotel were, I believed, sent ‘clear’ – that is, not in any code save the Morse of all telegraphy. Here, I believed, the majority of the messages would be coded. It was a long, thin room, facing on to the river, with all shutters and windows open on that side. The river was directly below, but the sounds from it seemed to come from far off. The desks were placed crosswise at regular intervals, and each was loaded with a mix-up of equipment. But when it came down to it, every bit of kit could only either send or receive, and it was all connected by wires to a clock in a glass case on the end wall. Next to the clock, and in joint command of the room with the clock, sat an officer smoking a pipe, and with absolutely nothing on his desk save a leather tobacco pouch. A large safe stood on the other side of the desk from the clock.

  The officer rose as I entered the room. He was a tall, dark-eyed and hairy man, although whether his head was hairy I couldn’t tell, since he wore his cap. His legs, certainly, were extremely hairy. (He wore shorts – and very well-pressed ones at that.) He wore a wristwatch, the better to show off the thinness and hairiness of his wrists, and I was sure this watch would be exactly keyed to the clock on the wall, for he was obviously the most orderly of men. His name, he told me, after smoking at me for a while, was Captain Bob Ferry. He had very clean fingernails, and he wore a gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand.

  ‘I want to send to London,’ I said.

  He smoked on.

  ‘War Office?’ he said, with a kind of gasp. He was afflicted with a stutter, only he did not stutter, but waited for the word.

  ‘Well, take . . . a pad,’ he said. ‘The man Collins will see you right.’

  He had twirled his pointing finger in the air before settling on Collins, who sat two desks away from where we stood. Ferry placed a small notepad in my hand. The headings were ‘Message’, ‘To’, ‘From’, and ‘Sender Can Be Found At’. There was a carbon beneath, so that a duplicate would be made of whatever was written.

  Under ‘To’, I put ‘The Head Clerk, Department F, War Office, London’. (That was Manners.) Under ‘From’ I wrote out – somewhat reluctantly – ‘Capt. Stringer, Railway Office, Corps HQ’. Under ‘Sender Can Be Found At’, I gave both Rose Court and my office number at the Hotel. That was the easy part, but what was my message? Of the choices available it must be either ‘GRUFF’ – ‘Request identity of local agent’, or ‘RELAX’ – ‘Request telephonic communication’. I wrote ‘GRUFF’ and then, because it looked ridiculous on its own, I underlined it.

  The clerk, Collins, was typing at a perforating keyboard, making words into Morse as he read from another of the pads. I saw on it a list of five-digit numbers: a military code. It might have been anything from ‘Turkish assault expected’ to ‘Send more foot powder’. I shouldn’t have been looking at it either way.

  Collins turned around, and said quite sharply, ‘Be with you in three minutes, sir.’ I stepped back. Captain Ferry was speaking to another of the clerks: ‘It is not to be sent from this office. We are not in the business of transmitting tittle- . . . tattle. It is a private matter.’

  ‘We refuse to send, then?’ said the clerk.

  ‘We do.’

  Ferry did not sound angry so much as rather steely. A little under two minutes later, the man Collins held out his hand to receive my pad, and I watched him as he read the word ‘GRUFF’. He keyed it in at lightning speed and with not a flicker of expression on his face. He then made a note in a ledger referring somehow to the message sent, and took the Morse tape he had created to the man at the next desk, who fed it directly into an automatic transmitter. Collins returned the top sheet of the pad to me, but kept the duplicate copy.

  As the man at the automatic transmitter sat back and closed his eyes, I imagined the word ‘Gruff’ flying down the cable to Basrah, running under the waters of the Gulf to Bombay; then reversing, so to speak, out from Bombay to the south of the Red Sea, proceeding north to Alexandria, crossing the Med to Malta, then on to Lisbon, before embarking on the home straight: running north under the Atlantic to Cornwall, from where, as I believed, the cable followed the tracks of the Great Western Railway up to London, and the War Office. I figured the word coming out of the machine in Department F, being torn off and handed on to a runner – a boy scout, or perhaps the boy scout who had guided the Chief and me – and given at last into the hands of the supercilious Manners.

  I went back to Collins, and enquired, ‘How long does it take to reach London?’

  ‘Three minutes,’ he said.

  It appeared those two words were about the limit of his conversation. Ferry had returned to the vicinity of his desk, where he stood smoking, and looking down at the bustle of boats on the Tigris.

  ‘Where will the reply come to?’ I asked Collins. Without looking up from his desk, he stabbed the air with his pencil, indicating the man at the desk over‚ opposite Captain Ferry’s.

  This chap commanded two machines. Tape was coming from both, and he was reading one of the tapes. I took up station next to him, and he gave me a narrow look before going back to reading the tape. I thought: Is this message for me? No, couldn’t be. It had come too quickly and it was surely too long. The message was in Morse, whereas the one coming from the second, bigger machine was in actual words that seemed to flow on unread for ever. (I made out ‘. . . Religion has a great influence over the Arab . . .’) This second machine was operated by compressed air, and made a kind of sucking noise at frequent intervals. I became aware of a similar sound closer to me, and Captain Ferry and his pipe had come up close. The clerk tore the Morse tape from the first machine, and handed it to Ferry, who read it thoughtfully with pipe in hand, before placing his pipe in his mouth, and quickly twisting the tape with his long brown fingers into a perfect, pretty bow.

  I found myself saying, ‘I was told to expect an immediate reply,’ whereas in fact I had been advised by Manners not to wire at all.

  Ferry removed his pipe from his mouth. ‘That means’, he said, ‘. . . tomorrow.’ He added, ‘At the earliest . . . I should think. A runner will be sent to you.’

  I nodded. ‘Much obliged,’ I said.

  ‘You’re in the railway section,’ said Ferry. ‘Has Lieutenant Colonel . . . Shepherd interested you in his Railway Club?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m going along tonight. Will you be there?’

  A long period of smoking followed from Captain Ferry, during which time he saw that my own cigarette was coming to an end, and so fetched an ashtray for me from a window ledge.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ I said, which rather got across whatever he had wanted to say next, requiring him to smoke for a while longer as he mustered the words for a second time.

  ‘. . . I will be,’ he said, ‘although I have no particular interest in railway topics. Except perhaps for . . . railway telegraphy.’

  Nice, I thought. He probably knows the railway code book backwards. But then what could it matter if he thought that, by ‘GRUFF’, I meant ‘Blockage on the “up” line’ or whatever might be its meaning in the railway code? (I could not just then recall it.)

  ‘However,’ Ferry was saying, ‘the Club, as I understand it, is not really to . . . do with railways. The main concern of Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd seems to be—’

  And at this the receiving clerk cut in, for the Morse printer had started up again, and the matter was evidently urgent.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Ferry, and he turned to the machine.

  Being fascinated by Captain Bob Ferry, I contrived – by means of lighting another cigarette near the doorway – to delay my departure from the telegraph office. As I looked on, Ferry stood over his man, and read the tape coming from the machine. He tore it off, and quickly made another bow of it while walking to the
safe that stood alongside his desk. He put both paper bows into the safe, glanced up and saw me watching him do it. He removed his pipe from his mouth, and called, ‘I will . . . see you this evening, Captain Stringer.’

  And still the words spooled unread from the second receiver.

  Chapter Nine

  Trying to picture the Baghdad Railway Club, I had kept thinking of the original Railway Club in Victoria Street, London, namely a dusty room, green-papered walls crowded with pictures of trains – something like that, only hotter. The reality of the matter was as follows:

  The Club was housed in a three-storey building that had once been grand. On each floor, overlooking the small square – Quiet Square – was a window of coloured glass and a faded red veranda. A sign projected: ‘The Restaurant’. The front door gave on to a hot, dark lobby into which a spiral staircase of fancy ironwork descended. Arab voices echoed from rooms off. I had been told to go to the third floor and here I smelt pipesmoke, and found Captain Bob Ferry sitting alone at a long table, his lean, dark form strangely decorated with geometric patterns of blue and red-brown light from the window. His hat was off, and he was quite bald.

  I sat down opposite to him.

  ‘You’re early,’ I said.

  ‘I was just around . . . the corner,’ he replied.

  He reached into his tunic pocket.

  ‘Your reply,’ he said, handing me an envelope.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It came quicker than expected?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ferry eventually said.

  Opening the envelope, I was not surprised to read the single word ‘CRATE’. Bob Ferry manipulated his pipe with his long fingers as I did so. In the cipher that I had agreed with Manners, the word ‘CRATE’ meant ‘Cannot accede to your request, continue investigation’. Even so, I thanked Ferry again. He must have read the message, but at best it would have meant something like ‘Your shortage of coal acknowledged’ or whatever was its railway code-book meaning.

  Just then, Stevens entered. I introduced him to Ferry, since they did not appear to know each other.

  Stevens asked me: ‘Are you speaking, then?’

  I shook my head. ‘Maybe next time.’

  ‘Are you?’ he asked Ferry.

  I was embarrassed for Ferry, since now his stutter would be discovered. He had got as far as removing his pipe from his mouth when Stevens said, ‘I’m speaking. Worse luck.’

  He gave no outward indication of having seen me at number 11 Clean Street. He sat down, and set his great right leg bouncing. It was very irritating.

  ‘Some Arab’s going to bring up some cocktails, or something,’ he said, glancing over to the door. ‘I could do with a stiffener. Public speaking always makes me nervous. Ever since schooldays, you know. I did a talk on the National Debt and I couldn’t remember anything about it. “The first great rise in the National Debt occurred in . . .” Totally blank. The moment I apologised and sat down looking a prize idiot, it all came back to me and I’ve never forgotten it since.’

  I nodded. Stevens continued to bounce his leg.

  ‘In the Revolution of 1688,’ he said, ‘the National Debt rose from £664,263 to over sixteen million.’ Turning to Ferry, he said, ‘Do you know what it was in 1816?’

  Ferry removed his pipe from his mouth, and said, ‘I—’

  ‘There’s a cat over there,’ said Stevens. There were two long red sofas in the room, loaded with green and red cushions. Among them was a thin white cat that had just woken up. ‘I know her game,’ said Stevens, contemplating the cat, ‘she’s pretending not to look at us.’

  I wondered whether he’d been drinking already.

  A young Royal Engineer turned up just then, saying, ‘Did you hear about the trouble in town? An Arab was beaten to death just now.’

  Stevens gave a shrug. ‘I heard something of the sort.’

  I wondered: Did he do it? He’d certainly be up to beating a man to death, but he looked perfectly smart, carried none of the marks of a fight.

  I enquired, ‘Do you think it was one of our boys that did it?’

  ‘Should think so,’ said Stevens.

  An Arab entered with blue glasses and silver bowls on a board. He put them on the table by the window, walked out again without a word.

  ‘What is this place?’ I asked Stevens.

  ‘No idea,’ he said, sitting back in his chair.

  ‘It was once a restaurant deluxe,’ said the Royal Engineer. ‘Unfortunately that was some time ago.’

  Turning to Ferry, who might be feeling a bit left out, I said, ‘What did you do on civilian street, Bob?’

  ‘Taught,’ he said at length. Thinking he wouldn’t be much good in a classroom with that stutter of his, I asked, ‘Where was that then?’

  ‘Oxford . . . University,’ he said.

  The sound of voices came from the staircase. In walked a chap in the mid-fifties; he wore the white tabs of a political officer, and his badge of rank was crossed swords, denoting a brigadier general. Shepherd came in behind him. The brigadier removed his cap, and we all saluted. He had thin grey hair and sleepy, kindly eyes. ‘All students of the railway hobby, I take it,’ he said, in a husky voice. ‘Very good, very good.’ He then took up where he’d left off with Shepherd, speaking in a low tone. Presently, the brigadier drifted towards the window, and Shepherd came over. I introduced him to Captain Ferry ‘of the telegraph office at the Residency’.

  The moment I said that, I thought: It must not come out that I’ve just sent from there.

  Ferry said to Shepherd, ‘The fame of your club has reached as far as the . . . Annex.’

  ‘The Annex’ was what some people called the Residency. Shepherd had listened politely as Ferry had spoken that delayed last word, so I wondered whether the two had met before. I doubted it, since most of the telegrams sent by political staff such as Shepherd would go from the Hotel.

  Shepherd said, ‘Oh, I assure you, it has even reached as far as the cavalry barracks.’ He was indicating one individual (a cavalryman, I supposed) in amongst a group of new arrivals, but I couldn’t see which one. In fact, a general bustle of standing up, saluting and making of introductions was proceeding at the other end of the table, which sent the cat scampering from the room – into which confusion was added the return of the waiter, with more food and drink. Shepherd now turned his gracious attention to one of the younger officers, a Royal Engineer, who’d just passed him a paper-wrapped package – a framed painting, as it turned out. ‘Ah now,’ said Shepherd. ‘The halt in the desert . . . and the locomotive. I believe it’s one of the big Krausses.’

  The young officer was embarrassed. ‘It’s a 2-8-0 anyhow.’

  ‘It is,’ said Shepherd, ‘and it’s a Krauss to the life. I believe you’ve worked from the engineering drawings, Harry.’

  We all clustered around the painting. It showed an encampment in the desert: soldiers illuminated by pinkish fire glow, palms behind them, and mountains, ghostly in moonlight beyond. Emerging from a mountain pass was a locomotive, and its smoke, rising up and over the mountains, spelt out the words ‘Baghdad Railway Club’, with the small moon as the dot of the ‘i’.

  ‘We’ll hang it for next time,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Very good painting,’ murmured the brigadier general, who’d wandered back over from the window.

  I heard one of the R.E. men saying to Shepherd, ‘I gather you’re having a run up to Samarrah, sir.’ I could not hear Shepherd’s reply. The R.E. man said, ‘On The Elephant, I gather? But where did you turn up the side rods, sir?’ He was talking about the giant engine at Baghdad station, but Shepherd did not answer. Instead, he called, ‘Gentlemen, take your seats please!’

  Shepherd put the brigadier general at the head. I presumed that he took pride of place by seniority rather than knowledge of railways, unless he owned a railway or two. To his right sat Shepherd, chief mover of the Club. Opposite to Shepherd sat a man I’d not seen enter the room: a handsome and sunburned major with swept
-back blond hair. I heard him saying to his neighbour, ‘Well now, isn’t this jolly?’ Then, a moment later, ‘Railways aren’t really my thing. Interesting though.’ Aside from myself, Stevens and Ferry, there was also a collection of amiable-looking officers from the Royal Engineers. One was the amateur painter. Apparently a free chair at my end was being kept free for a ‘special guest’ who would be appearing in due course, and whose identity was a mystery to me. The actual dinner was being laid out on the other table. It would be taken as a buffet meal after the talks were concluded.

  I turned to Ferry and whispered, ‘Who’s the guest of honour, Captain Ferry?’

  He began‚ ‘I have an idea that—’

  But the proceedings were starting. Shepherd was saying, ‘Captain Stevens will be entertaining us with a talk on “Some Memories of the Liskeard–Looe Line”.’

  Stevens was tensing and untensing his shoulders in a vexing sort of way.

  ‘That’s in Cornwall by the way,’ added Shepherd, blushing. ‘But we begin with some local railway news.’

  This was evidently the custom of the Club. The building of the line running north from Basrah was proceeding satisfactorily. It was two miles short of Nasiriyah. ‘And there is now a signal box on the line,’ said Shepherd, at which there were polite cheers, and raised glasses. ‘There are not, as yet, any signals, however.’

  The brigadier said in his whispering tones, ‘Poor show,’ and smiled directly at me, for some reason.

  The line from Kut to Baghdad was coming along more slowly.

  ‘The wooden sleepers’, said Shepherd, ‘are found to warp in the heat. The trouble is, they are made for the cooler climes of . . . Bombay.’ He gave his shy grin at this. ‘And now,’ he concluded, ‘Captain Stevens will take us to Cornwall.’