Lost baggage porter

Chapter Twenty

We came out of the old loco erecting shop, and turned right, heading still further into the railway lands, and away from the city proper. We were in a place not meant for boots, but for wheels, and it was stumbling progress that we made towards wherever we were going. We'd left the Rhubarb Sidings behind now, and come to the railway and carriage sidings that lay alongside the dozen lines coming from the south into the station.

After a couple of minutes, we stopped for a breather, setting the cylinders down on the black track ballast before a row of sleeping carriages – Great Northern and North Eastern Joint Stock – and that's just what they were doing: sleeping. They screened us from the running lines leading to the station, so I could not see the train that went rocking past just at that moment with a tired, Sunday-night rhythm. Only it was probably Monday by now.

We trooped on, crossing the running lines. Why were there no watchmen about? The betting was that Sampson had fixed them, too. We crossed the 'up' tracks, and were about to step on to the 'down' lines when the young bloke pointed right. A train was at a stand within the station, down side. It would be heading out shortly. We set down the cylinders, and watched as it fumed under the great station roof. We could see the guard's green lamp moving on the platform alongside the locomotive, and what a fuss-box the bloody man was: to and fro, back and forth beside the boiler of the engine. The cylinder cocks were opened presently, however, and the engine began to move through its cloud of steam.

It rocked along in our direction, and every one of us turned to face away, yet the driver, a friendly sort, gave two screams on his whistle, and not only that (I couldn't help but turn about, so catching a glimpse of this), he also stuck his head out of his side window, and waved at us. He had to stand at a crouch as he did it, for all North Eastern Company engines had the cab windows placed too low. So the fellow had put himself out to be amiable, and got nowt in return. It would be nothing to him, though: he would have his mate to talk to, the tea bottle waiting on the ledge above the fire doors, the prospect of some good running on clear Sunday night lines. I admired the man – already gone from sight, Doncaster bound – and I hated him at the same time.

We picked up the cylinders once again, and I thought of Edwin Lund, searching the Gospels in the Lost Luggage Office, trying to seek out God's way. Was it God who'd set me down on the tracks and not up on the footplate? I had no answer to that, so I thought again of Lund: he was the winder; he turned the rope and I skipped. He had kept back the detail of the Lost Luggage Office burglary. Why?

Valentine Sampson and the young bloke were far ahead by now. Sampson was not over bright; he was not as clever as Lund or Miles Hopkins. But he was the striking arm, the man whose actions dictated the fate of his fellows. He walked steadily on, and I could see now that he was making for the south-side roundhouses: the first was the engine shed that stabled those North Eastern locomotives kept south of the station. It was in the cinder triangle between the lines leading into the station mouth, and those swerving away directly north towards the marshalling yards, goods yards and goods station.

Beside it lay the Midland roundhouse. The Midland was the main foreign company holding running rights into York, and such a company was entitled to its own shed, just as a government has its embassies overseas, but Sampson was paying that one no attention, for of course the blokes who booked on there had not been on strike. Their wages had not been brought to the shed week upon week to remain uncollected. We moved forwards, toward the pillars of a water tower, and Sampson motioned us to remain as he walked on with the young fellow yoked to him by the cylinder.

The two disappeared into the North Eastern roundhouse.

'Isn't there a watchman in there?' I said out loud, to nobody in particular.

It was the clerk who answered:

'Reason it out,' he said.

'Eh?' I said.

'Paid off, en't he?' he said. 'Like all of us.'

I nodded, looked away.

'How come you don't know that, mate?'

I made no answer. He was too curious by half, that bloke, and now he was looking at me sidelong. Had he seen me about the station? Might very well have. And if so would the glasses do their work? I heard a church bell floating across the darkness. It was the strike of one. The wife would be worried sick, or had she already become accustomed to my late hours? Sampson was now at the shed mouth, beckoning us on. Hopkins and I entered with our cylinder a minute later, the clerk coming along behind clutching the sackful of extra kit. And now he took over from the young bloke the task of escorting Sampson to the important spot.

As they went off to the eastern side of the shed, I looked about me. It was the first time I'd been in an engine shed since the accident at Sowerby Bridge, and it was quite fitting, for I was returning to steal off the profession that had disowned me. The shed was a roundhouse, as I've said: tracks like the spokes of a wheel, the engines sitting upon them like a gathering of witches in the darkness, with the turntable in place of the boiling pot. Their high smokeboxes gave them a haughty look. There were sixteen stalls in all, only a dozen occupied. Sampson, or the young chap, had hung a dark lantern on the turntable crank handle. Another small allowance of light spilled in from the shed mouth, showing a shining pool of black water in the packed cinders. If the engines in this shed were to be used in the morning there'd be fire-raisers in here from four a.m. at the latest.

The clerk was in fidgets beside me, rattling the articles in the sack. Hopkins was smoking – the first time I'd seen him do so.

Sampson was coming back towards us. There was a revolver in his hand, and it was more of a relief than anything to finally clap eyes on the thing. The young man followed behind, looking sheepish-like. He was making towards the clerk, and I thought: he's going to do him, but no. Gesturing back to the young man, he said: 'Now you'll take no harm, but you must wait until the job's done.'

Sampson looked at the clerk, who was looking at the gun.

'How many poor buggers have had a taste of that, then?' the little bloke asked.

I looked across at Hopkins, who was shaking his head. The little ink spiller was past finding out.

'Four,' said Sampson, 'since you ask.'

I put two and two together: the detectives at Victoria… and the Camerons.

Then the clerk gave voice to my own thought:

'And I suppose two of those were the Cameron boys. I knew those lads – one worked at our place.'

Long silence. Sampson broke his gun, looked down at the cylinders, perhaps weighing up whether he could spare a bullet on the little clerk.

'I enjoyed that business,' he said, shutting the gun sharply and looking up. 'Clean sweep, you see. Once you've done one, what's the point of leaving the other hanging about in the world? I mean, it's fucking untidy. No earthly use to any living soul, the pair of 'em, and one's absolutely cracked into the bargain.'

All the men about ought to be given into the charge of the police without further ado. But it was past time for worrying about that. My job was to keep alive.

Hopkins crushed his cigarette stump under his boot. I heard a train go jangling past beyond the shed walls.

'Here, you,' Sampson was saying to the little clerk, 'show us your writing hand?'

'I'm right-handed,' the clerk said brightly. 'What of it?'

Sampson had picked up an old, dead lantern. He passed it over to the clerk, saying, 'Cop hold… right hand.'

He walked away ten paces, and asked the rest of us to step back from the clerk. He raised the gun, and I thought: this is worse than all; this is the point at which I must step in. But I did not, and the gun was fired and the lamp shattered. In the silence that followed Hopkins folded his arms, and I looked at Sampson. He was now side on to us, drinking whisky from the bottle.

The clerk was holding his hand under my nose, seemingly overjoyed that it was still attached to him. 'Five hundred invoices a day,' he said, making a writing motion, '… and demurrage bills are a great scarcity across my desk, I can tell you that.'

Sampson walked over to the clerk, and presented him with the whisky bottle; the clerk drank.

'Pass it round,' said Sampson.

As the bottle came my way, Sampson led us all off the part of the shed he'd visited a moment before. We were approaching a little brick room built on to the shed wall. The door to it was shut, and the two cylinders stood outside: the big man and the little man (as I thought of them), waiting to be put to work. The little clerk had the key, or a key, and he opened the door without being asked. We all then crowded inside. There was a gas lamp, which Sampson lit with a match, immediately turning it to the lowest setting. The room was somewhere between an office and a workshop. There was a desk, a metal cabinet, boxes of papers; boxes of engine bits. I made out some corks for oil pots, an old whistle, tins of screws. A smaller version of one of the shed's church windows was set into the back wall, and in the corner was the safe. It was about four foot high, with a metal crest on the front showing a lion and a snake in a tangle. Woven in between them was a ribbon on which appeared the words 'Croft and Son', and then something in Latin that probably meant: 'If you think you're going to break into this bugger, think on'. There was an ordinary lock, an American lock, I thought – a knob that you turned to find certain numbers. It was the opposite case to that of the Lost Luggage Office, in that they'd obviously not been able to find, or buy, the man who held the key or knew the numbers.

Sampson and the young fellow were now putting their boots to the top of the very dignified safe, and kicking it over. It fell on its back with a mighty crash, making matchwood of the desk chair on its way.

'Can we not bring it away?' said Hopkins, looking on. 'We're right underneath the fucking window.'

Sampson pointed at me, 'Fetch us a tarpaulin, won't you?' all friendliness quite gone, for now the business was under way in earnest.

I went out into the darkness of the shed, and Hopkins followed, although he then diverted away towards the shed mouth. Had he reckoned on me bolting? I walked between the locomotives. There was a Class R… also a Q Class, with its weird glass roof let into the cab top – that would give you a view of the clouds going in the opposite direction as you ran along. From the shed mouth, Hopkins was watching me as I looked at the engines. I fancied he knew that I was able to see them for what they were.

I saw a tarpaulin: folded over the boiler of a tank engine, like a horse blanket. I yanked it down, making a cloud of dust and muck; and a black lace was left dangling from my fingers: a cobweb. The sight of the thing checked me: I had given nothing but aid to this operation so far, and every new piece of assistance I gave made me less of a detective and more of a burglar. I wiped away the cobweb, and hauled the tarpaulin towards the little office. Hopkins closed with me as I did so, and I looked past him, beyond the shed mouth where – five hundred yards off – a figure was walking towards one of the cabins set between the tracks. Company man on a late turn. He might've had his hands in his pockets. At the same time I heard another train come rattling up, but it didn't go by the shed mouth.

Hopkins followed me into the crowded little room, where the cylinders – big man and little man – stood in place. Lengths of rubber tubing were now connected to the taps on their tops, and these came together in the brass blowpipe that rested in Sampson's hands. It was a double gun, able to mix the two gases.

'Put that against the window,' he ordered when he saw me with the tarpaulin, so I moved around the desk. The thing was pretty stiff, and stood up of its own accord. I made a kind of cone of it, and it shut out the window pretty well.

'Good-o,' he said, so I'd got points for that, as well as everything else.

With stout leather gloves now on his hands, Sampson was removing his hat, putting on a pair of goggles. They were like the eye shades sometimes worn by the blind but they gave Sampson the look of one who could see everything, just as though they were a pair of giant black eyes. He had not troubled to protect his suit, which surprised me.

'Let's have the acetylene,' he said, looking at all of us at once. But it was the young man who answered the command. Taking his wrench or spanner he turned a nut on the smallest cylinder; there came a low whoosh, and Sampson lit a match, and put it to the end of the blowpipe. But the rushing gas simply blew it out. He tried again with a second match, obtaining the same result.

'Well I'd say you need a flint,' said the little clerk. 'You can't blow a spark out, you know,' he said, addressing me for some reason, 'instead of going out, it just blows away.'

Sampson turned his weird, goggle eyes towards the clerk.

He tried again with a third match. No go. I supposed that the room must be filling rapidly with the gas. It smelt like onions… fried onions.

Sampson tried a fourth match, and this one did the job, only the result was a let-down: a weak, ragged orange flame with a good deal of smoke into the bargain. I had expected the flame to be white, like the cylinder from which it came.

Sampson took a step to one side in surprise as the oxygen came, for the roaring increased ten fold, and the flame changed in an instant, both narrowing and lengthening into the shape of a sword. It was also now blue, and the young man at the cylinders was shouting over the roar: 'It's the light blue at the heart of it that does the cutting, mate.'

Sampson made no answer, but fell to his knees, and bent low over the safe, like a man praying. At the instant he touched the flame to the steel he was surrounded in a whirl of orange sparks. They flew about everywhere in the office, seeming to bounce and roll across the desk, quite able to survive an impact like game little acrobats.

It was hard not to think of this wonderful display as being the whole point of the exercise, and in fact Sampson did seem to be having some trouble with the cutting itself. He'd gouged a red groove across the face of the steel but as he moved the flame back and forth along it, the metal seemed to flow back into the trench, filling it in again, like time itself rolling forwards and backwards. The mark he'd made was no longer-lasting than a line drawn in sand. He looked up, once again staring at all of us and everything from behind the black lenses.

'Now he's thinking: maybe I ought to have spent ten minutes practising this,' said the little clerk, and the goggles turned once again in his direction.

The young man evidently called Tim was now at Sampson's shoulder. 'Don't touch the flame down so close,' he said, 'and go at it more at an angle.' He was so thoroughly in the know of the business that I wondered why he wasn't doing the job himself. But I supposed he would then have been a different order of helper, and liable to a longer sentence if caught.

The burning continued, and then there was an extra column of smoke, coming from beyond Sampson. The tarpaulin had caught light. The young man tapped Sampson on his shoulder, and yanked down the goggles, shouting straight at Hopkins, 'Water!'

At the window, the tarpaulin had slumped to one side, the flames beginning to creep across it from the corner place they'd started in.

The little clerk was shaking his head, saying: 'Beats all, that does.'

Hopkins looked across at me: 'You can give a hand,' he said, and we ranged out into the shed again.

'Where would you find water in a spot like this?' said Hopkins. I replied, 'How the bloody hell should I know?' but why had he asked me in the first place? Hopkins never called me Allan. Never believed it was my name, that's why.

Sampson was charging out of the office now, with the little clerk and the young bloke spilling out behind him. It was no longer possible to remain in there. 'Get a fucking shift on,' Sampson roared, 'the cylinders'll go up any second!'

'I can take a bucket to one of the water cranes outside,' I called to Sampson, but he wouldn't have that. There was nothing for it. If the cylinders blew we'd all be done for. I pointed down at the hydrant that lay at our feet. It was marked out for the engine cleaners by a square stone – there was even a canvas tube attached, though half buried in ash. I lifted the steel flap to get at the little wheel, which turned easily enough, and the tube stirred, leaping crazily three times as the water speed rose to its fastest. Sampson himself pointed the nozzle into the office, where the flames were quickly put out, and every light article sent flying by force of water in the process. The cylinders held their ground though: the big man and the little man, standing over the fallen safe.

Sampson and the young bloke fell to starting up the gas again, as we all crowded back into the little room – the floor of it was now a pond. The water continued to stream out of the hose in the shed beyond.

'Shouldn't have had a tarpaulin in here in the first place' the little clerk was saying. 'It was bound to catch. Half of it's tar, after all. Why do you think it's called a tarpaulin?'

I looked up to see that – as I had somehow suspected – he was addressing me again.

'What's that tap in the ground for?' he said, and I made no reply.

Sampson had the blowpipe lit once again, and was kneeling before the safe for a second go. If the flame was seen beyond the window, then it was just hard lines. Before he began, he called Hopkins across to him, and the two exchanged a few words while Sampson held the flame away. Then Hopkins motioned me and the clerk out of the room. 'Keep him pinned' Hopkins said to me, and so the two of us sat down on a sleeper that had been placed across the tracks behind one of the engines – the weird- looking Q Class. I wondered whether they had any particular reason to fear that the little clerk would take off. If they did have a reason, then why had they brought him along in the first place? They could have had the keys off him with no bother. But the answer was easy enough to guess at: they wanted him involved – make him a guilty party. And if he was sitting here in the South Shed, then he couldn't be chattering to the night-duty coppers at Tower Street. Hopkins had returned to his former pitch at the shed mouth, so that the little clerk was now in a double prison: I was guarding him, and Hopkins was guarding me. If I made a run for it, he'd call for Sampson, who'd shoot me. Well, perhaps he'd miss, but Sampson and Hopkins would do a push in any case with one man gone and liable to split. The cutting of the safe was continuing, with the door of the office kept open, so that I could see clear through toSampson as he worked away, like a magical figure in a cloud of bright sparks.

I thought I heard a church bell: three o'clock. But how could it be so late? I felt my eyes prickling. I ought not to be looking at the cutting flame. I remembered not to rub them by poking my finger directly through the frames of my glasses, but took the specs off first. It seemed as though my eyes were full of grit; and they felt better closed. I rested my head on my hand.

And then it was a different Sunday, late afternoon; darkness coming in to make sense of the gas lamps already lit across Sowerby Bridge, which rose on its bank above the engine yard. We'd run in light from Leeds – me and Terry Kendall. 'Grandfather Kendall', he was, to the blokes at the shed: the oldest driver on the goods link, or any link. The engine was 1008, the first of Mr Aspinall's radial tank engines, with bogies designed for making tight curves.

We were stood over a pit on an in-road, and it was one of those evenings with the coldness locked into the sky. No developments in the weather were imaginable.

I began lifting the fire out with the long clinker shovel, which was slightly bent a little way out of true, and when I'd done, I finished off the dregs in my tea bottle. Grandfather Kendall was fussing about somewhere near the front of the engine. I called out to him that the clinker shovel wanted replacing, and that I meant to go and see the toolman about getting another. He said 'Right enough' to that, and I went off. When I returned with afresh shovel, I expected to find 1008 in the shed – put there by her driver. But she remained over the pit on the in-road with Kendall now up on the footplate. There was a quantity of engines round about, most being prepared for stabling, and there were happy shouts coming up from the blokes at work, whether in the engines, on top of them, or under. It was coming up to the time when they'd stroll off to the pubs for the latch- lifter (first pint of the evening) and a smoke. To these shouts, I joined my own, for I called over to Kendall: 'Can I take her in myself?' Like most firemen I was keen for any scraps of driving I could get.

He climbed down and I climbed up, and I thought he looked a little dazed. We exchanged some words during this crossing over: 'Warmed the brake, have you, Terry?' I said. T have that,' he replied. There was nothing to that conversation; we were as casual as you like, but it touched an important matter. It was necessary to give a couple of tugs on the engine brake after the engine had been at a stand – this to put steam into its chambers, and prevent condensation occurring when it was next used in anger. If the chambers were not warmed, and condensation occurred, the brake would not do its job.

There was no fire in 1008, but there was steam in the boiler, and that would take her into the shed. It was magical: an engine rolling under the power of a memory. I gave a scream on the whistle, and a yank on the regulator, not thinking about the brake. I did not need to warm it, for Grandfather Kendall had told me he'd done that.

At the very moment 1008 went under the shed roof I knew something was amiss: not with the engine, but with the whole business of engines and engine sheds. This beast was meant to be at large outdoors, and now it was confined to a building, and, as we rolled on, past the workbenches on the south wall of the shed, I thought: this is like a lion in a living room; it is not right.

I pulled the brake as 1008 approached its berth. Nothing. I pulled again, only this time I did so as a dead man.

'Want to know what brought me to this?' the little clerk was saying.

'Eh?' I said.

'Miles away, en't you?' said the clerk.

The sparks were still flowing from the cutting flame in the little room before us.

'I said "Do you want to know what brought me to this?'" repeated the clerk.

'I shouldn't think there's any great mystery over that' I said, replacing my glasses.

'I've been with this company since I quit school. I'm fifty- two now. This year I rose to thirty bob a week, and it en't enough – not when you've a wife and kids, and ten bob a week rent to pay. Even so, I'd always operated the rule book to the letter. No surreptitious removal by yours truly of little titbits from the goods yard.'

He turned and looked at me.

'Don't believe me, do you?'

I shrugged. My mind was still at Sowerby Bridge, my eyes were on the flying sparks.

'Six months back, I saw a fellow having his boots cleaned on Coney Street. Dazzled up lovely they were, by that little bootblack in livery outside the Black Swan. Do you know the fellow?'

I nodded; I knew the chap. He had deformed hands – no thumbs – but was a marvel with a shammy leather.

'Well, I was minded to have my own boots done,' the clerk continued, 'seeing the job he'd done for the other fellow, so I walked up and sat down on his chair, and after he'd done the first boot, I said, "By the way, pal, how much is it?" He said, "It's a tanner, guv", and I stood up there and then, gave him thruppence for the one boot he'd done, and walked off. The price was too high, and I en't saying it was unreasonable, but I couldn't run to it.'

The sparks had stopped now. Sampson and the young fellow were crouching over the safe. Sampson was looking chuffed.

'It's pissing through it,' I thought I heard him say. 'Well that was when the light dawned,' the clerk was saying.'I looked down at that one clean boot all the rest of the day, and a fortnight later, I heard of a bloke who would be willing to supplement my wages.'

He nodded towards Sampson, who was back at his metal cutting.

'It was him, your governor, Duncannon. Of course he's not an easy bloke to get along with, but if I hadn't made his acquaintance I'd have run into debt six month since. Practically kept me out of the workhouse, he has.'

'And how will you feel when you come to serve your term?' I said.

'Beg pardon?' he said, in a startled voice. When I made no further remark, he rose to his feet, saying: 'Just going to see how things are getting on.'

He walked towards the office where, I noticed, the sparks had again stopped.

'Taking your flipping time, en't you?' the clerk asked Sampson, who was pushing his goggles up onto his forehead with one gloved hand.

'We're done now,' said Sampson. 'Here, you – catch.' I believe that I tried to reverse that instruction, by shouting 'Don't catch' as the rough oblong of red-hot steel flew towards the little clerk. But he did catch it.