The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Sixteen

I clattered on the small door inside the big door at Hind's Mill, for there was no bell in sight.

We'd booked on at five that morning, taking a special to Fleetwood for the Drogheda steam packet, then coming back light. The engine had been running hot; I'd scorched the back of my hand on the motion in finding out, and had been on the look out for carbolic ever since. Meanwhile my hand was wrapped in a mucky bandage. It was Friday 30 June, four days after the late turn at Blackpool. We'd not been back since and there'd just been one other excursion in the week: church ladies to Southport on the Wednesday – trouble-free, but I'd been fretting about George Ogden, who, by paying for the window, had only made me think he must have been the one who smashed it. But he couldn't have been, because I'd seen him in his room only a second later.

The door of Hind's was opened by a bonny, plump girl in a white dress with a red ribbon round her middle. She looked like a sort of very nice cake, all prettily wrapped up. 'Oh,' she said, 'I thought it was going to be Mr Hind Senior. He generally comes along Friday afternoons with his gentleman's gentleman for a nosey… An inspection of the weaving hall, I should say.'

'Good evening,' I said, taking off my cap and trying not to be put off in any way; 'my wife works here in the offices, and -'

'You're Lydia's husband?' she said. 'Oh, come in.'

I shook her hand. 'Jim Stringer,' I said, and she said, 'Ever so happy to meet you. Cicely Braithwaite.'

I stepped through the little door and found myself in a kind of vestibule with wooden walls on either side, with bob-holes cut into them. Cicely lifted the hatch on one of the bob-holes, and I saw the wife talking on the telephone as though to the manner born. She was the only one in a light, wooden office with a high desk and tall, shiny-topped stools.

Cicely Braithwaite dropped the bob-hole door and said, 'As you can see, she's on the telephone presently. She's talking to Manchester, so best not to interrupt.'

'Who's she talking to?' I said, 'if you don't mind me asking.'

'Most likely Michael Hardcastle. He's our, you know, travelling gentleman.'

'I see,' I said, but I did not.

Cicely Braithwaite was going red. 'He doesn't like to be called a salesman,' she said. She was going redder still, crimson now. 'But that's what he is,' she added, firmly. 'That's where I work' she continued, lifting the opposite bob-hole. There was an office inside, but no people. It came to me that she must be the other office girl, the one spoken of by the wife; the one not allowed the Standard typewriter.

'My boss is Mr Robinson' she said. 'Well, was. He used to be one of the partners.'

'He's left though, hasn't he?'

'Yes,' she said, 'he's been sacked.' The redness came surging up again. She couldn't help talking out of turn, and couldn't help blushing over it afterwards. 'The other office, the one Lydia's in… That's Mr Hind's.'

'Old Hind's?'

'No. When we speak of old Mr Hind we always say "Mr Hind Senior".'

'Or "the fossil"' said the wife, who'd opened the bob-hole of her office and put her head through. 'Your hand!' she then cried, and came out into the corridor. 'Hold it up!' she said.

'It's nothing to fret over,' I said, as Cicely asked the wife, 'Shall I go and fetch something for it?'

'Boracic acid,' said the wife, 'that's the best thing.'

Cicely opened the door to the second office and came back holding a bottle of something and a glass of water, saying, 'Drink this. You look parched.'

Cicely handed the bottle to the wife who, looking at the label, said: 'Linseed oil. It'll have to do.' The wife began unwinding my bandage, saying to Cicely, 'Do we have another of these?'

Cicely said, 'They'll have bandages in the weaving room.' She opened a door beyond the two offices, at which moment all conversation with the wife had to stop on account of the racket.

I was looking through the door at the same thing done over and over again: row upon row of crashing looms, each row under a drive shaft, all the looms connected to this shaft by rolling leather belts, so that the machinery on the floor was tangled with the machinery on the roof, as though a giant spider had climbed over everything making a web as it went. The walls were white; the white was light, and everybody inside looked as though they'd just seen a ghost. Margaret Dyson, the woman I'd killed, had worked in there. No wonder she'd been so keen to get away to the sea, if only for a day.

The long blister under the bandage had burst, and there was coal dust inside the wet remains. The wife was shaking her head over this as Cicely Braithwaite came back, shutting the door behind her. The silence was beautiful.

'Was it Michael you were speaking to?' Cicely said to the wife, handing over a length of bandage.

'It was,' said the wife, 'and he's having to take one thirty- second of a penny on the -'

'Not on the twelve-ounce?' Cicely Braithwaite put in.

'Yes,' said the wife, 'on the twelve-ounce.'

'I knew it would be the twelve-ounce,' said Cicely, as we all went from the space between the offices into the wife's office proper. She took me over to a desk and made me rest my hand on top of a Kelly's Directory. Nearby were many other books lying open, with pages made of different kinds of cloth. I knew what they were: sample books, of the kind seen in draper's shops.

'What's the twelve-ounce?' I asked, as the wife poured on the stinging stuff and set to with the new bandage. Every so often she would flash a glance over at the telephone, as if expecting it to jump.

'Twelve-ounce suiting,' said Cicely. 'What do you think about that?'

I didn't think anything about it, so I just shrugged. It was Clive knew all about suits.

'Have you not told him about the twelve-ounce?' Cicely Braithwaite asked the wife, who did look a bit embarrassed over this. There was a kind of force about Cicely Braithwaite that could make you feel a stranger even to your own wife.

'I'm only just beginning to understand it myself,' said the wife.

'It's the biggest disaster going,' said Cicely, very happily. She turned to me. 'Let me put you straight, Mr Stringer. Now look at your coat. A lovely bit of worsted, that is. It's quite filthy, and it's full of burn holes but it's a lovely bit of worsted underneath. I reckon that would be about a twenty-ounce cloth. Most suiting is from twenty to twenty-eight ounce. Well, Mr Peter Robinson, the gentleman I worked for in that office over there -' she pointed in the direction of the second office he had the notion of making something much lighter than your common run of summer cloth: twelve- ounce suiting. Light green suiting.'

'But do you mean light, green suiting, or light-green suit- ing?'

'Why, both,' said Cicely, 'when all our suiting up to now has been normal weight and blue.'

'Well it sounds a perfectly good notion,' I said, as the wife wound the bandage. 'I'd feel a lot brighter in a thinner suit.'

'I daresay,' said Cicely, 'and in some spot like Italy, where it's stifling the year round, it would be just the thing. But they can't give it away here, and they're saddled with miles of it.'

'Well,' the wife put in, 'have they not thought of trying it in Italy?'

'Whatever do you mean?' Cicely asked.

'It would go perfectly well in Italy,' said the wife, 'and would do here too, especially in summers like this, if they just once gave it a starting shove.'

'How do you mean by a shove?' asked Cicely.

'Advertising,' said the wife.

Cicely nodded. 'You would have liked having Mr Robinson here, dear,' she said to the wife, 'if you'd got to know him properly, got to know his ways. He was go-ahead like you. Have you told Mr Stringer of your programme for the filing?'

'I've not,' said the wife, 'because he is not particularly interested in filing.'

I finished off my glass of water and gave Cicely a grin.

'In fact he doesn't even file his own nails,' said the wife.

'Tell me of your programme,' I said.

'Very well,' said the wife, who was finishing off my bandage with a pin. 'When I come to take dictation from Mr Hind, he always ends, "Kindly acknowledge in due course", which means that for every letter sent out we get one back, and half the time the other person puts "kindly acknowledge" on their letter of acknowledgement, so you can see that the smallest little bit of business does rather go on for ever. But when I mentioned it to Mr Hind, and suggested that he stop writing "kindly acknowledge in due course", he said, "It's quite impossible. How can you be sure you've sent a letter if you don't have a reply?'"

'Mr Hind is not go-ahead,' said Cicely, turning to me.

'So,' the wife continued, 'I said you must just put a little trust in the Post Office, and that way you could save pounds every year, to which he replied, "How am I to finish my letters? What am I to put instead?'"

'Well, what is he to put instead?' I asked the wife, after a little while.

'"Yours truly'" said the wife, and she stepped back from me, for the bandaging was now done.

'He'll never do it,' said Cicely.'No,' said the wife. 'But I will. He never reads over the correspondence after dictation.' 'You can't' said Cicely. 'You'll be stood down if he ever finds out, and -' She suddenly gave it up and stopped, saying directly to me: 'I'm expecting that buzzer any minute.'

I nodded at her.

'That's to tell us to stop working,' she added, although she had in fact not done a hand's turn since I'd arrived.

'The weavers clock off' explained Cicely, 'we book off, and where Mr Hind Senior has got to I really don't know.'

'Will the weavers be coming through this way?' I asked, for I didn't want to clap eyes on the woman who'd all but accused me of murder.

Cicely shook her head. 'They leave through the main doors. They only come through this way on Thursdays.'

'Pay day,' put in the wife.

Then the telephone did start ringing. The wife answered it very smartly, saying, 'Hind's Mill, Office of Mr Hind', and fell to discussing a sale of looms.

'Mr Stringer,' said Cicely, who seemed to have no inclination to stop doing no work and go home, 'your suit has more scorch marks on it than my uncle Jasper's tab rug, which is always getting burnt on account of him piling too much free coal onto his grate.'

I frowned at her.

'My uncle Jasper works on the railways,' she explained, climbing up onto one of the high stools.

'Well then' I said, 'so do I.'

'Lydia never told me' said Cicely.

'She doesn't really care for the job' I said. 'She thinks it's mucky and dangerous and not, you know… Well, it is true that you can't be an engine man and not be bowed down by it.'

It was the first time I had admitted anything of that sort, but nobody was really listening. Cicely had a faraway look, and the wife was still talking into the telephone.

'Mr Stringer -' said Cicely again.

'I was firing the Highflyer' I cut in. 'I mean the engine that carried this mill's excursion to Blackpool: the one that got stopped.'

'Oh' she said, except that it was really only half an 'oh', about the smallest sound you can make while still speaking. Climbing down from the high stool, she said: 'Would you care to see the weaving room, just while Lydia's busy?'

We walked along the wooden corridor between the offices, and I tried to collect my thoughts together. Why had the wife not let on that I'd been firing the engine on Whit Sunday? Well, she would not be popular if it was known she was married to one of the men who'd kept the whole firm waiting in a field for half a day. We'd promised them a holiday, and then made a smudge of it. Or maybe Cicely had known that I was part of that show, but didn't let on that she knew, so as to save embarrassing me.

Cicely opened the heavy door to the weaving room for the second time, and now I was ready for the noise. There must have been four hundred looms, and every one rocked and buckled as the shuttle inside it was pitched back and forth. The weavers were mainly women. They would dart in and trim at the cloth in the thrashing machines with tiny scissors, then stand back, looking over all parts of the contraption before swooping back in again with the scissors.

There were five rows between the lines of looms and men walked along these, pushing trolleys on which were spare bits of kit for the looms, to be stopped as needed.

Most of the lot in this room would have been on the excursion. Cicely was standing next to me, with a handkerchief in her hand, looking along the middle row of looms. She looked quite grave, which did not suit her. It was getting on for five o'clock on a roasting hot day, but the inside of the mill had a feeling of near-dawn on a cold day. I looked up at the skylights, but they weren't sky lights, for they'd all been whitewashed to keep out the glare.

'Which loom did Dyson, the girl who died, work at?' I shouted to Cicely.

She leant towards me and I shouted my question again. She heard it this time and pointed. My eye flew from her finger end to a loom in the centre of the weaving hall, where stood the superannuated fairy, my accuser. She was looking straight at me once again, as a great scream came in on top of the clattering of the looms. It was the buzzer, and even as it continued, the place wilted, the machines wound down, and all the madness came to an end, for the steam had been turned off.

But the woman was still staring.

I turned to Cicely and said: 'Who is that woman?'

'That's Mary-Ann Roberts,' said Cicely.

As Cicely looked at her, Mary-Ann Roberts finally left off staring at me and turned away to join the crowd moving towards the door at the opposite end.

'She knew Margaret Dyson, the one that died, didn't she?'

Cicely nodded. 'She was her elbow mate: worked at the next loom. She's moved along now to take Margaret's. She didn't want -'

Cicely was looking up, and now she was crying. All the weavers were walking out of the weaving room at the other end, and I was alone with this crying woman.

'… The ladies with her in the compartment,' Cicely said, 'they thought at first she was getting on nicely, but -'

And she was off again. I just stood there like a mule. My programme was to get her back to the wife, because the wife would know what to do. An idea struck me – not a very good one. 'Do you want a cup of tea?' I said. 'Come this way.' I didn't know where any kettle was, leave alone tea, and Cicely Braithwaite knew that I didn't know, but she followed me back to the wooden corridor between the offices. The wife was still talking on the telephone. Cicely was sniffing mightily as she walked, and starting on a speech.

'I've worked here five year,' she was saying, 'five years, I mean. I was taken on as a weaver and a friend said you should go typist because there's better prospects, so I did my typing course. In my first year, the Whit excursions for this mill started: it was to be an extra treat in advance of the Wakes Week trip to Blackpool. It was Mr Robinson's idea – he's the fellow that's gone now. He said it had to be Blackpool of course, and everyone from the mill was to go, and there was to be a tea at the Tower. Well, when we came back it was always given to me to write to the Blackpool Tower Company, and it was always the same letter.'

She took a big breath, and I was afraid of another big crying go, but she carried on, just as if reading this letter she'd spoken of: '"On behalf of the work-people and officials of Hind's Mill, I beg to thank you for the excellent manner in which you catered for our party of five hundred.'" A very big sniff here.

I could hear the wife, through the wooden wall, saying: 'You must telephone later when Mr Hind himself is here, or can you not write a letter?'

'"The tea'", Cicely was continuing, '"was admirably served, and the attendants left nothing to be desired… and… the fact that we have not had a single complaint out of the very large number -"' Another mighty sniff. '"- speaks for itself.'"

That last part did it. She was off crying again, saying how the tea was never served that day; and how it was to have been such a spread, how it had been the thing Margaret Dyson had been looking forward to most particularly; how the Wakes Week holiday that was coming up really would be a wake. But now the wife, having at last finished with the telephone, was stepping out of the office and putting her arms about Cicely, and things were set to rights while I was sent outside to wait.

I walked around to the side of the mill and stood between the chimney and the mill pond. They made a silent pair as always. The sunshine was sending a golden V shimmering out across the water. My heart was beating fast, just as after the smash. What I wanted was another smash, and there would then be a person lying down in a carriage, having taken a concussion. I would go in and I would not attempt to lift their head.

The last of the weavers were trailing away down Beacon Hill.

Walking further along the mill wall, I came to the boiler room. The door was half open and things were still in full swing inside. I could make out two boilers, with fireholes set below. There was one man to each, and now that the fires were finished, the two were scraping out clinkers with long irons. The sound they made was a desperate kind of clattering, for they wouldn't get home until the job was done.

There was a tug on my coat and the wife was standing next to me. We began walking down the hill to the town. Far below us, trams and horse buses were cutting through Halifax at a great rate, and folk were filing down all the streets that led to the Joint, which was full of engines coming and going. Freedom for the wage slaves: that's what we were looking at, for the Friday buzzers were going off all over.

'Do they talk much in the mill about the lass that died?' I said.

'Some do,' said the wife. 'She was popular – a bonny girl.'

'Do they ever say she might have been saved?'

But the wife didn't seem to hear that.

'Cicely is a good soul,' she was saying, while looking at flowers by the roadside, 'but she has an awful time of it. Hind treats her like a slavey – just like one of the work people, even though she's been in the office for donkey's years.'

'Where is Hind?'

'He has a yacht,' said the wife, 'and he's on it. Has been for a week.'

'Where?' I said. 'Cruising off Llandudno. You can send letters to it by posting to somewhere in Llandudno. He can send them back as well, worst luck. All week, the correspondence has been letters from Mr Robinson's solicitors saying that the price offered for his share in the mill is not acceptable; Hind saying that no more is to be offered because the light suiting of Robinson's has brought the mill almost to bankruptcy; and letters to wine retailers asking for Champagne to be sent out to Hind's yacht. If I put the wrong letter in the wrong envelope there'd be fun.'

'You mean if you sent the Champagne to the solicitors?'

'No, you nut. If the solicitors for Robinson found out how much Hind was spending on himself.'

'What about Hind Senior, the founder. What does he make of all this?'

'That fossil! Who knows if he thinks at all. Hind's the only one who talks to him. It was in King William's day when he founded this mill, you know, and it was powered by water.'

'Do you think he's on the yacht right now with Hind?'

'Is he heckers, like,' said the wife. 'The fossil hardly ever leaves Halifax, and he's due at the mill right now.' Then she pointed to a roadside flower: 'Foxglove,' she said quite fiercely.

'But they did lose money over the light suiting, and it was this fellow Robinson's fault, wasn't it?'

'It had been his idea, but young Hind had agreed to adventure it. I'd help Mr Robinson if I could… He has a little boy, you know, Lance, rather grown-up for his years, and he wrote a letter to Cicely to pass on to Hind. It was asking for his dad to be given his job back. Quite heart-breaking it was, according to Cicely. Well, that boy's mad on engines. Peter Robinson's often over here with all this solicitor business, and I thought you might show the boy about the station.'

'I'd say you were sweet on this Robinson' I said.

'Well, he had his points, you know.'

'Like what?'

'He gave me my start, for one thing. He was always gentlemanly to the workers, even if he was flogging them to death.'

'Where is he now?' 'At home.' 'In Halifax?'

The wife shook her head. 'He lives in Lancashire, at St Anne's.'

'Oh, you'd like it there,' I said. 'It's just before Blackpool; it's like Blackpool with everything taken out. Peaceful, like.'

'What I would fancy,' said the wife, very slowly, 'is a trip to Hebden Bridge.'

This was a turn up. The wife was not a great one for taking trips. 'Hebden would be a start,' I said. 'It's the prettiest spot within ten miles of here.'

'In fact I am going – tomorrow afternoon, with Cicely. She did want cheering up, you know. Would you come along?'

'I book off at one o'clock tomorrow,' I said, 'so I could do. Shall I ask George?'

The wife shook her head. 'I don't care for that one… I've read there are lots of wild flowers in the hills above Hebden.'

'You bet your boots,' I said.

'Jim…' she said. She did not often use my name, so I was certain she was going to say she was expecting. Instead, she said: 'I mean to take more of an interest in nature.'

'It's all the rage now,' I said.

'I mean to plant something in the garden.'

It was the first I'd heard it called that. 'You mean in that tub we have in the yard?'

'Tub in the yard! You're no loss to house agency, are you?'

'What are you going to plant?'

'Mint,' she said.

We'd drifted halfway down Beacon Hill Road. Two coal trains were crossing under the North Bridge, both going slow – lazy in the evening heat, and sending an echo all around the town. The wife had stopped again; she was looking down at some heather by the road.

'When did Robinson leave the mill?' I asked her.

'Friday 26 May he got the letter. It was the day after he'd interviewed me for the job.'

'A fortnight before Whit, then?'

'Aye' said the wife.

I said: 'I do think the coppers might ask that gent a few questions about what happened, you know.'

The wife was still looking down at the tiny flowers. One of the coal trains had come to a halt between the Joint and the North Bridge goods station; the other had disappeared.

'Why would he want to stop the excursion?' said the wife. 'It was his flipping idea in the first place. There's any number of hundreds who might have had reason to do it, mind you. I spend half my days writing letters to people saying we can't take them on at the mill. Bobbin-setters, reelers, duffers. They might not want to see the ones that have jobs gallivanting off to the seaside. If it comes to that…'

'What?'

'No, I shan't mention it. You'll only go flying off.'

'No' I said. 'You must.'

'If it comes to it' said the wife, 'when they stopped making the light suiting they laid off two hundred weavers. But half of them were taken on a week later at that show.'

She was pointing at the letters spelling 'Dean Clough' standing up on the roof of the building just beyond the North Bridge. Each letter was taller than three men, and although the North Bridge was high enough to fit the goods station underneath, those letters towered above it. The Dean Clough Mill seemed to have been built by men who'd never seen another mill, and so had no notion of the correct size, but what they did have was an endless supply of bricks. You could fit twenty mills of the common run inside it. It was built by the Crossleys, who'd also – along with a certain Porter – put up the brass for the orphanage where young Arnold Dyson now lived.

As we watched, the buzzer at Dean Clough went off, and it was loud even to the two of us, half a mile across town and halfway up a hill. After a minute, the workers came out, like oil spilling from an engine casing. As they poured forwards, crossing through the shadow of the great chimney, the wife said: 'Eight thousand carpet designs possible… Four thousand colours possible… Six thousand two hundred folk employed.'

'Wage slavery,' I said, thoughtful, like.

A motorcar was coming up the hill towards us. We stood back on either side of the road to let it pass, and the wife looked after it in a dreamy way. When it had gone she said, 'That's a bobby dazzler!' Then she laughed at me from across the road, because this was one of her new Yorkshire sayings.

We walked on a little way, and there was a trap stopped in the road, with a man standing up in it. There was something else in the trap: it was a small scrumpled-up something, and, as we got closer, we saw that it was a person, and that it was dead, with the little eyes in the little head closed and quite sealed up for ever.

I got in before the wife. 'Hind Senior,' I said.

Hind Senior didn't look as though he'd ever been a great talker, and nor did his gentleman's gentleman, but this fellow had to call out, for otherwise he would have been in league with the dead body at his side.

'Hi!' he yelled. 'Are you two down from Hind's?'

'I work there,' called the wife. 'Drive up there, and ask for Cicely. She'll let you telephone from the office.'

'What happened?' I called out.

'He was ninety-nine, Jim,' the wife whispered.

'Motorcar,' the man in the trap was saying, 'it was the bloody motorcar finished him off.'