The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Twenty-five

Wakes proper started on the Sunday.

The night before, I dreamt I was on an engine riding through open country that was half real and half a map. Preston was big capital letters lying spread over fields, then came the little villages of Salwick and Kirkham, with curly Ks in their names. On the very edge of the map was Blackpool with the capital letters again, these stretching out into the sea, which was nothing but a few squiggly lines, but dangerous all the same.

I woke at four, and so did the wife. She was excited about the Hind's trip. I tried again to talk her out of going, saying, 'It's all just skylarking, you know. You wouldn't care for it.'

'What do you take me for?' she said. Then we began to do something else, for stopping family increase could now go by the board.

Love-making eases anxieties, but not for long, and I was back to my old state of mind when, at half-past five in the morning, I wrote my name in the book that lay on its own table in John Ellerton's office at Sowerby Bridge shed.

It was not yet hot, and the weekly notices pinned to the wall were moving in the breeze from the open door. Every so often the breeze would increase, the door would bang, and a great surge of burning-coal smell and smoke would come in, for the engines were all being prepared outside, looking like a range of volcanoes. The usual timetables went to pot in Wakes. Half the normal trains in and out of Halifax didn't run, and the crews were put onto excursions instead.

Ellerton himself was at his high desk, drawing lines with a ruler in his fast and jolly way. He seemed to be enjoying the way the ruler worked, the perfect straightness of it over and over. The telegraph needle was clicking, but it must have been something safe to ignore, for he was ignoring it.

'You're in luck again over the Hind's,' he said, as he drew his lines.

'How's that?' I said. But I knew.

'Come along with me,' he said, and he stepped out from behind his desk, still holding his precious ruler. We walked out of the office and onto the barrow boards that crossed the tracks going into the shed.

It was a blue-grey morning. Night was going, but the engines around the shed were putting out their own darkness. I saw the Highflyer before John pointed at it with his ruler. Number 1418 – the very same beast as before: black but bright, the long, high boiler stretching out over the seven-foot driving wheels. It looked like an arrow in a bow, waiting to be fired. A cleaner with a long-handled brush walked carefully along the boiler frame, like a man on a mountain precipice. One long thin bootlace of smoke was winding out of the chimney.

'Where did that bastard come from?' I said.

John Ellerton laughed. 'It was fixed up at Horwich Works. Distant Control sent it down to us.'

'But why?'

'Well,' he said, 'why do they do anything? Orders from Manchester.'

'Who in Manchester?'

'Traffic manager – Outdoor Locomotive Office. Who else would it be?'

'What's his name?'

'Hasn't got a name,' said John, who was playing with his ruler, looking a little agitated at this bombardment. He wanted to get back to drawing straight lines.

'How's that?' I said.

'When I say "Traffic Manager" I mean Traffic Manager's office, and there's dozens in there.'

'The first time they sent us a Highflyer it was for Hind's Mill Whit excursion to Blackpool.'

John Ellerton nodded. A rush of tinsel sparks came spinning up from the Flyer's chimney.

'Now they send it for only the second time,' I went on, 'and it's Hind's Mill once again.'

Ellerton gave a big grin at this. 'What do you reckon's going on then?'

'I don't know.'

'Well,' said John, 'nor do I. Unless nothing is.'

'But what if someone's trying to get shot of that particular engine?'

'You're getting cranky in your old age,' said Ellerton.

'Has a grindstone gone missing from this yard lately?' I asked him.

John Ellerton just pulled a face.

We were at the front end of 1418 by now. Front bogey, guard plates… all good as new, as if nothing had happened. This was the virtue of blackness as a colour.

'Look here,' said John Ellerton, 'I put in for an engine for an excursion, they send me one. Manchester doesn't know it's for Hind's – they just want to keep all the engines working all the time. The Highflyers mostly work express, Liverpool to Manchester, but if it happens that one comes over to this side of the Pennines, they don't send it back light. They send it back on a job.'

I nodded, looking down. I knew for certain the wreckers would be back today, but I could say no more to Ellerton.

'You can put up some bloody good running in that engine. There's fellows would kill to be on it,' he added, and it was as near as he'd come to giving me an earwigging.

I saw Clive walking over the barrow boards towards us, carrying his snap tin and oil can, and looking down from time to time at his feet.

'Smart boots, he's got,' said Ellerton.

'They're new on,' I said, miserably. 'I believe he's bought them on the strength of his medal.'

Or was it on the strength of Emma Rnowles?

With Clive still making his way across the front of the shed towards the engine, I climbed up onto the footplate just as the cleaner who'd lit the fire climbed down the other side. He, or somebody, had left an old Courier on the sandbox. There'd been a Courier left in exactly the same spot before our last run on 1418.1 looked down at it: 'donegal election, this day's telegrams'. I opened the fire door and pitched it into the flames, where it whirled in a fiery circle, then disappeared. I turned to the locker and took out the ambulance box. There was the book again: What to Do in an Emergency by Dr N. Kenrick, F.R.S.E. This too I shied into the flames.

When Clive came up, I said, 'Rather queer, this business, en't it?'

'What's queer?'

'The two of us getting this engine again?'

Clive just shrugged. 'Luck of the draw,' he said, and began searching in his pocket for his leather book, where the time of departure from the Joint was written down. He wasn't bothered about where engines came from, only where he was taking them to.

'What's time of departure?' I asked him.

'Eight-nineteen,' he said. 'Ring a bell does it?'

It had been eight-nineteen last time.

We worked on for a while. Clive walked to the front of the engine to inspect the repair. Every so often there'd be a great bark of steam, like a gun going off, then more gunshot sounds and another engine would be out alongside us. Nothing would be left in the shed today, the first day of Wakes. Presently Clive walked off into the shed and came back with a kid who started putting the lozenge pattern on the buffer plates.

'She looks in fine fettle,' he said when the kid had finished and was walking away with Clive's tanner in his pocket.

'Will you be taking her a bit more steadily this time?' I asked as we both stood on the rails looking up at 1418.

'You're not in a funk are you?' 'I'll give you steam for whatever running you want'1 said, 'but if the wreckers were out to get someone from Hind's Mill, or everyone from Hind's Mill, then this'll be the day they'll try again.'

'If it comes to that, maybe they're out to get you,' he said, 'in which case you'll never rest easy.'

Or you, I thought.

I saw John Ellerton walking over to us again and he looked different. It was the first time I'd seen him not smiling or not ready to smile. He called up to us: 'You blokes,' he said. 'It's a bugger, is this, but I've just been speaking on the telephone to the fellow from the Courier – the reporter -'

'I bloody knew it,' I said. 'They've heard from the Socialist Mission again?'

Ellerton nodded, and even he looked pretty cut up. 'Now, he says the cops have not been able to dig up anything about this lot, and they're still of opinion it's a bluff.'

'But what did the message say?' I asked Ellerton.

Clive was looking down at his new boots.

'Bit of blather,' said Ellerton, 'but really just this: no excursions to run in Halifax Wakes.'

'But they will run, won't they?' I said.

'Of course they bloody will,' said Ellerton, and he turned on his heel.

Clive looked at me and grinned: 'That'll teach you to talk to strange blokes in pubs,' he said.

I shouted after Ellerton, 'Did they mention a fellow called Billington, an engine man killed at York?'

But I don't think he heard.