The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Twenty-six

At the Joint, originality was at a premium: everyone was doing the same as before. I wanted to shout out distracting things, to check the heavy programme of entraining and luggage loading.

We'd been put into platform three once more, where Knowles's blackboard again stood, reading: 'special train, sunday 9th july, hind's mill, wakes week excursion to Blackpool', with masses of underlining beneath. Station- master Knowles was watching from the far end of the platform, the back end of the train.

To make things different, to give the kaleidoscope a shake, I jumped down from the footplate and took a turn along the platform, just as the first excursionists were climbing up. On my stroll, I struck other novelties. There were seven rattlers as before, but this time all third class. The Hinds, father and son, would not be coming along. And there was no Martin Lowther patrolling the train with a face like yesterday, ticket nippers at the ready. At the end of the train, I nodded to Knowles, who half nodded back then turned on his heel and walked off.

I looked back along to the engine. Clive was standing by it, in his special place, where he could be looked at and admired; glancing down sometimes at his new boots, then up at the waves of happy excursionists, keeping his eye out for the pretty ones as they came running over the footbridge, tumbling down the steps and searching out their compartments along the platform, all sporting their white rosettes. Another tea at the Tower was evidently in store.

There was a banging of doors, laughing and shouting. Two of the trippers were at the cream-biscuit machine once again, rattling the little metal drawers that should have opened and never did.

Some new posters of Blackpool had appeared along the platform: half a dozen all the same, with the beach looking like a mustard plaster, the Tower brighter, friendlier and not so frightening as when you were up close, and the slogan running along underneath: 'Blackpool holds perennial delights'.

The luggage went into the place next to the guard's part, and here was another difference. Far more goods were for the van than before, this being a whole week away. Reuben Booth was in charge of the loading, or maybe he was just getting in the way of it. He had all on to check the boxes the porters were pitching in.

I walked back to 1418, and to Clive. Reuben was coming up, too.

'Five hundred and one souls… two hundred and twenty tons,' he said. The tonnage was the same as before, the extra Third in place of the First making no difference. The numbers were a little down. Well, not everybody could get away for a whole week. And then of course Margaret Dyson was dead, her boy in the orphanage.

Now Clive was giving me his special happy nod, meaning look at the doxies, and there was the wife, walking hand in hand along the platform with Cicely Braithwaite.

'It's the wife,' I said. 'I think I told you she'd got a start in the office at Hind's.'

'Which one's she?' Clive asked, double-quick.

'The beautiful one,' I said, 'what do you expect?'

'Well now,' he said, 'they're both rather handsome.'

'The one on the right,' I said, as the wife and Cicely stopped about three carriages down. They both wore the white rosettes.

The wife and Cicely spotted me, and gave a wave as they climbed up into their compartment.

'Will they not come and take a look at the engine?' asked Clive.'No point asking the wife'1 said. 'She thinks all engines are mucky, smelly things.'

Clive frowned. There had been no takers at all so far for his fancily polished buffers. 'I hope you've explained to her that they're cleaned from top to bottom for about six hours at the start of every working day?'

'Oh yes'1 said; 'more than you can say for our house, that is.'

As the Hind's excursionists continued to climb aboard, I opened the firehole door and put on more coal. The wife was on the train now and, short of main force, there was nothing I could do about it. I knew it was not worth trying to persuade her to stay in Halifax. The Socialist Mission had not threatened this excursion in particular, and we were one of hundreds that would be leaving the Joint over the coming week. That was the argument she would employ.

I looked at the high-set, gleaming injector handles, the beautiful wide black numbers against the clear white background of the steam-pressure gauge, all so prettily set off by the bright red danger mark. To a fellow of the right sort, there could be no handsomer sight in the kingdom. There again the fire was a little thin to left and right, so I picked up my shovel, turned towards the tender and set to.

At eight-eighteen Clive was up next to me, moving the gear to full forward. I leant out to watch the starter signal, and… nothing happened. Perhaps they've thought better of sending us out after all. I looked away from the signal, looked back, and then it fell. Clive pulled the regulator (I got a whiff of the Bancroft's as he did so), and the engine gave its first mighty bark, like something being roused that doesn't want to be roused.

We started to roll, though.

We moved into the sight of the sun, and I turned once more to the tender and the coal. As the beats came faster they began to drown out the cheering of the excursionists, and that was all right by me, for I meant to trust my luck to the brightness of the day, and lose myself in the work.

We rolled, faster than I would have thought right, along the side of the branch canal, then under the branch canal, which brought on a short night-time, then into Milner Royd Tunnel, which made for a longer one.

Coming out of the tunnel Clive was at the reverser, notching up the great engine with his hair falling forward over his eyes. With the higher gear engaged, the rocking began, like the start of a dance, and it was the start of a dance, for our feet fell into the old way of counterbalancing. I thought of Mr Aspinall, sitting in his office in Manchester, and wondered whether he knew what he had let loose with this great mechanical greyhound.

Clive gave his two screams on the whistle as we passed the shed at Sowerby Bridge, and I swear that a horse pulling a dog cart up Town Hall Street was stopped by the shock of it. Clive was not known as a scorcher but maybe the habit was growing on him, for we went through Hebden Bridge clear twice as fast as we should've.

We climbed to Todmorden without noticing it was a climb at all. I could not see the church clock that was lit at night, nor (for we were going at such a lick) any of the churches that might have held it. This engine, I thought, makes churches disappear. I looked for the school with the huge cot in the window, the house with the birds circling above, but these tilings lived in a slower world and were not to be seen today.

Clive was at the gear again. He wanted 1418 faster, and all the signals did too, for every one of them was down as we galloped on over the Pennine Hills.

Crossing from Yorkshire to Lancashire was no more than jumping a ditch, and Blackburn might have been a village, for it was coming up and then it was gone, with not much in between save for a smudge of smoke.

This time there was no cause to stop at Preston, so those on board had all of thirty seconds to view the handsome new paintwork of that station. We were coming to the danger point now, Salwick and Kirkham, and Clive seemed in a hurry to get there, for he notched up once, twice, within the shadow of County Hall. Was he bent on suicide? No, the man was in the prime of life and making love in secret with the stationmaster's wife.

To put this from my mind I was throwing on coal, but Clive checked me with a funny look and shouted at me to get on the injector and put in more water. It went ill with me to move from coal to water. I wanted to stick at one thing, and wait. If all was well after Salwick and Kirkham, that would be the start of a whole new world. I would take a drink and have a beano with the wife in Blackpool, for I was to book off on arrival.

The signal box at Lea Green came and went. Harry Walker, the fellow in there, would be moving slowly between his levers, drinking tea. Maybe he'd given a wave. It didn't matter.

Salwick came up, more of a garden than a station, more of a graveyard than a station, and Clive was eyeing me. The engine was going at seventy, and neither one of us could properly stand.

I asked myself again how he could be so sure we were not to meet another wrecking attempt.

I laid my shovel against the firebox, forced my head out into the battering air and looked back. I saw the 8.36 from Halifax, the regular Blackpool express, a tiny train miles behind, crawling onto the fields of the Fylde.

I would not tell Clive to slow down, not even with the wife on board and her expecting. I was done with showing fear. I turned to the firehole, looked inside: the fire was shaking, every white-hot coal had been set jumping by the speed. I stood upright again, and my shovel fell and began clanking over the footplate towards me like a thing gone live. Clive was standing back from the regulator, bowed down before it and pulling at the flaps of two of his pockets, the flaps of the poacher's pockets. He moved his hands slowly up towards his hair and put his head down and ran his hands through his hair, faster and faster. His hair was all there, but it might not be, so he had to make sure over and over again. He was looking at his boots as he did it, seeing how they were faring new-on, for really they should have been spared the black dust of the footplate. The best thing you can do with a pair of boots is not wear them. The best you can do with a railway engine is not drive it.

I looked through the spectacle glass and it was clean. I could see for miles along the line. Blackpool Tower, the tallest building in the country, and there it was: a tiny thing, ten miles off, jumping about in the corner of the glass, trying to come loose and move to the centre. Why had Clive got his medal? Well, it came in pretty handy, made it harder for Knowles to stand him down. There again, if Clive had copped on with Emma Knowles, the stationmaster might be expected to do a lot more than sack him. A lot more.

My eye went back to the spectacle glass, and I kept on staring hard at the clear track unrolling before us; I was challenging the track, and keeping with it for mile after mile. A sunbeam flew very far along it in a short time, and I almost gave a laugh at that. I turned away and looked again.

'Brakes!' I screamed, and Clive slashed at the vacuum handle as though killing something, which he was – killing the vacuum – and we began at once to slow… but slowly.

You can shout for brakes once if you're a fireman – once if there's no reason, I mean. With the engine finally at rest, and time moving once again, Clive turned to me and said: 'What was it?'

I had no answer.

I looked up at the spectacle glass and Clive looked there too. It was clean but for a single fleck of soot, dead centre.

'It might have been that,' I said, and I started to say I was sorry, but Clive checked me, saying: 'You were right to call out.'

I knew then he was one of the grandest fellows I'd ever met. It's rum. You know people for a while and you have them down for one thing, then they suddenly seem to grow.

I jumped down and looked along the train. Heads were coming out of the windows, but nobody was climbing down this time. We'd not had to use the reverser, so the train had stopped with a steadier motion. Yet a man in a cap called: 'That were a bit of a jar.' It was a lonely voice, floating over the fields.

'Anybody hurt?' I called.

'I'll consult!' he shouted, but he was already laughing. He ducked back into his compartment, then stuck his head back out. 'One here in desperate need…' he bawled.

I began walking fast along the trackside towards him, fretting over having burnt the medical book. 'In desperate need of what?'

'A nice glass of stout!' the excursionist called back. 'Nay, I'm only -' He ducked back in again. 'We're all in fine fettle here,' he said, coming out once more, 'but can tha get on? It's nigh on opening time, tha knows!'

I walked on fast; there were different flowers in the meadow from the time before: tall, purple ones. The wife was in the third carriage back from the engine. As I walked, the carriages were high above my head. It was like going along those old country lanes where the road has sunk and the hedges have gradually been lifted up: a feeling of being too small and kept in your place.

When I came to what I thought must be the right spot, I called up. It was Cicely Braithwaite who pulled down the window strap and looked out. She was laughing too. There was laughing gas running through the pipes on this train, but when she saw me her laughter caught.

'It's not the same going-on as before, is it?' she said.

I shook my head. 'You all right up there?'

The wife was at the window too, showing a face that had been laughing. 'Do get on,' she said.

I looked along the line. The regular express was there behind in the distance, shaking in the heat, and so far off that at first I couldn't make out whether it was moving or not. But no. It was of course checked at the signal, and all my doing.

I looked up at the wife and grinned. 'When we get to Central, I'll meet you at the ticket gates,' I said.

She ducked back into the carriage as if I was just a spare part, standing down below the train where no person ought to be standing.

I turned to walk back to the engine.

'Ey!'

It was the wife, calling from the compartment; I turned while walking and she blew me a kiss. The holiday mood was certainly on her. At this rate, she'd be after a whole week in Blackpool.