The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Three

Two hundred and twenty tons we had on, as Reuben Booth had said, and five hundred and twelve souls: Whit Sunday Excursion to Blackpool, booked by a mill – Hind's Mill. It was nothing out of the common as far as excursions went, except that the mill owners were riding with us and our engine was the Highflyer.

The boards went off at Preston, and we began to be in motion again. I watched Clive standing with one hand lightly on the regulator, thoughtful, like.

The mighty crunch of the exhaust beats filled the station like something that, though not over-keen to be started, is going to be the devil of a job to finish. Because of our delay in Preston we had time to make up if our five hundred and twelve souls were not to be late for the beach.

As we came out of Preston station we were running against the County Hall, which was like a red-brick cliff face with twelve flags on top: two crosses of St George and ten red roses of Lancashire, although I knew it had been the other way about when the King had come to open the new docks. Beyond this we were put on the fast road, and Clive really opened up the regulator, and I had to find my sea legs all over again while firing. The engine was a beautiful steamer, but it would dance on the rails, and it seemed to me that sixty tons of iron, flying along at sixty miles an hour, should not be set dancing.

Clive was suddenly hanging across my bows, and the smell of hair tonic was in my face as he looked out my side. 'The bloody lunatic,' he said.

It was the motorcar again – going along the street that was hard by the line for a short while.

'Well,' I said, 'he's only driving along the road.'

'He should be locked up,' said Clive.

'Is it the same bloke as before?'

'It had bloody better not be' said Clive, notching up for the first increase in speed.

'Reckon he's following us?' I asked Clive, but just then the motorist passed us, and for a while he was fastest man in Preston. Clive said, 'Bloody sauce,' and gave a jerk on the regulator so that we re-passed the man, but no sooner had we done it than the spire of the parish church shot in and wedged itself between the road and line, like an axe splitting wood, and we were rocking away left onto the Blackpool line with an almighty clattering.

There was now a bit of a dip in the fire, which I set about filling, but as we swung down the line to Lea Green, I had to keep interrupting myself to hold on. I could never seem to get right on this high-stepping engine.

Clive looked at me, and grinned. He was at the reverser again, putting us into the highest gear. 'Not up to much, is she?'

'How do you mean?'

'Too shaky,' he said. 'Boiler's set too high.'

So that was Mr Aspinall put in his box.

'It's fun though,' he said, and he opened the regulator a little more before standing back, taking off his gloves, and smartly straightening all the many flaps of his many poacher's pockets.

We were coming up to the signal box at Lea Road, and I put my hand to Harry Walker who was the usual fellow in there, but this wave couldn't come off when attempted at speed. The signal box just seemed to whirl once in a circle as we went by, giving me a sight of blank, shining glass. After Lea Road, we were onto the flat lands of the Fylde – the fields before Blackpool. The first of the windmills was coming into view. When the wind was up and they were really working, they put me in mind of fast bowlers in cricket. I put my head out and tried to hold it still in the hot wind as I thought back to my first trip to Blackpool, nigh on two months before, and how, the moment I'd opened the door of the dining rooms on the Prom, the wind had come in with me, and all the tablecloths had moved towards the tables, putting me in mind of ladies protecting their honour.

‹o›

The waitress had given me a big grin, crashed the door shut behind me, and shouted to another waitress: 'Eve, have you got a "one" for this gentleman?'

The other waitress hadn't heard, so I'd been left sort of dangling.

My waitress might have been Yorkshire, and she might have been Lancashire. Even though I suppose I was quite broad myself I couldn't always tell the difference. I sometimes had the notion that Lancashire folk had lower, darker voices that bent like liquorice. They would say 'Lankeysheyore', or 'Black- pewel', putting as many curves as possible into a word. What the two had in common was loudness about the mouth.

'Eve!' the serving girl had yelled across again, 'have we got a one for this gent?' Then she'd whispered, 'He's come in by his sen!', and I'd been minded to say that I was a married man, and not just some funny bit of goods that couldn't be fitted into an eating house. And not only that, but a fellow freshly promoted too.

I'd wanted to see Blackpool because, after a short time on goods, I'd been put up to the excursion link at Sowerby Bridge Shed, and Blackpool was the excursion magnet. It was the great demand for holiday trains that had left the Lanky short of firemen, and, seeing my chance to return to my home county I'd snatched at it, after all the complications I'd struck while firing for the London and South Western.

'Eve!' the serving girl had bawled, 'for crying out loud!'

That had done the trick, and I'd been led to the table near the window that I'd had my eye on all along.

I'd ordered six oysters, bread and butter, bottle of Bass.

Then I'd asked for salt and pepper, and the waitress had said, 'Condiments ha'penny extra.'

'Ha'penny extra?' I'd said. 'It never is… is it?'

But that was Blackpool all over: the wildness of the waitresses, salt and pepper a ha'penny extra – and Worcester sauce and a slice of lemon another ha'penny on top of that.

I hadn't minded, though. I was on velvet: going forward in my work (firing at present but with the job of driver in my sights), and happy at Sowerby Bridge Shed, which was just a mile outside Halifax.

I was newly wed, settled in Back Hill Street, Halifax, with three rooms for me and the wife, and a room upstairs to let, all ready and waiting with bed turned down and a spirit stove for making tea. Marriage suited me very well, in a roundabout sort of way. I liked being with the wife, and I also liked being away from her, for a little while at least.

My oysters had arrived and I set to. A woman at the next table leant across to give me the news that she 'could sit by this window, supping tea all day long'.

'Same here!' I said, turning to look out again at a paddle steamer going between the piers. Of course, I thought, they're not real sailors out there, the ones that meddle with wind and wild sea and darkness, but they were coping with quite a swell, for all the brightness of the day.

I then took from my pocket my Railway Magazine, to read of high dividends on the Furness Railway, new wagons on the North Staffs; and, after calling for the bill, I fell to marvelling for the umpteenth time at my Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway footplate pass.

The Lanky was run from Manchester. Fifth by size of the railway companies, its territory stretched from Liverpool in the west to Goole in the east, but the millions in between made it number one in population per mile. Every new engine was painted black for weeks on end, and that was because it was going to go to work. The Lanky was 'The Business Line' – cotton, wool and coal – but a lot of northern towns now had their own 'wakes' or holiday week, and the Lanky was all for that, because then people wanted to pack up, and they wanted to be off.

It was the johnnies in Central Timing in Manchester who planned most of the excursions. They would sit over graphs that looked like sketches of long grass bending in the wind: these were train movements, and the fellows would be squinting along the lines looking to see where the holiday specials could be slotted in alongside the ordinary trains, and if they could be they would be. Many of the excursions were put up by the Lanky itself but a good many more were dreamed up by clubs and societies, who would ask for a train to be laid on, and usually found the Lanky out to oblige, for it was all money in the bank.

One queer thing about wakes was that it was mainly a Lancashire tradition, but Halifax had its wakes. Halifax was honorary Lancashire really – a mill town like so many in Lancashire, and close to the county boundary. It was one of the things that made it foreign-seeming even to those, like myself, from other parts of Yorkshire.

Stepping out of the dining rooms I didn't bother to look at the top of the Tower, knowing it would crick my neck. I continued along a row of shooting galleries and oyster places, coming to a yard with swinging boats. The swings were on frames with scissor legs. There were four going, each with two ladies in. They all swung at the same rate, and I stood there thinking of them as governors, regulating the mighty engine of Blackpool.

There were plenty about on that Sunday, the last in April, but the Ferris wheel hadn't yet been set turning, and the twenty-three excursion platforms of Blackpool Central – the busiest station in Europe, come summertime – were sleeping in the sun.

Further along, on the seaward side of the Prom, I struck a weird-looking building: like a great brick pudding with fancy white icing into which were carved in curly letters the words 'The Seashell'. It was a music hall of sorts. There were three lots of revolving doors and beside each one a potted palm dancing about in the breeze. How they kept them going in that windy spot was anybody's guess.

As I watched, a little fellow walked up, carrying a carpet bag and a long stepladder, heading for the middle door. I thought: now what's his programme for getting those ladders through those doors? But instead he set the ladder down between two of the doors and climbed it, bag in hand. He was the man who changed the bills, and there was a whole alphabet in his bag. I was quite a one for music hall – I had seen Little Titch at the Tivoli just before quitting London – so I hung about to watch.

The fellow with the ladder had just taken down the letters spelling out the bill-topping turn 'Three Jinks in a Jungle', when I spotted a little bloke watching alongside me: dirty boater and hardly any teeth.

'How do,' he said.

'How do,' I said back. Then: 'What's "Three Jinks in a Jungle"?'

'Concertina band,' he said.

A tram went past just then, making a noise of a piano, kettle drum and a baby screaming.

'Where does the jungle come in?' I asked, and the man shook his head, as if to say: Blowed if I know. But it hardly mattered, since the Jinks were coming off anyway.

Then I watched with the toothless fellow as the new ones went up. First came an M, then O, N, S…

'Exciting this,' the fellow said.

Next came I, E, U and R, and the man on the ladder climbed down, being able to reach no further across. As he moved his ladder, Toothless tapped me on the shoulder.

'French,' he said, and I nodded. 'Glorious day,' I said, and the fellow nodded back.

I would have gone into the Seashell and watched the show, but I'd promised the wife I would be home before tea.

Clive had the rattlers jumping behind us now. We must have been up to seventy miles an hour, and the engine had more to give yet. I wanted to see how much, so even though I'd put nearly a ton on since Halifax Joint, and my shirt was well nigh soaked through with sweat, it was no trouble to keep going with the shovel.

Clive kept looking through the spectacle glass, along the length of the high boiler, aiming the engine. I wondered whether he was looking out for Blackpool Tower, like any tripper.

Presently, in a kind of dream of speed, I moved over to the side and forced my head out for a bit of a blow. We were between the villages of Salwick and Kirkham, flying through a simple world of grass and sky, with all signals dropped.

There were two lines: the 'up' (which was ours), and the 'down' alongside. I yelled across to Clive – some word even I didn't know; something like the sort of cries the holiday- makers would give when stepping into the sea. Holding fast to my cap, I twisted about and looked back. All the excursionists' heads were in, and no bloody wonder.

'Clive…' I began. But he didn't seem to hear. 'Clive,' I said again, 'the distant for Kirkham

No answer.

I knew we'd have this distant signal to look out for soon, but Clive was still looking through the shaking spectacle glass, with his gloves resting on the engine brake. Not his hands, but his gloves, which he had removed. He was studying the speed, frowning over it.

I put my head out once more but had to bring it in directly on account of not being able to breathe. I had seen sunbeams zooming along the line. Taking a gulp of breath, I tried again, looking backwards this time, and I saw, miles across the fields behind us, a train drifting and daydreaming along, or that's how it seemed compared to our speed. I knew it to be the 8.36 from Halifax Joint, the regular daily Blackpool express, which ran even on Sundays and had followed us all the way but only now come into view, the country being flat in the Fylde.

Turning back around, I glimpsed the air over our own chimney. It was a smooth grey, steady in colour. I smiled at the sight, as befitting a true-born galloper, but something slammed right into my eye, a bug or fly that set it burning, so I pulled myself back in.

Then there was a different kind of rushing air, and I was swaying forwards, and then came a duller roar, with the train kind of seizing up. Clive had the brake handle pushed hard over. He was mouthing to me, but with the roar of the brake I could hear nothing. I looked again out of my side and could see nothing up ahead but clear line. But something was wrong.

I came in again, and was bounced forward once more by the braking motion: the engine wanting to go on and wanting to stop, both at the same time. We were still running at sixty or so, and the brakes had been on for a half a minute.

I looked out again and saw an extra article ahead: not a signal, not grass, not track, but something on the track – might have been five hundred yards off, and we were fairly speeding towards it, even with the vacuum brake on at the fullest. Clive was at the whistle now, giving two sharp screams for the guard, Reuben, to screw down his brake from his van. I felt that brake come, but still the seven-foot wheels of the Highflyer wanted to go on. We'd be thrown off if we hit the obstruction, no question, and half the fucking train with us. I looked at the reversing lever and Clive was there. It was the last ditch.

As Clive pulled the reverser, I fell, smashing backwards into the door of the cab locker, and the scream of those mighty wheels filled the blue sky. We skated, screeching for a quarter mile, and I saw through the spectacle glass a windmill not turning, a bird not flying but hanging in the sky, the whole world stalemated under this new sound. I looked through the glass at the chimney of the Flyer: the smoke was going up, and then came the sight that's lived in my dreams to this day: not only the smoke and steam, but the chimney rising too, and a horrible complicated bettering going on beneath the engine.

When at last we came to a halt, Clive looked at me, and said: 'Wreckers.'

He turned and jumped straight off the footplate. I followed him down, and along to the front.

Well, it was the wrongest thing I ever saw.

The engine had tried to make a break away from the rails. Sixty tons, and we'd taken flight. The front bogey – the front four wheels, that is – were off the rails. Its supporting frame was bent, and the iron rods that were supposed to guard the wheels had been pushed back. Underneath the buffers, like something spat out, was a grindstone about four feet across.

Clive seemed pretty calm, though he was booting the rail twenty to the dozen and kept smoothing back his hair. 'Bastards,' he said. He knelt down next to one of the front bogey wheels. 'Flange is cracked,' he said.

'John Ellerton told us not to break the engine,' I said. 'And now we have done.'

Not much use, that remark, as I knew even at the time.

Clive was now looking back along the length of the train: 'They're breaking loose,' he said.

The Hind's Mill excursionists were climbing down from the carriages.

'They'd have been shaken to buggery in those old rattlers,' I said.

'Aye,' said Clive, 'we might have burst a few noses when the reverser came on.'

The doors were opening all along the train, and some of the excursionists, seeing the six-foot drop down to the grass, stayed put, but others were pitching themselves out. I could also make out old Reuben Booth climbing down from his guard's van. What you can do with when getting off a train at seventy years old is a platform, and Reuben seemed to hang, shaking for a while before letting himself drop. It was strange to see his body fall because normally he was so slow. As he landed, a book he'd been holding spilled out of his hand.

The excursionists were coming forwards now: Sunday suits, boaters and caps: faces frowning at having stopped somewhere short of Blackpool. They all wore the white rosettes and looked like supporters of a football team that had no name. Reuben was following behind, and he was reading a book as he came.

'What's Reuben up to?' I asked Clive, still feeling shaken and not seeing things aright. 'He's never reading a book, is he?'

'Looks like it,' said Clive. 'I'll tell you what, it must be a bloody good one.'

But then it came to me that the book must be his guard's manual.

The excursionists got to us first, hot and dusty from the track ballast. They all looked at the grindstone for a while.

'Who put that there?' said one of them.

Clive looked at me and rolled his eyes, before turning to the excursionist. 'Wreckers,' he said.

'You the driver?' said another excursionist, pointing to Clive.

'Depends,' said Clive. He was reaching into his poacher's pockets, taking out one of his little cigars. 'You're not going to start yammering on about being given a rough ride, I hope. We had all on to stop in time.'

'Daresay,' said the first excursionist, 'but Mr Hind's not going to be best pleased.'

Just then, Reuben came up with his book – it was his guard's manual. 'Stoppage or failure of engine?' he said, looking up from the book.

You could tell the excursionists couldn't quite credit this, but they shuffled out of the road in any case, to let Reuben see the millstone.

'Obstruction on the line,' I said.

'Then it's wrong page,' said Reuben, and there was a bit of cursing at this from the excursionists. Blackpool was waiting, and they were watching an old man read a book in the middle of a meadow.

Beyond Reuben, Martin Lowther was walking towards us in his gold coat, and behind him came the only man in the field wearing a topper. That had to be Hind himself, or was it Hind's father, for he was getting on in years.

Reuben licked his finger and turned over a few leaves of the manual. '"Should any part of the train in which the continuous brake is not in operation -" No, that's not it.'

There were two excursionists at my elbow. One of them was shaking his head, muttering 'Premier Line, they call themselves'. I looked him up and down: little fellow, coat over his arm. Still sweating, though.

'No sir,' I said, 'that is the Great Northern. We are "The Business Line".'

Well, they fell about at that for a while, but went quiet as Lowther and Hind came up: first a ticket inspector, then their governor – it could hardly have been a worse look-out for the poor buggers. But Lowther stopped twenty yards shy of us. As soon as he saw the stone on the line, he sat down, just sat right down in the bluebells beside the track, all crumpled inside his gold lace. There would be no more ticket inspecting that day. Beyond him, the bathtub was being passed down from one of the middle carriages.

But the mill-owner continued to approach at a steady pace. He was a big, stale-looking fellow of about sixty: the younger of the two Hinds. The excursionists shuffled down the track bank as he came near. Hind did not wear a white rosette. As he walked, the dust from the track ballast somehow did not land on his boots. His boots kicked it away, and I wondered what he'd hoped to be up to in Blackpool when all his people were at the dancing platforms, the grotto railways and hot- pea saloons.

When he spoke, he sounded like the excursionists, but more used to being listened to.

'I see we've nearly come a very nasty cropper.'

'Nearly, sir,' said Clive. 'It was seen in good time though.'

Hind nodded. You couldn't tell if he was angry or not. 'My father, who is ninety-nine, was pitched from one side of the compartment to another,' he said.

'And is he quite all right?' asked Clive.

'He suffers with his heart, but has a very strong constitution… which the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway has today tested to the full.'

Even that might have been a good thing from the way he said it.

'You'll find it hard to credit,' Hind said, 'but this is Father's first time on a train. He cannot be doing with them, but he'd decided to try the experience once.'

I thought: Christ, we're for it now. But Hind didn't seem too put out.

'I'm sure there's been no irregularity,' he went on, 'but I'll have both your names if you don't mind.'

'Clive Carter,' said Clive.

'Jim Stringer,' I said.

'Might we get this stone shifted?' said Hind, 'And then get on? My work-people are to be served with early teas by the Tower Company. And I have most important business to conduct on the seafront at Blackpool in exactly two hours' time.'

As he turned and walked back towards the engine, Clive said, 'Who does he think he is? King bloody Canute?'

Reuben Booth, who was still at his book, began reading again: '"When a train is stopped by accident or obstruction, the guard, if there be only one, or the rear guard, if there be more than one… "'

Hind looked at Reuben for a while, then turned and walked back towards 1418. As he did so, I looked at the crocked engine. A derailment: it had happened to me. It would be in the papers. The Board of Trade would send down an inspector. I felt like the tightrope walker who has fallen off the tightrope.

'Reuben,' I said, 'we must get the detonators down.'

'That's it,' he said, but went straight away back to reading his manual: '"Detonators shall be placed as follows: one detonator a quarter of a mile from the train -"'

'Is it a job for guard or fireman, Reuben?' I asked. 'What do you reckon?'

'It says here,' said Reuben Booth: '"The detonators should be placed by the guard or any competent person.'"

Clive looked over at me: 'You'd better do it then Jim,' he said in an under-breath, and it was hard not to laugh.

'It's all in hand,' said Reuben, 'leave it up to me.'

We watched as Reuben plodded back to his guard's van, climbed up, stayed up there for quite a while, climbed down with the detonators over his shoulder. They looked like belts with boot-polish tins attached. Reuben dropped one, slowly bent down and picked it up, and set off along the track back in the direction of Salwick.

'What's that bit of kit he's got hold of?' asked a fellow from the crowd of excursionists that was by now standing about us.

'Detonators,' I said.

'Explosives, like?' said the first excursionist.

I nodded.

The excursionist thought about this for a while. 'He wants one of them up his arse,' he said.

Clive was puffing at his cheroots.

'He'll lay the detonators on the track,' I said, 'so that any train coming up behind us will set them off.'

'What? And get blown to bloody Kingdom Come?' said the excursionist. 'Can we not just somehow warn it instead?'

It was hard to believe how Hind's Mill turned out any cloth at all if this was the class of fellow they had working in it, and Clive was grinning so that his little cigar was at a crazy angle.

They only give out a bang,' I said. 'But there's no need of them really because the signalman back at Salwick won't let another train in this section until the fellow at Kirkham gives him the bell to say we're clear of it.'

'So your pal's wasting his time?' said another excursionist, and we all watched Reuben in the distance, walking like a clockwork soldier because he would stick to the track and the sleepers, instead of going along the field, which would have doubled his rate of progress.

'I do hope he is,' I said, and then I asked Clive: 'Do you reckon we can shift the stone?'

'We'll have a go,' he said.

Some of the excursionists offered to give a hand, but there was only room for two to grip it. We had to graft but we got it off the rails. It wouldn't have been so hard to get it on, though, for small embankments rose up from the track just at this point. The stone could have been rolled down onto the line.

We'd no sooner shifted the stone than the bloody motorist from before -1 was sure it was the same fellow – came skimming along through the field next to us, trailing a great cloud of dust and sand. It looked as if he was driving clean through the pasture alongside the track, but there was a road, although a pretty rough sort going by how much the motorist was chucking up behind him. I looked down at the stone.

'It was brought here along that road,' I said.

Clive said nothing. He was again booting the rail, looking gormless.

A train was coming towards us on the other line, the 'down'; it was shimmering in the heat, so that the train itself looked like steam. When it came close, the driver leant out and gave us a wave, then shouted something that was drowned by his engine and gave us a couple of screams on his whistle. It was one engine pulling seven empty tenders – a water special, coming back from filling the water columns at Central.

An excursionist called to me: 'What's he carrying?'

'His train's empty,' I said.

The excursionist thought about this for a while. 'What was he carrying?' he called back.

I didn't want to talk about this. All of a sudden, I had no appetite for railway subjects. 'Water,' I said.

'Where to?'

'Blackpool.'

'Don't they have enough?' said the excursionist.

'No.'

'You'd think they would,' he said. 'I mean, they've the sea for starters.'

'The engines need fresh,' I said, 'and country round here dries fast in this weather.'

Clive came up to me and we started walking back to the Highflyer, which was leaking steam and looking embarrassed at being half off the rails, and walked about by excursionists.

Clive was saying, 'I like these mill girls in their summer toilettes.'

About half of Hind's Mill were down on the pasture by now, and they'd taken their boxes, blankets and bottles down with them. The sun was high; it was about dinner time, and the excursionists were picnicking; either that or they were stretched out reading their penny papers, drinking ginger beer.

I liked mill girls in their summer toilettes, when you could see a bit more of their hair, spilling out from under their bonnets (in the mills it was kept up all the time). The weavers among them could earn the big penny, even the half-timers, and they always had a lot 'off'. They would dash about Halifax, looking always on the edge of opportunity, while the men would sort of mooch along behind.

We came up to Martin Lowther, who was still sitting by the track, sweltering in his gold coat. He would not take it off, for then he'd be somebody else. 'It goes down as "exceptional causes",' he said, in his morngy voice, looking out at the field and not in our direction. 'A train can only be stopped by engine, by signals, or by exceptional causes.'

'Did you find anyone in want of a ticket?' I asked him.

'Not so far.'

'It probably wouldn't do to carry on looking,' said Clive.

Lowther sighed. He'd struck a loser with us. He'd have been better off on that Leeds train he'd been after boarding.

We were back at 1418 by now, watching all the skylarking excursionists. A game of cricket had been got up in the shadow of the half-wrecked engine; somebody was playing a mouth organ. I asked a gang of them who were just lying about: 'Why do you all have these rosettes?'

'It's the white rose of Yorkshire,' said an excursionist. 'It shows we're from Hind's Mill in Halifax, and that we're to be served a free tea and a parkin at the Tower when we get to Blackpool.'

'If…' said one of the excursionists, very slowly.

'Your governor wasn't wearing one,' said Clive.

'Well,' said the same excursionist, 'don't think that means he won't be getting a free tea and a parkin at the Tower.'

'Rum,' said Clive, as we walked on.

'I wouldn't work in a mill for fortunes,' I said, and then I felt quite lost because for the first time in my life, I wasn't sure that I wanted to work on the railways.

In the distance ahead I could see Reuben making his slow way back to the train, this time by the side of the track. He'd learnt his lesson about walking on sleepers. You could always bank on Reuben to get there in the end. My guess was that he'd be carrying the chit from the signalman that would let us move on. As I watched, he picked up one of the detonators he'd laid a few minutes before, so I swung myself back up onto the engine.

The fire was in good order, so I picked up the Courier.

'Hundreds of detectives guard the King of Spain' I read, but couldn't be bothered to find out why. I leant out and looked along the track. Clive was in front of the engine talking to a lass, so things were going on as usual with him.

How was it, I wondered, that Clive had seen the stone so early? I'd been looking out, my eyes were Ai, and I'd not been able to make it out. There again it had been lying flat on the rails. It might not have tripped us up after all; we might have gone clean over it.

I opened the fire doors and pitched the Courier in. It fluttered like a bird for less than a second, and was gone.

You'd read about railway wreckers from time to time: little articles in the corners of newspapers. I had an idea about the death rate on the railways: as a passenger, the chances against being killed were 1 in 30 million. I'd read that somewhere in the Railway Magazine.

Wreckers… They wanted to make a train jump – for fun. I banged the fire doors shut. They were kids; or drunks. Drunken kids.

We were a fair distance from either Salwick or Kirkham, so anyone putting that stone on the rails would have a chance of not being seen; there again you'd do well to have a motorcar if that was your programme. And while you weren't likely to strike a great crowd hereabouts, you'd be exposed to the view of the odd individual for a long time. The stone had been put on one of the fastest stretches of line to be found, so it would have been known that any train coming to meet it would be doing so at a lick. Well, they would have known it if they'd any knowledge of railways.

I stood up to reach for my tea bottle, and saw through the glass that Reuben was playing the gooseberry, interrupting Clive and the woman on the track ahead. Clive was nodding, so I reckoned we'd been given permission to take our train on.

And then there was a woman, her head below the level of my boots, looking up. Her hat was off. She did not look like a person on an excursion.

'Will you come along here?' she said. She was crying. She had a face that should have been happy. Should have been pretty too – would have been when she was younger. It was a sharp, small face. She looked like a sort of older fairy.

'Someone hurt?' I asked, and she nodded.

I put down my tea bottle on the sandbox. Then, with a guilty feeling, I remembered the first-aid or ambulance box that ought to be in the locker of any engine. I opened the locker door, and there it was: a wooden box with the word 'accident' hand-painted on the lid. I caught it up, jumped down from the engine and went after the woman.

As she walked, the words were coming between sobs: 'I didn't want her down… didn't want her stifled and jostled in that way… it was cooler up… so I left her on the seat. Well, she was sleeping…'

As she spoke, I opened the box. There was a bottle of carbolic, a roll of bandage (not over-clean), a tub of ointment of some kind, and a little book: What to Do in an Emergency by Dr N. Kenrick F.R.S.E. etc. Price one shilling. I flipped it open as I followed the woman along the side of the carriages: 'Treatment for the Apparently Drowned'. 'Drowning is a very frequent accident,' I read. Not on the bloody railways it isn't, I thought. But this wasn't a railway book at all. I read on, feeling vexed: 'Cases of Poisoning… A List of Poisons.'

We came up to the fourth rattler from the engine, and someone was saying: 'Oh she's been terribly bashed.'

I pulled myself up to the compartment and there was a woman lying across the seats on one side, with three others standing over her, blocking my view of her head and face. They all had the rosettes on; the rosettes were too big, and there were too many of them for this small space. The women shifted, and I got a proper sight of the one lying down: she was very beautiful, with green eyes and fair hair. I could picture her, not in a mill, but as the good fairy in a pantomime, and she looked a little like the woman who had come for me. But as I looked, she moved her head slightly and vomit rolled from her mouth. The stuff was pink. It spread across the red cloth of the seat.

'Oh!' said one of the women, 'and her so neat in all her ways!' She fell to mopping at the vomit with a shawl.

There was a boy on the opposite seat with a dog alongside him. On his knees was a book: Pearson's Book of Fun. I looked at him for a second. He was staring straight ahead and his white rosette was bent, as if he'd tried to fight it off. The woman who'd come for me was in the carriage too, talking in a low voice to the women around me. She turned to me and said: 'She was reaching for her box on the luggage rack when the great jerk came. It was to get a book down for her boy. We think she's taken a concussion, but she's not too poorly.'

'Let me see,' I said, 'I have an ambulance box.'

At which the woman lying down was sick once more.

She gave me a half-smile as the woman with the shawl began mopping again. She said something and the woman with the shawl replied: 'You are not holding up the excursion, love.'

'No,' I said, 'there's other things doing that. The engine's come off the tracks,' I added, speaking directly to the woman lying down, but she'd closed her eyes by now.

'Just you wait 'til you see that ocean, love,' said the woman with the shawl. 'Just you wait until you do. Like nothing on earth, it is. Why, it never ends you know.'

She turned to me: 'She's never seen the sea, you know. She's a widower, and she's always stayed at home with her boy when we've had excursions in the past. She particularly wanted this compartment because it had views of the sea.'

Above the seats, there were photochrome pictures of the Front at Blackpool.

I said, 'I think the boy should climb down… And the dog.'

'Why?' said another of the women. 'Whatever are you going to do?'

They all looked at the ambulance box that was in my hand. The rosette on the bosom of the woman lying down rose and fell in an uncertain way.

I turned to the lad and said, 'Want to see the engine, mate? She's a Highflyer, one of Mr Aspinall's… quite a beast, you know.'

The kid just stared back. He had a complicated face, the sort that can frown without trying. He also had too much hair, and his coat was too short, and too thick for the weather.

As I looked at the boy, I could hear his mother being sick for a third time.

'Oh, may God help her,' said the woman with the shawl, and I knew this was a bad lookout, with God coming into things.

The woman with the shawl was mopping again. I thought the boy was about to cry, so I said: 'It's a handsome dog. What sort is he?'

'A very good sort,' said the boy.

I looked at the dog, and all in a moment the sun coming into the carriage had turned its eyes to glass circles.

'He's an Irish terrier,' I said.

'If you knew,' said the boy, 'why did you ask?'

'I wanted to see if you knew.'

By turning his face about an inch away from me the boy made it plain that he thought this a low trick, but he said nothing.

'Oh, she looks a little brighter now,' the woman with the shawl was saying.

'My dad had one when I was a young lad,' I said to the boy. 'He was a butcher. All butchers have got dogs.'

'I know two that don't,' said the boy.

'Well…'I said.

'I can think of three that don't,' said the boy, and he added, with a look of fury, 'Most butchers don't have dogs.'

I turned back towards the woman lying down.

'First thing,' I said. 'Let's give her some air.'

At this, one of the women told the boy to get down, and with such meaningful force that he obeyed, taking the dog with him.

'Now' I said, putting down the ambulance box and the book, 'let's help the lady sit up a little.'

And I heard a word from the one who'd come to collect me: 'No,' she said. But she said it quietly and I paid her no mind.

I leant forwards and helped the woman into a half-sitting position. Nobody moved to stop me. Directly I touched her head, my hand was both wet and dry: blood. There was a deeper red stain on the red cushion on which she'd been lying too. There was a sort of bony rumble and the woman with the shawl had fainted. I turned back to my patient. She opened her eyes, and the beautiful, surprising green-ness of them came and went all in a moment. The eyeballs had rolled up and she was white as paper. No human should ever look like that.

One of the women shouted: 'May God rest her soul.'

All was confusion after that, with everyone fighting to get to the woman and to bring her back to life, but it could not be done.

At the end of this scramble, with the compartment filled with the sound of screaming, the elderly fairy, the woman who had come to collect me from the cab and who by rights ought to have had a happy face, looked at me: 'What is your name, Mister?'

'Stringer,' I said. 'Jim Stringer.'

'Well, Mr Stringer,' she said. 'You've just killed the sweet- est-natured, most beautiful lass I've ever known, and you've left her boy an orphan.'