The Necropolis Railway

Chapter One

Saturday 14 November 1903

With the letters from Rowland Smith in my pocket, I had a lively ride from York to London: just four and a half hours in all. The engine was one of the new Atlantics of Mr Ivatt, and when she came down Stoke Bank I put aside The Railway Magazine I was reading, and leant out the window at the carriage end to experience the amazing velocity.

After Peterborough I took down my box and opened the parcel my dad had packed for me, which turned out to contain three tubs of Melton cream for my boots, and two tins of Nugget's polish, also for my boots. My dad was red-hot for smartness, smart boots especially. There was an alarm clock too – which was the next best thing to Dad coming with me because he'd always woken me up himself at home – and a green Lett's pocket diary, which might seem an out of the way sort of thing to give somebody, November sort of time, but I knew it was the kind of thing Dad would have thought gentlemanly.

I opened the first page, which was headed 'The King and the Royal Family, showing ages and annuities', and stared at it for a while, thinking: well, it's all right, but I would rather have a map of the railways. Then I took out from my pocket the letters from Rowland Smith, which had been sent to me, not from the place he worked, but from his home address: Granville Mansions, Dartmouth Park. Whenever I saw that I thought with wonder, 'In the house of the Lord there are many mansions.' It was in the Northern Division of London. I put the letters away after a few more minutes of marvelling but took them out over and again throughout the journey.

We came into Platform One at King's Cross, which was as I had expected, but what I had not expected was that half of London would be there, and most of them attempting to force me into the Ladies' Waiting Room, where I had no right nor any desire to be.

When I finally struggled free, the first thing I saw was the road packed with darting waggons, then, over the road from King's Cross, and three times the size, St Pancras. I could not believe there had ever been so many bricks in the world – it must have had more than the Eskdale viaduct and I knew for a fact there were more than five million in that. The clock said five to three; I turned back and looked at the clock on King's Cross, and that said five after, and I thought: now, that is strange, because it was impossible to imagine either the Midland or the Great Northern making a bloomer over the time, of all things, but one of them must have, and it seemed that I was only getting in everybody's way by standing there and fretting over it.

Then I spied a stream of hansoms pouring out of a little arch at the bottom of St Pancras like beetles from under a stone, and decided I would take one for the first time in my life. But as soon as I stepped into the road between King's Cross and St Pancras, I was put into another cab – one of a completely separate lot – by a lad who had lately been holding a horse's head and eating a fish. Now he was tipping his head back, and, blowing spinning bits of fish into the air from his mouth, saying, 'If this keeps up, we might be in with a fighting chance, eh, guv?'

He was talking about the sun. It had been raining in Yorkshire but the day was set fair in London, and I might just as well have stepped off a boat train, such was the newness and strangeness of it all. 'Where you off to?' shouted the fish-eating kid.

I said, 'Waterloo,' sounding not like myself, but even the horse seemed to have heard of the place for he set off without coaxing.

There were just too many people in London, and that was all about it. Sooner or later, I thought as we rolled away from King's Cross, they will have to bring this madness to a halt and get everything put straight. All the buses were marked 'Vanguard' and there was no end of motor cars. There was no end of everything else either, so that after a sprint of a start we soon settled down to a crawl, and I added a second half crown to the one I already had in my hand for the fare, fearing the price might be to do with time spent as well as distance covered.

After twenty minutes or so we came up to the river, which was something more like ten rivers side by side, all brown and glittering and packed with rolling, smoking boats, with big factories on the Waterloo side. Through a gap between two of them, I could see the engine shed of Waterloo rising above the factories and houses like a lot of giant greenhouses at an angle to the river, but the greenhouses gave out after a while, and then there were metal girders, and the automatic hammer was somewhere in there: you'd hear the bang, and then the black cloud would come up after every one.

On the other side of that rusty bridge – and I believe that in my excitement I forgot to breathe all the way across – I realised I had gone from what they called the Northern Division to the Southern Division, and when I remembered that Rowland Smith lived in the Northern Division yet worked in the Southern Division, I began to think of that gentleman as being even grander than I had already imagined, and resembling the Colossus of Ancient Greece who stands over whatever river it may be.

We came onto what I now know as Westminster Bridge Road, where trams were surging up to the people like steeplechasers. We had also struck the smell of Waterloo, which came from the station and the chimneys on the river. It was the smell of bad beer, or good pickles, or something that kept you thinking, mingled with engine smoke and another smell that was like the sea captured by factories.

We carried on under a long, low viaduct with a slow-goods hammering overhead, and when we emerged I saw a great vibrating building with steam and smoke rushing out of a line of chimneys. I had thought this would be another factory, but a sign on the roof told me it was the 'Lambeth Skating Rink'. We did not reach that building, however, but turned sharp right, going immediately under another black viaduct with another goods pounding overhead. This viaduct was enormous, and, when we came out from under, the day was not as bright as it had been before.

This dark street, which was called Lower Marsh, was all in the shadow of that great viaduct, and so the people there lived in a world of under and over: under went the houses and shops, the pubs, the people and the lines of stables, and over went the trains with a constant clanging. The shops spilled out into the street and had more goods outside than in: everybody was selling everything to everybody else, and everybody was shouting to make themselves heard over the trains. The most important thing in the street apart from the viaduct seemed to be a round pub called the Citadel: a big, orange-glowing beer-barrel sort of a place with a sign saying Red Lion Ales and Reid's Stout over and over again -1 would soon learn that in London they are never happy to just do something once.

Above the pub, above the street, and really above all, was the great station itself, the spider in the middle of the viaduct web. I knew it to serve the grandest railway in the world, the London and South Western, and yet I was surprised, for there was nothing glorious to it. Waterloo seemed to have no front and no back. It did have a roof – in parts – but there were many huge tarpaulins rising and falling in the dirty breeze over the rambling mass of bricks and glass. Under these great tents, I was sure, they were making the station bigger still, and I did not doubt that it would finish up the mightiest in the Empire. Already, as I knew from The Railway Magazine, Waterloo received 700 trains every day, compared to 250 at King's Cross. St Pancras received… a good many, I did not know the exact number, and I realised, alone in the dark little cab, that it would be a very long time before I would be able to look it up, for I had only brought the latest two numbers of The Railway Magazine in my box.

But there was no time to fret over that because the cab man called down to me through his hole. He might as well have been talking in a foreign language, but did not sound happy, so I gave him the two half crowns, thinking: well, he'll give me some of it back, at any rate. Having taken the money, though, he just opened the door. I thought: he'll hand over the change when I've stood down; it's probably that way about with hansoms. I climbed down in front of a pharmacy that seemed entirely given over to selling Vianola Soap, and watched the cab man turn in a circle, thinking: as the horse turns he'll count out the change, but the fact of the matter was that he was lighting his pipe as the horse walked, and then he was gone altogether, and the whole of my five shillings with him. I did not have much time to worry about this, though, because I now saw a sign that hit me like a bullet: Hercules Court.

I cannot now say how, on the journey down from Yorkshire, I had thought my lodge and my landlady might actually be because any memory of it has been blotted out by the thought of how they actually were. The lodge was on a corner, half in Lower Marsh and half in Hercules Court. The wall facing Lower Marsh was covered in posters, all saying, 'Smoke Duke of Wellington Cigars', except for one going out on a limb with 'Stower's Lime Juice, No Musty Flavour'. I knocked on the door of this giant cigar box and a lady opened it, releasing a smell of wash day. She was certainly not from the common run of landlady, and while she did not look well-to-do, she looked clever – her faded skirts did not matter. Her eyes were very large and yet she herself was very small, and that to me was the right way about. It would have been very easy to lift her up, I thought, but I perceived instantly that nobody would ever dare to try.

She stood aside and looked away as I dragged my box through the doorway. On the floor was brown linoleum, and the wallpaper was black, with big, glowing orange flowers. This continued up the stairs, which were so narrow that my landlady's skirts touched both walls at once. She opened a door and showed me into a room.

'It's quite commodious,' I remarked after a while, for this was the best that could be said. The wallpaper was a design of roses on a trellis; there were two windows opposite each other, not at all clean. I walked towards one of them and my landlady said, 'As you see, they give on to the garden.'

There being no grass or plants of any description, but just bricks and a coal shed, this was more of a yard, I thought. I knew about yards because we had one at home. Immediately beyond this one was a brick wall that must have been sixty foot in height, if not greater, with an oil lamp burning towards the top of it. I was just trying to think of a way of asking about it when the landlady said, with a faraway look, 'Soap works. You'll have no trouble from it.'

There was a truckle bed and a broken bamboo table with a candle end in a saucer. No gas. There was one picture over the bed which showed a glum sort of castle in a brown field with two sad-looking men standing alongside it. I walked a little way towards the bed, and saw that underneath this scene were the words 'Harrow School, 1723'.

My landlady said, 'It's a pound down,' and then, as I gazed at a small pool of water on the floor, 'I believe that you have a start on the railways?' 'I'm to begin as a cleaner,' I said.

But people don't understand how it lies with engine cleaners – they didn't then and they don't now – and I could never leave it at that. 'Cleaning', I went on, as my landlady looked down at her boots, 'is the first stage on the road that leads to firing an engine. After some months, I anticipate becoming a passed cleaner, which will mean I can do some firing duties, and then, if all goes satisfactorily, I will perhaps move on to driving on a low link: shunting work, I mean, little goods and the like. At the top of the mountain that I am endeavouring to climb -'

At that, she flashed a look at me: a kind of warning I suppose it was, looking back. But I pressed on.

'At the top of that mountain are the express drivers, the ninety-mile-an-hour chaps, that is, and I have the confident expectation of becoming one of those myself, but I will have to spend many years proving that I'm the right sort, and if I have faults my watchword will have to be that I will seek to mend one every day.'

'Yes,' she said at length, 'well, it's a pound down.' She would have no fussing about; she wanted the money in her hand. I paid up, and she wrote me a receipt there and then, very fast and determined. As she wrote, leaning on the mantelpiece, she explained the rules of the house while I looked at the water on the floor, then up at the crack in the ceiling from where it came. There had been one other gentleman staying in the lodge – a schoolmaster who rode a bicycle – but he was leaving that day. Like this gentleman, I could have my laundry done if I left it out on a Friday evening. Wash day was Saturday. Today was Saturday but there would be no more done since the boiler had just been drained.

In the kitchen, my landlady said, there was hot water that could be brought up in bowls, and some margarine, bread and preserves to which I could help myself. I asked whether there was cocoa, and she said, 'No.' I said I was partial to it in the mornings, especially Rowntree's, at which she gave me such a look that I immediately added that I could do quite well without after all.

This lodge, she then told me, was owned by her father and he also owned another lodging house in which he lived and where she spent most of the week. He was not well, and presently kept no servants: there had been a skivvy for both houses but she was sick, therefore my landlady spent a good deal of time at her father's place. But she would be in this lodge every Saturday to do the washing – for the other did not have such a good kitchen – and to collect the rent. When she had left, I quickly unpacked my box. Then, to put me in the right frame of mind for my new life, I sat on the truckle bed and began reading, in one of my two Railway Magazines, a long article about one David Hughes, 'A Great Western Railway Engine Driver Who Received the Royal Victorian Medal'. Seldom has any driver put up harder running than Mr Hughes over any territory, but it was difficult to give him my full attention, what with all the shouts and screams and railway clamour around me. After a while I took up my two numbers of The Railway Magazine and tried to stand them on the mantelshelf with a lump of coal as a prop, but they would not stay upright, not being bound, as all my others were in the regulation red leather, all standing proudly in rows on the shelves of my cosy little bedroom in Baytown. But I tried hard not to think of that.

Every now and again, as I brushed the dust off the mantel and thought, despite myself, of the balmy life I had left behind, there would come a great smashing wave of laughter and shouting rolling out of the pub just along the road. This presently mingled with another train thumping over the viaduct, and the clanging of a church bell. It was only four o'clock. But it was four o'clock in Waterloo.