The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Seventeen

Tuesday 8 December

continued I stood at the side wall of Hercules Court looking up at 'Stower's Lime Juice, No Musty Flavour'. I did not now believe that it had no musty flavour. Upon opening the door I saw in the hall a package and a letter, both addressed to me. I could see that the package was from Dad, but the letter was more mysterious. It was from Rowland Smith, and carried yesterday's date. I read it with a galloping heartbeat: he was anxious to speak to me concerning the exploits of the half-link, for, although he did not want to alarm me, he had some grave anxieties on that score. Would I reply directly, giving a time and place to meet? He knew that I, being a young man of good sense out of the common, would regard this as a matter of strictest confidentiality.

Well, I nearly laughed at it. I was in a nightmare without end, for would there not be the greatest danger in talking to him over this? Anyway, it would not come to it: I was going home.

I stood in the hall for a while re-reading the letter, wondering how I could quit my lodge with my landlady not about. I walked up to my room and paced about with the package of Dad's under my arm. There was no coal for a fire. I put my clothes and my Railway Magazines into my box, and then took the magazines out again. Why take them back? They were part of my past. I threw them onto the truckle bed.

I looked through the window giving onto the street. There were girls down there as usual, laughing outside the Vianola Soap Pharmacy, and they looked quite a proper lot this time. I wanted a fuck, and I believe I said the word out loud, which I was not in the habit of doing in any circumstances. It seemed a very London answer to agitation. Another one was drink, and all at once there seemed nothing else for it but to walk down the road to the Citadel.

I took three pints before opening the package from Dad, which contained a letter and the latest number of The Railway Magazine. In his letter, Dad spoke of a fearful storm the previous month that had sent a schooner crashing through the window of the Bay Hotel – which had happened once before, so it was as if things were going on pretty much as usual up there.

He commended to me a gentlemanly course in all things, hoping I was lacquering my boots and wearing collars on Sundays at least. He reminded me that though he himself was in quite a humble way of business, that I was not of the factory or service class, and should be mindful of that in all my dealings. He said I should speak of having taken 'rooms', and not being in a 'lodge'. He said it was all right to have a bottle of beer in doors, but that he hoped I had not become a frequenter of public houses. For his P.S., he repeated that he had very good memories of Tottenham Court Road and said it was a good spot for a Sunday jaunt.

All in a daze – that letter seemed to have come from a million miles away – I stepped out of the Citadel and walked up the driveway leading from Lower Marsh to the great station. I had been told that you only knew you were at the front of Waterloo because that was where the hansoms waited, but all I saw from my particular corner were high walls, from behind which came muffled cries and the blasting of steam engines, these two noises always coming hand in hand, with moments of silence in between. It reminded me of something, and at first I couldn't think what, but it came to me after a while that it was the little Assembly Rooms in Baytown on a Saturday morning, when they had dancing lessons, and in between the quiet times, when the dancing mistress was talking (which could not be heard from outside), the sound of the piano always came with a great clomping of feet, and it drove me half mad that you could never get either feet or music on their own.

Giving up on making any sense of Waterloo, I came down off the walkway into Westminster Bridge Road. It was dark and cold, and there was a great queue at the ice rink, which was steaming like mad, making extra ice to meet the great demand. The racing trams all carried a huge picture of a man who had improved his kidneys by eating enormous amounts of Hoffa's Vegetable Pills. He had a wide orange face and was grinning like the devil. I turned some corners, and found myself outside the Necropolis station, and there was the sign again: 'Extramural Interment: An Address'. There was no queue for this, but for me there was something mesmerising about the Necropolis show. It was the only spot in London that was not crowded, and I always seemed to have the run of the place.

I walked through the arch and mooched around the lamplit courtyard, which was not quite deserted, for as I walked past a door I heard a muffled voice muttering, 'Plate of inscription, memorial service books, superintendent and assistants, thirty-five shillings… similar without lead coffin, twenty-five shillings… Open car, or glass hearse and pair, two broughams and pairs, elm shell-lined swansdown, oak case…'

It was a strange speech to hear, for there was never any other voice, no answer to or interruption of these endless, glum particulars.

I drifted back towards the arch. The door in the arch was propped open – to admit those who wanted to hear the address, I supposed. I walked into the wooden vestibule and read the notices there for a while. The biggest was a poster talking up the cemetery: "The lovely cemetery, situated at Brookwood, is the most complete in all its arrangements, and universally admitted to be the ideal burial ground. It is the biggest in England…'

That's right, I thought, and its trains are regularly driven by the biggest pill in England, too. Alongside this were some 'press opinions': 'The privacy and quietude with which the whole business of receiving, conveying and depositing the coffins is effected cannot be too highly commended' – that was one. Another just said, 'Noted for its picturesque scenery.' Was the Necropolis truly a success or not?

I did not think so, for it was as quiet as the grave at both ends rather than just one. I began walking up the stairs, and, as I climbed, the voice of the strange Mr Stanley – in high force once again – floated down from the fourth floor: "The lightened and purified system of extramural interment cannot fail to be of interest to all, whether as regards sanitation, morals, convenience or economy.'

But by the time I had reached the doors of the room in which the address was taking place (which also had the secret signs in the wood panels, and an old dusty crest at the back), all this high and mighty stuff had given way to talk in ordinary voices. There were two people in the audience: a man in middle age wearing a salt-and-pepper suit, and an old woman in a sort of sailor's hat. The old woman was very livery though; in fact I'd have laid odds she was saturated.

'But Mr Stanley,' she said, in a voice that sounded put on, 'why are we here?'

Stanley looked at her for a long time, and I looked at him. His suit had given up trying to be black: there were black tints there but also shiny patches of a greenish shade. This fellow is always in mourning for himself, I thought. He was a big, dangling fellow, with sad eyes of a kind of orange colour, and a long yellow face – all in all his looks matched a certain kind of illness that I had read of but could not at the time put a name to.

Stanley glanced in my direction as I entered the room and sat down, but gave no sign of happiness that his audience had suddenly increased.

'We are here,' said Stanley to the woman after a while (and as he spoke the big voice swelled), 'to deliberate nothing less than the furtherance of a city of the dead, a cemetery that will suffice for the absorption of the annual metropolitan mortality, not only for the present generation, or for many years, but for all generations – even until the last trumpet shall sound and the dead arise.'

'Mr Stanley,' said the saturated lady, 'have you ever heard "Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day" by Mr Sullivan? Oh, it is a most excellent ditty with such a pretty tune. I heard it myself, performed at a Chappell Ballad Concert in St James's Church Hall.'

'What has this to do with extramural interment?' asked the man in the salt-and-pepper suit, looking straight ahead, and not at the high-spirited old lady.

'Mr Stanley, I hold St James's Church Hall to be the very place for the address. It is always packed to the rafters! Here you are rather out of the way. There you will be in the thick of things. Think of it, Mr Stanley – the address on interment following hard upon a zither recital or a pianoforte concert. People will naturally linger on after the one and more than likely flock in for a look at the other.' Stanley said nothing to this but just slowly began to frown.

'I too have a question,' said the man in the salt-and-pepper suit. 'Shortly before the establishment of the Necropolis and the incorporation of your company, seven commercial cemeteries were created in the suburbs of London.' "They are of a limited capacity,' said Mr Stanley wearily.

'They are Kensal Green,' said the man, 'West Norwood, Highgate, Nunhead, Abney Park and Brompton and Tower Hamlets, and between them they hold a good many dead. There followed legislation allowing the creation of further burial places in London, and of late the boroughs have been required to supply grave-sites too. You speak of the seventy thousand interred on top of one another in the two hundred square yards of St Martin-in-the-Fields, but no such horror can occur again, and nor need it, for the fact is that wholly adequate provision is now made within the boundaries of the city and the Necropolis is nothing but a vast anachronism.' I had this fellow down as a rich sort of bloke who had nothing better to do with his time than go around putting a crimp into the dreams of others – and Stanley did not answer him back but merely said, in his ordinary voice: 'Are there any other questions?'

'Mr Stanley,' said the woman, 'when were you last at the cemetery?'

'Some four months ago,' said Stanley. 'Its picturesque beauties were at their height.'

'Did you see the Actor's Acre in bloom?' said the woman. 'I should love to have seen that. There is a part of the cemetery, sir,' she said, leaning over at an unnatural angle in order to address the man in the salt-and-pepper suit, 'reserved for entertainers of one sort or another. I have my name down for a plot there because I am a theatrical myself.'

'I can see that perfectly well, madam,' said the man as he picked up his Derby hat and started walking towards the door.

I followed him out and down the stairs, leaving poor Mr Stanley to the theatrical lady.

I was back in my lodge ten minutes later feeling blue, too tired to think straight, and looking down at all the pretty doxies on Lower Marsh – one under every lamp now. I would go to work in the morning: I might as well get the boot before returning home. A train went over the viaduct and rattled my room, but did not bother the women, who were like the flowers that grow along the railway embankments. I lay back down on my bed and read, in the edition of The Railway Magazine that Dad had sent, of some notable railway journeys in Portugal that some bearded fellow had taken, but I put it aside almost immediately. It is a paper for boys, I thought, and I pushed that journal off my truckle bed because I had other business there for the minute.