The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Three

Baytown It seems a horror to think of it now, so many years on, but the whole of my life is divided into the times before Rowland Smith came strolling along that platform at Grosmont, and the times after. 'Before' started in 1884, the year in which I was born, my mother died, and the railway came to Baytown.

Baytown, which the gentry called Robin Hood's Bay, was just a few tall thin houses – a quiver of arrows on the edge of the sea – and if one dog barked, everybody heard it. Dad thought he was the cream of Baytown because he was a butcher and not a fisherman. He told me that the trouble with Baytown wasn't that it stank of fish but that it stank of fishermen, and perhaps that's why I started to like the trains, which called at this funny, fishy little town but didn't have to stay.

If you stood on the front with your back to the sea you could see the train come across the top of the cliffs from Hawsker in the north, stop at Baytown, then head south to Ravenscar. Only two people watched them with me and the first was Crazy May, who was crazy, maybe because she had one eye lower than the other, and who all day long crushed crabs on the beach for the seagulls and couldn't remember whether it was the trains that were scared of the horses or the horses that were scared of the trains.

The other was Mr Hammond, who had been a swell in his day but had made a mistake in London which was never to be spoken of, but had put him in Queer Street, so that he could no longer be in business. When I was tiny he took me on the train to the West Cliff marshalling yard at Whitby and we would watch a little 172-class cutting fruit and fish specials. That was the engine for me because it had a name: Robin. As we watched, Mr Hammond smoked cigarettes and told me the differences between a handbrake, an engine brake and a vacuum brake, and so on. He was very amiable considering I was just a kid. "The smoke box is at the front of the engine,' he would say, 'and the firebox is at the back.' He must have told me that hundreds of times before it sank in.

Later on, Dad and I would ride the train to Darlington to watch the Atlantics flying down the main line. After every one that went past, I would look up at him and say, 'What about that, Dad?' and the poor fellow always had to think of something to say, for I had no mother after all.

I had no aspirations to a life at sea; I did not want to be a butcher either. I would look at the letters on Dad's shop -'Stringer: Family Butcher' – and wonder what there was 'family' about it. I remember the barrels of ice in the cold room at the back and the fire in the shop at the front – those two always fighting each other, it wore me out to think of it somehow. My ambition instead was to be on the railways. I read everything I could lay my hands on that had for a subject trains, and had The Railway Magazine every month for 6d, which my Dad paid for because he thought it was improving. Not that he wanted me on the railways. Dad wanted me in his shop, but he changed his tune when myself and three other lads from Baytown were offered five bob each to build a bonfire for Captain Fairclough's firework-night carnival.

Fairclough lived at Ravenhall, and the whole headland was his garden. The fire took a while to get up, but I was told it was still smoking on the seventh, and I expect that's why the Captain sent me a letter, having heard from one of the other lads that I wanted a start on the North Eastern. Fairclough had more connections than York station, and he said that he would be willing to write to the general manager of the North Eastern Railway telling him I was an eminently suitable person to go on.

Now, if Captain Fairclough, who had done something at Khartoum and got the QMG for it, had suggested informing the Governor of Armley Gaol that I was a very good person for a fifteen-year stretch, then that would have been it as far as Dad was concerned: I would have been off. But he did still want me clerking in some way. 'I would prefer you in a post offering some prospect of advancement to stationmaster,' he would tell me, 'and I do not mean stationmaster at Robin Hood's Bay.'

'But the fellow up there, Langan, has thirty shillings a week,' I would say, 'and with his coal auctions he does a lot better than that. They're not lawful, of course, but that's all right.'

I would say things like that so as to tease Dad, and in hopes of making our pretty part-time slavey, Emma, start laughing, because then she was even prettier.

Dad took to spending evenings in the back parlour with The Railway Magazine, and in the morning he might say, in a thoughtful sort of way, "There are twenty thousand bikes taken into Newcastle station every year.' 'I know that, Dad,' I would say. 'Who do you suppose is in charge of them?' "The bicycle booking clerk, Dad. Who else is it going to be?'

'He would have to be quite a respectable party, looking after that amount of bikes.'

I did not want to be a bicycle booking clerk, so I would give no opinion on that. I wanted to be a driver, and I knew I could do it. I'd practised on my safety bike by coming down Askrigg Hill without touching the brakes or without hands on the handles, and without a lamp if it was after dark. I secretly felt that I was built for high speed: my eyesight, I felt certain, was six-six, and I knew I had the lean looks of an engine man. But Dad got his way, and I applied to the North Eastern for something that would lead me into the clerical line all the same. I had my certificates, and my testimonial from that famous gentleman, Captain Fairclough, and my letter was very well greased: 'I feel that I am able to hold my own in a gentlemanly way… I am seventeen years old, and need scarcely say that I am a total abstainer…' (Which was true give or take the odd sip of dad's Sunday night jugs of ale).

I was called to York by some johnnies in top coats who said there was a chance I could go on immediately as a lad porter at Grosmont, but first I had to answer such out-of-the-way questions as 'What is the difference between up and down?' I got my start the following week.