The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Six

Tuesday 17 November – Friday 20 November

On my second morning as a Nine Elms man, I woke to find that the pool on the floor of my lodge and the black mark on the ceiling had been added to considerably. I looked out of the window: it was raining hard, and London in the rain, with all the colour and light gone, frightened me. So too, and for the first time, did thoughts of a life on the railways.

It was as though I had brought down a curse on myself for coming out with the name of Rowland Smith, I decided as I pulled on my boots. Arthur Hunt, who may have looked like a wolf but was the only man I had so far met who was the right sort, had dismissed me from the rough steps of the half-link drivers' mess and gone back to his paper. Vincent had stared after me, while the somewhat friendlier fellow, Barney Rose, had given a half smile through the window as if to say, 'I'm sorry for you, mate, but what can I do?' I had spent the rest of the day wandering around Nine Elms in a daze, with only the token in my pocket to say I had a job at all.

I went out into the dark street. The saturated man was there, banging his stick, and the queer thing was that from the look of his face you could tell he was aiming at solemnity. There was a great roaring coming from within the station. It was somewhere between the wind trapped in a chimney and the elephant house at a zoo. I bought a cup of coffee and a cheese sandwich from the barrow under the railway viaduct in Westminster Bridge Road, from which a whole gang of people seemed to get their living. On the other side of the street were three women, not going anywhere. They were next to a brazier with half the cinders tipped out of it. They were all beautiful, but too thin and too dirty, part of the very street. As I looked, one of them said something to another, and this second one turned and gave me a look I could not understand. Later, I thought there might have been a question in it – a notion that set my head spinning.

I drained my cup and set off on my new route from the lodge to Nine Elms: into Westminster Bridge Road with the trams already racing in the rain, then down the steps to the Embankment, with the black river to my right, and the wet, dark gardens to my left. Continuing west, I struck a district of factories: a distillery with high windows that made yellow patterns on the dark water, two gasworks and a brewery. I felt very compressed as I walked along that narrow path between the silent factories and the river, but it did save ten minutes on my journey.

In the gatehouse I tried to give a cheery 'Hello' to Mr Crook. I had decided to put from my mind the first day; I would start all over again in the hopes of this time seeking out some men a bit more like driver Hughes in The Railway Magazine, as well as getting a leg in with the ones of a more ordinary sort. But Crook just kept his head bent over his metal chequerboard. He had pinned up over the fireplace a new article concerning the weather: 'MORE FOG', it said, but I hadn't noticed any so far, only rain. When he gave me the token, it was with no friendly word, or any word at all.

Things got worse too, for I was stopped on the ash patch before the sheds by a red-headed fellow who said he was Flannagan, the charge cleaner. He was at an angle because he had one leg longer than the other; he also should have been Irish with a name like that but he was not. None of these things was his fault but they made me take against him, and he had certainly taken against me.

I said I was on my way to see the Governor, having been instructed to report to him each day, and Flannagan staggered for a second in front of me before saying, 'He's not in, he's taken sick. I'm putting you to tidying up coal.'

'But am I not to clean the Bampton tanks Twenty-Nine and Thirty-One?' I said.

"They're perfectly clean as it is' replied Flannagan, and there was no answer to that. 'Get yourself a shovel from stores.'

The stores were in a long building slotted in the gap between the two middle roads in the shed, which were slightly further apart than all the others. There was a desk with a sort of black brick tunnel behind it that was full of everything that could be carried and had a fire going at the back of it. There was a man in there asking for a set of fire irons: dart, pricker and paddle. The dart was the subject of a jolly chat between him and the storekeeper, and the pricker and paddle caused a near riot of laughter when the storekeeper finally turned them up. But when this fellow had gone the storekeeper stood before me like a pillar of stone.

'I'd like a shovel, please' I said, and he gave me the evil eye for a while. Then he moved off to get it and when he returned, I said: 'Don't you want my number?' 'I know your fucking number,' he said.

I couldn't ask him why he spoke in that way, for I didn't trust my voice not to shake. There was a row of coal pens near the coaling stage where all day long the biggest blokes in Nine Elms stood on coal waggons on an embankment and flung the stuff down into the engines that drew up on the lines below. On the first day of this duty – which was really just a way of making a fellow eat dog – I put myself wholeheartedly into the job, but it soon came to me that there was no difference between the bits of coal I'd tidied up and the bits of coal that I hadn't, and I began to spend half my time crowning rats with my shovel.

I would also kill time by trying to name the engines I saw coming off-shed. There were several 0-4-4 tanks of the M7 Class, many O2s of the same wheel arrangements, and all kinds of 4-4-0 tender engines, including K10s and the T9s, or Greyhounds, which seemed to be the maids of all work about the place. Being so close to these wonderful motors and having prospects of riding out on them should have put me in great snuff, but all I could think was that each had two men on the footplate, and here was I without a mate.

As to the blokes who came by my coal heaps on foot, I soon gave up nodding at them. They were passing me all the time: riding bikes, pushing barrows or just mooching along close enough for me to smell the smoke from their pipes, but the only one who stopped, apart from Flannagan – who'd stagger up to scold me on the untidiness of the coal from time to time – was a tiny man with a suitcase who said that if I was to have any hope of becoming a passed cleaner, I'd better have some books. It was heartening that he had in mind my ultimate goal, but the books in his suitcase were expensive. I bought Continuous Engine Brakes, though, which he said was very galvanising and was willing to let go at one and six.

This I would glance at while taking my suppers of fried tatters and bacon alone at a dining room near my lodge.

I kept myself to my lodge or the dining rooms, for I'd had a bit of a fright on only my second day in Lower Marsh. In the evening, thinking to have a bit of a look about, I had come across three men of the world under the viaduct. Their clothes were rags, but their boots were big and shiny, and the one nearest to me, who had the face of a doll and very glittering eyes, looked down at his boots and up to my face with a grin, as if he meant to bring the two together. I had them down as a kicking gang, and was sure they would have set about me had not a constable come by at that moment – he never said a word, but the three walked backwards away from me as he passed, letting me keep their bootcaps in view for as long as possible.

I hadn't funked it; it had never come to that, and maybe it had been a put-on from the start. But I was shaken up, for I had never seen the like before. In Bay, the men who built the Eskdale viaduct would have their battles on the beach, but the people in the town were never touched, and though there'd be blood spilt it was more like sport. If it had all happened before my Nine Elms nightmares had begun I would not have believed that any such thing could happen in the shadow of a great railway station.

Afterwards, I started to get the district of Waterloo right. Yes, there was cleanliness and newness all about: the public baths and the laundry that looked like a great ship were two streets away, and there was high-class this, royal that, advertisements for Beecham's Pills and all those soaps. But these were frauds. The real Waterloo was in the semi-drunks colliding with donkey carts, the shop sign speaking of 'knives, steel saws and choppers', the roaring from the pubs, the shouts I heard from my windows at night, all coming from smashed-up, wrong-speaking mouths – 'I'll put the fixments on you, you bloody rotter!' And the station itself. Too many builders had been at it, and all with a different idea. It didn't look like a railway station at all; it didn't look like anything. But still the trains rumbled in over the viaducts – one a minute or more, it seemed to me.

I sat wondering whether I should write to Rowland Smith -I had his address after all – to ask whether shovelling coal and braining rats surrounded by unfriendly faces was what he'd had in mind for me when we'd met in Grosmont. I would ask him straight out. Later in the evenings I would think of going to the pub at the end of the road, the Citadel, but the amazing wildness of it and thoughts of Dad, who enjoyed his jugs of Old Six at home but did not hold with public houses, kept me in my lodge.

This itself was a very queer spot. None of the rooms in the house was locked, but there again there was nothing in any of them apart from the one next door to my own. This, like mine, had a view of the soap works, which at least were always quite silent and sent out no smoke. The floorboards were very bad, and there was quite a big looking glass, so you got a double dose of the empty black fireplace. Looking into it I saw that my face was yellower than it had been before – yellower, and blacker too, in parts. This was what it meant to become a man, but I was not getting the coal in the way I would like, namely, swirling up from a rattling, open firehole door on a happy run down to the sea, with my mate watching the road beside me and a bottle of tea waiting on the drip plate. Towards the middle of that first week, I had the notion of taking my twenty minutes in the Old Shed, where I would be free of that pill Flannagan for a while, and I might carry on with Continuous Engine Brakes. It was dinner time on Wednesday when I first stepped into that shed full of crippled engines and walked past the old house, which was like a guard, or a kind of warning.

The Old Shed was kept in darkness at all times, so I had a bull's eye with me, and with this I picked out the broken engines. They all stood in queues that led nowhere, and the closer you got to the top of the shed the more they looked like kettles. I couldn't put a name to most of them, for they all had parts missing, some even their wheels. The parts that remained had all been scrawled with chalk numbers that I could make no sense of.

One that caught my eye was a strange 2-4-0 with mighty rim-splashers. It reminded me of a bike. I leapt up onto its footplate and gave a yank on the dead regulator. Then I turned and pointed my lantern tank through the open fire-hole door. There was a nice bed of dry rags in there, so I climbed inside, pulled the door to, and set about making myself a cosy nest on the grate.

The firehole was of the usual sort of size, by which I mean it would have made a bedroom for one of those half-size people they have in circuses, being perhaps eight feet in length, four and a half foot high, and three and a half wide. All about the metal walls of the firehole hung ghostly grey ash – the place seemed to keep a memory of every fire that had burned in there. For ten minutes I munched on my snap and tried to make sense of a drawing of the Westinghouse Automatic Brake. Once, I heard a clatter from within the shed that fairly made my hair stand on end, but after a second's thought I knew it to be rats.

The Westinghouse Brake comes with many complications, and presently I fell into a doze. How long it lasted I don't know, but I woke up in the greyness feeling: this is too complete. There ought to have been a circle of light around the firehole door but it was firmly closed, and a firehole door cannot be opened from the inside, for all that is meant to be inside is the fire. I tried to kick the door but my quarters were too cramped to allow it. I tried standing and stretching but could not unbend my body in any direction.

Then I saw a little twist of smoke coming up through the grate, and I knew that after the Taylor kid it was my turn. I was about to suffocate, then to disappear altogether. I cried out once, 'No!' and as I did so the smoke leapt into my lungs, and afterwards it was all coughing, with the smoke now coming up from all parts of the grill. I could not see the sides of the metal box in which I was locked, but as I kicked and pounded against them they seemed to close in on me. I could not breathe, and nor could I stop myself from trying to breathe. Shaking and dying, and trying to pray, I lay down on the floor of the box, and all at once the smoke changed colour around me. It was streaming freely over my head and away from me, turning like twine, and I found that with my coughs came breaths. I sat up and saw the fire door open once again and the smoke drifting slowly through. I rolled through the doorway and found a pair of shaky legs on the footplate of the engine. The backs of my hands were bloody but I could only feel and not see the blood, since my bull's eye was broken. From the top of the shed I could hear the scuffling of boots in ash, and laughter.

Railway blokes, I knew, were likely to go in for all kinds of japes with a new man on the job, but this little exploit had nearly finished me off.