The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Eight

Tuesday 24 November

The following Tuesday I walked in on Crook, bent over his board. He seemed to be playing a game of chequers against himself, but then there came a fearful shriek; he glanced out of his window, and what he saw galvanised him into speaking.

"The Bug!' said Crook, and his eyebrows jumped, giving me high hopes of a conversation.

'What's the Bug, Mr Crook?' I said, for I had stopped siring him.

'A four-two-four tank,' he said after a while, looking over my head as he spoke. 'Anything special about it?'

'It contains at all times Sir Roger White-Chester.' He was back at his chequers game now. 'An important gentleman, is he, Mr Crook?'

'Board member,' said Crook, who was now back to mumbling, 'and more important than the locomotive superintendent, Mr Drummond, who was meant to have that thing to himself.' 'What does Mr White-Chester do?' 'Comes in weekly to inspect the shed.' 'To inspect it for what?' 'Slackness,' said Crook. 'Slackness of what kind?' 'Your kind would do,' he said, looking up at me. 'Standing about talking when you should be on the job.' And he went back to his tokens.

Walking out of Crook's place, I saw the Bug directly: a little squashed-up tank revolving on one of the turntables with a lot of smoke twisting out of its chimney in a spiral. I walked into the shed and found the Governor coughing outside his office with papers in his hand. He was walking me over for another cleaning turn when there came a second shriek from the Bug. It was pounding up towards the shed now, with us directly in its sights.

The Bug lurched to a stop and a johnny in a top hat and frock coat leapt out of the side and started striding along the very road on which we were standing. At first I thought there was something the matter with his face but this turned out to be his moustache. 'Sir Roger,' said the Governor in an under-breath.

The arrival of Sir Roger White-Chester had an electrifying effect on the shed. He came in shouting, 'Very good, very good!' and yet all the blokes in the shed had disappeared from view. He caught one poor bloke who was pushing a barrow-load of rags, though, and quizzed him about something before setting off again with his 'Very goods!' which echoed all about in what you'd have thought was an empty shed.

'What does any man who's up to the mark have to fear from talking to him?' I asked the Governor. 'Do you want me to introduce you?' he said.

It was fortunate – for I certainly did not want to be introduced – that White-Chester turned around at that moment and walked back towards daylight and his Bug. The aim, I supposed, was not that he would see others but that others would see him, and stop their slackness as a result. At three o'clock or so I was sweeping the footplate of Bampton Thirty-One – which was like Twenty-Nine, only red – when Barney Rose came for it. I first spotted him coming through the shed towards me with the Governor and Mike, but when I looked again there was only Mike with him, and that toothy fellow leapt into the cab while Rose called out, 'Fancy a trip?'

'I'm sure I do,' I said, and straight away went bright red. This was very unexpected after all the surliness of earlier days. Alone of all the cleaners in the shed I didn't work in a gang, and I was desperate for company.

After we'd coupled up to two blank, black carriages and two passenger carriages, neither of which I got a proper look at, and finally got ourselves untangled from the Nine Elms sidings, I felt as if I'd been living in that shed around the clock for years. I had forgotten how blue the sky could be. As we rolled along the top of the black viaducts, we were level with the roofs of the houses, among which great factories squatted, like giants sitting down among pygmies.

Rose took it pretty easy on the footplate, never looking at the fire, not seeming too bothered about steam pressure, saying hardly anything to Mike. Seeing a fellow like Barney Rose at the regulator was like marvelling at a ship in a bottle: you couldn't understand how it had come about.

I realised that very likely I was only on this trip because the Governor had ordered it, but Rose was pretty friendly towards me, just as he had been on my first day – friendlier than he was towards Mike. He said that he couldn't believe anybody who came from Yorkshire was not a great hand with bat and ball. He wouldn't look me in the eye, though, I did notice that.

Mike was amiable too, but all wrong about the footplate. As he shovelled, he spilt coal everywhere – kept stumbling on the lumps like a drunk – and he just kept piling the stuff on, sending the steam pressure through the roof. He wasn't right in his looks, either, which is probably why I couldn't stop staring at him. With most people, you never see the teeth; with others you see nothing but. Mike was one of the others.

I left off staring with Rose's next remark: 'We're off up to the Necropolis station at Waterloo,' he said. 'What we've got on here are two hearse waggons and two passenger carriages, which will make up a funeral set for tomorrow.'

At last I was seeing the work of the half. 'Are there bodies inside the funeral carriages?' I said. Rose grinned at that.

'We don't run the stiffs into the Necropolis station. We run them out. The trip is from the Necropolis station to the Necropolis itself, which is at Brookwood in Surrey.' He knocked his pipe out on the regulator, sprinkling the baccy over his boots in his unparticular way as he asked: 'Now, Necropolis is a Greek word, and it means what, Mike?' He looked at his mate for the first time, who gave a sort of shrug. 'Boneyard, I expect,' said Mike.

'It's a terrible thing, this Board School education,' said Rose, as I tried to place Mike's accent. It was certainly not London. 'Necropolis means city of the dead,' he continued, 'and that's what we have at Brookwood: the biggest cemetery in the world.' 'What locos are commonly used on the run?' I asked.

Rose shrugged. "The Bampton tanks: Twenty-Nine and this one – also known as the Green Bastard and the Red Bastard.'

I said, 'They are a pair of beasts, really, aren't they?' but I knew I could never call an engine a bastard, and didn't think a chap of the right sort ever would. (I was wrong about that, however, along with many other things.)

"They're not fast,' said Rose, 'but that doesn't matter because the funeral trains never go above thirty, unless Arthur's at the regulator.'

'He's still on the expresses to Devon – inside his head, I mean,' put in Mike. 'You've not lived 'til you've been put off a footplate by him.'

He smiled after saying this – it was an odd smile, because of the need to cover up his teeth – and then went red. Rose looked at Mike again but said nothing, and I thought Mike had gone a bit far in poking fun at Hunt, even though he was a pill.

'Would Henry Taylor ever have been on this Necropolis run?' I asked Rose, for I seemed to have more in common with the missing man than I would have liked.

He said nothing for a while, then: 'All cleaners get rides out' Now Mike spoke up, and Rose gave a strange little sort of gasp as he did so. 'Henry liked the cemetery,' he said. He had the eyes of Rose and myself on him now. 'Why?' I asked.

'It's beautiful there. You've got, you know, grass… trees. It's something a bit different.' 'What was this fellow like?' I asked. 'You shouldn't say that,' said Mike, and it was the first bit of sharpness I'd had from him. 'Shouldn't say what?' 'Was.'

He'd stopped putting on coal now; he was leaning on his shovel. 'We got to be good mates, me and him, and I've had the coppers on at me no end of times, twice in the last month, trying to get to the bottom of it, and they haven't finished with me yet. If you'll take a pint with me sometime,' he went on, 'I'll tell you all about him, because he really was a first-class fellow.' At which Rose cut in: 'We got the road for the Necrop?' Mike leant out of his side and nodded back to him. The Necropolis terminus was two private lines and two private platforms of no great length. It was just outside Waterloo, and the branch that led into it veered off at the last moment from the thirty or so roads going into the great station. We came in with Mike reading all the signals, the steam hammers from Waterloo beating away and echoing for miles in the hot, dirty air around the factories and houses.

The little station had a simple metal and glass canopy on each platform. It looked like a place that everyone had recently left, and when Rose shut off steam late, giving the carriages a bit of a whack against the buffers, I thought: he's trying to wake somebody up. Even though it sounded like it might be a breakdown job, though, nobody came out from any of the black doors on either platform. After a couple of minutes, however, a little tidy man in blue did come out. He looked about him a bit, then hopped down behind the tender to start uncoupling our set, and Rose told me I could go off for a quarter hour and take a look about.

I walked down the platform we'd come in on, past a row of doors in a low, blank building. The first two doors were closed, but the third was open, so I looked in. There was a fat young fellow standing in a shadow holding a broom. He was being given a scolding by an older, taller, dismal-looking fellow. They were both in black suits – neither of the best cloth – and there were posters on the walls showing folks at funerals. 'Mourning Suits Made by the Gross', I read, and 'Dickins and Jones, Mourning in All Its Branches'.

"The address is to begin in ten minutes' the older man was saying, 'and the room is not swept.' He sounded devilish surly. 'Well, I did sweep it,' said the fat fellow. 'When?' 'Earlier' said the fat fellow. 'Today?' 'Bit earlier than that.'

'During the summer the room was very frequently found to be in a terrible condition. At that time it was not found necessary to give the address every week…'

'Well, then' said the fat kid, 'it was not found necessary to sweep the room every week, either.'

'But now the address is once more weekly; it is also of a considerable duration -' 'So I've heard' said the fat fellow.

'- and being so, it is quite intolerable to give it in a dusty room or a room that is too cold, as is very frequently its condition.'

'Well, the fires are not down to me' said the fat fellow, 'and two weeks ago you said it was too hot.'

'If the room is overheated, the address attracts a class of person it is desirable should not attend.' 'What class is that?'

'A cold class' said the other, slowing down, and sounding glummer by the second. 'A class with a limited interest in extramural interment, and a much greater interest in getting warm on a sharp evening.'

'Bloody hell' said the fat fellow, but he had a jolly sort of face, I thought, for somebody working in a spot like this.

I moved on to the next door, which was also ajar. In the darkness I made out a table, on top of which was a tangle of candelabras and a stack of thick yellow candles laid on their sides. Underneath the table was a pile of long dried rushes and two clocks of black marble that reminded me of tombs. In the corner of the room was another table, and at this one a small, worried-looking man of about seventy was reading a book while eating what must have been an early supper. It looked like chops, but where they came from I could not guess. From the door next to him, another man entered, and I at once had a feeling of great danger when I saw that it was Rowland Smith. He had on more business-like togs to the ones I'd seen him in at Grosmont, but they were still exquisite. Half-hiding at the edge of the doorway I listened.

"That's a very good mixture you have there, Erskine,' he said to the worried-looking man.

'Mmm,' said the man, because he was eating – and very fast. 'Now, on the Underground Railway, Rowland -' he continued, before stopping to pour salt onto the side of his plate. 'On the Underground Railway,' he began again after a while, 'which is the nearest station to the Temple?' 'Temple,' said Rowland Smith.

'Yes,' said the worried man. 'Which is the nearest station to it?' 'The nearest station to Temple is Temple itself.'

'This is where my spy glass comes in,' said the worried man, and he put down his knife and fork and picked up a lens on a stick. He looked through the glass at the book of maps that was before him. 'There is no station close to the Temple at all except… Oh, yes, I do see now. When did they build that one?'

'I don't know exactly, Erskine. It's been there for some time, I believe. On the matter of the fifty poles that are to be conveyed tomorrow to Palmer -'

But the worried man was not having this. 'Is Stanley preaching the gospel?' he asked instead, pushing his book away. 'I saw you speaking with him earlier.' "The address is shortly to begin.' 'Good attendance?' "There will be the usual number, I expect. If that. He says the room is too cold, and not swept.' 'Yes, he seemed very agitated.' 'He is always in that condition.'

'Indeed, and I fear the matter goes deeper than an unswept room,' said the worried man, going back to his chops. "The difficulty is the manner of the address.'

'And the subject,' said Smith. 'But it would look amiss, I think, after all, to drop it or even reduce the frequency.' "That is your settled view?' said the worried man. 'Yes.' 'You have no thoughts of bringing him into your scheme of economy?' 'No.' These two are not the greatest of pals, I thought. 'Have you moved yet?' said the worried-looking man, chewing ten to the dozen. 'Yes,' said Smith. 'Last week.' 1 have not had notification of the change of address.'

'It is not much changed' said Smith. 'I'm still in the same mansion block.'

"Then why the deuce did you move?' said the worried-looking man. 'It is a better flat. It is on the lower floor, giving on to the garden, and it is to the rear, so it is quieter.' 'A southerly aspect, I trust?'

'Easterly,' said Smith, at which he looked up and saw me in the doorway.

'You know, as to the poles to be conveyed to Palmer,' the worried man said, 'I must, as Chairman, take heed of the points raised by Mr Argent -'

'Excuse me, Erskine,' said Rowland Smith, and he came hurrying across the room towards me.

He was very friendly, as before; and when he lifted his hat his hair sprang up, also as before. 'How are you settling in?'

'Tolerably well, sir, thank you,' I said, for I was at least man enough not to say I was having an awful time of it. 'And the lodge is a pretty good one?' 'Quite all right, really,' I said.

'You've come in on the footplate?' He pointed to Thirty-One, and I nodded. 'Just for a jaunt, or have they got you firing all ready?'

'Just for the jaunt,' I said. He really seemed to know nothing at all of railways. 'Mr Smith,' I said, 'when you were good enough to take an interest in me before, I was given to… I was… I formed the impression that you were connected to the London and South Western Railway.'

Rowland Smith was always able to bring out the best from me, in a roundabout way. It had taken a lot for me to say that, just as it had taken a lot for me to ask him to take me on in the first place.

He smiled and nodded. 'As you might know, this and that company are closely interconnected, the South Western running the trains to Brookwood by contractual arrangement with the Mausoleum Company. Some five months ago I found myself in the position of being able to do some work, advisory in nature in the main, for the board here, and I put myself forward. On finding I had been succesful, I of course resigned my seat on the board of the South Western so as to avoid any collision of interests.'

I thought: it is not normal for a man like this to speak to a man like me in this way.

Smith suddenly laughed, and in a most amiable manner. 'You yourself would have stayed at the South Western?' I could not help but nod, crimson-faced I should imagine.

'But then you speak as a lifelong subscriber to The Railway Magazine,' said Smith, seeming to bow at me as he did so.

The worried-looking man appeared at the doorway. 'If you must talk to me about those poles, Rowland -'

'Yes, Erskine. I'm just saying hello to this young fellow here: Mr Jim Stringer. He is a very hard worker, entitled to every possible encouragement. He works with the chaps that drive for us, and he's always after footplate runs, so we'll be seeing a fair bit of him.'

This obviously did not excite the elderly gentleman all that much; in fact it made him look very sad. As he looked on, Smith asked, 'Will you meet me, in order to let me ask you some questions?' 'Questions as to what, sir?' 'Oh, concerning the life at Nine Elms.'

'Where?' I said, and I must have fairly gasped out the word.

'My flat. The address is on the letters.' He reached into his jacket and a pocket book flopped open in his hand. 'You must come to my place,' he said again, 'and you must come by cab.' He held out his long, fine right hand, and I saw a ten shilling note there.

I shook my head and took a step back; a cab (with an honest driver) could be had for sixpence a mile. I was young but I was not stupid, and it seemed to me plain that he wanted me to sneak on my fellows and would pay me to do so.

'I'll write to you,' he said, putting the note back into his pocket as though quite used to having his offers refused. 'Do carry on with your tour,' he said. 'It's quite an interesting setup we've got here.'