The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Ten

We were back on the Rishworth branch the Thursday and Friday after the Scarborough run. I was able to get nothing from Clive over his movements at Scarborough, and had eventually given up.

On the Saturday afternoon, the wife went off to the Cooperative ladies to hear about 'Health in the House' and 'Thoughts on the Minimum Wage', and when she'd gone I took down my Railway Magazine and lighted on an item about 'the largest signal gantry in New Zealand'. It wasn't very big, as even the Railway Magazine admitted: 'From the photo it is evident that New Zealand is far behind the mother country.' It was meant to be a joke, I supposed.

The words of Dr N. Kenrick came back to me: 'It is only a matter of common sense to keep the head low.'

I would take a stroll. And I would try to find some company. I walked upstairs ready to tap on George Ogden's door, but I saw that it was ajar. I was full of curiosity about this fellow, who I had seen nothing of all week. He had use of the scullery, but he never did use it. He would go up by the back stair late at night and very quietly, but it was a kind of quietness – by which I mean not very – that told me he'd taken a drink.

I pushed the door and George was inside, sitting on the truckle bed, with the plants – half of them quite dead – on the floor around him.

'George,' I said in an under-breath, and he came to life, like a penny-in-the-slot mannequin.

'What ho!' he said.

'I'm off up to the Albert Cigar Factory. If you knock on the back door they give out cigars that have got a bit bashed.

They've usually only had a little nick and they come very cheap, less than half price.'

'They're quite all right, are they?' said George, standing up. It was heartbreaking to see him so galvanised over such a little thing.

'They have 'A's and 'B's,' I said.

'Good,' said George, 'I'll have an 'A'. This will be our first step to better acquaintance. I'm to book on at two, but I'll have plenty of time, won't I?'

He stood up, collected his hat, picked up a letter that was lying on one of his boxes, and caught up one of the packets of biscuits. 'Care for a cream biscuit?' he said. He sounded like an advert, and his face looked like an advert too as he bit into the biscuit: a big smile decorated with crumbs and bits of white sugar cream.

'Don't they sell those down at the Joint?' I said.

'That's it,' he said, 'from the penny-in-the-slot machine.'

'I didn't think it worked,' I said. 'Well, the excursionists can never make it work.'

'Excursionists?' said George. 'Daft lot! I expect they just put their money in and hope for the best!'

I said I thought that was more or less the recommended procedure.

'It is if you're a juggins. Now listen, there's an address on the side of the machine' said George. 'You write in to it if the thing is not giving out biscuits, and they send you any number of them back, gratis. Duggan's Sweetmeats, 54 New Clarence Road, Bradford.'

'You have it by heart,' I said.

'That's the best way' said George. 'You ought to give it a go.'

'But I've never put money in the machine,' I said.

George said nothing to that. 'You get a very gentlemanly letter of apology too,' he went on, 'signed in person by the chairman himself.'

We were crossing Ward's End, dodging the darting wagons and traps and their hot, cross drivers. All the pavements were chock full, as if the heat had turned the whole town inside out.

'You're very lucky in your Mrs Stringer,' George said.

'Yes,' I said, 'I know.'

'She's rather pretty.'

I thought to myself: now that's going a bit strong, but I didn't really mind it coming from George Ogden. It would have been different if a dog like Clive had said it.

'She stops at home as a rule, does she?'

'Used to,' I said. 'She works at a mill now.'

I could not bring myself to say the words 'Hind's Mill'.

'I wouldn't fancy that myself,' said George. 'You'll see a lot of weavers in some pub of a Saturday night, crowding around the "Try Your Fortune" machine, startled at whatever comes up, and it's enough to make a fellow weep. I mean to say, the tickets might just as well read: "You're a weaver in a mill, you will stay a weaver in the mill, and when you are quite worn out you will leave the mill, and then you will die.'"

After that little lot, I found that I didn't quite know George Ogden. I would have to think on.

I said, 'The wife is in the offices at her mill, you know?'

'Of course she is, old man,' he said. 'Don't mind me at all.'

A tram was stopping outside Victoria Hall, and George Ogden suddenly made a run for it. It was an unnatural sight, George running. It was like a man having a fight with himself while on the move, and it seemed that half the street came to a halt in order to marvel at the spectacle. He jumped onto the tram then jumped directly off with the conductor bawling at him. There were post boxes on the trams, and George had just posted his letter. You weren't supposed to do it like that though. The boxes were for fare payers only.

As he strolled back to me, the conductor was giving us the evil eye, but luckily his tram was carrying him further off by the second.

'You want to watch he doesn't open the box and take your letter out,' I said.

'How will he know which is mine?' George said, and then he smiled and then he frowned.

'It's a letter to my best girl,' he said.

'Where does she live?'

'She's out in Oldham,' he said.

'Do you get over there very often?'

'Not so very… It's a fair way, you know.'

'Matrimony on the cards, is it?'

George, who had wandered onto the road, now had to scuttle out of the way of a delivery bike and was nearly flattened in the process. His legs were too short. He was all brain and belly.

'That's… it's never quite settled,' said George. 'Your Mrs Stringer,' he said. 'She's got her own mind, hasn't she?'

'It's all the woman's role, and so on,' I said. 'She's ardent for freedom.'

'Bit hard on you though, old sort?'

'Well, she wants better conditions for all.'

'What about lodgers?' he said, quite sharply.

'How do you mean?'

'It's just that I'm in rather low water in present, financially speaking, and -'

'If you want a rent cut it won't wash, George,' I said. 'You've only been in a week.'

'But with all her beliefs about fairness -'

'No,' I said. 'As far as all that goes… You see, a part of freedom for her is being able to charge you five shillings a week rent.'

'Oh,' said George, and he stopped dead on the pavement, looking quite abashed. 'Anyway, it's quite all right,' he said, starting to walk once again. 'I'm a socialist myself, you know.'

'Yes,' I said, 'so am I, but I will not go to lectures on the minimum wage on Saturday afternoon.'

And I will not put grindstones on railway lines on account of being one either, I thought, and it came to me that I hadn't seen Paul, the socialist missionary, hanging about Horton Street since our conversation of eight days ago.

'There's just nothing to be done about it,' said George, who was still thinking of his rent. 'I shall have to reduce my savings.'

'Well you could stop going out for knife-and-fork teas every night,' I said. 'You do have use of the scullery, you know.'

'I do not have knife-and-fork teas,' said George, 'I have damn good suppers.'

'And I suppose you'll have a bottle of wine too?'

'I will take a carafe,' said George, and he said that last word with very great care. 'That would be nothing out of the way.'

'What is a carafe?' I asked him.

'It's a sort of small jug,' he said, and then he stopped and smiled: 'But not too small.'

We walked on, skirting past People's Park, where all the benches were full. I was trying to spy the rainbow in the fountain, while thinking violently about George and money. He either had too little or he had too much.

'Where did you lodge before, George?' I said.

But he ignored this question completely.

We were by now at the Albert Cigar Factory, whose two chimneys did look like cigars puffing away, but nothing had been made of this for advertising purposes. I took George round to the back of the factory, where there was a small blue door with a broken metal sign on it. The only words remaining read: 'always delightful to inhale'.

I knocked, saying to George, 'You sometimes have to wait a while.'

But the door was opened straightway by a young fellow in a dust coat. He was standing in a kind of shop – a take-it-or- leave-it kind of show, not out to please, where the goods were just left in crates and kicked about as needed.

'What ho!' shouted George, and the cigar man sprang back. For a minute I thought he was going to crown George.

"A's or 'B's?' the cigar man asked.

"A's for me', said George. 'Take a dozen.'

"B's for me,' I said. 'Half a dozen.'

Mine were two shillings, George's four, and they came to us in boxes without lids.

'Do you have any tubes?' said George to the cigar man.

'What sort of tubes?' came the reply.

'Cigar tubes,' said George.

The man turned to one of the crates and George turned to me, muttering, 'Extraordinary fellow!'

George got one tin tube, gratis – which he thought a great thing to bring off – and as we walked away he took a little clasp knife out of one of his dozens of pockets, chopped the end off his 'A', and lit it. It was more than twice the size of one of my 'B's.

'Sound smoke,' he said after a while, and he carried it off pretty well. Folk looked at him as he walked by. Then he stopped, and with the smoke racing into his eyes, unlaced his watch from his waistcoat: 'Fancy a stroll down to the Joint?'

I said that I did, and we set off down Horton Street, carrying our cigar boxes.

'You really ought to get 'A's, you know,' said George.

'Why?' I said, even though I'd been thinking the same thing myself.

'They're bigger,' he said, taking a puff, 'and better. You're an Ai fellow, so have an Ai cigar.'

'Thank you,' I said, because there didn't seem much else to say.

After a few paces he turned, with a flaring match in his hand, saying 'Won't you join me, old man?'

So I bit the end off my 'B' – which George frowned at – and started smoking it.

I might have taken two draws on the cigar when we came alongside the Thomas Cook excursion office in Horton Street. They were queuing out the door as usual, but the window was boarded.

'Hey!' I called to George. 'That's been smashed.'

George didn't even stop walking; didn't even remove his cigar from his mouth. 'Friday night, old man!' he called. 'High spirits!' Then he added: 'I've no use for that place myself. I won't go in for your whirligig holidays. Besides, the trains can be dangerous from all I hear.'

'It's not the trains,' I said, staring at the boarded window. 'It's the loonies with the bloody millstones.'

Without a word to George, I stood on my cigar, crossed over Horton Street and began pushing towards the front of the queue of excursionists, apologising as I went. As I did so, I realised that George was behind me, not apologising, but saying, every now and again, 'Step aside there', and the funny thing was that his big cigar allowed him to get away with it.

There were three clerks inside the excursion office, all looking very hot and bothered, and surrounded by posters of people standing at the seaside in golden sun, and grinning fit to bust under straw boaters. There were some Lanky posters up there as well, and two or three of the same one: a poster showing a steam packet, and the words: 'step on at goole for the continent'.

'Who smashed your window?' I asked one of the clerks, who was in the middle of serving an elderly party in a dinty bowler.

'Mr Bloody Nobody,' he said, and then, after a quick glance at me, 'It wasn't thissen, by any chance, I don't suppose?'

George was right behind me, smoking into my ear. 'Bloody sauce,' he said. 'Why, it's slander, is that.'

The clerk now turned to George: 'And will you get out of here, and leave off poisoning us all with that dratted great cigar.'

'That was slander as well,' said George, when we were back outside in Horton Street.

'Come here,' I said, and I led him back across the road to the wall of the old warehouse. The poster was still there: 'a meeting to discuss questions'.

'I reckon it was that lot that smashed the window' I said. "Ihey want to stop all excursions, and they want to frighten the railways off.' And I told George all about Paul, the socialist missionary-cum-anarchist, and how there might be a connection with the stone on the line.

'Anarchists…' said George, when I'd finished. 'There's a lot of those blighters in Germany, from what I read in The Times. Bomb-throwing's meat and drink to them, you know. Then there's the bloody Fenians too.'

'Well, that puts my mind at ease, I must say,' I said. 'Why do they do it?'

George puffed on his cigar, using it to think. 'Get in the newspapers' he said.

We walked on, heading for the Joint, and George said, 'Do you care to know my theory on your little bit of bad business?'

'Go on then,' I said.

Walking down a hill didn't suit George Ogden any more than walking up a hill. With every step the breath was knocked out of him, escaping with a little whistle, which was sometimes accompanied by a jet of smoke from his 'A'.

'It was wreckers' he said.

'I know that' I said.

'But this is what you don't know,' he said, quite sharp: 'they were going for the next train.'

Above the station, the flag of the Lanky and the flag of the Great Northern slept side by side in the great heat.

'Why would they be doing that?'

'Beats me.'

'Well, what makes you think they were?'

'Simple,' said George. And the next speech he made standing still in Horton Street, with his fingers in his waistcoat pockets and his cigar always in his mouth: 'The next train was knoivn of. The Blackpool Express. Runs every day, even Sunday: eight thirty-six. Famous train, and the only timetabled one of the day from Halifax to Blackpool. It was in the timetable, do you see, there to be found by anyone picking up the month's Bradshaw. Yours -' Here he took one hand out of his waistcoat, to point at me,'- yours was an excursion, and a late-booked one at that. Some excursions get into the Bradshaw's, those known of long in advance. Yours didn't. Some – those known about a little less in advance – get into the working timetables. Yours didn't. Some get into the fortnightly notices, but yours missed that as well. The first we all knew of yours was in the weekly notices.'

'Do you fellows in the booking office get the same weekly notices as us engine fellows?' I asked.

'Wouldn't be much point in having different!' said George.

That was true enough.

'Wreckers are sometimes just kids out for fun,' I said. 'They want to make the train jump. They wouldn't be particular as to which train they tripped up.'

'No,' said George. 'But another sort might be. If they had planned to send one particular train galley west, odds on it would have been the second.'

'Yes,' I said slowly, 'unless they had seen the weekly notices, and they knew of our train.'

'Yes' said George, even more slowly.

'But that's half the Lanky,' I went on. 'Every stationmaster and signalman from here to Blackpool, and everyone who reads a stationmaster or a signalman's notices, which, since they're pinned up all over the shop, is hundreds.'

'Thousands!' said George.

We now carried on walking towards the station, with me wondering where this conversation had got us, but thinking very hard over it, and over the broken window of the Thomas Cook office.