The Blackpool Highflyer

Chapter Four

The Halifax Parish Church clock was striking six when I stepped out of the Joint station and lit a small cigar. Clive smoked small cigars. They fitted the bill for a fellow of the right sort. A cigarette was too dainty and fashionable, and a big cigar was for semi-swells: the smaller the man the bigger the cigar, my dad – who did not smoke at all – had once told me.

My way home was along Horton Street, which climbed up from the Joint, and there were many temptations on that cobbled hill, starting with the Crown Hotel that gave 'meals any hour', for although my wife had many virtues, cooking was not one.

I carried on up. Sugden's ice-cream cart was over the road, with the little white pony that looked as if it was made of ice cream. I hadn't seen him for a few days, for he would often get a lad to hold the horse's head when he went into the Crown for a glass of beer. The lad would get a penny lick for his trouble.

Sugden saw me coming and called out: 'Weather suiting you?'

'Champion,' I called back, for that's what I always said to Sugden.

Next came the works where Brearley and Sons made boots; then the moving crane, which had stopped, then the old warehouse where they posted the bills. There was a new one up there: 'a meeting to discuss questions', I read, just as though I didn't have enough questions on my mind to be going on with. But I read the ones set out: 'Blackpool: A Health Resort?', 'Wakes: Curse or Blessing?', 'The Co-operator… Does He Help?' At the bottom, the poster said: 'Mr Alan

Cowan, founder of the Socialist Mission, has the Answers', and I wondered what sort of crackerjack he was. The meeting was fixed for 18 July – which would be the Tuesday following Wakes Week – at the Drill Hall in Trinity Street.

I walked on, past a grand pub called the Imperial. This I had never been in, but you sometimes got the most wonderful prospect if the two front doors happened to be open as you went by. The saloon was jungly inside with twisted metal lights and big plants moving under electric fans. All seemed to go on very smoothly and quietly in the Imperial Saloon, where the waiters crept about in their patent-leather shoes. One pull on the beer pump, it was said, would give a pint of bitter in an instant.

But I didn't bother to look inside this time.

Alongside the Imperial was my own haunt, a pub called the Evening Star. There was one room, with barrels on stools behind the bar and sawdust on the floor. Most of this room was taken up with a handsome billiard table with red baize – it was as if one day the shavings on the floor had miraculously flown together to create this marvellous article. I was no great hand at billiards so I never played a game on it, and the queer thing was that nor did anyone else.

I walked into the Evening Star and asked for a pint of Ramsden's. It was three days after the stone on the line, and we'd been on the Rishworth branch ever since, but late that afternoon some bit of business with a broken ejector end had kept me back in the shed. Try breathing kerosene and oil inside an engine shed with fires being lit all around you, and the glass rising towards eighty – it's the only thing for discomfort and sick imagination, and puts you in sore need of a pint.

On the billiard table was a folded Courier, left behind. I picked it up, and there at last was the report. It was very short. 'Railway Outrage' in big print, then 'Lady Passenger Killed' in smaller, and 'Who is the wrecker?' smaller still.

A special Whitsuntide train to Blackpool, which left Halifax Joint station on Whit Sunday, had a narrow escape from utter disaster near Kirkham. With admirable speed the driver applied his brakes on seeing the obstruction, which proved to be a grindstone placed squarely between the rails. Some minutes after the train was brought to a halt, a woman was found to be suffering a concussion after a fall in her compartment. At first she seemed to be merely shaken, with bruises about her forehead, but she fell into unconsciousness and died within a short time of the train coming to a halt. A reward of?5 for information leading to the apprehension of the culprits is being offered by the railway.

To speak of a 'narrow escape' was wrong – that would have been something else altogether. Clive had been going too fast.

Then again, was it right to blame Clive for the way things had come out? I knew that I had not shone myself on that day. I took from my pocket the note I had made from the book, What to Do in an Emergency, for I had found the right page half an hour after the woman had passed away, and while waiting for the engineers to come out from Blackpool Central had copied down the important part. It came under the heading: 'About Unconsciousness and Fits', and Dr N. Kenrick had not minced words. 'If the head is not getting its full supply of blood, as you see by the pale face, surely it is only a matter of common sense to keep the head low… I will go further, and say that if it is a delicate person you are dealing with, to put him or her suddenly upright may cost your patient his or her life.'

That's what I'd found, having looked in the book for reassurance. The woman who'd come to collect me from the engine had been right, and that was all about it. I'd read the passage time and again as the engineers had jacked up the front of 1418 and got it back on the rails, hoping that somehow the words would change, and the meaning bend the more I read it over.

There was to be a Board of Trade inquiry, and the smash had set the police on the move after a fashion. A constable had come to Sowerby Bridge Shed and questioned Clive and myself. Clive had kept pretty quiet, but I'd spoken up to the copper, talking about how the grindstone might have been got to the line, mentioning the motorcar flying past. I wanted salt put on those who had done it. But I had the notion that the constable wanted as little information as possible, because information meant hard graft for him.

I folded up the paper. The mill girl who'd fallen had not been named but I'd learnt it while waiting for the ambulance to come along the meadow track: Dyson. Margaret Dyson, weaver. And the boy she'd left behind was Arnold Dyson.

The ambulance had taken her, and the boy too, rocking over the meadow. We'd started away ourselves then, rolling at five miles an hour – owing to that cracked front wheel – into Blackpool Central. We'd got in two and a half hours late with the 8.36 coming behind, and down by the same amount. The Hind's lot would have missed their teas under the Tower, and the white rosettes would have gone for nothing. But I guessed they would soon have another taste of Blackpool, for any good-sized mill sent its people there at wakes, and the Halifax wakes was in the second week of July, less than a month off.

I put down my pint pot, and my eye fell on the folded Courier once more, bouncing from the words 'Robbed Another Lady' to 'Giant Strawberries Expected' to 'Excursionists Alarmed'.

A North Eastern train carrying excursionists from York and district to Scarborough was required to brake with unwonted suddenness before Mai ton yesterday, as a large branch lately fallen from a tree lay on the line ahead of it. One man, who appeared to have hurt his back in the sharpness of the jolt, was removed by ambulance staff to the hospital at York. No other passenger sustained injury beyond a serious shaking.

The travellers, who were members of excursion clubs at York, were delayed somewhat but nonetheless enjoyed a full four hours to sample the delights of Scarborough before their return.

This train had been heading to the east coast, we'd been heading west, and it had been on the North Eastern, not the Lanky. But it was an excursion, just like ours: a special train. No connection had been made between the two items. According to the Courier they were not connected. I'd seen the editor of that paper about town: a big chap with a silk beard and a silk hat; I'd seen him stepping in and out of the Imperial, and he looked nobody's mug. But how much thought had he, or the fellows on his paper, given over to the matter?

A branch lately fallen from a tree… It had a kind of hollow ring to me: words too easily put together.

I put the peg in after the second pint, as usual, and walked back out into Horton Street. At the bottom of the road, Sugden was sitting on his cart, dreaming of a pint of plain. The dazzle was gone from the day but the heat had not abated. It checked me as I started to walk, and seemed to be slowing down the smoke from the mill chimneys on Beacon Hill.

Back Hill Street is not far above the Joint as the crow flies. It wasn't the best part of town, and it wasn't the worst. We were more fortunately placed than many working people, as I supposed. I had twenty-five shillings a week. I would have been better dressed on the rates of the Great Northern, but it wasn't bad; and the wife had come into fifty pounds on the death of her father.

Our house in Back Hill Street was No. 21. It was an end- terrace, but we weren't side to side with the others. Instead we looked outward and down, so we fancied we were like the prow of a ship sailing into the next street, Hill Street, which was like a continuation of Back Hill Street but with houses of a better class: bathrooms, gardens and electricity laid on.

The house was probably made with the leftover bricks of the terrace: an odd piece, so to speak. There were the two rooms and a privy downstairs and two more biggish rooms up. An outside iron staircase leading to the bigger of the two upstairs made the house more like a place of work than a home, but it was ideal for letting. This was the main reason the wife had wanted the place, although she hadn't said so to the house agent. I used to fancy she was a little ashamed of landladying, even though it was how she'd got her money down in London too.

The wife called the outside stairs 'the balcony'. I would stand on it with one of my small cigars, which she didn't like in the house, and look out at the backs of Back Hill Street. There would be washing on all the lines. When she'd first come up to Halifax the wife had said every day was like a washday. Now every day was a drying day.

Back Hill Street… It was just two rows of net-curtained windows to me. One net curtain – at No. 11 – had a fishing rod propped against it. Everyone who lived there had lived there for ever, except for me and the wife, so, while we were pleasant and gave our 'Good mornings' or 'Good evenings' to whoever we passed by, we didn't really 'neighbour'.

They were a daft lot living there really, as far as I could make out, and seemed dafter still in the light of what had happened to Margaret Dyson. Your typical household in Back Hill Street might be one half clerks, but let down by the other half, who would be weavers. Front steps were likely cleaned at night, in secret, so nobody could say for certain that a skivvy hadn't done it. We were the exceptions over this, for the wife just didn't clean the front step. We had our net curtains downstairs of course, but the wife didn't bother with them up, and we were alone in that as well.

I let myself in. The wife was in the chair by the stove reading the Courier. I had told her all about the grindstone on the line, but not about my efforts in the carriage. I suppose I just didn't want her to think she'd married a chump; or worse still a killer.

'Your accident's been reported here,' she said happily, from behind the pages. 'It seems you did very well to stop in time.'

She turned the pages of the Courier. It was only one article out of many to her. I wondered if she'd clapped eyes on the item about the Scarborough trip. It wouldn't do to let on about it.

The parlour was painted green. It was meant to be the finished job but always looked like an undercoat to me. Having pushed the boat out for the boiler, we were light on furniture: we had the cane-backed chair the wife sat in, and the red sofa. There was a continental stove instead of a fire, and we meant to have that taken out and the old fireplace brought back into use. The old mantelshelf still stood, and the old Couriers were put beneath it, ready for the far-off day when the fireplace would go back in, and the other far-off day when the weather would be cold enough for it to be used. That was the house in which we were to make our future, and to the wife it was too important a matter to be rushed. We had a tea caddy in the bedroom in which, on the wife's orders, we were saving for all manner of household goods of a superior kind.

'They ought to give a bigger reward,' she said.

I walked through to the scullery, and the jug, basin, towel and soap had been laid out by the wife as usual. It was always Erasmic Soap, 'The Dainty Soap for Dainty Folk'. The wife wanted me double clean, for she knew I would always scrub down at the shed after booking off, but she hated the smell of the axle grease and the yellow soap I used to take it off at work. In fact, she didn't want me a railwayman at all, and if I was clean she could forget I was in that line, at least for a while. To the wife, trams were the thing. She was all for things of the future.

'Cape gooseberries from the stores' the wife called out.

The store meant the Co-op.

'Are we to have gooseberry pie?' I called back.

'They're a delicacy just as they are' she said.

She always bought things for tea that weren't quite the thing, and she always bought them from the Co-operative Stores. She was a great co-operator, but she liked the idea of it more than the actual buying, so we'd quite often end by going out for a knife-and-fork tea.

'Five pounds for information' the wife was saying. 'Twenty would be more like it, but that would be too go-ahead for the Yorkshire and Lancashire Railway. Why, it would be twenty pounds less in the pockets of the directors!'

'It's the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway' I said. She always got that wrong – on purpose, I believed.

I ate a gooseberry and was rather knocked. No pips. But I would rather have had a chop.

I walked back into the parlour, and the gooseberries were at once forgiven. I even forgot about the accident for a second, for the wife was standing and smiling, looking just the size and shape of a person you could put your arms around.

'Oh yes?' I said, half smiling myself, but a little nervous at the same time.

'Two items of news' she said. 'Number one. Do you remember that I said I might have let the room?'

'Yes.'

'Well, the gentleman called this morning to confirm that he would be taking it.'

We kissed over that. We'd had all on with this let: adverts in the Courier week after week at half a crown a go. The wife had seen five or six folk over it, and every one she said would turn out a flitter. Unknown to her, I'd also written up adverts and placed them about the Joint in hopes a railwayman might be interested. We were handy for the station, after all.

'He's coming on Saturday and has sent the ten-shilling deposit. He has even begun getting his mail sent here.'

We looked across to the old mantelshelf. We had up there the wife's gold crucifix on a chain, which hung across our marriage lines, and a picture showing two kittens playing with a flower, and words along the bottom reading: 'Never a rose without a thorn' – this bought on one of the few occasions that the Halifax Co-op had run to art.

In front of the picture was the little fat envelope that I knew contained my Railway Magazine, which would have arrived that day, and a letter addressed to 'Mr George Ogden' care of 'Top Floor Apartments, 21 Back Hill Street.' I picked it up.

'It came by the five o'clock,' said the wife, meaning the 5 p.m. delivery that brought most of our letters and packets.

'He's giving out that he's taken apartments,' I said. 'It's an apartment at best, and I would have thought it was more accurate to say that it was a room, and a pretty small one at that.'

'Well it's a very good job you weren't put in charge of letting it out,' said the wife.

She stood up and smoothed the green sash around her waist, letting me see her trimness. I liked the way I was not supposed to notice what she was about in this.

'Would you care for a stroll?' she said. 'And I'll tell you my other news.'

I never knew what was going forward with the wife, but on occasions like this I expected her to say that she had fallen pregnant. One day she had given me a most mysterious look, and said that we must clear out the foreign stove immediately because it was dangerous, and I had been ready for it then.

I looked on the back of the envelope for the lodger, and saw that it had been sent by the 'Institute for the Diffusion of Knowledge'. 'He's quite a cultural sort, is he?' I asked.

She gave some thought to this, and as she did so a hundred possible images of this Ogden formed in my mind.

'No,' she said at last. Then: 'Are you ready for off?' She had her bonnet in her hand.

'What line is he in?'

'He works for your show' she said.

'The Lanky?' I said, wondering whether he'd seen one of my notices down at the Joint.

She nodded, saying, 'Come on now, bustle up.'

'Engine man?'

She shook her head. 'Certainly not,' she said. 'He tells me he has very great prospects.'

'But what is he now?'

'Ticket clerk,' she said.

There were battalions of clerks at the Joint. I would nod at the odd one, but they were all in a different world.

We stepped out of the door, and the wife turned to me before we'd gone three paces along the street. She was holding a folded piece of paper, which she passed to me. It was a very short letter: 'We have decided,' I read, 'to give you the situation of office clerk at our mill on the terms named, that is?1 15s. per week starting wage. We would suggest you commence duties on Monday next.'

I would not continue to mope over the accident. I kissed the wife, saying: 'I knew you would do it.'

When I'd brought her up to Halifax just after we were married, I'd said she shouldn't work, but had soon thrown up the sponge over that particular battle. In some northern towns, if a man let his wife take a job, folks would turn up their noses at him, but in Halifax the women worked because the mills needed them. And the wife went her own way in any case. To her, typists were the best thing out because they were part of the modern world. She'd been doing a course at the technical school, typing and shorthand, and was up to… well, a certain amount of words a minute. A lot of words as far as I knew. But when she'd gone to see about any situation there'd always been someone else who could do more, and the letters sent back had always begun: 'We have filled up the situation coming vacant…' She'd had dozens of those, and the more she got, the harder she grafted at her shorthand and typing.

Shortly after she'd started I had bought her an India rubber, and she'd said, 'Thank you very much,' while opening the window and shying it all the way to Hill Street. 'I will never get on with one of those in the house,' she'd said, to which I'd replied, 'Well how will you remove your mistakes?' 'By not making them,' had come the answer.

I had never seen anything bounce like that India rubber.

For weeks afterwards, I would find half-done letters about the house that she'd brought back from the technical school. 'Dear Sir, My directors wish me to convey to you…'; 'My directors wish to inform you that the matter you name…' – all with imaginary directors named and supplied with hundreds of initials. Or: 'Replying to your letter of the 5th inst, our reqxxxxmentx…' And then might come a long line of bbbbs or!!!!!s, for there was a lot of ginger in the wife.

It had not been easy for her to come to Yorkshire from London, and at first she had seemed in a daze, and, when not in a daze, blue. The rain was like prison bars. She told me she thought that Halifax and places around were like Red Indian villages thrown up all in a moment on the side of a hill. To her, coming from London, they were fly-by-nights, not real.

Slowly, she had begun to make her corner. Through ladies at the parish church – to which we went most Sundays, the wife to pray, me to guess the engines coming into the Joint (which was just over opposite) by their noises alone – the wife had joined the Women's Co-operative Guild, which had suited her philosophy to a tee. Equal fellowship of men and women in the home, the factory and the state: this was their line, and it was all quite all right by me, except it meant I would frequently miss my tea, for the wife would be off to some talk on 'Cheaper Divorce', or 'The Air We Breathe', because they were not afraid of tough subjects. I would then go off to the Evening Star or to the Top Note Dining Rooms, which was where the two of us seemed now to be heading.

We walked on through the little streets between our house and the middle of town. It was very hot, but there was nothing in these streets to catch the gleam of the evening sun. You'd see children in all the back alleys. The poorer sort were barefoot, and the wife would say, 'Poor mites, I don't know how they manage to live.'

They seemed to me to manage all right, going all out to make a racket as they did so: rattling the marbles in empty glass alley bottles, skipping in the sun and counting endlessly, or echoing about unseen.

The wife was always pleasant to the kids, and told me not to speak of a child as 'it', which I was in the habit of doing, but I noticed she would always walk fast until we got out of the back streets, which happened when we struck the Palace Theatre at Ward's End. This was all Variety, and I would usually stop to have a look at the bills. I'd been inside twice, but never with the wife. She preferred lonely sounding ladies at the piano, of the sort they sometimes put on at her Co-op evenings. She'd once said to me: 'What's funny about a little man in big boots?' and I said, 'Well you must admit, it's funnier than a big man in big boots.' But no. There was no funny side to boots at all as far as the wife was concerned.

Looking quickly at the Palace bill for that week, I saw the word 'Ventriloquist', and resolved to go along later. After comedians, ventriloquists were my favourite turns; there'd been one on at the Palace just recently, and I'd meant to go along. A good show would be just the tonic I needed.

Next to the bill, another of the advertisements for the 'meeting to discuss questions' had been pasted up. I pointed it out to the wife, and she said, 'Why do they ask: "The Co-operator… Does He Help?'"

'How do you mean?'

'Why "he"', said the wife, 'and not "she"?'

'Well,' I said, 'it's mankind, isn't it?'

The wife snorted, and turned away from the poster, saying: 'They don't like excursions.'

I stopped and looked again at the poster. 'Blackpool: A Health Resort?' I read. You could tell they had a down on the place. I wondered what they thought of Scarborough, for that was the same thing on the other side of the country. 'Wakes: Curse or Blessing?' I read once more. 'Mr Alan Cowan, founder of the Socialist Mission, has the Answers.'

'Mr Robinson,' the wife was saying a moment later, as we waited for a gap in the traps and wagons racing along Fountain Street; 'that's the gentleman at the mill who gave me the start… He said that he would prefer me a little faster at the keys, but that I was the only one he'd seen over the position who knew what worsted was.'

The wife looked at me, but I was miles off, thinking of Mr Alan Cowan and the Socialist Mission.

'What?' I said.

'Mr Robinson' she said, 'who interviewed me for the job, said I was the only applicant who knew what worsted was.'

'Doesn't say much for the others' I said.

'How do you mean?'

'Well, they must have been a lot of blockheads if they didn't know what worsted was – and them living in a mill town, too.'

'What is it then?'

'What's what?'

A tram was coming along Fountain Street, keeping us pinned to the kerb. The driver standing in his moving pulpit – for that's how it always looked to me – had been burned by the sun.

'Worsted' she said.

'Worsted?'

'Worsted, yes.'

'Well… it's a sort of cloth.'

'Cloth made of what?'

'Wool.'

We were dodging through the traffic now. Happening to glance backwards I noticed that all the little high back windows of the Palace were open on account of the heat – a sight I had never seen before.

'What sort of wool?' the wife was saying.

'Well, you know… sheep's wool.'

'Long staple' said the wife. And she looked away, and then she laughed. 'Eh, you daft 'aporth,' she said. She was practising her Yorkshire. 'You wear it every day but don't know what it is,' she said, straightening her white bonnet with her thin, brown hands.

'You could have said something quite clever there you know,' I said.

'I believe I did,' she said, smiling at me. The hat was righted now.

'You could have said you'd worsted me over worsted -' I said.

'You're loony,' said the wife.

'- if you really had done of course.'

We were now outside the Hemingway's Music Shop in Commercial Street. It was the wife's favourite shop, along with the Maypole Dairy at Northgate, where they had very artistic cheeses, kept cool by fans, like the drinkers in the Imperial Saloon. The Maypole could draw quite a crowd in the evening, although whether it was the cheeses or the fans that did it, I never knew. At Hemingway's, the wife always liked to look at the Hemingway's Special Piano they had in the window that was?14. She wanted to have only the best items in our home, and the Special Piano was on the list and some money towards it was in the tea caddy. Meanwhile we had no items, or very few. Whenever we struck this subject of furnishings I always pictured the shop in Northgate that had the sign in the window saying: 'homes complete from?10 to?100'. It was the ten pound part that interested me, but the wife would have none of it. 'I will not equip the house from a cheap john,' she would always say.

'The marvellous thing' she said, still looking in the window, 'is that it looks just like any other piano.'

'That's one of the things that worries me,' I said.

'But for fourteen pounds' she said.

'That's nigh on three months' wages,' I said. 'There'll soon be two of us earning' the wife reminded me, 'and now that the room's let…'

'But what about the extras… tuning it, and the two of us learning to play the piano.'

The Top Note Dining Room was two doors up from Hemingway's Music Shop, which might have explained the name. Nothing else did. The tables went the whole width of a wide room, and the people eating at them looked like workers in a mill. But they would give you ice in a glass of lemonade without waiting to be asked. The wife and I took our places. We both had steak and fried onions with chipped potatoes. It was the first good meal I'd had since the smash, which had put me off food in lots of ways.

'You see it's not that I don't like Cape gooseberries,' I said, 'I just don't want to eat them for tea.'

'Well,' she said, 'it's just that I've had so many interruptions.'

'I would be willing to make my tea for myself,' I said, 'I would… almost.'

'Oh, we can't have you living on Bloody Good Husband Street' said the wife, 'you the dolly mop!' Then: 'Would you like to see the mill where I'm to go on?'

It was one of those lonely ones up on Beacon Hill. The trams couldn't get up there, so we took one as far as the Joint, sitting on the top for a bit of a blow. The sky was a greenish pink with the sunlight leaving it only slowly, and the smoke still coming out from the mills, snaking into the sky, adding to the heat and weirdness of all as they made their slow S's. The smell in the air was twice burnt.

We passed Thomas Cook's excursion office in Horton Street. It was still open for business. The people of Halifax could not do without their outings. I couldn't imagine for a minute how they'd got on before the railways and the excursions started.

'I could make a stew at the start of the week,' the wife was saying, 'and it would keep. Do you like stews?'

'Yes,' I said firmly.

'What kind? What do you like in them?'

'I'm not faddy. Anything at all. You should buy the meat on Saturday night.'

'Oh' she said suspiciously. 'Why?'

'It's cheaper then.'

She said she'd think it over.

The wife was smiling. She had taken off her hat, and as we came to the tram halt, I thought: she looks still more fetching without it, and will look more fetching again when she puts it back on, and so on for ever. She was wrong over trams, however, which were forever either racing or jerking to a dead halt. They seemed to go on by jumps, and I found myself – for the first time ever – a little anxious riding one.

We got off at the Joint, and as usual the wife paid no attention. She did not like railway lines, partly because her house in London had been underneath one. When I first took up lodgings there (for she was my landlady before she was my wife) I used to say: 'What do you expect, living in Waterloo?'

We took the little stone tunnel that went under the platforms of the Joint, and under the canal basin, and under the Halifax Flour Society mill, and a good deal else beside. We came out and began climbing the Beacon, going by the one zigzag lane – half country, half town, with rocks lit by their own gas lamps, and sometimes black thin houses like knives along the way. There was one mill above us all the time as we walked, and this was our goal.

Just then a bicyclist came crashing along. 'Evening!' he called, which was gentlemanly of him because by the looks of things he had all on staying alive. I thought his lamps were going to shake right off his machine, and he did look worried, but he wanted to keep up the speed. All my work started and finished down in that groove he was racing towards. There was too much life down there, and too much death too, because that's what the smoke was, and the black smuts floating along: that was your death certificate coming towards you. One in thirty million passengers might be killed on the railways, but your chances of coming a cropper if you worked on the railways, or anything that moved, were a good deal higher, and you could not avert what was coming.

The black mill was right above us now, made up of three buildings chasing each other in a circle, like a castle in a child's story book. A fellow in a gig was waiting outside in the darkness. As we looked on, a small door within the main door opened; light came out like something falling forwards and just stayed there for a while.

Presently, an old man emerged from the door, walking with two sticks. Well, he was practically a spider, or a little rickety machine. The man in the gig climbed down, and he didn't help the old man, but walked alongside, looking on very closely. He did give him a hand up into the gig, though. The old man was wearing a heavy black coat in spite of the heat, a high white collar that shone like moonlight, and a black necker. He looked all ready for death. His face was small and crumpled, almost a baby's again; he had one lock of no-colour hair going across the top of his head and, as he took his seat in the gig, this fell forwards like the chinstrap of a helmet or the handle of a bucket.

'What's the name of this show?' I asked the wife.

'Did I not tell you?' she said. 'It's Hind's Mill.'

I looked at the wife, but decided to hold my tongue for the time being.

'That must be Mr Hind Senior,' said the wife. 'He's the chairman and founder.'

As we watched, the manservant leant across to put the old man's hair straight, like somebody training a vine. Then the mill door closed and the light went. A moment later, the trap rattled off into the hot night.