The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Fifteen

Tuesday 8 December

Three days later I was in the shed early, stabbing with the handle of a brush at a mass of ash and mud on the brake block of Thirty-One, when the Governor walked up. He was smiling as usual – well, it was usual when he talked to me.

'Fancy a trip to Brookwood?' he said, and he almost bowed, like a magician about to demonstrate some marvellous phenomenon.

'I'll bloody say,' I said, and I chucked down the brush and rubbed my hands on my trousers, because you're supposed to be clean at all times on the footplate. I then realised I'd made a bloomer with that 'bloody', but the Governor didn't take exception. He was walking down the shed between two lines of Atlantics, galvanising the whole place as he went, sending blokes off wheeling barrows, or scrambling into the pits or doing whatever they should have been doing in the first place. He led me to Twenty-Nine, which was just off-shed, standing in a light rain. 'Hop up,' said the Governor.

I climbed onto the cab, and there was the man with the black beard who fired for the half when he was on spare, and who I now knew to be Clive Castle. There was a good fire in the hole, steam pressure was climbing nicely and the cab was pretty clean, but really only half done, so I decided to finish the job. I reached into the locker for the wire brush, then glanced across at Castle. He looked at me, but gave no friendly nod, of course. But I was becoming bolder with the Nine Elms fellows; I would not eat dog. So I said, very business-like: 'I'm coming out with you on the run.'

No answer. His face was very white, or maybe it was just the blackness of his hair and beard that made me think so. He had something on his mind, all right, something bad, but then they all did all the time. It would have been funny – if I didn't believe that evil was at the back of it.

'Where's Rose?' I said, because I had the idea that only he would let me on for a ride. 'Barney Rose?' said Castle. 'Search me.'

I heard a clatter, and an oil can was placed on the footplate behind me. I could tell by the sound that it was empty. Turning about, I saw Arthur Hunt flashing past on his way to going under the engine with a new oil can. The trip was to be with the big man.

Well, I resolved immediately that he would have no reason to find fault. I climbed down from the cab and scurried off to stores, where I meant to pick up a tin of Brasso, although in fact I came upon one on a workbench halfway there, together with a good clean rag which I also caught up. Returning to the footplate of Twenty-Nine, I began hastily polishing the injector wheels, engine brake, regulator. This was laying on luxury as far as cleaning duties went, but I was determined that Arthur Hunt would think me up to the mark.

Of course, it would happen that I was taking a bit of a breather when Hunt flew up onto the footplate with the new oil can in his hand. He'd been filling the pots underneath, but there wasn't a mark on him – which was the mark of a true engine man. Whether this man was a killer, or a friend of killers, he was always perfect about his business, so that I couldn't help but be keen to show him my paces. He wore his usual suit and a tie, and there was a rag folded as neatly as any silk handkerchief in his enormous hands.

I screwed up my courage to a 'Good morning, Mr Hunt' but of course I needn't have bothered.

The first thing he did was take my Brasso and stow it in the locker, cursing in an under-breath. Then without a word he flung my rag onto the fire, which ate it with a great whump. As he did this I noticed – and I saw to my horror that he had noticed too – that the firehole door ground against coal dust a little as it slid along its runners. Seeing that, while I'd got the handbrake looking like the crown jewels, I'd neglected one of the first footplate tasks, I tried to make amends by reaching once again into the locker for the wire brush, but in doing so I clashed arms with Hunt. I was trying to help, but it looked as though I was attempting to come to blows. He turned and gave me such a look that I shrank down onto the sandbox, where Clive Castle immediately told me I could not sit.

Hunt called over my head to Castle, 'We're ready for off, Clive.' He yanked the whistle, and as he did so a terrified blackbird crouched down in a black puddle next to one of the rails alongside us. Birds, as I supposed, could go anywhere they wanted, so why would they come to this hellish spot?

We pulled away from the shed into a black, wet world. We picked up the funeral set, which looked more than ever like cripples from a bygone age, yet Hunt gave them the kid-glove treatment, buffering up with the lightest kiss of metal on metal. Without a word, Castle climbed down to couple on, and I was alone on the footplate with Hunt. I wondered what secrets those two shared besides the arts of running an engine, and in doing so I glanced across at him. He was staring at his hands, pressing them over and over into his folded cloth as if he was trying to get himself the hands of a pen pusher or a parson. I would not suffer in silence, though. I would uncover all, but by degrees.

'You don't want me on this trip,' I said. 'I've been sent up by the Governor against your wishes.' No answer to that.

Clive Castle came back up. I asked if there was anything I could do, and he said, 'Keep out of the fucking way.' We crossed out of the yard and started rolling across the viaducts up to Waterloo. The rows of houses were at right angles to the line, with leaning walls of smoke rising above them. Suddenly there was a great eruption at the fire door, and I spun about in terror, thinking a gauge glass had exploded in Clive Castle's face, but all that had happened was that he had vomited. No wonder he'd been so white. The stuff was swirling all over the cab floor, and Castle was sitting on the sandbox watching it as we backed into the Necropolis station with a funeral party waiting. Hunt didn't say anything until he'd done Castle's job of putting on the handbrake, then he handed Castle a billy. As Castle wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve and took a drink, Hunt picked up the cab hose that used the water pipes of the injector and sprayed the stuff off the cab, looking like the most enormous skivvy I'd ever seen.

Behind us, the funeral parties – three of them – were waiting to get into the carriages, all solemn and silent but with no tears anywhere. As to their clothes, there was not so much blackness as I expected, and most of the men had made do with black armbands and their ordinary suits. The caskets must have been loaded in double-quick time – they seemed pretty light. A woman -1 could not see which one – cried out, 'Oh, I can't believe we shall never see her again!'

Hunt and Castle jumped down from the cab. I leant out and watched them walk along the platform towards the funeral lot, but before they got there they went through one of the doors on the platform, and that was the last I was to see of fireman Castle that day.

Hunt came back a few minutes later alone, with hat off and head bowed as he walked past the mourners. It did not suit him to bow his head, and the effort of doing it helped put him in an even fouler mood than before when he came back to me.

'Get back up there,' he said, for I had climbed down so as to get a better view along the platform.

I went back into the cab as the doors slammed shut along the line of carriages, and Hunt leapt up after me with his coat flying out behind, making him look like a great bat. 'What's up?' I asked. He didn't answer, but threw open the firehole doors. 'It needs three more on the right side and six at the front' he said, 'and a dozen in each back corner.' 'Mr Castle's not been taken too badly, I hope?' I said.

'Never you mind' said Hunt, and he picked the shovel out of the coal bunker and threw it at me.

I started shovelling. 'If I'm needed to take over from Mr Castle, you might give me a bit of advice. I'm not passed, you know.'

'I'll give you advice,' said Hunt. 'Don't bugger up that fire, or I'll bloody crown you.'

Well, anything was preferable to the treatment I'd been getting on the trip up. Hunt might have telephoned up to Nine Elms and asked for a relief, but if so the Governor would have turned him down. You can't very well relieve a relief, after all; you've got to go down to the next level, which was me.

I wanted the firehole door a bit wider open, but the lever was stiff, and scalding too. I did get it open after a while and then I stood and watched, hypnotised, as all the hairs disappeared off the back of my hand. That fire was white and evil, and it struck me for the first time that any engine, however small, travelled around with hell in its belly. I started shovelling, but the fire wanted the shovel out of my hands, and it wanted me in through those fire doors too. I took a step back and started again.

Getting the coal around the edges of the firehole door was easy enough, but when I started trying to chuck it six foot to the front of the firebox, I couldn't get the right sort of swing with the shovel and the coal, and it just plopped into the box halfway along. The harder I tried, the less far it went, and the blade of my shovel clanged on the top of the firehole at the end of every swing. I thought of my long days at the coal pens, and how I could have used my time there to practise shying, but I hadn't thought there'd be anything to it. Hunt wasn't looking on, or seemed not to be, but was watching the road from his side. I looked ahead from my side, and saw a signal I'd never noticed before. As I looked, it dropped.

'We've got the road'1 said, to let Hunt know that I'd spotted this.

'For Christ's sake' he said, so I'd probably made another bloomer. 'What's the guard doing?' I turned and looked the other way, back into the station. 'He's not doing anything,' I said.

I certainly wished he would do something. All the doors were shut, the mourners were on board; I saw no reason for delay. 'Is he going to blow his whistle?' I said.

This was too much for Hunt. He leapt across the cab to my side, shoved me out of the way, and looked at the guard. They shouted something to each other, then Hunt moved back across to his side, tugged the regulator and we were off, beating back along the Necropolis branchline and up towards the thirty-odd roads coming out of the great mouth of Waterloo.

Before long we were clattering across the roads, but eventually we settled onto one of them -1 could not have said which one, exactly, having no idea of the route between Waterloo and Brookwood Cemetery – and began approaching a signal gantry that stretched across about twenty roads. On top of the gantry was another jumble of signals and I realised that all my years of reading articles in The Railway Magazine counted for naught. There were some big signals, some little signals; some signals had other, smaller, signals underneath them, sometimes doing something different from the one above, sometimes doing the same. Half a dozen lamps were strung up there too: red ones, white ones, fighting the greyness of the wet morning. Of course, I had learnt something of signalling during my time at Grosmont, but up there signals came one at a time and with a good deal of warning.

'Have we got the road?' yelled Hunt over the rattle of Thirty-One.

Now he could see for himself, because our signal -whichever one might happen to be ours – would not be the kind that could only be seen from the fireman's side of the cab. I said, have we got the fucking road?' Hunt shrieked again. 'How do I know whether we've got it?' I replied.

Hunt rose threw open the fire doors. He lowered his long body and stared straight into the fire, challenging it to hurt him, like a man mastering a vicious dog. He tipped his face up towards the steam gauge. 'We're losing pressure,' he said. 'Fire's caking up. Give it a stir – and double-quick.'

That meant going at it with a fire iron. But which was the one for the job – dart, pricker or paddle? 'I want the dart, don't I?' I said, turning towards the hole in the bunker, from which the crooks of the three long irons jutted. 'You'll have it about your head if you don't look sharp.'

But which was the dart? I couldn't tell from the handles. My head was fairly buzzing as I looked from Hunt to the three handles and back at Hunt, who was just a pair of little eyes now, watching me raise my hands towards the irons. He could have told me which was which but he was making me eat dog. There was nothing for it but to pull hard on one of the three irons, which I did, stumbling immediately backwards in the process, for my tug had caused the whole boiling lot to come clattering out of the hole. I remained on the floor of the cab and shut my eyes, ready for Hunt to do his worst, but when I opened them he was at the fire, stirring the coal with mysterious motions. As he did so he looked across at me, seeming to shudder with hatred at the sight of me. He took the iron from the fire and put it and the other two back in their right place.

'Put another charge of coal at the front of the box,' he said, and by now his loathing was such he could not even meet my eye. 'I can't seem to pitch it to the front.' "Then you should not be firing,' he said, in a voice so strange and quiet that my legs got soft under me. 'No,' I said, 'I shouldn't be. I'm a bloody cleaner.' 'But you're dead set on the footplate,' he said, in the same weird way. 'You hold it to be a grand life of freedom or something… Now for the last time of asking, have we got the road?'

Thirty-One was threatening to shake the tears out of me, but I leant out my side and looked at the gantry again, which seemed to have sprouted a few more signals since the last time. 'I don't know,' I said. 'I've told you.' We were chuffing under the gantry now. 'Did we have the road?' I asked him.

'Did we?' he said, in his quiet, dangerous way. 'Did we? That's one for the hall of fame, that is.' He pulled on the regulator, and I reckoned we were up to fifty miles to the hour, which was marvellous, except that all my railway dreams were coming to nothing.

'Why have you got your knife into me?' I said. 'You think I've been brought on for some reason, but I don't know what it is. You think I'm a company man, but I don't know why I'm here, and I'll tell you something: I bloody wish I wasn't.' I wanted to say a lot more but I couldn't hold back the tears any longer. 'You're a bloody rotter,' I said.

He wasn't listening. He'd started driving and firing the engine himself, which was like seeing a man riding two horses at once. He rode the two horses through Clapham Junction, where there were hundreds of people on the platforms – every one of them alone, nicely out of the rain but right in the middle of the smoke. We rattled down through the Southern Division: hundreds of houses on either side with horses and waggons trapped between them, looking for a way out of the maze. I had never felt more dismal, and after Wimbledon I just sat on the sandbox and looked at my boots.

It must have been half an hour before we came into a new, wide, blank station – Brookwood – and began some clattering operations over points on the down side of it. A man came running out of a signal box in front of us and climbed up to the cab. Hunt was putting a bit on as he came up; I was still leaning against the coal bunker with my arms folded, thinking: well, this is the end of all, and it will be a life of butchering for me. I had been of the mind to stick things out at Nine Elms no matter what, to crack the mystery and make the most of my God-given chance to be an engine man. But now my mind was changed. I was going home. 'What's up with this fellow?' said the signalman.

I just turned away from Arthur Hunt and climbed down off the footplate. As I went I could hear him muttering something, after which I caught the guard saying, 'Twenty-one inches of vacuum in his head,' and he started having a bit of a chuckle about that. I had no clue where I was going, and nor did I care.

Hunt uncoupled the engine and then, maybe with the help of the fellow from the signal box, he ran around the coaches on a passing loop so that he was ready to pull the set into the Cemetery itself. I followed the black train in, walking on the track. Anybody watching me plodding behind the carriages might have thought I was part of the procession, except that I had my hands in my pockets and I was wearing my grimy suit with no collar to my shirt. It was easy to keep up, on account of the constant 'five miles an hour' signs.

The cemetery was like the Yorkshire Moors squashed flat: heather, bracken, boggy black soil, with the graves at all angles as if there'd lately been a great explosion of stone. The place was sunk in some long, gloomy dream. Thirty-One, the black carriages and myself were rolling down a single track, raised on a low grass embankment. The cemetery was coming and going between massive trees, three times bigger than the common run of trees and so big they made Thirty-One look like a toy locomotive. The bottoms of their trunks were like giant lizard claws, and the tops of some had been blown off – by lightning, I reckoned. Presently I fell to wondering what the mourners on the train were making of the place: probably thinking they were getting their money's worth because it was all a bit different, just as poor dead Mike had said.

Ahead of me, Hunt had Thirty-One in good order. There was no trace of smoke; he was just pumping out little ghosts of steam every now and again. The nothingness of the steam met the nothingness of the white sky, and it was all certainly very beautiful and strange, but this five-miles-an-hour business, well it was no job for a man, and that was probably where all his evil nature came from.

I followed the train to a station that was a sort of perfect white wooden house with tubs of flowers all around. It was called North Station, and did not look real. There was no fence around it and no road, so you just walked towards it over grass and graves, or came to it on the train. Climbing onto the platform caused no more trouble than stepping onto a box. I walked up and watched from one end of the platform or another – I could not say which, for 'up' and 'down' had no meaning in a place like this. Some of the mourners, and two of the coffins, came off. I noticed a gang of hearty vicars I'd not spotted before, and Thirty-One sat there simmering, with Arthur Hunt inside no doubt doing exactly the same.

One of the coffins, with the mourners tagging along behind, was being taken along a winding track in the grass. I thought at first they were going to march off and put the thing straight into the ground, but then I saw that the coffin men were winding towards a pretty building in the trees that was half house and half chapel. Why that one went there and the other two bodies stayed in the train I did not know.

The doors all along the train were left open, and I stepped up into the rear carriage. There were empty wooden racks here -nothing much more. It reminded me of the stable carriages that came through Grosmont. I opened a door and stepped through into another section of the carriage, and here were more wooden racks, two with coffins on them, flowers wedged into steel brackets, and Saturday Night Mack staring at a page of a magazine. Over his round shoulder I read: 'PRIZE OF AN EIGHT-ROOMED HOUSE: ANYONE CAN WIN IT AND THEN LIVE RENT-FREE FOR LIFE'.

'Bloody hell, where did you come from?' he said, putting down his paper on one of the coffins. It was Hoity-Toity Bits. 'The other part,' I said. "There's nobody in there.' 'Third Class, that is,' said Saturday Night Mack. I looked down at the pages of Hoity-Toity Bits, and read 'QUEER TREASURES OWNED BY KING EDWARD' and 'CURIOUS EFFECTS OF A CRUST OF BREAD'. 'What's this part?' 'Second.' 'What's the difference between third and second?' 'Nothing,' said Mack, and he went back to reading his paper.

'Where's first?' I asked, and he jerked his thumb at a door opposite the one I'd just walked through. 'Anything different about that?'

'Not as I've noticed,' said Mack. He put the paper down again. 'Some differences in the fittings for them as want to look closely, but it's all really just a matter of the number on the door,' he said, and folded his arms.

I sighed – I was still pretty shaken up – and said, 'It's all snob business, really, isn't it?'

"That's bang on, that is,' said Mack, and he looked at me as if I'd just told him something he could never have thought of for himself. I looked down at the new page of his magazine, and read the words 'REMARKABLE FACTS ABOUT BOGUS WINDFALLS'. We heard a couple of doors bang in other carriages; we were both rocked on our feet slightly, then we were away. 'Where to now, then?' I asked him. 'Church of England part – South Station,' he said, as the cemetery rolled backwards on either side of us. 'So that last one was chapel?' 'Chapel, plus Jewish and Papist – those folks all go together.' 'But the Jews need their own churches of a special sort.'

'Well, it's hard lines, in't it? They can't run to one of those here.' 'I'll bet not many of them come here, then.'

'That's just where you're wrong, mate. A lot of that sort do come here on account of liking to be buried. Well, they don't like it, but they prefer it to burning. Who's driving this engine?' he went on, 'Arthur?' I nodded. 'How did you know?' 'By the smoothness of the running.'

1 was supposed to be on with him – his mate was taken sick -' 'Probably on the pop last night,' said Mack.

'He's chucked me off the footplate.' My questions could have no meaning any more, but I could not stop asking. 'Why exactly is Mr Hunt on the half-link, Mack? And why won't they pass Vincent?' I had heard of a speaking machine they had over at Blackpool, and I imagined I sounded the same,, asking questions in a hollow voice, with no hope of answer. 'Don't ask me,' said Mack, 'it's all shed business.' I looked around the coffin carriage.

'How is it that you're riding in here with the bodies?' I asked him.

'Guard duty,' said Mack. 'A lot of these stiffs are covered in jewels, and there are people in this world with a mind to have such goods away.' 'But they'd have to open the coffins first.'

'Ever heard of a screwdriver?' said Mack, and he gave me a smile that started off little and grew.

Now we were at the second cemetery station, the South Station. It looked exactly like the first, except turned around and put on the other side of the track; and here too there was a little building half-hidden in trees near by.

Mack opened his door and let in a gang of his mates from the Necropolis Company. They took the two coffins away, with Mack lending a hand and the mourners following. I was left alone on the platform. I watched Hunt climb down from Thirty-One, wiping his hands on the cloth. He strode towards the South Station building and through the door marked 'South Bar', then I hopped off the platform and walked over the track behind the train and out into the cemetery.

I pushed on through the grass and heather. My boots and trousers were soon sopping, and that was fine. I would go back to Grosmont and work in the shop with Dad. I thought of the farmers driving their beasts across the headland to the top of Bay, coming up in the morning with the sun. They brought them into the yard behind the shop for poleaxing by Dad, but they would just as soon bring them to me or whoever was paying out. I would take over the deliveries – running the trap out to Whitby on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and down the steep street to the centre of Bay every morning. But who would be on hand to carry the mallet to stick behind the trap wheels if it should roll back coming up? That's what I had done for Dad, the one bit of work in the butchering line I had regularly performed. Perhaps I would have my own son to do it for me.

I had struck a line of small stone angels: one held a stone star, another a sword, a third an anchor. Behind them was a new-dug grave with black soil and flowers on top, all crushed by the rain, but brightened by it at the same time. Looking up from this I saw a man on a horse; he was pulling a rope that was also held by three men on foot behind. It was a very long rope, and the men were all silently taking it towards a part of the cemetery where the graves gave out.

I could've carried on stumbling all day: one direction is just as good as another when everybody about you is dead. I heard a horse and trap going along the cemetery lanes somewhere, and dripping rain marking time. After the best part of half an hour's wandering I headed back to the South Station, where Thirty-One was still waiting, and for the first time I thought of that engine, which had been the scene of such a disaster for me, as the Red Bastard.