The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Twenty-One

Saturday 19 December – Sunday 20 December

'How is the engine-driving life?' asked my landlady, who was at her boiler. 'Fine,' I said.

She stirred my clothes into the mixture. 'Except that you are not driving engines,' she said. She never ceased to remind me of that.

'And you do not sound as keen on whatever it is you are doing as you were before.' 'There was another murder,' I said, so as to get at her.

'My goodness,' she said. But she didn't seem very interested, and nor did she turn around; she was in a devilish strop, and I was beginning to think I should have passed by her kitchen and gone straight to the Citadel this Saturday night, the one place I could be sure of putting aside thoughts of Arthur Hunt's strange behaviour and the mutual improvement class on the Monday to come, where I would be at the mercy – in a dark and deserted shed full of crippled locomotives – of all the many enemies I had managed to make in such a short time at Nine Elms.

'A man who used to be a director of the London and South Western was burned to death in his flat,' I said, because her behaviour did not put me in the mood to mollycoddle.

'And was it an accident?' she asked, still with her back to me, and now scraping soap into the boiler. 'I don't think so,' I said.

I wanted to give it all to her straight to see how the ordinary sort of person might react. Then I started with my questions, which were the one bit of power I had in London. 'When Henry Taylor lodged here, did anyone ever come calling for him?' 'One man came calling.' 'What did he look like?' 'I only remember one thing about him.' 'What?' 'Teeth.' Mike, I thought. 'It is why no one will lodge here,' she said, 'because they know what happened.' 'I lodge here,' I said.

'But you didn't know. I haven't had any luck with my notices, in any event.'

I thought of the one she had given me, which I had quite forgotten to do anything about. My landlady washed our clothes in silence, and I fell into my habit of reading the names on the tins on the mantelpiece: Bird's Eye Custard, Marigold Flake, somebody's candied peel, Goddard's Plate Powder, raisins, currants.

'What's wrong?' I said eventually, and not in a very friendly way, either.

'You come in here,' she said, still not turning around, 'and all you do is tell me about your horrible rattling trains, and men crowning each other and burning each other, and you keep coming back to the boy who was here, who I only saw half a dozen times, and you make me feel awful about taking his money in advance, and keeping his book. You shouldn't be in this lodge if you don't like it.' 'I didn't say I didn't like it.' 'And you complain about the water on the floor.'

"That's gone,' I said. "There hasn't been any water on the floor for some time now.'

"That's only because it hasn't been raining so much,' she said. 'It's been cold but it hasn't been raining.'

'Well,' I said, 'I am very sorry about all that. I will be going now.' I walked towards the door; I was in very low water, for a man ought not to be turning his back on a face like hers. 'At the church…' she called after me.

'What church?' I said. I had forgotten that she was keen on religion, and if the subject gave me hopes of continuing in her company, then I was all in favour.

'All Saints… where they've put up a scheme to help the ladies of the night-houses.' "The fallen women, you mean?'

"They are not fallen,' she shouted. 'It is the men who come to them who are fallen.'

I nodded, remembering a little bit of Bible class: 'Well, everybody is fallen, anyway'1 said.

She was now looking at me in amazement for some reason. 'Oh, you're not at all interested in this' she said.

'I certainly am' I said, and the beautiful looks of her – she really was an eye-opener – and the thought of her going to waste in this kitchen with its empty tins and the soap works towering over her garden, which was no garden at all, made me walk towards her and put my hands on her shoulders.

Of course, I took my hands down quickly enough when I realised what I had done, but she hadn't seemed to mind, and it was with the strangest mix of sadness and happiness that I listened to her woes.

'Well, it is the ladies who are to be involved' she said, more calmly, 'and I do mean the ladies. Oh, they all have their own broughams – and one of them a motor brougham – and three hundred pounds a year to do nothing with, and all I wanted to do was help in some small way, really nothing more than be on hand. I told them that I would make tea, I would make beds, but it is not to be. My face doesn't fit because they think I'm a skivvy, but it's just that our skivvy is taken sick, and has been for quite some time, and if you're not the right class in that place then the Christian religion goes right out of the window, Mr Stringer, I promise you it does.' 'I'd say you were in the wrong church.'

'Would you?' she said, and she almost smiled. 'Are you church, Mr Stringer, or chapel?' 'I think chapel is more modern' I said, because I knew she liked to be up-to-date, and it was also a way of not having to say I was neither.

'You're right,' she said, and then, although she was not quite crying, she gave a mighty sniff, so I handed her my undershirt, which was on the table waiting to be washed. 'Why are you giving me this?' 'So that you can blow your nose on it.' 'But it's your undershirt.'

'Would you like to come on a jaunt with me tomorrow?' I said. My plan was to cheer her up. And to spoon with her as well.

'Of course I wouldn't. Well, I couldn't. Anyway, where would we go?'

'I'd like to go on the Underground Railway,' I said. 'I've read a great deal touching on it but never seen it, and I think that, since I've been down here for so many weeks, it's high time I did.'

'It's electric in parts,' she said. She was always ardent for electricity. 'And would it be quite all right if my friend Mary Allington came along with us?' she added.

This was a blow, but, since I had gained so much ground, was only to be counted as a small one. 'I would be delighted,' I said.

'Because otherwise it would look as though I was your girl, wouldn't it?' She smiled, and all thoughts of the Old Shed, and how it was the perfect place to jack somebody in, flew from my mind for the time being, for this was London: a place of constant change. The next day my landlady knocked on my door at ten o'clock and said, 'All set?' She seemed very keen to get on. She had put on a blue coat and a very effective hat, and I thought: all this for me. It was very hard to believe. I had on my best cap, best suit and collar, and I had plastered my boots with the Nuggets and the Melton Cream, so that they quite out-did my best suit, which was actually falling apart.

We waited for Mary Allington outside the front door of Hercules Court. It was a middling sort of day: quite grey and quite cold, but it was the two of us against the weather. The air was full of church bells and trains. The Citadel was going – it went around the clock, after all – but it was quiet, and the noise was low. At ten o'clock it was like a candle that had burned right down.

By ten after ten there was still no sign of Mary Allington, and my landlady expressed the opinion that she probably wasn't going to turn up. I said, 'Well, where does that leave us?'

'There's no harm us going as friends. We were meant to be a crowd, and it's hardly your fault that it's ended up being just the two of us.'

So we set off, and I wondered whether Mary Allington was any more real than the skivvy my landlady had spoken of. In truth, I was a little put out that there was no other with us. We were all set for spooning, but I had no more idea of how to go about it than I did of how to drive the express to Bournemouth. I would have to watch her carefully, to read the signals. I paid her a compliment on her hat, and she gave me a perplexing look, so that I thought buttery of this sort was perhaps not the way.

We walked first into Waterloo – the first time I had been inside, I reflected in amazement. There was an army band playing and a Christmas tree going up. It looked better inside than out, with trains waiting in a neat row like horses in a stall; and it was very crowded, but with a Sunday lot – excursioners and shooting parties and so on. There were two of the Jubilees in, and any number of T9s, but I kept all that to myself. We both had a ham sandwich and a lemonade by way of breakfast, and tried to go down onto the Waterloo and City line to reach the Bank by Underground. The gates were locked, though, as it was closed on Sundays. As we came back up I could not resist telling my landlady that the Waterloo and City Line was run by the London and South Western Railway, who also supplied the trains for the London Necropolis and Mausoleum Company, and she said, 'I can't keep up with all these names.'

We walked over the river, going slowly, watching the boats, then we struck the District Railway at Charing Cross, but my landlady said that was no good for a first ride because the trains were not electric. We came to Tottenham Court Road after a while, and I told her it was my dad's favourite spot when he'd been in London. Being all pubs, dining rooms and doxies, and very bright and tinkly, it was hard to imagine him there. Or maybe he'd been different when young, more like me, in fact. It was the first time I'd had that thought.

We stood about looking for motor cars, and two or three did come by. My landlady said they looked very strange, and I said you could supply the horse in your imagination. We also saw a motorcycle with a man on the front and a lady on the back, and my landlady said, 'I should like to ride on one of those.'

I said, 'Well, then, you'll have to find yourself a young fellow who has one.' 'Why should I not have one of my own?' she said.

I told her I had never seen a woman on a motorcycle before, and she said, 'I daresay you've never seen a motorcycle before.' I said I certainly had, and she said, quite fiercely, 'Where?' I said on a railway waggon in a siding at Whitby, and she said, 'In a siding' and shook her head.

We walked through the front of what looked like a shop, and we were in the Central London Railway station for Tottenham Court Road. All tickets were 2d. As we rode down in the elevator my landlady had an even livelier look than usual in her eyes, and then I realised that all the half dozen fellows in there with us had the same moustache.

On the platform, you couldn't see the wall for advertisements and maps. I learnt from one of the maps that the Central went in a nearly straight line from a place called Wood Lane to a place called Bank – not a bank or the bank, but just Bank.

I was just going to ask my landlady about this – which I knew would involve the risk of a pretty sharp reply – when I saw that she was enquiring of a fellow in a uniform whether the electricity was Mr Edison's. He didn't seem to understand the question but he didn't mind being asked it by her. I could tell he was thinking that we were a handsome couple, and that I was a fellow with more luck than he deserved.

There were no timetables of any sort, just signs saying 'Trains arrive every few minutes', and certainly we only waited ninety seconds or so before one came in. We liked the coaches, which my landlady said were like little villas. It was a funny arrangement, though: a loco at the front and one at the back, but they were just electrical boxes on wheels. When they moved there came a buzzing noise that just went on and on. I wanted them to breathe. As we buzzed towards our destination of Notting Hill, I said, "They often have steam locomotives along here, you know.' She asked why, and I said, 'To rescue the electrics!'

'No!' she gasped. She would not hear of it. She said that, even though it was very good, it was very rattly, and I said that was because the track lengths were too short. She said that she'd read of draughtsmen in a spot called Cheapside who'd been drawing wonky lines ever since it was built, and then she asked: 'Why can they not have tyres like the motor cars?' and I couldn't think of a good answer.

We came to Notting Hill, from where we walked to another station which also turned out to be called Notting Hill, and there took a Metropolitan train to Brompton, where we changed for West Kensington. This was all by steam, and the lines mainly went through brick valleys between the houses, although some of the valleys had roofs. All parts were very smoky, and I couldn't see why they bothered with windows in the carriages since, if you opened one, you'd be choked to death.

'How can this work?' I asked my landlady, 'Steam engines underground?' She said, 'It can't. It will all be electric soon.'

That was one up for her, but I didn't care for these little locomotives in any case. 'You wouldn't get me driving one of these,' I said. 'It would be like being a dog always on the leash.' My landlady told me not to be swanky. I asked where we were going, and she said, 'Timbuctoo.'

It was a mystery tour, but as we rolled in to West Kensington my landlady told me to take a look out of the window, whereupon I saw a huge wheel, three hundred foot high, turning in the sky, with cabins for people to sit in.

'Whatever next?' I said, sitting back down, closer to her than I had been before.

We couldn't ride on the wheel because it was a guinea even for second class. It was like the Necropolis Railway in that there was little difference between second and first except the number on the door. We noticed that both classes were packed with johnnies, and I ventured to say, 'But I've got the prettiest girl of all.' But when I looked at my landlady she seemed not to have heard, which I was glad about.

Underneath the wheel was an Empire exhibition of some sort, with elephants that you could see for free. We had a look at those while drinking ginger beer, then we walked through a pretty Japanese garden decorated with lanterns that was alongside the exhibition, and so returned to the District Railway. As we stepped into our carriage it was dark, and the wheel was still turning above the station with lights burning in every cabin, and the sky around seemed not black but very dark blue.

We were back at Hercules Court for five-thirty. I asked whether she would like to come along to the Citadel. I told her about the mirrors with the electric lights like bunches of grapes, but could not persuade her. I said, could I go and get some bottled beer, and we could continue talking in the kitchen, so she made tea while I did that. The fire was going when I came back, and her hair was somehow different and even more fetching. When I finished my beer she just came over and sat on my knee, and I kissed her until she had to return to her father. As she rose to her feet I think I made a pretty good show of looking as if I had done that sort of thing a hundred times before.

But when she'd gone it was as if I'd always been alone in the lodge, and had never had anything in my thoughts but the half-link and the mutual improvement class they had arranged for me.