The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Seven

Saturday 21 November

On the Saturday, Vincent rolled up again, once more in the mood for a chat. He settled down with his snap on the top of the coal pen I happened to be at, which was downwind of the coaling stage so my face was black and my eyes were red. 'I can see you're up against it today,' said Vincent.

'Clear off, will you, mate,' I said, but in an under-breath. It came to me that I just didn't trust this little fellow; I couldn't say for certain whether he was behind the exploit in the Old Shed but he was top of my list.

'I'm cleaning a big Birmingham class,' he said. 'Been at it for two days, and the job's nearly done. I'm going at her with rape oil just now.' 'Coming up nicely, is she?' I said in a weary kind of way. 'Top hole,' said Vincent.

That was all tommy-rot, for the engine he was speaking of would be black and you can't clean a black engine in a black shed, but I said nothing, and carried on shovelling while he watched me in a superior way.

He began eating, and I spotted that his dinner was a clanger, which is a pastry with jam or apple at one end and bits of meat and potato at the other. They'd had them on the North Eastern too – and up there a clanger was an engine man's dinner. There was no law against eating one if you weren't on the footplate, but it was all wrong in my eyes.

'I could do with some goggles, I tell you,' I shouted at Vincent, as the yard pilot banged another wagon up to the coaling stage.

'That's a funny bit of kit for a railwayman,' he roared back, as the blokes began chucking down the coal. 'In France,' I said, 'engine men wear them on the footplates.' 'Go on!' said Vincent.

'Honour bright' I said, and Vincent repeated these words with a sneer, adding: 'You read that in the Boy's Own Paper, I suppose.'

'Railway Magazine,' I shouted back, but he didn't hear, or pretended not to. 'In France,' I said again, 'they call the drivers ingenieurs.'

'Give it a bloody rest, will you?' said Vincent, who'd gone moody again. He bit into his clanger, then quickly put it down, and I thought: I know what's happened – the jam's shot through the meat end. Serve him right, too.

'I suppose you think cab roofs should be all over,' said Vincent.

'Well,' I said, stopping shovelling because I was desperate for a proper chat, really, 'that would be up-to-date, at least.'

'Only trouble is, you'd have drivers falling asleep all the time if they didn't get a soaking or a bit of a blow to keep them going.'

'How could that happen? In America the drivers sit on seats in the footplate, and they don't fall asleep.'

'Seats? Can you imagine a first-class man like my uncle Arthur sitting down at the regulator?'

'Uncle!' and I fairly gasped the word out, for Vincent did not look like the sort of happy-go-lucky young fellow that has an uncle, and Arthur Hunt did not seem like the amiable sort of bloke you imagine as having a nephew.

'I'm wondering how those two ended up on the half-link,' I said. 'Your uncle especially. He looks all right to me, and you don't get taken off the main line just on account of a hard nature.'

Vincent gave me one of his looks. 'Arthur won't lick the Governor's boots, and Barney's no toady either, but he's easier meat for the bastards on account of being a more obliging sort of bloke.' 'They were both top-link men at one time, though?' Vincent nodded: 'Lodging turns,' he muttered. He was a very suspicious fellow, slow as Christmas at giving out facts. 'So they're both in hot water, are they?' 'Drowning in it.' 'Why don't they get stood down?'

'Too popular about the shed. There'd be a bloody riot if Arthur went, especially. Barney's got to look out for himself a bit more.' 'Why?'

'Five years back he crashed the express just before Salisbury.' 'A bad smash, was it?'

Vincent nodded: 'Made the hills rattle; he was never the same after that.' 'How do you mean?'

But Vincent said nothing to that. I looked at him, trying to fathom his face, which was like a white billiard ball, right down to the little blue chalky marks. 'This summer,' Vincent went on after a while, 'they said he ran over in the yard here, and they tried to get him for that.' 'He went past a stop signal?' 'That's what somebody said – some little splitter.'

I asked who, but he wouldn't say. He may have been slow with information but it was coming now, and it was, in a sly way, against Barney Rose. The half-link, it seemed to me, were pretty thick with each other, but Vincent preferred Hunt to Rose. I found I had a great appetite for all that he could tell me, and I wasn't sure whether it was a strength or weakness in me, but it was something altogether new.

'Barney's all right though,' he went on. 'He doesn't mind the Brookwood runs.' Now, he'd mentioned that spot before. 'Where's Brookwood?' I asked.

'I don't know why you don't look it up in The Railway Magazine,' said Vincent; 'it's sure to be in there.'

We both turned away at that moment, for an 0-8-2 monster tank was coming up like nightfall. As the coal blokes began to fill its bunker, Vincent stuffed what was left of his clanger under his jacket, but it was no good, because the dust gets you from all sides.

I put in a few minutes more with the shovel before I spoke to him again. "The Governor said nothing about me shovelling coal on these heaps.'

'But he's on sick leave just at the moment,' said Vincent, and a little smile sneaked quickly across his face. 'Maybe you should have watched your step a bit with Arthur.'

'But I've only ever said half a dozen words to him since I've been here.'

'Maybe they were the wrong half dozen,' said Vincent, bringing his clanger out of his pocket again. 'Or maybe there's a bit of a mystery about why you're here in the first place.'

'What are you getting at?' I asked, but of course I knew very well because the thing was a mystery to me as much as anybody.

'I mean, look here,' said Vincent, 'you meet some johnny up in the bloody middle of nowhere.'

He meant Smith, who was the cause of all my troubles in some way, but I tried to pretend that my thoughts concerning that gentleman came without complications. 'He wasn't some johnny, he's a director of this company.'

Vincent put his pipe on the coal, and gave me one of the hypnotising looks he went in for. 'No, mate,' he said, 'he's not.'

With this, all the ground went from beneath my feet; but I tried not to let on. 'Who is he then?'

'I can't believe you don't know all,' said Vincent. 'You must have had a few chats with the gent.'

'I've had one chat with him,' I said, 'and some letters were sent.'

'Smith used to be part of this show,' said Vincent, 'the London and South Western Company, I mean, and he still comes back to cause trouble from time to time, but now he's with another lot.' 'What other lot?' I was desperate for the answer, which might make everything plain, but Vincent first caught up his bottle and had another long go at his tea.

'Ever heard of the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company?' he said after a while. 'No.'

"They run the bodies out to Brookwood Cemetery. Well, they do the ceremonials; we lay on the trains, and the half-link runs 'em.' 'And I'm to work on this funeral train?'

'If you ever get off these coal heaps,' said Vincent with a horrible little grin.

Vincent stood up and put the cork in his bottle. 'You've been sent to work on that show for a reason.'

I was still too busy trying to imagine 'that show' to be thinking of reasons, but I said in a daze: 'What?'

He didn't answer, but instead asked, "This fellow Smith… he's not been in touch since?' 'No.' 'And he was helpful towards you?'

A funeral train. I had heard of a funeral train, but not a funeral train. 'I say,' said Vincent, 'was he helpful towards you?' 'A proper gent in all regards.' 'Think he might be a Tommy Dodd?' 'A what?'

'Don't know? Then count yourself lucky. Let's say that you're here because he's got friends who've pulled strings, and now, you see, Arthur doesn't like that because he can think of other people who should have had this start before you.' 'Like who?'

'Like friends of his.' Vincent was watching me like a coal rat. 'Friends of his from London. You see, we don't go up there and take your work, poking our nose into your ways…'

I thought of Grosmont, and how the sun had shone every single day as I worked my notice and the rooks had risen off the trees at dusk like cinders off a fire, and then I thought of Smith, and how he had gulled me from start to finish. He had heard of my liking for high speed, yet had brought me down to work on a funeral train. But why had he done so?

'Hunt thinks I earn too much money for a new lad, doesn't he?' I said. "That's one of the reasons he's got his knife into me.'

'No,' said Vincent, 'he thinks you earn too little, and that nobody should agree to come on at that rate. But you did, and so did those other out-of-town blokes – bloody Taylor and bloody Mike.'

Then I saw a big man stumbling towards us wearing a bowler that was more on his hair than on his head: the Governor. As he began to climb the coal hill, Vincent turned to face him; the two closed, and I thought the Governor looked fit to explode as he reeled back and crowned the side of Vincent's head, roaring, 'Get back to your fucking duty!' For a moment I thought Vincent was going to be up and at him, but he did saunter off eventually, cool as a cucumber, and the Governor led me into the shed to finally start me on the long road to engine driving, by which I mean that he started me cleaning Bampton Number Twenty-Nine. The Bampton tank was green. It looked somewhat like an M7, being thirty-five tons of muscular-looking side tank, but there was something not right about it. The dome was too big, like a big, ever-growing bubble rising out of the boiler, threatening to burst.

I spent the rest of that Saturday going at it with paraffin rags on the motion and frame, and tallow on the boiler, and thinking about the private war I'd struck. The missing man, Henry Taylor, was to do with it, I was sure, and so was Mr Rowland Smith. When I was not thinking of that I was revolving in my mind funerals and trains, and how the two might go hand in hand.

For all my troubles, I was glad to be cleaning at last, and I would like to have set to with Brasso on the controls as well, but a fire-raiser came onto the engine at four o'clock and ordered me off the footplate. He didn't seem to mind, though, that I watched him about his work as best I could from down on the tracks. The lights were all lit and the shed was almost pretty – quieter than usual, too, for there didn't seem to be many blokes about.

After a while the fire-raiser looked up from the firehole door, where he'd been spreading out the coal, and shouted, 'I hear you're from the North Eastern.'

'That's it,' I said, and I was glad he was willing to chat, but anxious as to what he'd heard about me.

'Some good running up there,' he said, and his voice came out with an echo to it, as though his head was half in the fire-hole.

'Our first Rs', I shouted back up at him, 'did almost a hundred and fifty thousand miles between Newcastle and Edinburgh with no valve-wear to speak of.'

But by that remark I had somehow killed the conversation, for there was no answer.

Having no other duties, I hung around that funny little hunchback, Twenty-Nine, sitting on the buffer bar drinking tea until late in the evening, and watching the fire blokes come out of their mess at the top of the shed, which must have been a pretty uncomfortable spot, as it had a great fire burning at all times inside it. They were off to raise steam in the engines going out on 'dark days', which is what nights were called at Nine Elms, and they carried torches or sometimes buckets of burning paraffin held on wooden spars. They never used the engines' proper names but called out nicknames instead, and the talk was all of Jumbos, Piano Fronts, Town Halls and the like. As the evening progressed they were shouting about the Turnstile too, the pub near to the Nine Elms gates. I had seen it, of course, but that was all.

I was just thinking this was a bit of all right, that maybe things were looking up, when Arthur Hunt came out of the darkness with a black-bearded fellow. One nightmare glance went shooting between us, then he and his mate leapt up onto Thirty-One, and he took her off somewhere – I did not care where.

That night the streets were full of girls, and I suddenly knew how they got their living. From my lodge I saw washing flying on the line in the yard. There were three pairs of my landlady's knickers and three of her blouses, and they were all lit up by the light on the soap works wall. But there was no sign of the lady herself.