An Audience with an Elephant (26 page)

His office was an ante-chamber to the State wine-cellar under Lancaster House, the best wine-cellar in the country, he says – and he should know. That in Buckingham Palace was bigger, but there was nothing of interest there. When we met he showed me round the state cellar, pausing at the two bottles of Mouton Rothschild 1953, all that was left, for no one has come up with an excuse for an event which would require such legendary claret. His duties were roughly those of his surviving counterparts in the big houses, except he was in the strange position of being in service without a master. ‘With a master he knew how far he could go with you before you’d sulk or leave. Here you came up against so many personalities, some stuffy civil servant or a PPS who was a pig, a proper snob. You had to use diplomacy.’

But he had the wiles of the servants’ hall on his side. A single sherry in his office, he said, did more to cut red tape than 500 letters. They were heady days, for in addition to the booze he was in charge of the government silver, and one day he reported to his superior in the Hospitality Fund that there were no proper table decorations for banquets. That afternoon the two of them spent £10,000 of your money, and mine, in the jewellers.

His world was Lancaster House, Hampton Court, the Banqueting Hall, Henry VIII’s wine cellar in Whitehall, and the two Downing Street houses, numbers 10 and 11. The biggest change in his duties was when Harold Wilson came to power – a man he always liked (‘He never called me anything but Mr Pettifer’) but who would insist on strange parties with show business guests. ‘I remember one of these. Everyone had gone except this actor, who was very drunk and kept telling the Prime Minister, “Yer no bloody good, d’you know that?” Nobody knew what to do with him, so I went up and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, your car’s at the door.’ He was so surprised, for he didn’t have a car, that he got up, and when I got him to the front door I kicked him out. He came from Liverpool.’

George Brown he disliked intensely. ‘He never knew what to call you. “Leave that, steward,” he’d say of an unopened bottle, but I didn’t. I had to do my returns and make sure they added up.’ He liked the old-style Tories best, he said, for he knew where he was with them, and they knew where they were with butlers. Some of the Labour people tried it on with him. ‘“Pettifer,” this man said, “Try this wine, will you?” “A perfectly good Burgundy, sir.” “Well, my friends here say it’s off?” “That’s probably because they think it’s claret, sir.’”

I met him when he was one year away from his retirement. This had been planned with the care with which he approaches everything, and the bungalow had been bought in the Northamptonshire village where he was born, but, after all they had been through together, his wife died suddenly before they could move in. That was the year before we met.

The interview had been set up by a magazine I then worked for, and as I pedalled my bicycle towards Lancaster House, I kept thinking there had to have been a mistake, for the idea of a government butler was pure Gilbert and Sullivan. ‘Where d’you reckon on putting that bicycle, sir?’ asked a policeman suddenly stepping into my path. Startled, I said I had thought of chaining it to the railings, but he shook his head and looked very tired. ‘You put that within a hundred yards of this place and there’ll be blokes inside having heart attacks.’

It was then I realised that everywhere I looked there were policemen accompanied by armed soldiers, and when I eventually got inside Lancaster House there were others staring into closed-circuit screens. I had forgotten that upstairs Rhodesia was being negotiated away. But then I was through the cordons and, in a lift, sinking through concrete like a bathysphere in the sea, to a certain depth at which there is always peace.

That was eighteen years ago and Bernard Pettifer’s odyssey is complete. The bungalow he bought is in the village where the bell calling children to his old school is the only one he hears – he whose life was once full of bells. It is all behind him now, that little white cave where he agonised over the drinks trays of foreign potentates; and over Mr Wilson, who was polite; and Mr Brown, who was not; and Mr Heath, for whom once, at Trooping the Colour, he substituted champagne for the usual Pimm’s No. 1, knowing he loved champagne. ‘What, no Pimm’s?’ asked Mr Heath grumpily.

The 27 Troopings of the Colour are also behind him. And Buckingham Palace, where he was given six weeks just to find his way round its subterranean passages.

Yet none of his neighbours have been told any of this.

Ghost Train to Stalybridge

WAS EARLY. I SAT
alone on Platform 3a at Stockport Station, a sort of half forgotten annexe to the main-line platforms, gloomily remembering what the lady in the ticket office had said in answer to my question when I bought my £1.75 single to Stalybridge. ‘How long does this train take?’

‘Let me see.’ The service did not appear to be listed in the usual timetables, and the queue behind me was getting more and more restless so that when she finally said, ‘Ah, here we are.’ I would not have been that surprised had she announced she had found it in the
Book of Kells
. ‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Can I have a return?’

‘Well you can, but that’ll mean you catch a train into Manchester, then another back.
This train does not return
.’

A light rain was becoming mist as, on other, through, platforms, some admirer of Lord Haw-haw called people with somewhere to go to, and places to see, to exotic Stoke and legendary Cardiff. But on 3a, where the line ends, I stared at the weeds and the rusting rails beneath me, and was a man at the edge of the world.

Ten years ago there was an hourly service through the outer suburbs of Manchester from Stockport to Stalybridge. Now there is just one train
a week
. This leaves Stockport every Friday afternoon at 3.00, and does not come back, or rather, it does, but then no passengers are allowed on it. Every week they disappear into Stalybridge and what becomes of them is of no interest to the railway company. You will not need reminding that there were trains like this in Hitler’s Germany and in Stalin’s Russia, and it does not help that the Stockport to Stalybridge is known in the railway press as the ‘Ghost Train’. But to Northwest Trains, the company responsible for it, this is known as a ‘Parliamentary Service’. By running it once a week the company is able to avoid the lengthy, and costly, bureaucratic procedures which attend the closing of a line, even one that has outlived its commercial use.

There were, indeed still are, two stations in Manchester, the one on the main line South, the other on the main line to the North East, and until the late 1980s anyone needing to cross the Pennines, from London to York say, had to change trains and cross the city in the process. The Stockport to Stalybridge was thus a link service between the two, enabling travellers to avoid Manchester altogether, but for ten years now there have been through trains from the South of England to the North East. So a busy suburban link became a parliamentary service.

When this happens you enter a world meaningless to anyone who is not a lawyer or an accountant, for there is no obligation on a railway company to make a profit on such a line, a profit might even be an embarrassment. All it has to do is provide a service which passengers could use if they chose, and the company has no interest in attracting them to something which long ago disappeared into the small print of railway timetable footnotes. Even finding it in these is something akin to the three-card trick. . .
Now you see it, now you don’t
. . .

Thus North London Railways have taken up the rails between Watford Junction and Croxley Heath, so their Ghost Train is not a train at all but a bus which runs once a week
at twenty past six in the morning
. And there is one beyond this again. The 06.48 a.m. Derby to Sinfin Central train service, which once carried factory workers, is not even a bus,
it is a TAXI
. These moments of lunacy at dawn should long ago have been immortalised in film comedy, for you can imagine what the late great Will Hay, playing a taxidriver, would have made of the farce enacted once a week at dawn in the forecourt of Derby Station.

‘Sorry sir, you may not hire this taxi. Yes, I know the law too, and of course it is your privilege to report taxi drivers for refusing a fare. But this is not a taxi. It was a taxi five minutes ago, and it will be a taxi again in half an hour, but at the moment it is a train. It became a train at eighteen minutes to seven, and no, my name’s not Cinderella, sir. I know it may not look like a train to you. I know it doesn’t run on rails. But that’s what it is, a T-R-A-I-N. And puff puff to you too, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

Apart from some local people and rail enthusiasts crazy enough to get up at these ungodly hours, nobody knows about the Ghost Trains of old England, even when, as in the case of the Stockport to Stalybridge, this is a ghost at tea-time.

‘It’s worth going on, if only for the station buffet at Stalybridge,’ said Pip Dunn of
Rail Magazine
.

‘Fair enough, but can you imagine anyone writing 2,000 words on a 20 minute train service?’

‘We do that all the time here,’ said Mr Dunn.

You will gather from this that the idea to ride the Ghost Train did not originate with me. It was something I agreed to do, then put off until finally it became an embarrassment. And so it was that having driven 250 miles, I sat gloomily on Platform 3a, watching as the rain thickened and the tower blocks of Manchester went out one by one.

‘Afternoon.’

He was in his late thirties, a thick set man in a leather jacket and jeans, a haversack over one shoulder. I had company on 3a.

‘Excuse me asking, but you wouldn’t be taking the 3 o’clock to Stalybridge?’

‘I certainly am,’ said the man, sounding like Oliver Hardy.

‘What for?’

This is the Policeman’s story. He was travelling through Manchester, he said, he had time to kill, and, for old time’s sake, wanted to see what had become of a train he had last taken 20 years before. No, he hadn’t told anyone of his plan. People would think him mad, said the policeman. One odd thing though, there were just two stations on the route, and even when he had used the service regularly, he had never seen anyone alight, or waiting, at Reddish South or Denton.

‘Just one question, do you love railways?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the Policeman.

It was five minutes to three now, and an elderly lady and what looked like her son had turned up. A guard came, his two flags protruding from a satchel. ‘No sign of the train is there?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know where it’s got to.’ Three o’clock came and went. At four minutes past, there was an announcement. ‘For all those awaiting the 3 o’clock to Stalybridge, we are sorry for the delay.’ Nothing unusual about that, it was what came next which was so strange. ‘The full extent of the delay will be given as soon as possible.’ All other announcements about delays had given reasons and times. ‘Due to signalling problems the So and So is running ten minutes late. We apologise.’ But the station authorities themselves did not know what had happened to the Ghost Train.

‘Is it usually late?’ I asked the old lady.

‘Yes,’ she said.

And this is her story. It was all her fault, she said. Her grandfather had had a model railway in his garden, with trains big enough to sit on, so, when she had a family of her own, her idea of a day out was to take her two boys on a train. It did not matter much where the train went, nor did it now when she was old and they took her. Her bearded son listened impassively. She had passed her enthusiasm on to them, she went on, and his brother was even keener than he was. Most summers they went on the Stockport to Stalybridge at least three times, in winters less. Why, they had even met a lady on it once, who had actually wanted to go to Stalybridge, someone with a suitcase.

‘You haven’t been before?’ she asked me.

‘No.’

‘So you haven’t been to Stalybridge Buffet?’

‘No.’

She and her son exchanged glances, and the two smiled. Stalybridge Buffet, I gathered, seemed to be some rite of passage awaiting me at the end of the line.

‘Here she comes,’ shouted someone, and out of the mist came a fussy little diesel, not only 20 minutes late but a train out of time altogether, the line having never been electrified. I had not seen one of these in 20 years. It stopped and some twelve people, most of whom I had not noticed on the platform but who seemed to have been beamed down like the crew of the Starship Enterprise, got on. Only they did not get on the way people normally do, they piled on board, the old lady amongst them, like children on a school trip or soldiers going on leave, as though terrified they might be left behind.

I found myself in one of the two elderly carriages with three men who, to my amazement, told me they worked for the railways. One was a signalman, another an engine driver, and the third a younger man just about to join. All had come a long way for these 20 minutes to nowhere, one from Accrington, another from Reading, the third from Swindon.