The Blackpool Highflyer (8 page)

'Stringer,' I said. 'Jim Stringer.'

'Well, Mr Stringer,' she said. 'You've just killed the sweet-
est-natured, most beautiful lass I've ever known, and you've
left her boy an orphan.'

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.