The Somme Stations (30 page)

‘I’m a ticket checker,’ she replied.

Plumptree exclaimed, ‘But you’re a woman!’ and at that I could not keep quiet.

‘There are no flies on
you
, are there?’ I said, and he told me he would be making a complaint about me.

What happened about this complaint I’ve no notion, but he was back the next day, and as Mary (one of the servers) mopped up the tea and cake that he’d spilt, he said he was willing to tolerate the idea of women working on the station (as if anybody had
asked
him) on
the grounds that three women could do the work of very nearly two men if ‘trained to the hilt’.

Do you have any vacancies for spare Majors out where you are, Jim? You could ask your officer commanding to write to him care of the buffet.

Well then, to Naburn, and my enquiries on your behalf.

Of course it is barely a mile from our house, but I went from the middle of town, after a morning of work. It was a rather rainy day …

And I couldn’t help but smile, for that word ‘rainy’ was just then spotted with a drop of the stuff, as I sat reading beyond the half-broken platform canopy of the station of Albert. Beside me sat Alfred Tinsley. We were waiting for a connection for Amiens, liberty passes in our pockets. At the start of the rain, we moved under a less broken part of the canopy, and sat down on a luggage barrow, where he resumed his reading of the
Railway Magazine
with the same keenness as that with which I returned to the wife’s letter, thinking how lovely it was to hear from her, and wondering why she’d had to go round the houses quite so much before getting to the nub of the matter. But then Naburn evidently
wasn’t
the nub of the matter in her life. I read on.

It was a rather rainy day and I was the only passenger on Black Leonard’s pleasure steamer. I’d never heard him speak before, and in fact, he hardly does speak, but his few utterances are always extremely gentlemanly. As we came out of the town, and sailed through Thorpe (do you ‘sail’ when it’s a steamboat?) our village looked perfectly lovely, Jim, with the canopy of yellow and orange leaves over the water, and the afternoon lamps glowing in the Archbishop’s Palace. As we went past
there, Black Leonard said, ‘I
like
today.’ Just that: three words. Nothing more until our arrival at Naburn, when I held out a shilling for him, and he said, ‘Free ride.’ I said, ‘But I am not a soldier.’ He said, ‘You qualify under a different heading’, and I
would
write that he was wasted on that boat of his, had not my trip been so very enjoyable.

I set all this down, Jim, to make you feel better about having sent me on such an exhausting and mysterious mission. However, it was all downhill from then on.

The landing stage at Naburn is some way from the lock, and my boots were soaked through by the time I got there. There was nobody at the lock, not even a lock-keeper as far as I could see, and no boats going through. The tea place, Martindale’s, was closed, and the door glass was cracked. It was a world of water: the falling rain … the rushing of the water through the weir beyond the lock … the soaking fields. Well, I felt a perfect fool standing there, and it seemed to me that the question you wanted put – ‘Has anything notable happened at the lock in recent times?’ – was very likely to be answered in the negative. I then recalled the little reading room in the village, and the fire that burns there. I might go there, have a warm, and enquire. I was about to set off when I saw a trap approaching along the road that runs over the fields from the village to the lock. The man driving it was a glazier, come to replace the window of Martindale’s. He told me his name was Harry Robson, and that he lived in Naburn, so I asked
him
whether anything notable had recently happened at the lock, and I got a very funny look for my trouble, but he did speak up eventually, while taking a mallet and chisel to the broken glass.

‘You mean Matthew Waddington,’ he said.

‘Do I?’ I said. ‘Who’s Matthew Waddington?’

‘Cattle drover,’ he said, and I did wish he’d stop bashing away at the glass, and just address me directly for a minute.

‘And what was his association with the lock?’

‘He was found dead in it, if you call that an association.’

Well, I questioned him closely (isn’t that what you policeman say?), and it appeared that the body of Matthew Waddington had not been found inside the lock, but floating up against the
outside
of the lock gates at the town end – upriver, in other words – and this in the middle of July, 1914. Matthew Waddington was, according to Harry Robson, ‘an old beer eater’ – a heavy drinker. He then started in on a long description of him, for it seemed that Waddington was well known in the village. It was difficult to make out what Robson was saying, because he would keep hacking away as he spoke. At first, I thought he was speaking unflatteringly of Waddington, but this was not the case: the man was often ‘beered up’ but kept himself to himself. ‘He had his cottage and his garden, and that was him, nicely suited.’ He was a big fellow, ‘Built like a … ’ (Well, I can’t write it down.) And something that would interest you, Jim: he had once worked at the cattle dock at York station. He might have been ‘in bother’ with the police once or twice as a younger man, but there’d been nothing of that recently.

When he’d finished telling me this, Harry Robson said he’d drive me back to Thorpe, since he was heading that way, but I would have to wait for him to finish the window. Well, he was intolerably slow at his work, so after a while I thanked him, and set off to walk through the rain. The next day, I went to the Library and found
the report from the ‘Press’. I copied it out for you, and there will be an extra charge for this, Jim.

Appearing on Monday 22nd July, 1914, under the heading ‘Naburn Lock Mystery’, it ran, ‘The body of Matthew Waddington, aged 50, a cattle drover of Oak Field Lane, Naburn, was recovered from the River Ouse at Naburn Lock yesterday evening by P.C. Hartas and P.S. Hill. It appears that Sidney Stewart Taylor, a retired pharmacist, was going home along the river when he saw an object floating in the water. He informed David Brown, a lamplighter, and the two gave information to the police, who discovered the body of the deceased in the water. An inquest is to be held.’

The inquest was held a week later, and I did not copy out the report. It was too long, Jim, but there wasn’t much to it for all that. Sidney Stewart Taylor and David Brown gave evidence. They seemed from it to be very respectable – as you would say, ‘above suspicion’. A doctor gave evidence that Matthew Waddington had been dead, and in the water, not above a week. He was found to have suffered a blow to the forehead, whether from a fall or a blow could not be stated, and his liver was in a very poor condition. He was known to have had a weakness for alcohol. An open verdict was returned.

So there you have it, Jim: nothing else notable had occurred at the lock as far as I can tell, and this is one more death among all the other thousands. I mentioned it to Lillian, and she
had
heard of the matter from Peter, who knows the Naburn gravedigger. (He mixes in all the best circles, does Peter.) She said the police force in Naburn – that is, Hartas and Hill – were sure Matthew Waddington had been murdered. I think this will not surprise you, but quite honestly I do not want to know any more.

I pray for you every day in St Andrew’s Church, and I know you will laugh, but after all you are, as you always point out at the start of your letters, ‘still living’. (Jim, there is no
need
to point that out: if you were not living you would not be writing.)

I will close now. Write again soon, and do keep small.

With all my love,

Lydia.

PS: In your last letter, you said that some leave might be in the offing.
When
, Jim?

Half an hour later, I returned the letter to my greatcoat pocket after reading it over for the third time, at which moment the engine gave a whistle, a sure sign that we were a long way behind the lines.

We were approaching the town of Amiens in a very old French ‘Nord’ carriage which boasted open seating – that is to say, no compartments. In spite of the brass ‘Défense de Fumer’ signs on the backs of the seats, I personally had a Virginians Select on the go, and the signs were ignored by most of the thirty or so blokes riding up. The majority were Burton Dump men, equipped with the same liberty pass as rested in my pocket, and among them was Oliver Butler. I looked up to see him facing my way about five rows along. I couldn’t see his brothers about, though. Amiens was a civilised place, not suited to their rough-house ways, and perhaps Oliver had told them as much.

Alfred Tinsley sat opposite to me. We knew Amiens by the approach of a great cathedral spire. Famous for its cathedral, was Amiens – its cathedral and its station, which was now closing around us.

The place was normal, as before: civilian services running to time, gorgeous-coloured advertising posters. The station dining rooms, located on our arrival platform, seemed all fitted out in gold, and there was a white-coated bloke sitting inside,
folding napkins. Some military wagons and troop carriages
were
to be seen, but these were in far-off sidings. I pointed out a British 2-8-0 to Tinsley, and he said, ‘Well, there are heaps of those round here’, and didn’t seem particularly interested.

The ticket collector looked long and hard at our passes, but finished off his inspection with a respectful nod.

‘That’s the Frenchers all over for you,’ I said to Tinsley as we strolled through the ticket gate. ‘… Like to keep you guessing.’

Coming out from under the station glass, we saw that Amiens was enclosed in a thin white mist of the sort you only seem to get in the afternoons. It was like the half-formed idea of snow, and the place was freezing. Still, they had the tables set out in front of the cafés, and there were people sitting at them too – usually greatcoated soldiers with pretty, muffled-up women. I saw a man smoking, and then passing the cigarette to the woman. I’d never seen that done in Britain. Women seemed to be a speciality of Amiens – beautiful ones, I mean and we saw some real peaches.

‘They’ve got everything here,’ said Tinsley, ‘women, proper buildings that stand up, tablecloths on the tables.’

We came upon the cathedral, and the size came as a shock – every part of it trying to be higher than the other part. The Germans had been in Amiens at the start of the war. How come they hadn’t wrecked it?

‘This is Gothic,’ I said to Tinsley when we were inside. ‘Like York Minster … I think.’

It
was
like York Minster, only more so. Tinsley put some change into a box marked, ‘For the Poor of Amiens’ – rewarding the town for being normal. Watching him wandering about in there, I thought of the bullet that had landed in
The Count of Monte Cristo.
I had taken it to one of the Royal Artillery blokes at the Dump, and without saying where I’d found it, I’d asked whether he thought it came from a British or a German weapon. He said it was too misshapen to say, but most likely
German. As regards the book itself, I’d asked Oamer if I might keep it, and he’d agreed, saying, ‘It’s not going to save my life again, is it?’ I would now be able to give it back to Harry with the best possible excuse for not having read it, and I decided that as far as the lad was concerned, it might as well have saved
my
life as Oamer’s.

Behind the cathedral was an area of narrow canals running between ancient-looking houses connected by wooden bridges. It was a beautiful spot, but I looked into the waters of the canals expecting to see dead men floating there, and when I looked into the sky it appeared to be unnaturally empty and silent as though something had lately been taken away. As we drifted about, the light fell, and the buildings became distinct by virtue of the different colours of light showing from them. About half of them turned out to be pubs or restaurants, and this quarter was evidently a big draw for the Tommies. We had three or four glasses of beer apiece, then went into a little restaurant and ordered what turned out to be a quarter of a chicken apiece with herbs and fried potato – and gravy. There was no gravy at Burton Dump, never had been and never would be. The owner of the place came up to us and asked ‘Bon?’

‘
Très
bon,’ I said, but that only encouraged the bloke to say something else in French that I didn’t get, but that I fancied might be, ‘Thank you for fighting the war – I hope you win it.’

‘You know, I could live in France,’ said Tinsley, as we were fishing out our francs to pay the bill.

‘You are doing,’ I said.

‘After the war, I mean,’ he said, and I was struck by his confidence in using that expression.

‘If you lived in France you couldn’t be a train driver in York,’ I said.

‘I know,’ said Tinsley, ‘that’s the trouble.’

He must have been a bit squiffed because he started in about how the locomotives were more exciting over here, the carriages
wider-bodied, the stations bigger. They had bigger ideas about everything in France. Only he couldn’t live without tea, and they didn’t run to that. When we left the restaurant, the owner said, ‘Bonne journée.’

‘That means “Have a good journey”,’ said Tinsley. ‘It’s the politeness of the French for you.’

After our supper there was a bit more drifting, but it struck me that, while Tinsley’s body might be wandering aimlessly in the maze of little houses and canals, his mind was not.

‘What are you after?’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said, and he coloured up. ‘Something Bernie Dawson told me about ages ago.’

‘A pub?’ I said.

‘Not exactly a pub,’ said Tinsley.

‘I think you want to be over that way,’ I said, indicating a quarter where the lights in the windows burned lower and redder. He’d missed his chance in Albert, so here was another opportunity.

‘Fancy coming with me?’ Tinsley enquired, looking in the direction indicated, and not at me. ‘I think you should.’

Towards the end of one particular cobbled street, the only people on view were women, mostly sitting on the first-floor windowsills, and looking at the blokes walking past – the uniformed ones especially. Tinsley stopped, and eyed one back, going crimson in the process. I was sure it would have been the longest he’d ever looked directly at a woman – about three seconds. It was enough though, and she jumped down off the window ledge, indicating that he should follow her into the house.