flattened, as surely as if you'd stood on the tracks before one of Mr Ivatt's mighty Atlantics. And so I would try to keep up with the game.
Chapter Ten
Saturday 28 November
On the Saturday following – by which time I had recorded all the strange events in my Lett's diary, with notes as to possible meanings in the many spare pages at the back – I walked through the door of my lodge after a long and lonely day of cleaning at Nine Elms to find my landlady in the kitchen. She was about her Saturday clothes- washing, stirring the boiler with a black wooden stick, and very prettily too, with her head turned away from the rising steam, which had somehow unloosed her curls. 'Mr Stringer,' she said, nodding slowly.
I nodded back, and she gave me a glance which I took to mean there was something a little too forward in the way I had looked at her, so there was nothing for it but to leave the kitchen.
A few minutes later, however, when I was lying on my bed listening to the rumbling of the trains and looking once again at the notes in my diary (which had quite replaced The Railway Magazine for me), there came a knock on my door. 'Come in,' I said, standing up, but she would not.
She had put her hair to rights; the style was complicated but most effective. 'You forgot to put out your washing again,' she said. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Would it be too late to do it now?' 'I'm just about to drain the boiler.' 'Oh.'
She was looking all around the room, as if she had never set eyes on it before, but I was interested to see that she did not once look at the water on the floor. Should I say that it was a little hard to be paying six shillings a week, with a pound down, for a place with a puddle next to the bed? I was struggling for the right words here when she thrust a piece of paper at me, saying, 'Mr Stringer, would you be so kind as to post this somewhere about the premises of your railway company? It is an advertisement.'
'Yes,' I said, 'I would be very pleased to. Do you mind if I read it?' She shook her head.
'Unusually excellent furnished bed and sitting room with garden view offered to respectable person,' I read aloud. 'One minute from Waterloo Station. No servants kept, every comfort and convenience. Very moderate terms.' 'Well?' she said. 'What room is this concerning?' I said. 'The one alongside this one, of course,' she said. 'The one with the looking glass?' I said.
'It has a very pretty looking glass,' she said. 'Ought I to mention that?' 'You've put down 'No servants kept',' I said, 'but -' 'I am not a servant,' she said, most indignantly.
'No,' I said, 'of course not. I only meant that your terms do include laundry.' 'I will wash clothes,' she said, 'if they are put out.'
'I think it's an excellent notice,' I said, handing back the paper, 'unusually excellent, in fact, and I know just the spot for it at Nine Elms.' I had in mind the noticeboard in the timekeeper's office. I put the notice into my waistcoat pocket, and my eyes drifted once again to the water on the floor. I noticed that my landlady's had done the same. 'I wonder what causes the water on the floor?' I said. 'A broken roof,' she said.
She was certainly very direct. She walked into the room and put the toe of her boot into the puddle in a very hypnotising way. She looked up at me and her face was caught mysteriously between smiling and not. 'It's the trains have loosened the tiles on the roof,' she said. 'What I call the dray-horse engines do it – those fearful draggers that bring the heavy waggons over the arches and set every house in the district shaking.' 'You mean the slow-goods?' I said. She did not seem very sure of that.
I somehow took her to mean that she fancied the expresses at any rate, and I asked if that was true.
'Well,' she said, 'I suppose I do. If I have to go to Bournemouth then I wish to go in a hurry.' 'You've been there?' I said, 'On excursions?' She nodded. 'The Greyhounds can do it in two hours,' I said.
'Well, ours took four on the last occasion,' she said, walking rapidly towards the door as though I personally had been responsible for the slowness of her journey to the sea.
'High speed is my passion,' I said, to try and stop her going. 'But you are presently retained… not as a driver?'
'As a cleaner,' I said eagerly, 'but cleaning is the way to driving, did I not tell you that when I arrived at this lodge?'
She nodded quickly, and said, 'The subject of trains is of great interest to some people – or so I would imagine.'
And then she was gone, but the puddle was still there on the floor.
Chapter Eleven
Monday 30 November
For the following week I had the worst turn of the lot: the five o'clock in the morning go-on. On my first day of early turns, which was Monday 30 November, there was more coming and going in the shed than I had seen at any later hour, with 200 locomotives under the roof, and the fires were being started on all sides. The men were stoking up the whole of London, setting the world turning for another day, and by their looks they seemed to say they could manage the job quite well without me.
I went in to see the Governor first thing. As Nolan scribbled away, the Governor said he was giving me a rest from Twenty-Nine and Thirty-One for a while, for there weren't enough funerals. This was no great shock: those two only went out three or four times a week in any case. He put me on to general tidying and making straight, and as I was leaving he called out, 'Watch yourself off-shed today. It's thick as a bag out there.'
I walked back to the mouth of the shed, and saw that the dawn had come but it had been one of those frauds, where too much blackness makes way for too much whiteness. I couldn't even make out the turntables. A bell was being rung behind me, echoing in the shed. A couple of engines were coming off-shed, rolling out on the tracks to either side of me, big as black clanking houses on the move and giving me a sheer blank fright as they swept strangely past, proving the power of the fog, which swallowed them in an instant. A minute after, I heard an explosion.
A man to my left threw off his cap and began to run. On Filey Beach when I was twelve, my dad offered me a sporting challenge: first to touch the spars of Lighthouse Pier from a hundred yards off. For the first time my father did not let me win, and I saw what a man could do, even a little, sometimes-silly butcher in a brown billycock. This fellow was faster than my dad. He was leaping the rails, flying across the front of the fog, then disappearing diagonally into it. A crowd was coming up behind me to watch, and I turned around and saw Crook. It was a shock to see him away from his clock. 'Detonation,' he said to me, and his eyebrows did their little jump.
Detonators were put on the tracks as a back-up for signals on foggy days, and an explosion meant an engine had struck one. I didn't breathe as I awaited the sound of a smash, which was like waiting for death itself, because there was curiosity and horror too. I believed smashes came as the sound of a great bell being rung, and now I was about to find out for myself. But thirty seconds went by and we heard nothing, and I felt I ought to be doing more than standing there and waiting, so I stepped away from the shed.
I knew, once in the middle of the fog, that the bad business wasn't over. There were shouts, lamps swinging, the sound of people scrambling forward, then stopping. I was hard by the locomotive now, and I saw it was an engine commonly called a Jubilee, one of the two that had rolled out of the shed beside me. There were men all around it, with more crammed onto the footplate. A man was being moved around in there, propped up, turned about, and I could see the little ambulance box being passed across from one fellow to another. Then I saw the head of the man being moved: it was Mike's, and it was all wrong; blue, like a bad potato.
The body that was connected to the head flopped – the legs were for a second forgotten, and dangled from the cab – and it seemed too small, although in fact it was the head that was too big. But it scarcely mattered either way: the two could not remain connected for very much longer, since the one would henceforward want nothing to do with the other.
Now there was a fellow coming up from behind who said, 'Did you hear the barker?' Somebody else I didn't
