I cannot now say how, on the journey down from Yorkshire, I had thought my lodge and my landlady might actually be because any memory of it has been blotted out by the thought of how they actually were. The lodge was on a corner, half in Lower Marsh and half in Hercules Court. The wall facing Lower Marsh was covered in posters, all saying, 'Smoke Duke of Wellington Cigars', except for one going out on a limb with 'Stower's Lime Juice, No Musty Flavour'. I knocked on the door of this giant cigar box and a lady opened it, releasing a smell of wash day. She was certainly not from the common run of landlady, and while she did not look well-to-do, she looked clever – her faded skirts did not matter. Her eyes were very large and yet she herself was very small, and that to me was the right way about. It would have been very easy to lift her up, I thought, but I perceived instantly that nobody would ever dare to try.
She stood aside and looked away as I dragged my box through the doorway. On the floor was brown linoleum, and the wallpaper was black, with big, glowing orange flowers. This continued up the stairs, which were so narrow that my landlady's skirts touched both walls at once. She opened a door and showed me into a room.
'It's quite commodious,' I remarked after a while, for this was the best that could be said. The wallpaper was a design of roses on a trellis; there were two windows opposite each other, not at all clean. I walked towards one of them and my landlady said, 'As you see, they give on to the garden.'
There being no grass or plants of any description, but just bricks and a coal shed, this was more of a yard, I thought. I knew about yards because we had one at home. Immediately beyond this one was a brick wall that must have been sixty foot in height, if not greater, with an oil lamp burning towards the top of it. I was just trying to think of a way of asking about it when the landlady said, with a faraway look, 'Soap works. You'll have no trouble from it.'
There was a truckle bed and a broken bamboo table with a candle end in a saucer. No gas. There was one picture over the bed which showed a glum sort of castle in a brown field with two sad-looking men standing alongside it. I walked a little way towards the bed, and saw that underneath this scene were the words 'Harrow School, 1723'.
My landlady said, 'It's a pound down,' and then, as I gazed at a small pool of water on the floor, 'I believe that you have a start on the railways?' 'I'm to begin as a cleaner,' I said.
But people don't understand how it lies with engine cleaners – they didn't then and they don't now – and I could never leave it at that. 'Cleaning', I went on, as my landlady looked down at her boots, 'is the first stage on the road that leads to firing an engine. After some months, I anticipate becoming a passed cleaner, which will mean I can do some firing duties, and then, if all goes satisfactorily, I will perhaps move on to driving on a low link: shunting work, I mean, little goods and the like. At the top of the mountain that I am endeavouring to climb -'
At that, she flashed a look at me: a kind of warning I suppose it was, looking back. But I pressed on.
'At the top of that mountain are the express drivers, the ninety-mile-an-hour chaps, that is, and I have the confident expectation of becoming one of those myself, but I will have to spend many years proving that I'm the right sort, and if I have faults my watchword will have to be that I will seek to mend one every day.'
'Yes,' she said at length, 'well, it's a pound down.' She would have no fussing about; she wanted the money in her hand. I paid up, and she wrote me a receipt there and then, very fast and determined. As she wrote, leaning on the mantelpiece, she explained the rules of the house while I looked at the water on the floor, then up at the crack in the ceiling from where it came. There had been one other gentleman staying in the lodge – a schoolmaster who rode a bicycle – but he was leaving that day. Like this gentleman, I could have my laundry done if I left it out on a Friday evening. Wash day was Saturday. Today was Saturday but there would be no more done since the boiler had just been drained.
In the kitchen, my landlady said, there was hot water that could be brought up in bowls, and some margarine, bread and preserves to which I could help myself. I asked whether there was cocoa, and she said, 'No.' I said I was partial to it in the mornings, especially Rowntree's, at which she gave me such a look that I immediately added that I could do quite well without after all.
This lodge, she then told me, was owned by her father and he also owned another lodging house in which he lived and where she spent most of the week. He was not well, and presently kept no servants: there had been a skivvy for both houses but she was sick, therefore my landlady spent a good deal of time at her father's place. But she would be in this lodge every Saturday to do the washing – for the other did not have such a good kitchen – and to collect the rent. When she had left, I quickly unpacked my box. Then, to put me in the right frame of mind for my new life, I sat on the truckle bed and began reading, in one of my two Railway Magazines, a long article about one David Hughes, 'A Great Western Railway Engine Driver Who Received the Royal Victorian Medal'. Seldom has any driver put up harder running than Mr Hughes over any territory, but it was difficult to give him my full attention, what with all the shouts and screams and railway clamour around me. After a while I took up my two numbers of The Railway Magazine and tried to stand them on the mantelshelf with a lump of coal as a prop, but they would not stay upright, not being bound, as all my others were in the regulation red leather, all standing proudly in rows on the shelves of my cosy little bedroom in Baytown. But I tried hard not to think of that.
Every now and again, as I brushed the dust off the mantel and thought, despite myself, of the balmy life I had left behind, there would come a great smashing wave of laughter and shouting rolling out of the pub just along the road. This presently mingled with another train thumping over the viaduct, and the clanging of a church bell. It was only four o'clock. But it was four o'clock in Waterloo.
Chapter Two
Monday 16 November
On my first morning I climbed out of bed at five, an hour before my alarm rang, and put on the old black suit of Dad's that I would be wearing for work. He'd said I ought to wear a collar and tie, and I'd said that sort of thing was for the porters, the little men of the railways, and that I would not keep a collar on my shirt but would wear a kerchief, and we had agreed on that. I had two caps with me down in Waterloo: my best cap and my other one. As it was my first day and I was nineteen and felt myself on a heavenly mission, I stood up, put on my best one, and prepared to look in a glass to see how much I resembled a fellow of the right sort. But there was no looking glass, and it would have been too dark to see into one even if there had been, which was all just as well.
Then I sat back on my bed and watched my new alarm go around to six o'clock. It did go off at six, which made me feel a juggings for not trusting it, but I had a dread of having to be woken by a call boy on my first day.
I stepped out of the front door, and there was my welcome to Waterloo: a man in an Ulster, stiff with mud, was banging a metal bar against the iron ladder that went up the side of the viaduct. The fellow was saturated, and the queer thing was that he quite looked the part, for his coat was bell-shaped and swung in time with his blows. Above him, the cold wind raced under and over the dirty tarpaulins that bandaged Waterloo.
I turned away from this scene and, thinking things would pick up with the sun, I began to walk. It took me one day to realise that the quickest way from Waterloo to Nine Elms Locomotive Shed was along the river. On that first morning, however, I attempted to walk there through ordinary streets, following the viaducts whenever I thought I might not be going right, but this proved no simple matter since they were tangled up with the buildings. The dismal streets were full of dark warehouses instead of ordinary houses, and full of men and their horses and waggons bringing things into Waterloo or taking them away and making a great din about it, and what with the noise, the strangeness of the streets and my fearfulness of being late, I was in a very fretful condition when I finally came upon the main gates of Nine Elms.
It was Monday 16 November 1903, bang on seven o'clock, and I could've done with some cocoa inside me. I walked past a pub called the Turnstile, ever closer to those golden gates, although they were far from golden, of course.
'Who are you, mate?' he said, a funny little bloke who was suddenly in my way. 'I'm new, I'm to come on as a cleaner.' 'I might be able to help in that.' 'Oh, yes?' 'It depends who you are, though.'
This funny little fellow, who had, I believed, the accent of the true cockney, was very keen to have my name, so I thought I would give him it, and then I would be able to get on: 'Jim Stringer,' I said, and held out my
