open the firehole doors. 'It needs three more on the right side and six at the front' he said, 'and a dozen in each back corner.' 'Mr Castle's not been taken too badly, I hope?' I said.
'Never you mind' said Hunt, and he picked the shovel out of the coal bunker and threw it at me.
I started shovelling. 'If I'm needed to take over from Mr Castle, you might give me a bit of advice. I'm not passed, you know.'
'I'll give you advice,' said Hunt. 'Don't bugger up that fire, or I'll bloody crown you.'
Well, anything was preferable to the treatment I'd been getting on the trip up. Hunt might have telephoned up to Nine Elms and asked for a relief, but if so the Governor would have turned him down. You can't very well relieve a relief, after all; you've got to go down to the next level, which was me.
I wanted the firehole door a bit wider open, but the lever was stiff, and scalding too. I did get it open after a while and then I stood and watched, hypnotised, as all the hairs disappeared off the back of my hand. That fire was white and evil, and it struck me for the first time that any engine, however small, travelled around with hell in its belly. I started shovelling, but the fire wanted the shovel out of my hands, and it wanted me in through those fire doors too. I took a step back and started again.
Getting the coal around the edges of the firehole door was easy enough, but when I started trying to chuck it six foot to the front of the firebox, I couldn't get the right sort of swing with the shovel and the coal, and it just plopped into the box halfway along. The harder I tried, the less far it went, and the blade of my shovel clanged on the top of the firehole at the end of every swing. I thought of my long days at the coal pens, and how I could have used my time there to practise shying, but I hadn't thought there'd be anything to it. Hunt wasn't looking on, or seemed not to be, but was watching the road from his side. I looked ahead from my side, and saw a signal I'd never noticed before. As I looked, it dropped.
'We've got the road'1 said, to let Hunt know that I'd spotted this.
'For Christ's sake' he said, so I'd probably made another bloomer. 'What's the guard doing?' I turned and looked the other way, back into the station. 'He's not doing anything,' I said.
I certainly wished he would do something. All the doors were shut, the mourners were on board; I saw no reason for delay. 'Is he going to blow his whistle?' I said.
This was too much for Hunt. He leapt across the cab to my side, shoved me out of the way, and looked at the guard. They shouted something to each other, then Hunt moved back across to his side, tugged the regulator and we were off, beating back along the Necropolis branchline and up towards the thirty-odd roads coming out of the great mouth of Waterloo.
Before long we were clattering across the roads, but eventually we settled onto one of them -1 could not have said which one, exactly, having no idea of the route between Waterloo and Brookwood Cemetery – and began approaching a signal gantry that stretched across about twenty roads. On top of the gantry was another jumble of signals and I realised that all my years of reading articles in The Railway Magazine counted for naught. There were some big signals, some little signals; some signals had other, smaller, signals underneath them, sometimes doing something different from the one above, sometimes doing the same. Half a dozen lamps were strung up there too: red ones, white ones, fighting the greyness of the wet morning. Of course, I had learnt something of signalling during my time at Grosmont, but up there signals came one at a time and with a good deal of warning.
'Have we got the road?' yelled Hunt over the rattle of Thirty-One.
Now he could see for himself, because our signal -whichever one might happen to be ours – would not be the kind that could only be seen from the fireman's side of the cab. I said, have we got the fucking road?' Hunt shrieked again. 'How do I know whether we've got it?' I replied.
Hunt rose threw open the fire doors. He lowered his long body and stared straight into the fire, challenging it to hurt him, like a man mastering a vicious dog. He tipped his face up towards the steam gauge. 'We're losing pressure,' he said. 'Fire's caking up. Give it a stir – and double-quick.'
That meant going at it with a fire iron. But which was the one for the job – dart, pricker or paddle? 'I want the dart, don't I?' I said, turning towards the hole in the bunker, from which the crooks of the three long irons jutted. 'You'll have it about your head if you don't look sharp.'
But which was the dart? I couldn't tell from the handles. My head was fairly buzzing as I looked from Hunt to the three handles and back at Hunt, who was just a pair of little eyes now, watching me raise my hands towards the irons. He could have told me which was which but he was making me eat dog. There was nothing for it but to pull hard on one of the three irons, which I did, stumbling immediately backwards in the process, for my tug had caused the whole boiling lot to come clattering out of the hole. I remained on the floor of the cab and shut my eyes, ready for Hunt to do his worst, but when I opened them he was at the fire, stirring the coal with mysterious motions. As he did so he looked across at me, seeming to shudder with hatred at the sight of me. He took the iron from the fire and put it and the other two back in their right place.
'Put another charge of coal at the front of the box,' he said, and by now his loathing was such he could not even meet my eye. 'I can't seem to pitch it to the front.' 'Then you should not be firing,' he said, in a voice so strange and quiet that my legs got soft under me. 'No,' I said, 'I shouldn't be. I'm a bloody cleaner.' 'But you're dead set on the footplate,' he said, in the same weird way. 'You hold it to be a grand life of freedom or something… Now for the last time of asking, have we got the road?'
Thirty-One was threatening to shake the tears out of me, but I leant out my side and looked at the gantry again, which seemed to have sprouted a few more signals since the last time. 'I don't know,' I said. 'I've told you.' We were chuffing under the gantry now. 'Did we have the road?' I asked him.
'Did we?' he said, in his quiet, dangerous way. 'Did we? That's one for the hall of fame, that is.' He pulled on the regulator, and I reckoned we were up to fifty miles to the hour, which was marvellous, except that all my railway dreams were coming to nothing.
'Why have you got your knife into me?' I said. 'You think I've been brought on for some reason, but I don't know what it is. You think I'm a company man, but I don't know why I'm here, and I'll tell you something: I bloody wish I wasn't.' I wanted to say a lot more but I couldn't hold back the tears any longer. 'You're a bloody rotter,' I said.
He wasn't listening. He'd started driving and firing the engine himself, which was like seeing a man riding two horses at once. He rode the two horses through Clapham Junction, where there were hundreds of people on the platforms – every one of them alone, nicely out of the rain but right in the middle of the smoke. We rattled down through the Southern Division: hundreds of houses on either side with horses and waggons trapped between them, looking for a way out of the maze. I had never felt more dismal, and after Wimbledon I just sat on the sandbox and looked at my boots.
It must have been half an hour before we came into a new, wide, blank station – Brookwood – and began some clattering operations over points on the down side of it. A man came running out of a signal box in front of us and climbed up to the cab. Hunt was putting a bit on as he came up; I was still leaning against the coal bunker with my arms folded, thinking: well, this is the end of all, and it will be a life of butchering for me. I had been of the mind to stick things out at Nine Elms no matter what, to crack the mystery and make the most of my God-given chance to be an engine man. But now my mind was changed. I was going home. 'What's up with this fellow?' said the signalman.
I just turned away from Arthur Hunt and climbed down off the footplate. As I went I could hear him muttering something, after which I caught the guard saying, 'Twenty-one inches of vacuum in his head,' and he started having a bit of a chuckle about that. I had no clue where I was going, and nor did I care.
Hunt uncoupled the engine and then, maybe with the help of the fellow from the signal box, he ran around the coaches on a passing loop so that he was ready to pull the set into the Cemetery itself. I followed the black train in, walking on the track. Anybody watching me plodding behind the carriages might have thought I was part of the procession, except that I had my hands in my pockets and I was wearing my grimy suit with no collar to my shirt. It was easy to keep up, on account of the constant 'five miles an hour' signs.
The cemetery was like the Yorkshire Moors squashed flat: heather, bracken, boggy black soil, with the graves at all angles as if there'd lately been a great explosion of stone. The place was sunk in some long, gloomy dream. Thirty-One, the black carriages and myself were rolling down a single track, raised on a low grass embankment. The cemetery was coming and going between massive trees, three times bigger than the common run of trees and so big they made Thirty-One look like a toy locomotive. The bottoms of their trunks were like giant lizard claws, and the tops of some had been blown off – by lightning, I reckoned. Presently I fell to wondering what the
