The Blackpool Highflyer (20 page)

"A's or 'B's?' the cigar man asked.

"A's for me', said George. 'Take a dozen.'

"B's for me,' I said. 'Half a dozen.'

Mine were two shillings, George's four, and they came to
us in boxes without lids.

'Do you have any tubes?' said George to the cigar man.

'What sort of tubes?' came the reply.

'Cigar tubes,' said George.

The man turned to one of the crates and George turned to
me, muttering, 'Extraordinary fellow!'

George got one tin tube, gratis - which he thought a great
thing to bring off - and as we walked away he took a little
clasp knife out of one of his dozens of pockets, chopped the
end off his 'A', and lit it. It was more than twice the size of one
of my 'B's.

'Sound smoke,' he said after a while, and he carried it off
pretty well. Folk looked at him as he walked by. Then he
stopped, and with the smoke racing into his eyes, unlaced his
watch from his waistcoat: 'Fancy a stroll down to the Joint?'

I said that I did, and we set off down Horton Street, carry­ing our cigar boxes.

'You really ought to get 'A's, you know,' said George.

'Why?' I said, even though I'd been thinking the same
thing myself.

'They're bigger,' he said, taking a puff, 'and better. You're
an Ai fellow, so have an Ai cigar.'

'Thank you,' I said, because there didn't seem much else to
say.

After a few paces he turned, with a flaring match in his
hand, saying
'Won't
you join me, old man?'

So I bit the end off my 'B' - which George frowned at - and
started smoking it.

I might have taken two draws on the cigar when we came
alongside the Thomas Cook excursion office in Horton Street.
They were queuing out the door as usual, but the window
was boarded.

'Hey!' I called to George. 'That's been smashed.'

George didn't even stop walking; didn't even remove his
cigar from his mouth. 'Friday night, old man!' he called.
'High spirits!' Then he added: 'I've no use for that place
myself. I won't go in for your whirligig holidays. Besides, the
trains can be dangerous from all I hear.'

'It's not the trains,' I said, staring at the boarded window.
'It's the loonies with the bloody millstones.'

Without a word to George, I stood on my cigar, crossed over
Horton Street and began pushing towards the front of the
queue of excursionists, apologising as I went. As I did so, I
realised that George was behind me, not apologising, but say­ing, every now and again, 'Step aside there', and the funny
thing was that his big cigar allowed him to get away with it.

There were three clerks inside the excursion office, all look­ing very hot and bothered, and surrounded by posters of peo­ple standing at the seaside in golden sun, and grinning fit to
bust under straw boaters. There were some Lanky posters up
there as well, and two or three of the same one: a poster show­ing a steam packet, and the words: '
step on at goole for the continent'.

'Who smashed your window?' I asked one of the clerks,
who was in the middle of serving an elderly party in a dinty
bowler.

'Mr Bloody Nobody,' he said, and then, after a quick glance
at me, 'It wasn't thissen, by any chance, I don't suppose?'

George was right behind me, smoking into my ear. 'Bloody
sauce,' he said. 'Why, it's slander, is that.'

The clerk now turned to George: 'And will
you
get out of
here, and leave off poisoning us all with that dratted great
cigar.'

'That was slander as well,' said George, when we were
back outside in Horton Street.

'Come here,' I said, and I led him back across the road to
the wall of the old warehouse. The poster was still there: '
a
meeting to discuss questions'.

'I reckon it was that lot that smashed the window’ I said.
"Ihey want to stop all excursions, and they want to frighten the
railways off.' And I told George all about Paul, the socialist
missionary-cum-anarchist, and how there might be a connec­tion with the stone on the line.

'Anarchists . . .' said George, when I'd finished. 'There's a
lot of those blighters in Germany, from what I read in
The
Times.
Bomb-throwing's meat and drink to them, you know.
Then there's the bloody Fenians too.'

'Well, that puts my mind at ease, I must say,' I said. 'Why
do they do it?'

George puffed on his cigar, using it to think. 'Get in the
newspapers’ he said.

We walked on, heading for the Joint, and George said, 'Do
you care to know my theory on your little bit of bad busi­ness?'

'Go on then,' I said.

Walking down a hill didn't suit George Ogden any more
than walking up a hill. With every step the breath was
knocked out of him, escaping with a little whistle, which was
sometimes accompanied by a jet of smoke from his 'A'.

'It was wreckers’ he said.

'I know that’ I said.

'But this is what you don't know,' he said, quite sharp:
'they were going for the next train.'

Above the station, the flag of the Lanky and the flag of the
Great Northern slept side by side in the great heat.

'Why would they be doing that?'

'Beats me.'

'Well, what makes you think they
were?'

'Simple,' said George. And the next speech he made stand­ing still in Horton Street, with his fingers in his waistcoat
pockets and his cigar always in his mouth: 'The next train was
knoivn
of. The Blackpool Express. Runs every day, even Sun­day: eight thirty-six. Famous train, and the only timetabled
one of the day from Halifax to Blackpool. It was in the
timetable,
do you see, there to be found by anyone picking up
the month's
Bradshaw.
Yours -' Here he took one hand out
of his waistcoat, to point at me,'- yours was an excursion,
and
a
late-booked one at that. Some excursions get into the
Bradshaw's,
those known of long in advance. Yours didn't.
Some
-
those known about a little less in advance - get into
the
working
timetables. Yours didn't. Some get into the fort­nightly notices, but yours missed that as well. The first we all
knew of yours was in the weekly notices.'

'Do you fellows in the booking office get the same weekly
notices as us engine fellows?' I asked.

'Wouldn't be much point in having different!' said George.

That was true enough.

'Wreckers are sometimes just kids out for fun,' I said. 'They
want to make the train jump. They wouldn't be particular as
to which train they tripped up.'

'No,' said George. 'But another sort might be. If they
had
planned to send one particular train galley west, odds on it
would have been the second.'

'Yes,' I said slowly, 'unless they
had
seen the weekly
notices, and they knew of our train.'

'Yes’ said George, even more slowly.

'But that's half the Lanky,' I went on. 'Every stationmaster
and signalman from here to Blackpool, and everyone who
reads a stationmaster or a signalman's notices, which, since
they're pinned up all over the shop, is hundreds.'

'Thousands!' said George.

We now carried on walking towards the station, with me
wondering where this conversation had got us, but thinking
very hard over it, and over the broken window of the Thomas
Cook office.

There were two booking offices at the Joint: one for the Lan­cashire and Yorkshire, one for the Great Northern. That's
why it was called the Joint. They were on a sort of wooden
bridge, in a building that was like a pier pavilion and went
over the tracks and platforms. You climbed dark dusty steps
which smelled exciting in some way, and fanned out to left
and right, depending on whether you wanted the Great
Northern ticket window
-
which you would if you wanted a
connection to London - or the Lanky side.

Between the ticket windows was a door, which I supposed
was as good as invisible to passengers, for it was through this
that only the ticket clerks came and went. Once through the
door, things split into two again. To the left, small letters on a
door said '
gn ticket office
'; to the right, small letters on
another said '
l&y office'.

As I prepared to follow George through this second one, I
asked him: 'Have you ever been through the other door?'

'Wouldn't care to,' he said, shaking his head.

'Why not?'

'Because it's exactly the same as this show, except with dif­ferent printing on the tickets.'

As he said the word 'tickets', that's what I saw. The walls of
this big wooden room were made of them, and they muffled
any noise. I could hear the station below but it might have
been a mile away. All around the walls were dark cabinets
with wide, thin drawers, and above the cabinets were racks in
which the different types of tickets stood in columns. The
tickets, thousands upon thousands of them, were imprisoned
in their long thin racks. They were dropped in through the
top and could only be slid out from the bottom.

In those few wall spaces where there weren't ticket racks,
there were pictures. One was the famous Lanky poster that
had been in the Thomas Cook excursion office, '
step on at
goole for the continent
'. I thought of holidays, and again
of the broken window at the excursion office. Had Paul done
it? Or even Alan Cowan himself?