Young Phillip Maddison (52 page)

Phillip imagined himself to be Bill Nye, the crowstarver he had met at Rookhurst. “They have a good flavour, from slugs, as Pype says. After all, chickens eat slugs. Let's have one each. Where shall we make the fire?”

“I'll bet you a tanner you don't eat one,” said Pett.

“Taken!” cried Phillip. Ha-ha, he had fallen into his trap!

They collected sticks. Someone found a fire-pail, full of pick-holes, outside a hut of sleepers beside the railway line, and carried it up. Soon smoke was arising, flames licked round the sticks. To dry their clothes, more fire was needed. Bigger branches were laid on top of the bucket; acrid smoke poured forth; stick-ends began to bubble and steam. They stood around, watching the fire grow, glad of its warmth, while Phillip toasted the hedgehog on a green stick.

He was bound to win the bet: for Pype had bet him sixpence that he would not eat it. Well, he would not! The tanner was won! The prickles were beginning to glow when there was a cry of
Cave!
from Cundall, dragging a six-foot branch. He dropped it, and following his glance, they saw a man hurrying down the path between the hazel-nut stoles. He did not look like a keeper; but he shouted, he waved a stick. A burly great brute of a farmer!

“Hop it, chaps! Follow me into the tunnel!” cried Cundall.

In great excitement they ran and slithered down the path to the wire fence bordering the railway. Slipping through the strands, they hopped along the railway sleepers. The man shouted. Before them lay a blackened tunnel.

“Forward,” cried Cundall. “Into the Tunnel of Death, rode the Six Bagmen!”

Phillip followed with some apprehension into darkness.

“Keep into the left,” cried the booming echoing voice of Cundall somewhere in front.

Phillip stumbled on, in complete blackness. Looking back, he
saw the shiny oval opening, and thought that a fly taken into a spider's tunnel must see the last of its life rather like that. He bumped into someone. The others had stopped. Water drips splashed from the unseen roof above.

“He may go to the other end, to wait for us. How about trying to race him. If a train comes, press against the wall. Then it won't hit you, unless some idiot chucks out a bottle. He's always chasing chaps out of his wood.”

“Who is he, Vic?”

“Old Blanchflower the builder. He's bought the mansion and the wood, and fancies himself as a sportsman, don't-cher-know. If he tells the police, and they guard the other end, we may have to wait for a goods train going this way, and shin over the side of a truck. I did that once, and found myself in Nine Elms Yard, beside the Gas Light and Coke Company. It's a fact! When I got out, a bloke with a red flag waved it at me. The traffic stopped, and I walked past as though I owned the bloody works!”

“You bloody liar!” remarked Pett, in admiration.

“S' fact,” said Cundall. “What's more, I didn't have to walk back. I hopped into a truck loaded with coke, one of many, all labelled for Chislehurst; and within an hour I was back in this very tunnel, though going the other way this time. I got off, and bifurcate me if I didn't see, at each end, when the smoke had cleared, a copper on guard at the station! So I had to do the whole journey over again, when the trucks returned empty.”

“What happened?” asked Milton.

“Yes, tell us,” urged Phillip.

What had started as rot was now interesting, as Cundall's dry sort of matter-of-fact stories always were.

“Well, I found myself back at Nine Elms yards. I was about to slip away, as before, but there the same bloke was, with the same red flag. “What's the gaime, mate?” he asked. ‘I'm trying to trace a lost truck,' I said. ‘What's in it?' he asked, suspiciously. ‘Coal,' I replied. Fortunately just then I spotted a truck, filled with coal, and by luck it was labelled for Chislehurst. It was coupled to a lot of other trucks filled with coke. ‘Ah, there it is!' I said. ‘Loaded with coal, you see. That's the one I've been trying to trace. You see, my good fellow, people in Chislehurst only burn coke, all of them being members of the Smoke Abatement Society. Thank you very much for helping me find it. I must follow it and report it to London Bridge. I will commend
you for good service in the matter.' And so saying, I climbed up among the lumps, while he held up his red flag to stop the traffic, as before. So back I came here again, through the tunnel, and so to the station.”

“You are a fool!” said Pype, admiringly. “Do you think we believe that?”

Pype was a scholarship boy; and being small as well he had assumed an aggressive sort of manner.

“Belief is entirely a matter of faith,” replied Cundall. “And faith is a personal matter since the Reformation. Well, for my efforts I was made an honorary member of the Chislehurst Branch of the Smoke Abatement Society. The truck of coal went back to Nine Elms, where they discovered it to be anthracite, no good for gas, so back it came to Chislehurst. Forgetting to inform the stationmaster what it was, he returned it. And ever since then, for two years and more, the truck has been going up and down the line, nobody's baybee. You see,” concluded Cundall blandly, “there just aren't any slow-burning stoves in Chislehurst. Coke, as you know, needs something of a draught. Hullo, hullo, I hear a familiar rumble. Listen! Back comes the old truck of anthracite!”

The rail, on which Phillip was standing, appeared to be alive; it was stirring under his foot as though squirming, without actually moving. “Seriously, it's the Hastings-Tonbridge express,” said Cundall. “We'll be all right if we keep pressed against the wall. Turn your faces to the wall and shut your eyes against bottles and smuts. I've done it lots of times.”

Phillip was frightened. Supposing someone opened a door in the tunnel? The wall was very near to the rail.

Turning his head, he watched the distant white oval as the noise approached: the white space dimmed out as the tunnel roared and then thundered with an increasing pink glow. The engine rushed upon him so fast in its haze of deepening red above a gold blur along the walls that without being able to think he flung himself at the foot of the wall, in terror lest his legs be lying too close to the rails. Water splashed in his face unheeded. Were his legs lying aslant the rails, black thought asked him. He had forgotten his companions as he pressed his eyes hard shut upon his hands and waited for the obliterating blow. It swished and increased upon him, with a great screeching of steam with the overbearing sound of a whistle dropping in pitch as though
pressure of steam had blown the brass dome off the boiler. He knew he was safe, but pressed hard away from the battering rush of wheels. It was gone.

He got on hands and knees, and then upright, trying to pull himself up by the wall. Soon they were all laughing, Phillip among them. It had been grand fun.

They voted to continue through the tunnel, now that its terrors were known, and overcome. At the other end they climbed the cutting and came upon a golf course. From some bushes they watched several people driving off from a green, one of them a tall old gentleman with big beaky nose, a very thin body and a red jacket. He wore a very small, tight-fitting cap, and knickerbockers with spats half-way up his calves.

“That figure,” said Cundall, “is the ghost of the Duke of Wellington.”

He told them that recently some Suffragettes had appeared on the course, one of them blowing a bugle, while others bore banners and gave away leaflets. The old bloke, said Cundall, had gone on playing as though they were not there; and when one had seized his club, saying, “Mr. Asquith, I believe?” the ghost of the Duke had raised his cap, and replied, “If you believe that, you will believe anything, mar'm,” whereat he vanished.

“I don't think that's funny,” declared Pype.

“A sense of humour depends on the digestive juices,” said Cundall. “A dose of Epsom salts can work wonders. Try it, my boy.”

Phillip thought of Aunt Dora, and hoped that no one knew that it was his aunt who had been to prison, and out again, many times, on the Cat and Mouse Act. Uncle Hilary had told him that she was now in hospital, as some of the forcible feeding had gone into her lungs.

Where were they going? No one seemed to know. It didn't really matter. They were having fine sport, just by being together. What matter that their trousers and jackets were still wet? The March wind would dry them. Forward the Bagmen!

“How about going to the first house at the Hippo?”

“What time does it start?”

“Ten to six. We could have tea first.”

“I haven't got much money.”

“Nor've I.”

“We'll have to hunger-strike, that's all.”

“It's only tuppence up in the gods.”

“Tuppence? I'm broke.”

“I'll stand treat to you all,” said Milton. “I'm rather flush just now.”

“You owe me a tanner, Pett, for not eating the hedgehog.”

“But you didn't eat it!”

“Exactly! You said, ‘I bet you
don't
eat it'—well, I didn't!”

Pett handed over a sixpence.

“No, really, I was only joking, Pett. I didn't mean it, honestly.”

“No, you won the bet, Phillip. Take it, be a good boy.”

“Well, thanks,” said Phillip.

They crossed the Seven Fields, and came to the woods south of Whitefoot Lane. Phillip determined to treat them all to a glass of stone ginger beer in the little cottage just back from the lane. They went to the door. There was a bit of paper in the window, saying
Minerals.
The old woman invited them into a small front room, which had a cuckoo clock on the wall. She was very respectful, and brought the six bottles and glasses on a tray. She kept looking at Phillip, and when he paid her, she asked him if he had been there before, saying that his face was familiar. He remembered that Father had said something about having stayed there; but his face was quite different from Father's, so the resemblance could not be the cause. Phillip hoped none of the chaps would mention his surname, in case she knew Father by name, and said something about him which the chaps would hear.

He never knew that his father had often gone to visit the woman and had shown her his photograph.

*

It was a pleasantly tired body of Bagmen which, after a feed of peas-pudding and bacon in a cook-shop, crossed the tram-lines to the Hippodrome shortly after half past five that Saturday evening. The new moon and evening star, looking, Phillip thought, like a silver ring set with a big white diamond, hung in the clear duck-egg green of the sky. Milton paid a shilling for their entry into the gallery. It was the first time Phillip had been to the Hippodrome, which had been built about eighteen months before.

It was a wonderful experience, all the tiers of dark red seats below, the huge safety curtain, the boxes for rich people beside the stage, the orchestra filing in from under it shortly before the
lights went down. Cundall said they were in for something, as the star was Marie Lloyd. This name meant something rather wicked and fearsome to Phillip, from what he had heard. Marie Lloyd was the hottest of the hot stuff.

Pett, who knew his way about the world, said that the dud turns always came on first. Phillip thought they were pretty good, all the same. A man who could ride a bike with only one wheel, and that the front one, wasn't to be sneezed at. He was followed by two dancers, a man and a woman, who also sang together in the sizzling white beam from a box in the middle of the gallery. Sometimes the light clicked, and changed colour.

Three jugglers followed. They threw a sort of Indian clubs for one another to catch, flip flip flip, quick as that, sideways and from behind their backs, between their legs, six always in the air at once.

The next turn was awaited with some excitement. A footman with powdered wig and golden livery came on, and put a board with a name on it by the gold pillar of the wings. Gertie Gitana!

A storm of clapping and whistling greeted the slight figure of a dark girl, dressed in a pink frock with a short skirt, appearing from the wings. Her dark hair, tied with two pink bows on her head, was brushed down her back. She looked like Petal. She wore pink stockings and shoes with pink bows. She bowed to the applause before lifting her head again, and, as the violins and cellos stilled all sounds, began to sing words which immediately found all hearts. She hadn't any gold, to leave when she grew old … the sad, haunting voice arose into the darkened auditorium.

Phillip's heart ached with longing for the singer to stand there always, so that he could feel his heart going out to her while the Bagmen sat beside him, for ever and for ever. Soon the wonderful
afternoon would be but a memory, with all the sunshine, and the birds, and the new moon sinking with the white star in the western sky. He held down his face, to hide the moisture in his eyes, glad of the storm of whistles and clapping which greeted Gertie Gitana's bowing. Then he was clapping and clapping and clapping for her return, and she came back again, and once more the song arose into the hushed gallery, with its rows of silent white faces.

Phillip did not want to hear the funny fat man in a bowler hat who followed, singing Yorkshire songs. The audience liked him, but Phillip did not think so much of him as of Gertie Gitana. Who was he? George Formby the Lancashire Lad, said Pett. Phillip thought that it was not bad to have guessed that he came from near Lancashire, which was almost part of Yorkshire, or vice versa.