NGLND XPX

by Ian Hutson

  ‘They had scythes! Do you know how dangerous scythes can be?’

  ‘No but you should know, you were in the old barn for hours afterwards talking about it with all of those swarthy casual harvest labourers lured from Mediterranean regions by promises of fine wages and dalliances with milk-skinned English virgins’ said Peter-Billybub, demonstrating either an understanding beyond his years or something he’d overheard while emptying ashtrays and collecting glasses down at the village pub while waiting for Mummy to cash-in her returned bottles.

  ‘Was not!’

  ‘Was so!’

  ‘OK then cleverclogs Peter-Billybub – you wave yours this time.’

  ‘No point.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mine blend in like desert camouflage against most backgrounds and, anyway, you know I have to soak them off whenever Mummy says I need to change them, otherwise my skin comes off too.’

  ‘Phyllis-Jo – you get yours off and wave them over your head at the driver.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Not wearing any. Can’t be bothered. I’ve seen the trouble yours cause you. The Vicar says I’m going to make a fortune when I’m older. I assume he means the money I’ll save on laundry costs. He says that if you only wear top-clothes you can do away with the boil wash altogether.’

  ‘Right, so we’re back to me again. It’s always me that takes responsibility. I’ve got to stop them before they get robbed. The poor men! Think of the poor men! Won’t somebody think of the poor men! Look out – there’s danger down the line! Liverpudlians!’

  With that Roberta-Jo began running down the track towards the on-coming train, careful to stay safely between the rails and waving her underwear in the time-honoured fashion. As the loco neared she stopped, shut her eyes and kept waving for all she was worth, visualising the usual outcome where she would end up nose to nose with the heroically heroine-halted engine and a thoroughly saved magnificent day, with maybe a quick and sooty snuggle from the chap with the big shovel who puts coal in the little fire-hatch thingy.

  This would all have worked train-stopping wonders had Burstall and his fireman, Michael Palin, been looking up and forwards at the time. As it was, well...

  ‘What was that? The engine hiccoughed.’

  ‘It was almost like we hit something. Something soft on the outside and crunchy on the inside but with the sound deadened as though covered in layers of quilted red cotton and extra-wide gusset elastic.’

  ‘Nonsense – the track’s clear all the way to Liverpool docks. Keep your foot down and keep stoking, Palin, we’re creating legends here.’

  Roberta-Jo shook her head to clear it. ‘Ouch!’ Dragging herself to her feet again she watched Perseverance screaming towards its Merseybeat doom at seven or eight blistering miles an hour. Just as she was trying a last-ditch, dismal little wave of her oily underknickerglorybockers Sans Pareil came hurtling over the horizon and over Roberta-Jo. She regained consciousness face-down this time, on the clinker between the rails.

  ‘Ooh, gosh – that hurt. That really hurt. Those poor men!’ Novelty caught her just as she was bending down to pick up the remnants of her underwear and flattened her once again into the sleepers. Being made of stern stuff though she soon regained her feet and stood firm and foursquare to try to save the final engine, Rocket, from ending up without wheels and parked on house bricks. That loco made a frightful clanging sound when her forehead accidentally hit it just above the delicate front-axle bogey thing.

  Roberta-Jo was beginning to suspect that between the rails was not the safe place after all, despite what her little brother had told her. Oh, she thought, if only she wasn’t a girl she’d have a chance of being able to work out these mechanical and scientific things herself. It was really most unfair.

  Roberta-Jo’s voice was a touch weak and she could only wave with one hand, the other arm being limp at her side or as a squeamish grown-up would later term it “just one big compound fracture from wrist to shoulder”.

  ‘I’m not wearing any knickers’ she whispered forlornly to the receding carriage where a kindly old gentleman was reading a newspaper. He waved and then went back to the crossword in The Times. Seven letters, starts with “T” and rhymes with “dollop”. Aha! Trollop.

  Phyllis-Jo and Peter-Billybub – who had stepped experimentally to one side of the tracks - set about reviving Roberta-Jo. She was stunned by her failure.

  ‘The man on that last train. The young driver. When I shouted that I wasn’t wearing any knickers he just said “tell a man who gives a damn, Honeybun”. Why would he say that? Why didn’t he stop? They usually stop.’

  ‘I guess you weren’t giving him the right signals, Roberta-Jo’ offered Peter-Billybub. ‘Maybe here you have to wave them up and down rather than side to side.’

  ‘It’s always worked before. I was just sort of whirling them around my head and smiling.’

  ‘Well maybe he just didn’t hear you. You tried though, no-one can say you didn’t try.’

  ‘Those poor men. Liverpool! Oh those poor souls! They’ll be in the thick of it before they realise.’

  ‘Daddy would have been proud of you, you did all you could. You always do.’

  ‘Lie still for a while, Roberta-Jo. Peter-Billybub and I will go for help.’

  ‘OK, but what’s that rumbling noise?’ replied Roberta-Jo, looking for storm clouds but, again, finding none.

  ‘A stampede?’ said Phyllis-Jo, checking on the old cow in the other next field. Nope – it hadn’t moved and was just staring back at her with a vacant wonky eye, lots of slobber and a smelly case of festering mastitis, just like a delicious milky commercial bovine should. The OAP she’d seen earlier gathering the firewood for winter was heading towards the cow and wondering if it would burn. She hefted it aloft and carted it off on the off-chance.

  ‘An earthquake?’ offered Peter-Billybub, imagining Los Grimsby, city of the fishing-angels, shaking until it was just a blur and with everything on the Cleethorpes side of Park Street sliding into the Humber Estuary while a big lava-flow destroyed Immingham completely (his imaginings were never really very detailed or very novel).

  ‘Oh goodness me – it’s another train!’

  ‘But it can’t be – they can’t run backwards can they? Dogs can’t look up, poor people don’t mind being cold and hungry and trains can only run one way, surely? Mummy always says so.’

  ‘Well something’s coming and I don’t think it’s the Games Mistress of St. Trinians on a hand-cart chasing the proceeds of the Great Train Robbery. Oh I don’t know though – they have had time to get to Liverpool and back.’

  ‘Peter-Billybub, Phyllis-Jo – run! Go get Percolator, the old station porter. He’ll know what to do. I’ll just wait here, I suppose I‘ll be quite safe if I just stay between the tracks again. Go! Quickly!’

  The Stephensons were in a fast “father and son” reverse on Rocket. ‘Isn’t it weird, Father, moving backwards and watching the world rush away from one as the vanishing point of perspective works its wonderful but mysterious magic. It quite stops the flies going in one’s mouth.’

  ‘Makes me dizzy. I’d rather eat the flies. What was that?’

  ‘Sounded like the engine hiccoughed.’

  ‘Maybe we hit something again?’

  ‘Oh yes – look, it’s little Miss fur coat and no underknickers or glorybockers or something mysterious and female-wardrobe orientated. Should we stop and render first aid?’

  ‘Not likely! Your mother would have my guts for garters. More coal, son, more coal.’

  Roberta-Jo watched them go. ‘Hello! I’m glad that you’re safe. My name’s Roberta-Jo and some day I’m going to be a very famous actress called Dame Jenny Agutter you know.’ She gave a feeble wave with her good arm and an injured smile. ‘I’m not wearing any bockerknickerunderlongs’ she whispered forlornly, feeling concussion sweeping over her again.

  Poor soul, she never even saw Novelty coming,
revived again just in time to raise her head for Sans Pareil’s rather low-slung rear-axle and then “slept” right through Perseverance as it thundered overhead, dripping oil on troubled daughters.

  The hot-wired Perseverance was being driven by two chaps in white shell-suits who weren’t too familiar with the controls but were flogging its bollocks off all the same. Timothy Burstall was somewhere very elsewhere indeed, trying to give a statement to a nice Police Officer who often dealt with stolen and hijacked horse carriages and who was drinking a bottle of Police canteen “WKD” while he listened politely. Constable Dodd explained that they didn’t have a form for anything that wasn’t horse-driven. ‘Moves all by itself you say? No horses at all? Is that right. Hmm. You’re from Manchester way, aren’t you? Could I ask you to blow into this little bag please Sir, it just that my, er, my chips are too hot at the moment, nothing to worry about, just blow through the little tube until the crystals change colour.’ Burstall blew until he was red in the face and quite thoroughly hand-cuffed and then Ken took him down to the cells.

  Back in Manchester The Queen Victorian, Dr Beeching, Prince Albert and Mr Sir Branson Sir were getting fed up with playing strip poker as they waited. Victoria was down to just her morning pre-mourning veil and Prince Albert was about to reveal to the English public that jewellery was not just for women, not just for the fingers, sometimes required vomit-inducing minor backstreet surgery and could result in a gentleman peeing in all directions at once like an overworked muck-spreader.

  The chap in the signal box who worked the points at the Manchester Station station had been peering down the line for ages, hoping that he had time to send all of the returning entrants back to their starting platforms. He did a couple of star jumps, touched his toes, loosened his neck muscles and shook the tension out of his arms and legs. Then he resumed blowing the used air out of his lungs through his mouth and then breathing in through his nose, past his chakra and over his diaphragm (he refused to use The Pill, however safe the wife said it was).

  A distant whistle accompanied a massive spark of excitement through the waiting crowds.

  ‘Sorry! So sorry!’ said the chap who was finishing off the station’s electrical wiring. ‘Shouldn’t happen again. So sorry!’ He was laying the last of two hundred and forty cables leading towards the platform clock. ‘Each one carries a whole volt, you know – a whole volt!’ All he had to do next was lay another two hundred and forty downhill cables to take away each of the used volts and he’d be done. Time and technology wait for no man, you just have to solder on as best you can. ‘Once I’m done it won’t need re-volting for years.’

  The Queen Victorian stood, holding field glasses to One’s nose. ‘Oh this is so rad!’ she squealed.

  ‘Totally, like, far-out!’ agreed Albert. ‘Awesome!’

  Victoria found herself almost strangled as Branson borrowed her field glasses.

  ‘It’s them! It’s them!’

  ‘So, you were expecting somebody from else maybe alright already?’ said Victoria, allowing her accent to slip a little and grabbing back One’s field glasses.

  ‘It’s going to be close, very close, Ma’am’ whispered Billy Connolly, worming his way in to the Royal circle under the guise of a creepy McManservant.

  Albert wet a finger and checked the humidity for himself, not convinced that Connolly entirely spoke the truth or that he really had to stay in Victoria’s room overnight just in case she needed the light turning on or a window opening or a glass of water or something.

  ‘Close schmose, after this it’s married they’ll have to get. More room there was between my dear late Albert and I than these competitors and we? We had twenty-seven childrens. When you’re older yourself, you’ll know. Then you’ll know. When they’re young they break your back, when they’re older they a-break-a even your Sichilian heart.’ Victoria was bobbing up and down with excitement, flip-flopping between Jewish-Italian and Brooklyn-Schmooklyn with a touch of the Godfather. God-Mother. God-Queen – Jewish-Italian-Brooklyn God-Queen with German roots. German roots? Schmoots! Oy! Don’t get me started on German roots with the crowns and the divine rights, damned European mongrels. ‘Ah that my dear Albert should have lived to see this – such a fine race it is that we shall have!’

  Albert started to try to mention once again that he was still alive, well and, well – present, but thought better of it. He’d learned early on in their marriage that it as best not to interrupt The Queen Victorian when she was at a dog track or the en-horsed jockey races.

  The chap on the points lever took a few more practice swings to get his arm in and to warm up the grease on the points mechanism.

  The four invitation-only sponsor’s enclosures, one at the end of each competitor’s platform, were served fresh canapes and were all pushed forwards to watch, the tartan rugs on their three-wheeled wickerwork bath-chairs billowing in the haste among the clanking of oxygen tanks and the clunking of buxom nursing staff.

  The public in the cheap seats and the stands began a series of Mexican waves, anyone not participating being ostracised and regarded as terminally un-amusable. Victoria tried a couple of popular waves herself but somehow just couldn’t synchronise. ‘We are not Mexican’ she announced, grimly. When she swapped instead to a Radio Ga-Ga hand-clap her public, naturally, followed suit. The upper crust in the expensive seats in the John Lennon Memorial Enclosure simply rattled their jewellery.

  All four locomotives appeared over the horizon, in reverse, hell for leather, jockeying for position on the single-track line from Liverpool. Steam belched and Sparks flew even though the town wasn’t big enough for both of them and ’planes hadn’t been invented yet. Pistons, levers and wheels, pushed to the limit, pounded, thrashed and spun like never before seen components of a Brave New World.

  Copying Victoria, as one did in those days, the crowd leapt and danced in excitement, the hastily-built stands creaked and rumbled and the horses’ bits, as ever, were covered with foam (filthy beasts).

  One, two, three, four they flew past the chap on the points control at eleven or twelve miles in an Imperial hour and, giving his all for Queen and Country in the performance of his working life, he switched them back to their respective starting platforms, four, three, two, one. A great cry, a national roar, went up from the crowds and Branson ran forwards, his coat-tails flailing, waving his hands and shouting to the competitors. As he ran he tripped over some rather pessimistic chap walking about with a sandwich board bearing the legend “The end is nigh” to his front and “Prepare to meet thy doom” to his back.

  From lying prone on the cold concrete platform Branson looked up and shouted. ‘Brakes! Use your brakes! You must seriously retard yourselves with respect to your present velocity such that it will reduce to a value neither positive nor negative before the combined loci of your locomotives bisects the approaching terminator in the plane of the existing track!’

  One by one the competitors turned to one another and one’s other anothers on their dozens of tons and half-hundredweights of speeding fire and iron and shrugged before they turned back to him questioningly.

  ‘Brakes?’ They all shook their heads, puzzled, looking seriously under-funded in re quality cranial content.

  Branson borrowed a megaphone. ‘Your stopping devices! Deploy them now or you shall surely plough through the end of the platforms, through the sponsoring Independent Financial Advisors, the National Association of Estate Agents, the entire Law Society and the Health & Safety Executive stands, and thence on into the Salvation Army Hostel for travelling Members of Parliament that lies just behind that flimsy partition wall! Tragedy may ensue unless you quite presently arrest yourselves and nullify your momentum! ’

  Stephenson Junior on Rocket cupped his hands and shouted a reply. ‘But the competition was all about speed – you said nothing about testing our capacity to decelerate! We mapped our machines’ abilities to the positive half of the space-time displacement gradient only! The paradigm in the entry reg
ulations suggested a certain unidirectional nature to the salient criteria for success!’

  Stephenson Senior leapt, rather more pragmatically and with the wisdom of old age, from the footplate to safety, swinging from an overhead beam like some sort of sooty decorative dwarf in workshop-tweeds. He was positive that half of his spine had displaced itself in space-time, but at least he would no longer have to watch his collective loci bisecting the terminator with disastrous respect to some of the most beloved functional socio-economic groups in England. ‘Ouch, me back’s gone!’ he said, in slow, rumbling tones that captured the mood of the situation quite succinctly.

  Braithwaite leapt from the rear of his machine, grabbed hold of the tender and dug his heels in, scattering clinker and gravel impressively, but vainly. In the public stands his boot-maker put his head in his hands and wept. Hackworth frantically scribbled designs for an anti-momentum mechanism on the back of a cigarette packet and the two chaps in shell-suits on Perseverance simply leapt off and ran away, chased by an experimental Police “hot air” pursuit-balloon and Alastair “Boing-Boing Ding-dong nobody’s really home Infra-Red Camera ” Stewart.

  Branson, limping but legging it somewhat hastily back to the Royal Enclosure, arrived just in time to wail “No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o” in slow-mo’ and leap, equally s-l-o-w-l-y, to tackle the largely naked but still winning-hand holding Queen Victorian to the ground and out of the path of the flying debris.

  Rocket hit first, flattening the little cross-hatched barrier at the literal end of the rail line and shattering the concrete of the platform into the new crazy-paving that was to become so popular in years to come once patios had been invented. Gentlemen from the Euro NCAP agency took copious notes as the engine deformed nicely in the impact and the buttoned velvet “airbags” that had attracted such derision when explained by the Stephenson’s, deployed correctly, scattering duck-down and ostrich feathers. The tanned man manning the tannoy system intoned ‘Four point nine, four point nine, five point zero, four point nine, four point seven, five point zero...’ and public people began throwing bouquets of flowers, confirming thereby that the English have always been, as one, quite clinically insane. Functional in extremis of course, but clinically insane nonetheless.