The Somme Stations

by Andrew Martin

  The Chief said, ‘He was a popular bloke in the booking office.’

  ‘But what do you make of him?’

  ‘Well, he’s queer of course.’

  ‘He’s a good soldier,’ I said.

  ‘General Gordon was queer,’ said the Chief. ‘It’s said Kitchener is.’

  ‘But would Oamer be the sort to go off, you know, adventuring with much younger blokes?’

  The Chief drained his glass, poured himself another one, drank it, kept silence for a good half minute. (He’d regained some of his old style now that we were talking of an investigation.) At length, he said, ‘I know the bloke he lives with. He’s Deputy Manager of the Yorkshire General Bank in Parliament Street … Name’s Archibald … summat or other. They have a place on Scarcroft Road – big house. You’re meant to think it’s two flats, but that’s just a tale. This Archibald … He’s not a young bloke.’

  ‘But you’ve not answered my question,’ I said, and from the flashing glare he gave me, I thought the Chief was going to lay me out. This was the man I knew!

  ‘I’ve no bloody notion,’ he said.

  The bar was filling up with soldiers. Once again, the Chief was looking a bit lost. He see could the other blokes eyeing his odd uniform and wondering about it. I watched him light up another of his Marcellas, and it looked a very lonely endeavour, as he puffed and blew to get it going. It was as though he was trying to make up for his age, his scrawniness and the funny uniform, by the lighting of a big cigar. When he’d got it going, he stood up, showing no sign of unsteadiness from the wine.

  ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Lorry’s waiting in the Square. I’m putting up with some King’s Own Yorkshires a couple of miles west. Tomorrow it’s back to Blighty.’

  ‘How’s the police office going on?’ I asked, also standing.

  ‘Just me and Wright at present,’ said the Chief, as I set about stuffing the cigarettes into my pockets. ‘Any bad lad coming onto York station has a free hand just at present.’

  ‘Now that I don’t believe,’ I said.

  Back in the street, under a lonely lamp, we heard a few distant crumps from the front.

  ‘I did get forward a couple of weeks ago,’ said the Chief, blowing smoke. ‘… But it was a quiet sector,’ he added glumly.

  ‘You look in fine fettle, Chief,’ I said.

  Still in this gloomy phase, the Chief said, ‘Bloody shame about young Harvey. He was a good kid.’

  ‘Was he?’ I said, and I looked the question at the Chief.

  ‘He would aggravate some of the blokes in the shooting leagues,’ the Chief admitted. ‘He was from an army family. His old man had been in the colours … won a medal out in Africa. The lad thought nothing of railways, you see – looked down on the oily blokes.’

  I nodded. My own impression was confirmed. There had without question been grounds for a fight between Tinsley and Harvey on Spurn. As a battalion we were meant to be the-railway-in-the-army, but here was a case of the railway against the army.

  ‘Did you hear about his mother?’

  The Chief nodded.

  ‘She married twice didn’t she?’ I said. ‘And it was the first husband that was William’s father?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said the Chief.

  ‘And he was the one who won the medal?’

  ‘You wouldn’t catch the second one in the bloody colours. He’s spent his whole life behind – or in front of – the bar in the Station Hotel.’

  I had the dawning sense of having been a fool about something.

  ‘I thought that bloke, the barman, was William’s father.’

  The Chief was scowling at me.

  ‘Who was his real father? I asked. ‘What did he do when he left the army?’

  ‘John Read?’ said the Chief. ‘He went in the Reserves for a while. For a job, he did nothing … No, that’s wrong, he’d been a carriage cleaner for a while … But could never find his way … Went a bit loony. The kid carried the second husband’s name.’

  John Read … I knew the name.

  ‘Whoever did it,’ said the Chief, ‘you’ll bring him in.’

  It was about the first compliment I’d had from him, and it wasn’t right.

  ‘You might look a bit gormless at times,’ the Chief ran on, ‘but you keep your eyes skinned.’

  … But I was still thinking of John Read.

  On the half-illuminated street corner, the Chief and I nodded at each other, shook hands, clapped each other on the back. About the only thing we didn’t do, in the awkwardness of our parting, was salute. The Chief turned about and walked away. I remained standing, watching his retreating figure, breathing deeply the cordite air of Albert and trying to work out how drunk I was. I tilted my face up, and a thousand stars swung into view, like a packet of stars that had been spilt. That had happened a little too quickly. I was on the way all right. Three blokes were approaching along the street, but on the other side. Glancing down, I saw that I held two remaining packets of the Virginians Select. I made to stuff them into my top pockets when I discovered the letter I’d written to the wife. I called to the Chief, who turned slowly.

  ‘Will you take a letter back home for me?’ I said, going up to him with envelope held out.

  He spat hard.

  ‘Might as well,’ he said. ‘I look like a bloody postman.’ He peered at the address. ‘Why didn’t you put it through the army post?’

  I grinned. ‘The contents are confidential,’ I said.

  ‘You dirty bugger,’ said the Chief, and I looked over the road to see Oliver Butler and his brothers. Butler was eyeing me. He’d seen the Chief, and the handover of the letter. He turned and called to his brothers like a man calling to his dogs, and they moved rapidly away. The Chief did not seem to have clocked them. He was moving away more slowly in the opposite direction, and I watched him go, thinking: if you’re in a lull at pushing seventy, you stay in a lull. Would he ever be back to commanding me at York station? The police office would never be the same, nothing ever would be. It annoyed me to think that the men who’d drawn up the notice announcing the formation of the battalion had not let on about that.

  I turned into the street that Dawson and Tinsley had gone down. It was full of buried jollity, light leaking up from the basements, and the muffled sound of dozens of Tommies enjoying themselves. I came to a sign propped against railings. The moment I saw it, I said out loud to myself: ‘Oh Christ.’

  It read, ‘COME IN FOR JOHN SMITH’S YORKSHIRE BITTER’. I read it over again, looking for some fault in the wording, some indication it wasn’t true, but the buggers had even spelt ‘Yorkshire’ correctly. I descended the steps, and pushed open the door. That Dawson would be in there was a surety. No doubt this was the place he’d been looking for all along. Someone must have tipped him the wink.

  I expected to find him roaring, but when I caught sight of him – which I did immediately on entering – he was sitting at a table talking in a normal fashion. Tinsley was beside him, smiling, and looking very composed, all considered. But then Dawson had only a glass of wine in front of him. Perhaps he had missed seeing the sign. No … I couldn’t credit that.

  Dawson was addressing a couple of RE blokes that I recognised from Burton Dump. Tinsley, seeing me come in, waved across the bar. This place was altogether more business-like than the other, and more fun too. The tablecloths were black and white squares, and the place was ram-packed with uniformed men. Was there a piano? I can’t now recall, but there was an undercurrent of musicality, a lot of shouting, a great heat rising from somewhere. Dotted about the bar were other examples of the owners’ good English: a sign reading ‘BOILED EGGS’, a second announcing ‘BREAKFAST AVAILABLE ALL DAY’, a third: ‘THE PROPRIETOR AND STAFF WELCOME OUR VALOROUS BRITISH ALLIES’. Well, the writer was just showing off with that last one.

  I pushed my way over to the Dawson table, where Tinsley pushed a wine glass over to me, and slopped in some red stuff from a bottle in a basket. The kid was lookin
g very chipper.

  ‘How are you going on, son?’ I said.

  ‘I feel a lot better since I was sick,’ he said.

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘Eight twenty-five,’ he said. He was always exact as to time – it was the engine man in him. ‘Bernie here gave me a cigarette and that did me a power of good.’

  Tinsley evidently had a weak stomach, but recovered fast. Had he chucked up on Spurn? Not to my knowledge. The drink had just made him a bit more forward, and a bit more lively too. He’d joined in my scuffle with Dawson after all.

  One of the RE blokes was saying to Dawson, ‘But you’re a Londoner – how did you end up in York?’

  Dawson took a belt of wine. He was popeyed, but in a jolly sort of way. He said, ‘The fact of the matter is that I just got on a train in London …’

  ‘King’s Cross,’ Tinsley put in. He had to fix a place by naming the railway station.

  ‘… And you had a ticket for York,’ said the RE bloke.

  ‘I had a ticket for nowhere,’ said Dawson. ‘I mean,’ he added slowly, ‘that I had no ticket at all. And that’s why I got off at York.’

  ‘Eh?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I missed that bit out,’ said Dawson. ‘The ticket inspector got on at York – ’

  ‘That would be old Jackson,’ said Tinsley with a grin.

  ‘ – So I got off,’ said Dawson.

  ‘And you’ve been here ever since,’ I said. ‘I mean there. I mean … no … ’

  I must have put away a good deal more than I’d thought – that was always the danger of encountering the Chief anywhere near licensed premises. I was instantly sobered, however, by the loud French-accented cry that came from the man at the bar, ‘Mister Dawson, we have found the barrel of the John Smith’s beer!’

  The RE man was saying to Dawson, ‘Hold on a minute, how did you get through the ticket barrier?’

  But Dawson was making fast for the bar. He came back a moment later with an enamel jug full of the stuff.

  ‘Apparently, they found the barrel in the cellar,’ he said. ‘It’s odd that, because I mean, we’re in the cellar.’

  He offered the beer around, and we all drank it from our wine glasses. Dawson did not talk as we did this. The talking fell to others. I watched him go back to the bar for another jugful after a matter of only a few minutes, and he did not offer this second one around. His face was changing as he drank, giving him the grubby, peeved look of the faces on the criminal record cards in the police office. The talk was going on merrily around me. A bloke was saying, ‘He was fucking kippered at High Wood. Boche flame-thrower. Below the fucking belt is that.’

  John Read … that had been the name of the bloke I’d charged with indecent exposure. He’d been the last man I’d arrested before enlisting, and he was William Harvey’s real father. What had become of him? Being drunk, it was hard for me to round up all the facts. They’d keep wandering away. He might well have gone to court and been lagged. He might have been sent down for six months. The Company solicitors would have handled the prosecution. They had all the witness statements … and if Harvey’s father had been gaoled on this charge, would young Harvey have known of it; and would he know I’d been the arresting officer? If so, it would give him a reason to hate me. But he hadn’t hated me, or if he had, he’d kept the fact well hidden. If he did know, he’d have a motive against me, whereas what Thackeray needed to find was a motive the other way about. Even so, this could be seen as the cause of needle between me and Harvey.

  The man who’d talked about the flame-thrower was laughing – and laughing too loud – as I tried to get hold of the important questions: did Company Sergeant Major Thackeray know of my connection with Harvey’s true father? Next question: would he be likely to find out? And what would he make of the fact that I hadn’t told him? Well, I hadn’t told him because I hadn’t known. But he wouldn’t believe that.

  I found myself eyeing Dawson. He seemed to meet my gaze, saying, ‘You fucking rotter.’

  I thought: Here we go, another barney, and this time I won’t be palling up with him afterwards.

  ‘Fucking treacherous fucking copper …’ Dawson was saying, ‘Fucking monkey.’

  And at that word I was let off. I might be a copper, but I was certainly not a monkey. I turned and there was Thackeray himself. He was with another military policeman. They were the only two blokes not holding glasses. The second bloke had a smaller moustache – not as good as Thackeray’s, but Thackeray was being big about it, smiling at him. There were about twenty standing blokes between us and him. He did not appear to have heard Dawson’s remarks – not yet – although the bar had gone a bit quiet. The barkeeper, seemingly panicked out of his good English, said ‘English police here! End of beer and wine!’ (Bars closed early in the garrison towns. Perhaps it was ‘time’.) This caused uncertainty in the bar and another moment of silence, but Thackeray seemed to be indicating to the barkeeper that he was quite all right to keep on serving. I assumed he thought that blokes at the front were entitled to a bit of a drink-up occasionally. The stream of chatter started up again, and it might have been enough to keep Thackeray from hearing as, Dawson, standing, called out, ‘The enemy’s that way, in case you’ve forgotten.’

  That was twenty-one days’ field punishment right there – if not five years in a military prison – but Thackeray did not react. I began pulling Dawson towards the door (with Tinsley in tow), going a roundabout way, so as to avoid Thackeray and friend. When we were about halfway to the door Thackeray, who I really believed had not yet spotted us, laughed at something his mate said, at which Dawson yelled out, ‘Can it, you warphead!’

  Thackeray stopped laughing He began turning his head our way as I fairly threw Dawson at the half-open door of the bar. We tumbled out onto the steps.

  ‘Did he clock us?’ said Tinsley. ‘If he clocked us, he’ll never leave off.’

  ‘John Smith’s bitter …’ I said, as we made our shambling way along the half-illuminated street that led to the railway station.

  ‘Where?’ said Dawson.

  ‘You should lay off it,’ I said, and he made no reply.

  The railway station was packed with blokes. It too was half shrouded in darkness, but how can you keep a railway station secret? As we got there, two long dark trains came in. One was going to the war and one was going away. We climbed onto the one going to.

  Aveluy Railhead and Points East: Early September 1916

  ‘I’ll just give her a breath of steam.’

  Tinsley, shovelling coal, looked up at me and grinned. It had been the right thing to say.

  Then – since I’d caught a bit of a chill – I pressed my right nostril and blew snot from my left down onto the footplate, at which his grin faded.

  ‘I’ve just swept that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a bloody footplate,’ I said, ‘it’s not carpeted.’

  The light was fading over the Dump as I eased back the regulator. We would be the first train to go out. We had six carriages on – and Oliver Butler as chief brakesman. He stood on the rear of the back wagon, controlling its brake, and it would be his job to tell Dawson when to apply the brake on his own wagon, which was the third. It was to be hoped that these two brakes and those on the engine would do the job. Two other trains were all ready in the sidings to come onto the main ‘Up’ – the line that led to the front, where the ‘hate’ was building up nicely. The sky over there glowed green and red, colours that periodically shook.

  Tinsley and I had both had a tot of rum. We’d taken it in the running office, where the lines going forward were all mapped out on a blackboard. Oamer had drawn thick lines (with the side of the chalk) for the lines already put down, and thin lines (with the end of the chalk) for the extensions and branches that would be laid shortly by the Butler twins, amongst others of the tough, silent, platelaying breed. Control points on the line – both existing and planned – were also marked. These took, or would take (since only one
was actually operative at that moment) the form of one or more blokes in a dug-out. They would be equipped with a telephone and a lamp for indicating to the engine crews whether they could proceed.

  We were stuck with this Somme offensive, which was a very bloody and slow one. Some of the New Army Battalions had been half wiped out, and word was that the whole of the town of Accrington was draped in black, for the Accrington Pals had had a particularly hard time of it at the start of the show.

  The business in hand for us was the endless bloody scrap over the village of Pozières, or what was left of it. The narrow-gauge railway now went a little further towards that shattered village – about level with the latest line of reserve trenches, but there was also a new feature: a branch off to the right, which is to say to the east, for the supply of batteries targeting German strongholds at spots like Bazentin le Petit, Delville Wood, Ginchy, Combles. It was hoped to capture these places and make of them a new front.

  We would be running along the new branch, and delivering our goods to two gun positions served by it. As we rolled away, I noticed that about half the blokes at the Dump, some holding lamps, had turned out to see us go off. They were watching the fruits of their labour, namely the start of the regular runs. Riding with us on the footplate was Captain Muir, the quiet sort who’d been dead wrong about us all coming back in one piece from the last run. He kept making notes in a little book that he pulled periodically from his pocket.

  By shutting off steam, and opening the sand valves, I avoided wheelslip on the greasy rails as we climbed the incline to the first of the trees, and he made a note of that – or, more likely, of something altogether different, since I did not believe he was familiar with engine driving techniques.

  I looked at Tinsley, who was shovelling coal.

  ‘Little and often with the coal and water,’ he said – this for the benefit of Muir, by way of explanation, because in moving to the firehole Tinsley would keep requiring the officer to step aside. ‘Little and often … That’s Tom Shaw’s motto,’ he said to me, as he closed the firehole door. I frowned at the kid, and he hesitated for only a fraction of time before cottoning on and opening the firehole door. That was one way to keep our production of smoke to the minimum – draw in cold air so as to discharge the products of combustion.