Station Jim

by Louis de Bernières

  STATION JIM

  LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

  ILLUSTRATED BY EMMA CHICHESTER CLARK

  CONTENTS

  STATION JIM

  OH GAWD, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH THIS?

  ENYWON WANT A PUPY?

  JIM

  JIM AND TILDO

  BUCKETS AND CHAIR LEGS

  JIM AND SNIFFY

  JIM’S NEW JOB

  THE POSTMAN’S LEG

  STATION JIM’S CHRISTMAS

  STATION CAT

  STATION JIM’S SECOND FINEST HOUR

  SCHOOL

  RAGGABONE

  STATION JIM’S FINEST HOUR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Louis de Bernières (Author)

  Louis de Bernières is the bestselling author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book in 1995. His most recent books are So Much Life Left Over and The Dust That Falls From Dreams, the short story collection Labels and the poetry collection The Cat in the Treble Clef.

  Emma Chichester Clark (Illustrator)

  Emma Chichester Clark is one of Britain’s best loved children’s authors and illustrators. She is the author of the immensely popular Blue Kangaroo series and many other books, and has illustrated books by Roald Dahl, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Peter Dickinson, Michael Morpurgo and, most recently, Quentin Blake.

  Also by Louis de Bernières

  FICTION

  Labels and Other Stories

  So Much Life Left Over

  Blue Dog

  The Dust that Falls from Dreams

  Notwithstanding: Stories from an English Village

  A Partisan’s Daughter

  Birds Without Wings

  Red Dog

  Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World

  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

  The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman

  Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

  The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts

  NON-FICTION

  The Book of Job: An Introduction

  POETRY

  The Cat in the Treble Clef

  Of Love and Desire

  Imagining Alexandria

  A Walberswick Goodnight Story

  STATION JIM

  One evening in early spring, in the days when all the trains were driven by steam, an assistant stationmaster found something abandoned on a train. It was at the end of a long day’s work, and he was very tired and grumpy, because the public is sometimes most obstreperous and hard to deal with, and he had been on his feet a great deal.

  Back then the carriages were divided up into separate compartments, without any connecting corridor. This was a good thing if you got one to yourself, and a bad thing if you had to share it with people who were pestiferous, smelly, smoky, nosy, over-talkative, or so fat that you got squashed. If you had one to yourself you always dreaded it when you reached a station, in case someone horrible decided to come into your carriage. Perhaps the worst thing was that if you were dying for the loo, you had to wait until the next station, and then nip into the public ones, hoping that the train had not gone before you came back out.

  The compartments were homely, with a netting parcel rack above the seats, and small posters advertising holiday destinations, such as Great Yarmouth or Lyme Regis. The woodwork was heavily varnished, and the seats were extremely bouncy, so that fathers and mothers were always having to tell their children to sit still and behave. You could open the windows, and lean out, even though there were notices telling you not to, and if you did, you sometimes got a wet smut in your eye. If you felt sick and stuck your head out of the window to do it, your sick would fly out of yours and go straight back into the next window along. You could also open the doors when the train was moving, so that you often saw people jumping out at the platform before it had actually stopped, or running for a door when it had already begun to depart. It was altogether more fun when trains were like this, but more dangerous too. You sometimes even saw children collecting conkers from the railway line. Perhaps the most fun thing was that more often than not there were no lights, so that when you went into a tunnel everything suddenly went pitch-black. This gave the children an opportunity to scream with pretend terror, and for people in love to sneak a kiss.

  People remember that in those days the summers were very long and hot, which may be because they really were, or because they used to wear an awful lot of clothes. They often had so much luggage that every station had porters to help them carry it, and many people sent their luggage in advance, in large trunks, which would be collected from their houses and delivered to their destinations. Eventually your trunk would get plastered with stickers, and an old person looking at theirs would have a perfect record of everywhere they had ever been. Mine was blue, and bound together with wooden hoops, and it has been in my father’s attic for forty years, but once upon a time I could put into it practically everything I owned.

  The steam trains on the Great Western Railway were handsome, and gleamed with polished brass and beautiful paintwork. The locomotives had marvellous names, such as La France, The Great Bear, The City of Truro, The Albion, and many of the railway workers were extremely proud of them. They certainly did take a lot of caring for, possibly even more than a horse. They took hours to warm up in the morning, and needed enormous amounts of coal that were shovelled into the fire compartment by a stoker who was invariably rippling with muscles, and covered in coal dust from head to foot. The moving parts would need oiling and greasing and inspecting, and there was a big tank of water at every station so that the engines could be replenished through a big floppy canvas tube. This is why you often had time to nip out to the loo.

  Mr Leghorn was a proper dyed-in-the-wool railwayman, like his father before him. He loved his steam trains, had worked for only one railway company, the GWR, and expected to work for it for the rest of his days. His brothers worked for the same company, and his sisters worked in a huge house outside Bristol whose owners were hardly ever there. It had to be kept in a state of readiness, even so.

  Mr Leghorn had a big moustache, and a head that was mostly bald. His nickname was ‘Ginger’ because that had been his colour before his hair went white and fell out. This nickname was often shortened to ‘Ginge’. He was neither tall nor short, and neither fat nor thin. He had kindly blue eyes, and his complexion was somewhat florid, possibly because he liked to drink a lot of beer during his time off, and he smoked a pipe because in those days no one had any idea that it was bad for you. He smelled of beer and tobacco, which is pretty horrid, so it was lucky for him that so many others smelled exactly the same. He wore a smart uniform, which was not, however, as smart as the uniform he wore when he was out parading with the yeomanry.

  At the end of his working day Mr Ginger Leghorn had to check in the carriages and compartments for lost property and for passengers who had accidentally fallen asleep, and ended up in a siding at the wrong station. There used to be a song that went ‘Oh! Mister Porter, what shall I do? I want to go to Birmingham, and they’re taking me on to Crewe.’

  On the day that concerns us, he found something rather unusual, all on its own in a compartment about halfway along the train. He took his cap off, scratched his head, and said ‘Blimey, what’s this then?’ even though he knew perfectly well what it was.

  He was quite used to finding things that had been left behind. Today he had already found two umbrellas, one a lady’s and the other a gentleman’s. It was nearly always umbrellas that he found, but in his time he had found fishing rods, accordions, folding card tables and silver teapots. He had once even found someone who was dead, but this was the first time he had ever found a tiny puppy.

  OH GAWD, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH THIS?

/>   Mr Leghorn took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘Oh Gawd,’ he said to himself, ‘what am I going to do with this?’

  Mr Leghorn was not, in general, an animal lover, but he did have a shed full of racing pigeons of which he was very fond. They all had fanciful names and pedigrees, and they were extremely smart. Because Mr Leghorn could go wherever he wanted on the railway for free, he sometimes liked to take a couple of pigeons a long way away, and release them from a basket. His long-suffering wife, Mrs Leghorn, was under strict instructions to make a note of the exact time when the pigeons returned, but she was always busy, and not particularly interested, and so she made the times up. Poor Mr Leghorn believed he had record-breaking pigeons, when in reality they were a bunch of saunterers, grain-gatherers and socialisers. He never could understand why it was that he had won no races, and would lie awake at night bothering about it.

  Mrs Leghorn’s first name was Mary, but everybody called her Molly. She was a cat lover, and she had a big fluffy tabby cat, originally called Matilda. Because someone had not been very good at sexing kittens, it had eventually transpired that Matilda was in fact a boy. In one respect this was a relief, because then Mrs Leghorn did not have to worry about what to do with all the kittens, but in another sense it was an embarrassment to have a tom cat with a girl’s name. Then someone who had learned Latin at school told her that all you had to do was change the ‘a’ into an ‘us’ or an ‘o’ and you would have a sort of boy’s name. In this way Matilda became Matildo, and he never noticed the difference. Quite often he was addressed as Tildo, and most people assumed it was a pet name for Tiddles, which, in those days, was a very common name for cats. Mostly he was just called Puss.

  It will already have occurred to all sensible and knowledgeable readers that it must be a serious mistake to keep a cat and a flock of pigeons in the same place. Tildo, however, was like most cats, in that he was not at all interested in chasing or catching things that made no effort to get away. He would sit in the yard with the pigeons pecking at corn all around him, his mind far away in imaginary mountains and jungles, thinking about all the wild creatures that he would like to pounce on. This was a great relief to both Mr and Mrs Leghorn, because the one could not have done without his pigeons, and the other could not have done without her cat.

  It will also have occurred to all sensible and knowledgeable readers that a full-grown cat is likely to be very put out by the arrival of a tiny puppy. When Mr Leghorn came home with one in his arms, and put it down on the kitchen floor, Tildo’s tail puffed up like a bottle brush. He arched his back, hissed, marched up to the unfortunate little dog, and scratched it across the nose. The dog yelped and whined, and Tildo stalked back to his chair and glared down frighteningly, his big round eyes full of hatred and disgust.

  ‘Oh Gawd,’ said Mr Leghorn, who was already in quite enough of a lather.

  Mrs Leghorn was squeezing her washing through the mangle in the backyard, and was in quite a sweat from heaving on the handle, but she came in when she heard the puppy yelp. ‘Blimey, love, what’s this?’ she said rhetorically.

  ‘Abandoned. Found it in a compartment. Thought I’d better bring it home. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t exactly put it in the locker with all the umbrellas.’

  ‘Someone’s bound to claim it,’ said Mrs Leghorn.

  ‘I hope so. I don’t want it. I’ve got enough to worry about, what with the pigeons an’ all. S’pose we can feed it on scraps.’

  ‘The scraps are Tildo’s,’ said Mrs Leghorn.

  ‘Well, he’s going to have to share. For the time being anyway.’

  ‘How could anyone leave a puppy by accident?’ said Mrs Leghorn. ‘It don’t seem very probable to me.’

  ‘Nor me neither,’ said her husband.

  ‘I hope we don’t get stuck with it.’

  ‘We can give it away. Someone’s bound to want a dog. Lots of people’d like a dog.’

  ‘Well, the kids would,’ said Mrs Leghorn.

  ‘Oh Gawd, don’t say that.’

  But she had said it, and when the children dribbled home one by one, they definitely had an opinion.

  The Leghorns had five children, Alfie, Arthur, Beryl, Sissy and Albert, in that order. Although they were equally scruffy and grimy, they were in neatly ascending size,and looked rather alike, so that they appeared to be a complete set of English Russian dolls. In term time they were packed off every morning with their satchels and sandwiches, their clothes clean and their faces scrubbed, but in the holidays Mrs Leghorn often had no idea where they were. There were no cars to mow anyone down, and the neighbourhood’s children mostly played in the street, kicking and throwing balls, breaking windows by accident, and engaged in wonderful games that nobody knows how to play any more, such as British Bulldog and Grandmother’s Footsteps. When the children were not in the street they were up on the hillside above the railway cottages, poking into rabbit holes with sticks, or rolling down on their sides. When it snowed, they stole the tin trays from their houses, and hurtled down the slopes on them, even though the only way of stopping was to crash into a fence.

  The days were long and warm now, and the children could have been anywhere, being fed butter and strawberry jam sandwiches in whichever house they happened to be. They all knew, however, that at half past five on most days Dad came home for his tea, and they would be having tea too. Inside their stomachs they had infallible timing devices that informed them when it was time to go home and eat supper, and then, later on at bedtime, they would get a cup of cocoa and a slice of bread with dripping.

  At half past five the Leghorn children came home, bleeding, bruised, tired and contented, and saw the puppy, which was under the table, hiding from Tildo.

  ENYWON WANT A PUPY?

  Alfie, Arthur, Beryl, Sissy and Albert went down on their hands and knees and peered beneath the folds of the tablecloth.

  ‘Ooh, it’s sweet!’ said Beryl.

  ‘Is it an Alsatian?’ asked Alfie, who wanted an Alsatian because in those days they were bred to be fierce, and were used as guard and police dogs.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Mr Leghorn. ‘It’s hard to tell. I don’t know how to tell what a little dog’s going to grow into.’

  ‘It is black and brown,’ said Arthur.

  ‘It’ll probably grow up black and brown, then,’ said Mr Leghorn.

  ‘Will it be big?’ asked Sissy.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell that either.’

  ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ asked Beryl.

  ‘That I do know. It’s a boy dog.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Arthur, and Sissy punched him on the arm with one knuckle extended from her fist, which was how the other girls at school had taught her to deal with boys. She hardly ever scratched or bit, however, although she had been known to pinch.

  ‘I want a big dog,’ said Albert.

  ‘It’s not ours,’ said Mr Leghorn. ‘Somebody might ring lost property, and claim it back, so it’s no use wanting any size of dog at present. We’ll have to wait and see.’

  Nobody rang lost property, not even after a week, so Mr Leghorn tried one last, desperate thing to get rid of the puppy. It wasn’t that he did not like it, in fact he was already very fond of it; it was simply that he felt he had enough to deal with in his life, what with difficult customers, late trains, five children, a cat, and a loft full of racing pigeons that never won any races.

  Beryl and Sissy caught him out, though. They were passing the post office when they noticed a postcard in the window. Now, Mr Leghorn’s writing was very distinctive. He wrote in large letters, his writing was not joined up, and he had perfectly dreadful spelling, which was not because he was stupid, but because he had had to leave school at ten, in order to go to work when his father died.

  The sign that Beryl and Sissy saw was

  Enywon want a pupy? Noy suer how old. Very sweet and wel behayvd. Prity much houstraned already. Afrade of cats. Blak and tan. Aply Number 4 Railway Cottiges.

/>   ‘Number 4 Railway Cottages is us,’ said Beryl.

  ‘Sneaky old Dad,’ said Sissy.

  ‘There’s only one thing to do,’ said Beryl.

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘Yes, come on!’ Beryl tugged her sister into the post office and approached the wicket.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Beryl,’ said the man behind the wicket. ‘What can I do for you? Been sent out for stamps?’

  ‘No, Mr Cramp,’ replied Beryl. ‘It’s about that dog notice my dad put up.’

  ‘Oh yes? What about it then?’

  ‘Dad sent me to tell you he wants it to be taken down.’

  ‘Decided to keep it then?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Cramp.’

  Mr Cramp smiled and nodded his head wisely. ‘That’s what nearly always happens. Same with kittens.’

  He came out from behind his counter and went to the window to remove Mr Leghorn’s card, presenting it to Beryl, who took it from his hand with a ‘Thank you, Mr Cramp’.

  ‘Are you children going to be helping with the harvest this year?’ asked Mr Cramp.

  ‘I ’speck so,’ said Sissy.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Cramp, ‘that’s what these long holidays are for, after all. Can’t spend all your time just gallivanting.’

  ‘No,’ replied Beryl.

  After they had gone some few paces down the cobbled street, Sissy said, ‘What are we going to do with that card?’

  Beryl thought, and said, ‘P’raps we should burn it.’

  ‘What with? You got any matches?’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘We could hide it.’

  ‘What if it gets found?’

  When they reached home the children had a parliament in the pigeon loft about what to do with the card, and voted for Alfie’s plan, which was to fold it up into a small boat, and drop it off the bridge and let it float away down the river.