Westmorland Alone

by Ian Sansom

  I looked around: the window was open to darkness and the tracks beneath us.

  ‘What’s under there?’ cried the woman. ‘Is Lucy under there? Lucy! Lucy!’ She did not wait for a response – she was hysterical. ‘Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!’

  ‘Look!’ I said. ‘You just have to let me check that everything is safe.’ I was worried that Lucy might be trapped beneath our carriage.

  ‘Lucy!’ wailed the woman.

  ‘Let me check if it’s safe!’ I said. ‘And we’ll find Lucy and we’ll get out!’

  The shuddering and moaning of the carriage suddenly stopped and the baby paused in its crying and the woman looked at me as though having just woken.

  ‘You must stay here,’ I said, more calmly. ‘Just for a moment. I have to check if it’s safe. Do you understand? And then we’ll get out together.’

  She looked at me, terrified.

  ‘Don’t leave us here!’ she said.

  ‘I’m not leaving you here. I’m just going to check that there’s a way out through the window and underneath the carriage and then—’

  ‘Take my baby!’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take my baby with you and make sure he’s safe. I’ll wait here for Lucy.’

  ‘Look, if you just wait here for a moment—’ I began.

  ‘You’re not leaving us here!’ said the woman. ‘You take my baby and you look for Lucy and I’ll wait for her.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You! Take the baby!’ she cried. ‘And you make sure he’s safe. And then you come back for me and Lucy.’

  She was confused. She thrust the sobbing child towards me. I had no choice but to tuck him under one arm and crawl down with him through the window into the darkness underneath the train. If I got the baby out I could get the mother out. And then I could find Lucy.

  Everything was wrong. It was dark, chthonic. There was a smell – a horrible sort of combination of hot metal and coal and oil and damp earth. I was breathing fast. It was as though we were being born. I made my way carefully with the baby underneath the carriage and across the tracks – I remember the rails somehow being greasy, with oil? – and then up into the light.

  It was the most incredible sight: coaches were slewed across the tracks, rails were bent and twisted into terrible shapes, giant sleepers uprooted, the ballast ploughed through and scattered, and thick black smoke was everywhere. Passengers were emerging from their carriages and there were men running down the line towards us from up ahead. But what do I remember the most and the most clearly? It was the sound: the sound of birds singing. It seemed impossible, impossible that they could be heard above the din of breaking glass, and of grinding mechanical noises, and the rushing of flames, and the terrible cries of injured people, but there they were: birds, singing. It was like Spain, again. I deliberately took deep, deep breaths, trying to steady my nerves – and was struck suddenly by another smell, some sickening, thick, horrible smell that somehow I didn’t recognise.

  I ran a few yards with the baby heavy in my arms. Now I could see the full length of the train: it looked like a buckled toy, as though having been tossed up and destroyed by some malevolent child. Up ahead was Appleby Station, with its proud sign and its fine passenger footbridge and over to my left were the station’s stables and cattle pens, the sound of the innocent animals joining the cacophony. And fire – fire was quickly spreading through the carriages, some of which had shattered entirely, stripped back to their thin pale wooden frames. It was a graveyard scene. It was pandaemonium.

  Everything was wrong

  One of the train guards was wandering up and down politely calling out, ‘Are there any doctors on the train? Any doctors on the train at all? Any nurses? Nurses? Any nurses?’ He might almost have been asking for passengers to present their tickets. A dining car steward was sitting down at the side of the tracks, stiff, stunned, blood on his starched white jacket, and – the most extraordinary thing – a refreshment trolley perfectly upright beside him, the Nestlé chocolate bars scattered around his feet, still glistening in their bright wrappers, broken cups and saucers like fragments of some vast whole. I ran over towards him and placed the crying baby in his arms.

  ‘Sir!’ I said. ‘I need your help. Sir?’

  He looked at me blankly.

  ‘You must go up to the station and look after the baby,’ I said. ‘Yes? Until the mother comes.’

  He continued to look at me blankly.

  I repeated myself: ‘You must take this baby and go up to the station. Do you understand? I need you to get up and take the baby with you up to the station, yes?’

  He looked at me for what seemed like a long time but then nodded and I helped him up and he began walking slowly along the line towards the safety of the station.

  ‘Go to the station with the baby!’ I yelled at him again – he glanced back and nodded – and then I ran and plunged back down under the carriage to help the mother. Soon the flames from the other carriages would reach us.

  She remained exactly where I had told her, in the corner of the carriage, entirely still now, and white, panic-stricken.

  ‘Your baby is OK,’ I said. ‘A steward has the baby up at the station. We’re going to get you up to the station.’

  ‘Where’s Lucy?’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘I’m going to wait here for Lucy,’ she said.

  ‘You can’t wait here,’ I said. ‘We have to go.’

  ‘But Lucy will come and try to find me here!’ She pressed herself into the corner of the carriage.

  ‘No. Lucy’s a sensible girl, she’ll know what to do. She’ll know where to find you. Come with me. Come on.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Now!’ I shouted, and I grabbed first one arm and then the other. ‘Now!’ I repeated, and she hit out at me and screamed but I wrestled with her and dragged her down and down through the window and under the train and up into the infernal daylight. As we emerged, a guard came staggering towards us, a terrible cut across his skull, his face sheeted with blood.

  ‘Where’s my daughter?’ the woman yelled at him, as if he were personally responsible. ‘Where’s Lucy? And my baby? Where’s my baby?’ She grabbed at the poor man, but he was in no state to respond and he simply pushed her away and staggered on past, entirely lost and silent.

  I held the woman’s arms firmly. ‘Look at me!’ I said. ‘Look at me!’ And I looked deeply into her eyes, willing her to be calm and to understand and I explained that her baby was with the dining car steward up at the station and I told her to go on ahead, and that I would find Lucy and bring her to her.

  ‘You promise that you’ll bring her to me?’ she said, heaving with tears.

  I promised. I promised I would find Lucy.

  I can remember to this day the look she gave me – trusting, fierce, her eyes wide – and I can remember that she then gave a little jolt of resignation or offence, I don’t know which, as if she had been pierced or branded. Then she turned and walked on, joining what was now a long stream of men, women and children passing alongside the burning train, many of them dragging their suitcases and belongings with them, some of them silent, others calling out for loved ones, or weeping and wailing, dishevelled and distraught. This is the end of the world, I thought: this is what it looks like.

  A man somewhere close by was frantically yelling for help. I turned towards the sound and ran over to the noise. Our carriage was now in flames and the fire was encroaching on the next carriage: the man was yelling from inside. I clambered and pulled myself up and onto the carriage, using all my strength, and made my way across to the window, which was filthy – and shut. I could see terrified faces inside: the man with his wife and children were trapped beneath me. The maroon skin of the carriage was warped and already beginning to warm with flames. It was like looking down into a nightmare from a nightmare. I tried to open the window, pulling and tugging, but it was jammed where the walls of the carriage had buckl
ed.

  ‘Stand back!’ I yelled. ‘Stand back.’

  The family disappeared from the window and I stood and attacked it with my heel, stamping and stamping with all my weight until the glass had shattered, until all that was left was a jagged gap in the glass and I could kneel down and one by one managed to help pull them free. They scurried up and out and over the ruined train and hurried up the line towards the station.

  I jumped down and away from the train, exhausted. I tried to take my bearings.

  There to my left was the station sign, ‘APPLEBY STATION’, and there was the station, with its big tall cast-iron water column, and the signal box on up ahead, and the signals, and to the right there was another large building, emblazoned with the words ‘EXPRESS DAIRY COMPANY CREAMERY’, the letters bold in red, with a fading image of a milk bottle substituting for the ‘I’ in DAIRY. And there, incredibly, was the engine, which had somehow parted company from the train and become embedded in this vast building, in the Express Dairy Company Creamery, milk flooding everywhere, soaking into the ground, lying in pools – black milk – and the crimson engine sunk and drowning, choking and gurgling like some dying animal, hot steaming coals sizzling in the darkening liquid. The engine’s chimney had gone, and lying by the footplate I could make out the figure of a man – the fireman? The driver? – lying in a pool of liquid, his clothes smoking, his shovel next to him. Metal. Flames. Machinery disassembled. Like the devil’s foundry. It seemed incomprehensible. Surreal. The stuff of nightmares and dreams – hashish dreams and opium nightmares.

  And then I remembered: where was Lucy?

  ‘Lucy! Lucy!’

  I began searching. I yelled and yelled and yelled.

  The first thing that Miriam and Morley heard, apparently, was my voice. They were nearly at the station themselves when the train crashed and Miriam had immediately pulled the Lagonda over and run down to the line, Morley close behind her, already making guesses and calculations as to the cause. By the time I saw them there were men everywhere with shovels and pickaxes and rope, clearing the carriages, and Morley was taking notes, Miriam assisting with the injured.

  The hours that followed seem now like a blur. Men rushing with buckets to douse the flames, and then the fire engine arriving, and the ambulance, and finally the police. ‘Ah, potius mori quam foedari,’ muttered Morley, or something. We were herded together in the tiny waiting rooms at Appleby Station, rumours and theories beginning to spread as quickly as the flames from the engine: the train had run into a stationary goods vehicle; hundreds were dead; no one was dead; we had collided with an oncoming train. It was the driver’s fault; the fireman; the signalman; it was a natural disaster; an act of God; a robbery gone wrong. There were terrible injuries, and great shock and tears, but there was also laughter and jokes – the appalling, disgusting, incomprehensible contradictions of humans thrown together in a crowd, first class, third class, and everything in between. I remember the young nurse who dressed my wounds assuming that Miriam and I were married – ‘Your husband’s very brave, madam, people say he saved a lot of lives. He’s a good man’ – and Miriam shooting back, as sharp as you like, ‘First, he’s not my husband. Second, as for him being good or not – in any sense – I couldn’t possibly comment.’ I think that’s what she said. I think I remember the nurse saying that I had lost a lot of blood and that she wanted to take me to the hospital for treatment, and my refusing, and Miriam arguing with me, and … but, as I say, everything was a blur.

  The only thing that remains clear is the moment I found Lucy.

  She had been flung through the window of our carriage at the moment of impact.

  If I hadn’t lifted her to look at the River Eden she would have been with her mother and baby brother, safely recovering in Appleby Station.

  But she wasn’t. She was lying in a field, twenty yards or more away from the crash, entirely peaceful, her pinafore dress spotless and clean. Dead.

  CHAPTER 5

  WILD WEST APPLEBY

  I THINK I’D KNOWN IT from the moment of the crash, but it was too difficult to comprehend. She looked so perfect. She looked unharmed. She lay on her back, looking up at the grey-blue sky. She could have been cloudwatching.

  I don’t talk about it unless I’ve drunk a bit – a lot – and even then I don’t tell the full story. I never mention Lucy. I find ways to avoid it, to circumvent it, as I have always found ways to circumvent everything in my life. Finally writing it all down, I suppose, writing all this down, however feeble and forgettable it may seem, however anodyne and nostalgisome – one of Morley’s favourite words, one he’d invented, I assume – is just a way of reassuring myself that it all really happened, and that it really meant something, that everything was linked together, that it wasn’t nothing, and that it wasn’t waste, that she mattered, that we all mattered. Morley’s County Guides were designed as a bold celebration of England and Englishness: my recollections, I suppose, are some kind of minor, lower-case companion. If the County Guides are a scenic railway ride then my own work is the scene of the crash.

  So, first we were gathered in Appleby Station, us survivors, our wounds tended in the waiting rooms, and a cup of tea for our troubles, and then we were escorted to various hotels in and around the town to give our statements and to be offered shelter for the night. We were billeted at the Tufton Arms Hotel, right in the centre of the town, down past some railwaymen’s cottages and across the River Eden. It was a short walk but it seemed like a long way, a desperate journey: some people in a hurry, some people going slowly; and many come to gawk at us; all of Appleby, it seemed, had come to find out about the crash. The police did their best to keep them away, but it was impossible to separate bystanders from survivors: we were all jammed together, shuffling forward as one. The only way you could tell the passengers from the locals was that the passengers all looked strangely alike, with that expression of surprise and horror from the moment when the crash had occurred.

  ‘I’ve not seen it like this since t’fair,’ said one woman, as I jostled my way past.

  ‘Folk turning out to gawk,’ said another. ‘T’ should be ashamed.’

  People were not ashamed, but they were baffled, just as we were baffled. ‘What happened?’ came the endless murmur. ‘What happened?’

  Lucy’s mother with her baby walked on up ahead of me, weeping. I made no attempt to go to her, to comfort her or to apologise: I simply lowered my head and walked on.

  In Spain I had often suffered exactly the feeling of that afternoon in Appleby: of arriving in a strange town, and not quite knowing or understanding what was happening, and with the knowledge and feeling of already having done something terribly wrong, so that the whole place seemed alien and unkind, a foreign land inhabited by foreign people suffering their uniquely foreign woes in their uniquely foreign ways. According to Morley in the County Guides, Appleby is renowned for its beautiful main street, ‘more Parisian boulevard than English High Street’ but I must admit that on that first day I did not much notice its beauty, and which particular Parisian boulevard Morley had in mind is not entirely clear, since there are none, to my knowledge, that are furnished with butchers, bakers, chandlers, haberdashers, gentlemen’s outfitters, greengrocers and pubs; Paris, for all its allurements, is no real comparison for a prim and proper English county town. A finer and – as it turns out – more fitting comparison for Appleby might be with a Wild West frontier town, in florid English red stone.

  The Tufton Arms Hotel had seen better days, though it was difficult to say exactly when those days had been. It was a sad sort of place: scuffed, worn moquette carpets, cheap and pointless marquetry, cracked clerestory lights, plush, dusty furniture; like a vast dull first-class carriage. The hotel bar was the centre of operations. Tea urns had been set out on some of the tables, and plates of bakery buns. There was much bustling and much organising being done: volunteers from the local Band of Hope had somehow appeared, with their own banner, and had positioned themselves i
n the hotel lobby, arranging places for people to stay, and drawing up lists and matching locals with passengers; the Women’s Institute were doling out the tea and buns; and the police had settled themselves in to conduct interviews. Morley later wrote in praise of the scene as a ‘model of modest English efficiency’. It may have been. It may have been a demonstration of all that is best in the human spirit, a triumph of calm over distress and of civilisation over human wretchedness. All I know is that it was thoroughly depressing and that I was desperate to get away. I needed a drink.

  ‘Yes, sir?’ asked the barman – one of those old-style hotel barmen, a professional barman, a middle-aged gent, spruce and natty, in a tight little tie and a bottle-green waistcoat. He might just as easily be a town councillor or a greengrocer.

  ‘Whisky, please.’

  ‘So, were you in the crash?’ he asked. My torn jacket and bloodied shirt, the bump on my head, and the ragged trousers must have been a give-away. I didn’t answer. ‘Very good, sir. Drinks are on the house for anyone who was in the crash.’

  ‘In that case make it a double,’ I said.

  ‘There’ll be no trains in or out for a week, I reckon,’ continued the barman, as he was examining the bottles behind the bar. ‘So I reckon we’ll be getting through a lot of port and lemon.’ He nodded towards the crowd around the bar, mostly women. ‘So, Scotch: we’ve got Haig, Black and White, or Macnish’s Doctor’s Special. Irish, I’m afraid we’ve only Bushmills or …’ He held up a full bottle of Irish whiskey. ‘Bushmills.’

  ‘I’ll take a Bushmills then.’ I had converted to Bushmills at one of Delaney’s places: he served only Irish whiskey, his famous gin fizz, and other drinks even more distinctly suspect and of no discernible provenance.

  ‘There was a little girl killed,’ he said. ‘Is that right?’

  I said nothing. I drank the whiskey and ordered another. And then another.