The Necropolis Railway

by Andrew Martin

  'Why is that?'

  'There's been some little exploits, thieving from bodies, thieving o’ bodies, if it comes to that.' "They dig them up, do they?'

  'That's it - your better class of stiff they might very well do. Not that it happens too often, but there's been a spade taken to a few graves recently, here and in other places; some have been made off with, others chucked about for a lark, and Mack's been... well, they've said to him: "What do you know?'"

  'Who have? The police?'

  'No, but the bosses from this show. They've made things quite hot for the lad.' 'Why him, though?'

  'Because Mack's Mack, isn't he? There's only one of him.'

  Terry caught up his drink, and I said, ‘I saw some fellows earlier on. One was on a horse. I'd hardly think stealing bodies was the kind of thing you'd get up to in daylight hours anyway, but...'

  "They were marking off the poles for selling,' said Terry. 'Face up to it, mate,' he continued, 'they haven't quite managed to make this place a public fad, have they?'

  'They've tried, though, haven't they?' I said, thinking of Stanley, the man who gave the address.

  'Oh, they've tried,' said Terry. "They're trying still.'

  After a little while, some of the mourners came in looking sorely in need of a pick-up. Mack came back and showed me a sign behind the bar reading 'Spirits Served Here'. He was grinning all round his head at that. Then he told me of ghosts he'd seen at Brookwood, and I wondered whether he'd seen a lot more since they'd had the Red Lion down in the cemetery, and he said, now he came to think of it, yes he had.

  I rode back with Mack in the empty coffin carriage. I wasn't much company for him. The fate of Rickerby I'd pushed to the back of my mind, and my own troubles were back at the front. I kept telling Mack I'd stood myself down and that was it, and he kept trying to make out that things could still turn out all right, but then here was a fellow who believed in life after death. Who was firing with Hunt as we rode back to the Necropolis I didn't know, and when we arrived at the station and the mourners were turfed out of the carriages, I scurried along the platform fast, trying not to glance at the cab of Thirty-One. But I couldn't help seeing Hunt standing outside it, too big for his little tank engine, dabbing his hands with that folded cloth of his. I chanced a look his way. He was staring hard at me.

  Well, I was so out with everything that I just decided to go to my lodge. This time I found the staircase that led down from the platforms to the courtyard, so I didn't have to use the iron ladder. I walked across the courtyard and under the arch, where I saw the sign reading 'Extramural Interment: An Address'. It was to be held that evening.

  As I came out of the Necropolis station it was raining trams and omnibuses. Every window looked black, every face looked troubled; the lights hanging on the front of the shops were too big, swinging too low, and the trains crashing through one after another had the whole place shaking. As I walked, there seemed no solidity in the pavement beneath my feet; my guts were knotted and my head throbbed. I would quit my lodge that very day; I would go straight to King's Cross, and home.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tuesday 8 December continued

  I stood at the side wall of Hercules Court looking up at 'Stower's Lime Juice, No Musty Flavour'. I did not now believe that it had no musty flavour. Upon opening the door I saw in the hall a package and a letter, both addressed to me. I could see that the package was from Dad, but the letter was more mysterious. It was from Rowland Smith, and carried yesterday's date. I read it with a galloping heartbeat: he was anxious to speak to me concerning the exploits of the half-link, for, although he did not want to alarm me, he had some grave anxieties on that score. Would I reply directly, giving a time and place to meet? He knew that I, being a young man of good sense out of the common, would regard this as a matter of strictest confidentiality.

  Well, I nearly laughed at it. I was in a nightmare without end, for would there not be the greatest danger in talking to him over this? Anyway, it would not come to it: I was going home.

  I stood in the hall for a while re-reading the letter, wondering how I could quit my lodge with my landlady not about. I walked up to my room and paced about with the package of Dad's under my arm. There was no coal for a fire. I put my clothes and my Railway Magazines into my box, and then took the magazines out again. Why take them back? They were part of my past. I threw them onto the truckle bed.

  I looked through the window giving onto the street. There were girls down there as usual, laughing outside the Vianola Soap Pharmacy, and they looked quite a proper lot this time. I wanted a fuck, and I believe I said the word out loud, which I was not in the habit of doing in any circumstances. It seemed a very London answer to agitation. Another one was drink, and all at once there seemed nothing else for it but to walk down the road to the Citadel.

  I took three pints before opening the package from Dad, which contained a letter and the latest number of The Railway Magazine. In his letter, Dad spoke of a fearful storm the previous month that had sent a schooner crashing through the window of the Bay Hotel - which had happened once before, so it was as if things were going on pretty much as usual up there.

  He commended to me a gentlemanly course in all things, hoping I was lacquering my boots and wearing collars on Sundays at least. He reminded me that though he himself was in quite a humble way of business, that I was not of the factory or service class, and should be mindful of that in all my dealings. He said I should speak of having taken 'rooms', and not being in a 'lodge'. He said it was all right to have a bottle of beer in doors, but that he hoped I had not become a frequenter of public houses. For his P.S., he repeated that he had very good memories of Tottenham Court Road and said it was a good spot for a Sunday jaunt.

  All in a daze - that letter seemed to have come from a million miles away - I stepped out of the Citadel and walked up the driveway leading from Lower Marsh to the great station. I had been told that you only knew you were at the front of Waterloo because that was where the hansoms waited, but all I saw from my particular corner were high walls, from behind which came muffled cries and the blasting of steam engines, these two noises always coming hand in hand, with moments of silence in between. It reminded me of something, and at first I couldn't think what, but it came to me after a while that it was the little Assembly Rooms in Baytown on a Saturday morning, when they had dancing lessons, and in between the quiet times, when the dancing mistress was talking (which could not be heard from outside), the sound of the piano always came with a great clomping of feet, and it drove me half mad that you could never get either feet or music on their own.

  Giving up on making any sense of Waterloo, I came down off the walkway into Westminster Bridge Road. It was dark and cold, and there was a great queue at the ice rink, which was steaming like mad, making extra ice to meet the great demand. The racing trams all carried a huge picture of a man who had improved his kidneys by eating enormous amounts of Hoffa's Vegetable Pills. He had a wide orange face and was grinning like the devil. I turned some corners, and found myself outside the Necropolis station, and there was the sign again: 'Extramural Interment: An Address'. There was no queue for this, but for me there was something mesmerising about the Necropolis show. It was the only spot in London that was not crowded, and I always seemed to have the run of the place.

  I walked through the arch and mooched around the lamplit courtyard, which was not quite deserted, for as I walked past a door I heard a muffled voice muttering, 'Plate of inscription, memorial service books, superintendent and assistants, thirty-five shillings . . . similar without lead coffin, twenty-five shillings... Open car, or glass hearse and pair, two broughams and pairs, elm shell-lined swansdown, oak case ...'

  It was a strange speech to hear, for there was never any other voice, no answer to or interruption of these endless, glum particulars.

  I drifted back towards the arch. The door in the arch was propped open - to admit those who wanted to hear the address, I supposed.
I walked into the wooden vestibule and read the notices there for a while. The biggest was a poster talking up the cemetery: "The lovely cemetery, situated at Brookwood, is the most complete in all its arrangements, and universally admitted to be the ideal burial ground. It is the biggest in England ...'

  That's right, I thought, and its trains are regularly driven by the biggest pill in England, too. Alongside this were some 'press opinions': 'The privacy and quietude with which the whole business of receiving, conveying and depositing the coffins is effected cannot be too highly commended' - that was one. Another just said, 'Noted for its picturesque scenery.'

  Was the Necropolis truly a success or not?

  I did not think so, for it was as quiet as the grave at both ends rather than just one. I began walking up the stairs, and, as I climbed, the voice of the strange Mr Stanley - in high force once again - floated down from the fourth floor: "The lightened and purified system of extramural interment cannot fail to be of interest to all, whether as regards sanitation, morals, convenience or economy.'

  But by the time I had reached the doors of the room in which the address was taking place (which also had the secret signs in the wood panels, and an old dusty crest at the back), all this high and mighty stuff had given way to talk in ordinary voices. There were two people in the audience: a man in middle age wearing a salt-and-pepper suit, and an old woman in a sort of sailor's hat. The old woman was very livery though; in fact I'd have laid odds she was saturated.

  'But Mr Stanley,' she said, in a voice that sounded put on, 'why are we here?'

  Stanley looked at her for a long time, and I looked at him. His suit had given up trying to be black: there were black tints there but also shiny patches of a greenish shade. This fellow is always in mourning for himself, I thought. He was a big, dangling fellow, with sad eyes of a kind of orange colour, and a long yellow face - all in all his looks matched a certain kind of illness that I had read of but could not at the time put a name to.

  Stanley glanced in my direction as I entered the room and sat down, but gave no sign of happiness that his audience had suddenly increased.

  'We are here,' said Stanley to the woman after a while (and as he spoke the big voice swelled), 'to deliberate nothing less than the furtherance of a city of the dead, a cemetery that will suffice for the absorption of the annual metropolitan mortality, not only for the present generation, or for many years, but for all generations - even until the last trumpet shall sound and the dead arise.'

  'Mr Stanley,' said the saturated lady, 'have you ever heard "Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day" by Mr Sullivan? Oh, it is a most excellent ditty with such a pretty tune. I heard it myself, performed at a Chappell Ballad Concert in St James's Church Hall.'

  'What has this to do with extramural interment?' asked the man in the salt-and-pepper suit, looking straight ahead, and not at the high-spirited old lady.

  'Mr Stanley, I hold St James's Church Hall to be the very place for the address. It is always packed to the rafters! Here you are rather out of the way. There you will be in the thick of things. Think of it, Mr Stanley - the address on interment following hard upon a zither recital or a pianoforte concert. People will naturally linger on after the one and more than likely flock in for a look at the other.'

  Stanley said nothing to this but just slowly began to frown.

  ‘I too have a question,' said the man in the salt-and-pepper suit. 'Shortly before the establishment of the Necropolis and the incorporation of your company, seven commercial cemeteries were created in the suburbs of London.'

  "They are of a limited capacity,' said Mr Stanley wearily.

  'They are Kensal Green,' said the man, 'West Norwood, Highgate, Nunhead, Abney Park and Brompton and Tower Hamlets, and between them they hold a good many dead. There followed legislation allowing the creation of further burial places in London, and of late the boroughs have been required to supply grave-sites too. You speak of the seventy thousand interred on top of one another in the two hundred square yards of St Martin-in-the-Fields, but no such horror can occur again, and nor need it, for the fact is that wholly adequate provision is now made within the boundaries of the city and the Necropolis is nothing but a vast anachronism.'

  I had this fellow down as a rich sort of bloke who had nothing better to do with his time than go around putting a crimp into the dreams of others - and Stanley did not answer him back but merely said, in his ordinary voice: 'Are there any other questions?'

  'Mr Stanley,' said the woman, 'when were you last at the cemetery?'

  'Some four months ago,' said Stanley. 'Its picturesque beauties were at their height.'

  'Did you see the Actor's Acre in bloom?' said the woman. 'I should love to have seen that. There is a part of the cemetery, sir,' she said, leaning over at an unnatural angle in order to address the man in the salt-and-pepper suit, 'reserved for entertainers of one sort or another. I have my name down for a plot there because I am a theatrical myself.'

  ‘I can see that perfectly well, madam,' said the man as he picked up his Derby hat and started walking towards the door.

  I followed him out and down the stairs, leaving poor Mr Stanley to the theatrical lady.

  I was back in my lodge ten minutes later feeling blue, too tired to think straight, and looking down at all the pretty doxies on Lower Marsh - one under every lamp now. I would go to work in the morning: I might as well get the boot before returning home. A train went over the viaduct and rattled my room, but did not bother the women, who were like the flowers that grow along the railway embankments. I lay back down on my bed and read, in the edition of The Railway Magazine that Dad had sent, of some notable railway journeys in Portugal that some bearded fellow had taken, but I put it aside almost immediately. It is a paper for boys, I thought, and I pushed that journal off my truckle bed because I had other business there for the minute.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Wednesday 9 December - Thursday 17 December

  I turned up for work next day all ready to be stood down, but when I booked on, Mr Crook's eyebrows remained in place, and there was no trouble from him. The fires were going into the engines as normal, with the background of happy crashing and men whistling. As usual I walked past a hundred heads that were all looking the other way, and made straight for the Governor's office, which I was sure would on this occasion prove to be my place of execution. However, I came across him before I got there.

  Coughing fearfully, he took me to Twenty-Nine and asked me to clean it.

  I mumbled, 'I am very sorry to say, Mr Nightingale, that when I was on the ride out yesterday with Mr Hunt, some things passed between us that -'

  But the Governor cut me off, saying, 'New trimmings are needed in all pots as well.'

  As I worked on that engine, my head was spirtning from the complication of everything and the smell of the linseed rags, and that night I was fair on the rocks for a sleep, but after a while the work became a sort of tonic, and I don't believe that Twenty-Nine had ever looked better by the time I'd finished going at her.

  I turned in without supper, and without replying to Smith. I wrote out my reply to that very vexing gentleman on the following day, the Friday, taking an age over setting down very little. Every word I could think of seemed highly dangerous. I cursed Smith for putting me to this, and I cursed the half-link for awaking all his suspicions of them in the first place. In the end I said nothing more than that I would be willing to meet him at his lodge if that was quite convenient, but leaving off time and date. Dad would have been horrified, for the usual compliments and pleasant touches were all left off. I was still set on going home, and with the decision made I felt easier: I had no doubt that I would never keep any appointment with Smith.

  Things went on as usual at the shed until the Thursday of the following week, 17 December, when Crook, handing me the token, said, ‘I was thinking of you today.' 'Good thoughts, I hope, Mr Crook.'

  'Not especially,' he said, and took a long drink of tea. 'There's bee
n an event,' he went on, his eyebrows jumping. 'An event touching on your arrival here.'

  'Well...' I said, 'What?'

  'It's not my place to tell you.'

  I walked out of Crook's room fast and in a high state of anxiety. The first thing I saw was my handiwork on show for all to see, for there was Twenty-Nine, gleaming, in full steam at the front of the shed and looking somehow like the point of an arrow on a day of marvellous blueness. I saw a fellow inside her feeding the fire irons into their hole. It was Vincent, and he was getting ready for a ride, all right - he must have finally passed up to the half-link.

  I began running along the barrow boards, crossing a hundred yards of track in no time, and when I came close I saw the driver was Barney Rose. He was wearing a black armband and lounging against the handbrake reading the Sportsman's Daily.

  'What's up?' I said.

  'A. R. Wisdom is the new amateur billiard champion,' he said.

  'No sporting matter too small to be missed,' said Vincent. Then he turned to me and said, 'We've got a special on.' He meant the funeral of a toff. "They've put you up, then,' I said.

  He nodded, as if too full of happiness to do anything more.

  'As from today, I'm a full half-link man.' He had a grin on him like a street knocker - I'd never seen his teeth before.

  Then I realised what he'd said. 'Who's dead?' I asked.

  Vincent smiled at me. He seemed to have no objection to my questioning this time, but he wasn't answering. Rose was saying to him, 'Have you heard of A. R. Wisdom?' Vincent was at the injectors, looking down from the cab, checking the flow from the exhaust before bringing in the cut off and sending the water into the boiler.