Another silence fell between us.
‘I was in it once,’ I said, indicating the magazine.
‘Were you?’ he said, and it was genuine interest too.
I believe I then spoke for about ten minutes continuously. I began by telling Shepherd of how I was a railway detective by profession, having been deflected from a career on the footplate by an accident involving an unwarmed engine brake and the wall of an engine shed in Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax. (On the basis of this data, I realised, he must be wondering how I came to be a commissioned officer, for I assumed he did credit me with being an officer of some sort.)
I told him how the police office I had worked in was situated at York station . . .
‘On platform four,’ he cut in, ‘I know it.’
I then started in about how a journalist had come from The Railway Magazine and written us all up, giving prominence to my governor, Chief Inspector Weatherill, and giving me second billing in a way designed to cause maximum embarrassment: ‘The sharpers and dodgers of York station have learnt not to run too close a risk in the immediate vicinity of Chief Inspector Weatherill, and his close associate Detective Sergeant Stringer . . .’
At this, Shepherd smiled, but I believe he was smiling at the words of the journalist rather than at my own recollection of them. In other words, he was not laughing at me.
‘Go on to the war,’ said Shepherd.
I told him the North Eastern Railway had formed its own battalion . . .
‘The Seventeenth Northumberland,’ he again cut in. I nodded, and waited for him to say, ‘. . . known as “The Railway Pals”,’ and he got points with me when he didn’t. I told him that in the second half of the Somme campaign my unit had operated trains to the front from the railhead at Aveluy.
‘Little trains?’ he said, again with excitement.
‘The two-foot railways,’ I said. ‘They’re everywhere now.’
‘Were you running the Simplex twenty-horsepower units?’
I shook my head.
‘Never touched the Simplex tractors. Never saw one, or any petrol engine for the matter of that. We were riding the Baldwins.’
Blowing out smoke, he said the one word, ‘Steam,’ and sat back. He eyed me for a while, sat forward. ‘Are they good runners, the Baldwins?’
‘They’re good steamers,’ I said, ‘but the boilers are set too high.’
‘So they’re unstable.’
I drained my glass of brandy.
‘They fall over,’ I said.
I told him how I’d got crocked, but not about the bad business I’d struck in my own unit – the matter of the bad lads within it. He listened, it seemed to me, carefully, and not just out of politeness.
His knowledge of railways might have put him in the Royal Engineers. But they were in the thick of the railway construction, and he’d asked his questions as an outsider. He held back, anyhow, which was his right as the senior man. But he again tried to make up for any lapse in manners by returning to the question of the cigarettes, which he had seen had interested me. Indicating the packet on the table before us, he said, ‘By the way, if you’re a regular here, you’d know that it used to be “Turkish cigarettes” and “Turkish coffee”.’
I nodded.
We were at war with Turkey. You might as well try and sell ‘German sausages’ as ‘Turkish cigarettes’, and this accounted for ‘Smokes from the Holy Land’ or whatever the phrase had been.
‘I’m surprised the fellow can still lay his hands on them,’ I said.
‘Oh, he can’t of course,’ said Shepherd. ‘His stock’s running very low . . . And they’re becoming rather dried out. With the fires and the steam heating,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘it’s very hot in here, whereas a cigarette wants moisture in the atmosphere.’
I nodded, thinking: Well of course it’s very hot in Turkey as well. But perhaps it was the humid kind of heat.
A long interval of silence. Then Shepherd suddenly asked another railway question: ‘How portable are the two-foot tracks?’
‘It takes four men to lift a length,’ I said.
‘Not portable enough.’
I said, ‘You could get away with lighter specifications if the engines were more stable.’ And then I tried a bit of philosophy: ‘Railways are called “The Permanent Way”, but in France just now, we don’t want them permanent. We ought to be able to pick them up and move them in just the same way a boy takes up his model railway when it’s time for bed.’
He nodded slowly, saying, ‘Well it’s time for my bed,’ but I fancied he’d liked that answer I’d given him.
He stood up; we shook hands again, and he walked off.
By now, the Mahogany Room was quiet – only half a dozen men left in it. A footman was clearing out the fire, which was a way of getting stragglers to get off to bed. But I wondered about another drink. I turned and saw, standing at the bar, Bartlett, the fellow who chalked up the scores at billiards. He was talking to the barkeeper, with a glass of something on the go.
As I approached the bar, he said, ‘Evening sir. Very fine gentleman, the lieutenant colonel.’
‘What is he?’ I said. ‘Guards?’
‘Grenadier Guards,’ said Bartlett. ‘Been involved in some marvellous forward moves, has Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd.’
Well, he would know, being the man who pinned up the war news. I looked across at the green notice-board, and saw in the headlines over and over again the wrong-looking word ‘Kut’.
‘He was decorated,’ Bartlett was saying. ‘D.S.O.’
‘Any chance of a drink?’ I asked the barkeeper.
‘The Mahogany Room closes at two, sir,’ he replied. ‘It’s ten after now.’
‘War regulations, sir,’ said Bartlett; but the barkeeper set another brandy before me. ‘Anyhow,’ Bartlett added, ‘that’s what we say to those chaps not in the war.’
‘I’m obliged to you,’ I said to the barkeeper, and put a half crown on the bar, which he pushed back my way.
‘What’s the name of the chap who sells the cigarettes?’ I said, pushing the half crown back.
‘Mr Ali,’ said Bartlett. ‘Coffee and cigarettes, it is.’
‘What is he?’ I said. ‘I mean . . .’
‘I would say he was foreign,’ said Bartlett, ‘but friendly.’
‘But where’s he from?’
‘Well now I don’t think you’d be far wrong if you said he was an Arab.’
‘Or something of the sort,’ put in the barkeeper.
The fire had quite gone out, and the steam heating had evidently been turned off in the public rooms.
‘It’s rather cold in here,’ I said.
Chapter Two
In the police office on platform four of York station, I was sitting ‘in state’, so to speak, observing the work of my old office with my bad leg up on the desk. This was to remind everyone that I was an officer on convalescent leave, as yet with no news of when I would return to my unit, and not to be troubled by the question of what was or was not in the Occurrence Book, or by the fact that the witness statements relating to an unlawful wounding at the Dringhouses Marshalling Yard had just gone missing for the second time.
I had done my officer training course after all. My commanding officer, Major Quinn, had written from France politely insisting upon it. Six weeks in a country house outside Catterick. The grounds of the place were apparently famous, but I had mainly seen them blurred through window glass, for it had rained almost every day. I had spent most of my time sitting down and being lectured, and sitting didn’t suit my bad leg. It got so that whenever one of the officer-instructors said, ‘Sit down, gentlemen,’ I’d think he was trying to do me in, and when I was driven out of the place, in the charabanc that shuttled between house and railway station, my limp was more pronounced than when I’d arrived.
Old Man Wright, the clerk of the police office, thought I was putting it on. He might easily have been seventy-five, and he’d been bucked u
p no end by the coming of a war from which he was exempt. The crisis made it seem a good thing to be a scrawny old man in a dullish line of work. With Chief Inspector Weatherill – my governor as was – it was the opposite case. The Chief loved a scrap. His war had been out in Egypt in the eighties, and his great regret ever since was that a fellow didn’t come up against too many dervishes on the railway lands of York.
Wright was moving about the office slamming drawers. He didn’t take kindly to seeing me with my leg up, but he could hardly say anything about it, for the Chief, sitting at the desk over opposite, had both his legs up. He was reading the Yorkshire Evening Press about the British occupation of Baghdad. The date on the paper was Monday April 23rd.
‘They’ve got their tails up in Mespot,’ he said, and I recalled to mind the talk I’d attended at the Railway Club.
‘A hundred and twenty degrees it is over there,’ said Wright, who was perhaps hunting up the missing witness statements. ‘Bit on the warm side.’
‘Fancy a walk?’ said the Chief, lowering the paper.
‘It’s raining,’ said Wright, from over near the fireplace, where he was blocking the heat.
But the Chief hadn’t been asking Wright, and he continued to look his question at me.
We walked through the station with the rain thundering on the great roof. I liked to look up and watch it roll over the dirty glass. As the Chief collared a messenger boy, and sent him off to the Lost Luggage Office with a sixpence and instructions to bring back two umbrellas, I watched an Ivatt Atlantic come in, mixing its own roar with the roar of the rain. It was London-bound, and there weren’t many takers for its carriages.
At the ticket barriers, the Chief said, ‘Where do you want to walk to?’ and he named a couple of pubs. Then he said, ‘But I was forgetting . . . you’re a hotel man now, en’t you? What do you reckon? Lowther’s? The Royal?’
As we stepped out from under the station portico, and raised our brollies, I said, ‘Let’s go to The Moon, shall we?’
The Full Moon was in Walmgate. It was most certainly not a hotel. You couldn’t even get a bite to eat there. You could drink beer.
Now that I was an army captain, the Chief would constantly set traps for me – giving me opportunities to put on swank, and I did my best to dodge them. He might be a chief inspector in the railway police, but he’d risen no higher than sergeant major in his own days with the colours. This was partly through choice. The Chief didn’t want to be doing with writing up reports and dining in the officers’ mess. He would scrape his knife against his plate; he didn’t know which way you passed the salt.
It was a ten-minute tramp to Walmgate. On Lendal Bridge, with the rain redoubling and the river seething below us, the Chief brought his umbrella close to mine, passed me a cigar, and lit both it and his own. We walked on through the darkly shining York streets, under endless sodden Union Jacks.
‘Well,’ I said, as we turned into Parliament Street. ‘What is it?’
Because he obviously wanted to talk to me about something.
‘Tell you in the pub,’ said the Chief. He liked to draw these things out – a bit of a sadist, was the Chief.
The Full Moon was not full. In fact, it was completely empty and silent. The Chief walked up to the bar, and bawled out ‘Carter!’ which was the name of the landlord – after which the silence gradually returned. Everything was brown, and slightly ticking – the clock, the tables, the benches. After a while, I began to hear the drumming of the rain above the ticking. The Chief swore, called out ‘Carter!’ again, and nothing happened again, but I noticed that the trapdoor in the floor behind the bar was open.
‘He’s in the cellar,’ I said.
Presently, we heard the trudge of Carter on the cellar steps, and he began to come up through the trapdoor.
‘Chief Inspector Weatherill!’ he said, when about three-quarters of him had appeared; but the Chief just said, ‘Four pints of Smiths.’
‘Four?’ I said. ‘Hold on a minute!’
‘Bloody emergency licensing,’ said the Chief. ‘You never know when a pub’s going to close. When are you going to close?’ he asked Carter.
‘Not till eight,’ said Carter, handing over the pints, ‘but there’s no long pulls for soldiers.’
We took our drinks, one in each hand, over to the table near the fire. Halfway over the Chief turned back to Carter.
‘I hope you don’t serve milk do you?’
‘Why?’ said Carter, ‘do you want a glass?’
‘Of course I don’t want a fucking glass of milk,’ said the Chief.
The Chief had never drunk a glass of milk in his life.
‘Some pubs are serving milk,’ the Chief told me, taking out his bundle of cigars.
I took my first sip of the Smiths.
‘Well, it’s the law,’ I said. ‘And you are a policeman.’
‘I tell you, this town’s being run by the teetotal cranks and the bloody cocoa men.’
The Chief was down on the York City Council, and he now started in about how they’d changed all the lighting out of fear of a Zeppelin attack, but then he stopped talking about that, and said:
‘I’m taking you up to London tomorrow.’
I eyed him for a while.
‘In that case I should tell you that I’ve developed rather a liking for the Midland Grand Hotel.’
‘No need for an overnight,’ said the Chief.
‘Is it the War Office again, by any chance?’
No reply. Well, the Chief was busy lighting his cigar.
‘Henderson-Richards again?’ I said.
The Chief knew a man in the Intelligence Section of the War Office called Henderson-Richards. He’d taken me to see him back in 1911, after a case in which I’d stumbled on some government-and-railway business that was to be kept muffled up. Henderson-Richards I recalled as having uncommonly long hair and slipper-like shoes. After talking down to me for a while, he’d made me sign the Official Secrets Act.
‘Different bloke,’ said the Chief, while working the cigar with his mouth.
‘Name of . . . ?’
The Chief set down the cigar.
‘Manners,’ he said.
‘Is he a soldier?’
‘Is he fuck.’
*
The Chief would refer to certain young military men who didn’t come up to the mark as ‘boy scouts’, but it was a real boy scout who led us up the great staircase of the War Office towards the office of Manners. The kid was about fifteen, and he and his entire troop were doing the work of the War Office messengers who’d gone off to France. We were put in his charge in the great lobby, which was full of men shaking out their umbrellas in a grey light. As we climbed the wide marble staircase, the scout said that his greatest hope was that the war would carry on long enough for him to be in it. But I hardly heard him. I was thinking of what had happened on the train on the way up.
The Chief and I had had a compartment to ourselves: a First Class smoker of course. The Chief always went First – well, he was The Chief, and he had the highest sort of staff pass, the one that came in a leathern wallet with an outline of the North Eastern territory embossed in gold. (It looked like the head of a cow.) A little beyond Doncaster, with the wind flinging occasional raindrops at the window, he’d leant forward and handed me a letter that nestled in a ripped-open envelope. It was addressed to me at the police office, and it came from France.
‘I opened it by mistake, lad,’ said the Chief, and I didn’t know that I believed him. Certainly he was very free and easy about the mail, often chucking away his own letters unopened, but I also knew he’d been like a cat on hot bricks over the question of whether or when I’d be returning to my unit.
Evidently, the letter had arrived at the police office on the previous Thursday, April 19th, when I’d been at home. It was from Major Quinn, my C.O., and had been despatched from Givenchy. Quinn couldn’t give his exact whereabouts, but I knew he was in charge of a detachment helping th
e Canadians with light railways behind Vimy Ridge. He gave me his best wishes, hoped I’d got something out of the training course, if only a good rest, and expressed the hope I’d be rejoining the unit soon. On the other hand, he had received, on April 10th, a letter dated March 14th, and sent from Baghdad, Mesopotamia, by a Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd, who had evidently sailed for the East within a week of my meeting him. It seemed I’d made quite a score with him at the Midland Grand, and he wanted me to join him in helping run the railways of Baghdad, such as they were. Shepherd himself had been invited out there by a high-ranking officer he’d run across in the early days of the war, and had got the job through ‘what was really the most tremendous luck’. (The old school tie more like, I thought.)
Quinn had pointed out that Shepherd had sent his letter only three days after the fall of Baghdad, meaning to indicate, I supposed, that I ought to be flattered at being in the thoughts of a lieutenant colonel during what must have been what Quinn called ‘a pretty hectic time’. Quinn was perfectly happy to let me go if I was so minded.
At first I’d been silent, annoyed at the Chief for opening the letter, and revolving a hundred questions. Then I’d begun quizzing the Chief. Since he had opened my letter, I’d felt he owed me some answers. But he hadn’t seen it like that, and as London approached, and the rain beyond the carriage windows came on in earnest, I’d settled into a mood that was a queer combination of sulk and stirring excitement.
‘This is Mr Manners’s office,’ the Scout said, knocking, and his patriotic front cracked a bit when he added, ‘I don’t mind saying . . . he’s had some queer blokes in here today.’
The shout came from within: ‘Enter!’
Whereas Henderson-Richards, back in 1911, had had hair practically on his collar, this bloke had none at all, and, his head being so long, he could have done with some. On the strength of his name, I’d expected him to have some manners, which he didn’t really. He just indicated a chair for me and another for the Chief, before saying to me: ‘Now you’re off to Baghdad. How did that come about?’
No preamble about whether I wanted to go to Baghdad or not (although I’d decided immediately on seeing the letter that I did want to). No apology on behalf of the Chief for opening the letter; no mention of how the Chief must have telephoned or telegraphed to him or some other department to reveal the detail of it. No explanation of what the letter had signified to the Chief, or how and why it had any bearing on my presence in this office.
The Baghdad Railway Club Page 3