Death on a Branch Line(15)

Harry was our boy. He was nigh-on seven years old, and a lovely lad, but the reason the wife had been looking forward to this week-end most particularly was that her friend Lillian Backhouse had agreed to take him in until Monday dinner-time.

‘He thought it was a real panther?’ I enquired.

‘I told him it was a boat, of course.’

‘A gunboat, I hope you said.’

The wife looked out of the window, watching the rolling fields, and keeping silence. Then she said, ‘What do you think I told him? That it was a flipping canoe?’

‘Well, I hope you told him all about the Moroccan crisis,’ I said.

‘What I can’t make out’, said the wife, who did not keep up with the foreign news, ‘is why Agadir?’

‘Because it’s a port in Morocco, and this is all the Moroccan Crisis.’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘It’s the second Moroccan Crisis as a matter of fact.’

‘When was the last one?’

‘About five years since.’

The wife frowned.

‘It crops up periodically,’ I said, taking a pull on my beer. ‘You see, the French and the Spanish run Morocco. We let them do that …’

‘That’s not like us.’

‘Well, there’s nothing there – just sand and terrific heat. But Germany’s always wanted to get a leg in as well.’

‘Are there soldiers on this boat, then?’

‘There’s believed to be a brass band on it, I know that.’

‘And are they threatening to strike up?’ the wife said, picking up the paper again.

We stopped at Slingsby in order for nothing to happen. A lad porter was cleaning the waiting-room windows, and signs running half-way along the platform read: ‘Do Not Alight Here’. I called to the lad and asked if he wouldn’t mind nipping along to the guard’s van to ask for the Adenwold stop. He said he would do, and disappeared from view.

We rolled on, and I might have slept again. I looked out just as the great dark sail of a windmill came close to the compartment window, and we were into a tunnel of trees. Two screams on the whistle as we ran through the woods; then the carriage gave a jolt as an application of the brake came, and we were going slowly through a clearing. In the centre of it stood a great steam saw with stacks of logs near by. Around the saw, the trees had been felled at all angles, and it looked as though they’d collapsed into a dead faint at the sight of the machine. The dark wood came in on us again as we closed on the station.

‘Adenwold,’ I said to the wife as a platform came into view.





Chapter Nine


We’d come in amid a slow hurricane of dust. I opened the door of the compartment, and we climbed down. The place was not as I had expected: somebody had picked up the village of my imagination, turned it around, removed some houses, added a lot of trees and made the air hotter, thicker and more orange-coloured. For a moment, the two of us stood still on the platform, watching a single cloud from the locomotive unwind through the stagnant air. There wasn’t much to Adenwold, or to the little station. There was no station canopy, and even though it was eight o’clock at night I had to shield my eyes against the glare of the low sun.

I was about to make my itinerary of this silent place when a door crashed open in the next carriage along. A man in a green sporting suit climbed down. It was the fellow who’d boarded at Barton. He immediately faced about, and took his bicycle down. He’d carried it with him in the compartment. The bell clanged as with an effort the man set the machine on the platform boards, and when the handlebar became entangled with the leathern valise he carried, no porter came to his aid.

The train began to move off, each of its three carriages complaining in a different manner. No-one gave it the ‘right-away’ – it had arrived and now left of its own accord. As the guard’s van clattered past, I craned to see if there was anyone in there, but could make no-one out. Our tickets had not been checked; no-one had prevented the bicyclist from carrying his machine in the compartment instead of placing it in the guard’s van … and yet there had to be a guard riding up somewhere, and the bicyclist must have asked him for the stop at Adenwold.

The train had left us on the longer of the two platforms, which was the ‘up’. Here stood the station house – a cottage in yellow stone on which a single advertisement was pasted: ‘Smoke Churchman’s Number One Cigarettes’. Outside it were two cut-down barrels pressed into service as flower containers, but they held only a few poor blooms parched half to death. A waiting room and booking office were attached to the station house, and an iron bench stood outside these – a great flowing thing like a stationary bath chair or tricycle. The booking office door was on the jar, but I could make out nothing of its shadowy interior. A little way beyond it stood a wooden urinal, which was little more than a screen, being just four low walls and no roof.