Part One
London and York
Chapter One
In a quiet and dark corner of London, with the rain falling, I walked up to the doorway of 92 Victoria Street, and read ‘Railway Club, Upper Bell.’ The lower bell was for William Watson, Tailor. Alongside the Railway Club bell was a wooden frame with a glass front. An announcement was pinned inside:
THURSDAY JANUARY 25TH, 1917 AT 6.30 P.M. ‘HUMOUR ON THE RAILS’. A TALK WITH LANTERN SLIDES BY MR JOHN MAYCROFT, AUTHOR OF ‘HUMOURS OF A COUNTRY STATION’, ‘OUR BOOKING OFFICE’, ‘DOWN OR UP’ & C. & C. MR MAYCROFT IS OUR PRINCIPAL RAILWAY COMEDIAN. TEA AND COFFEE WILL BE SERVED.
Alongside the notice was fixed a cartoon showing two women in a station restaurant. The first was pointing at a plate and saying, ‘These cakes are all quite stale, Miss Hunt. They’ve been on the counter a fortnight.’ The reply came, ‘Would you mind taking them to the Second Class refreshment room?’
What exactly John Maycroft had to do with this jollity was not indicated.
Victoria Street was lit by lamps turned down low. A man on a bicycle approached along it. There was no headlight on the bike, but when the bicyclist had gone past, I saw that he displayed a red rear lamp in accordance with the blackout regulations. It was evidently more important to see a bicycle going away than it was to see it approaching. The rain increased as the bicycle faded, and I was reminded of the new silk umbrella in my hand. It was a Peerless with an ash handle, and I’d bought it with money sent me by my father on his learning that I had been made up from corporal to captain as a result of my railway work in the Somme battle. ‘A quite remarkable leap’, Dad had called it.
The money – a cheque for ten pounds – had come with a London Handy-Map and Guide and a note insisting the wife and I were to travel south for a bit of a spree. He knew I’d been ‘through it’ on the Western Front, broken my thigh bone and all the rest of it, and he believed I deserved a treat. The wife and I were to stay for two nights in the Midland Grand Hotel, no other would do, and we were instructed to take a second-floor room, the first-floor rooms being more like suites, and the third-floor ‘inclined to be pokey’. (Dad himself had been to London on exactly two occasions, and both times he’d stayed at what was familiarly called ‘The Mid-Gran’.)
In retirement, Dad had come into money, or at least a means of making a good deal. After selling his butcher’s shop, he’d set himself up as the business agent of the model boat makers of the Yorkshire coast – The Ancient Mariners, as he called them, and they were in the main retired fishermen even older, and much less presentable, than himself. (Dad was seventy.) He’d done so well at this that it appeared he’d made a mistake in having worked as a butcher for the best part of fifty years.
I put the umbrella up and, well . . . It worked. But standing underneath it, I felt a fraud.
It was only just gone six; I had half an hour to kill before ‘Humour on the Rails’, so I crossed the road and drank a glass of London Brown beer and smoked a cigarette in a pub called The Albert. When I returned to number 92, there were two men on the doorstep: an elderly party and a young chap perhaps in the early twenties. The elderly party was singing the praises of John Maycroft – of ‘Humour on the Rail’ fame – even as he took down the notice advertising the man’s talk.
‘He’s awfully good, you know. He gave the talk at Cambridge. I’m led to believe it was an absolute riot.’
‘Where at Cambridge?’ asked the other, who wore a thick muffler.
‘At Cambridge – at the University, you know,’ said the first chap.
‘At the Cambridge University Railway Club?’ asked the younger one, evidently a stickler for fact.
The older chap looked flummoxed, but I got him off the hook by asking, ‘Is the talk cancelled?’
‘Postponed,’ he said without looking at me (which the young one made up for by staring). ‘But we’ve been able to get a fill-in at short notice.’
And as he spoke, he pinned up a new notice in the box:
RLY. CLUB
JAN. 25TH, ’17
THERE HAS BEEN A CHANGE TO THE ADVERTISED PROGRAMME. TONIGHT AT 6.30, MR NOEL DOWNES OF LONDON UNIVERSITY LECTURES ON ‘THE BERLIN–BAGDAD RAILWAY’.
There had originally been an ‘h’ after the ‘g’ in ‘Bagdad’ but this had been cancelled out by the overtyping of an ‘x’.
The younger chap asked me, ‘Are you a member of the Railway Club? Because you won’t get in if you’re not.’
‘Oh, I think an exception will always be made for an officer,’ the older man cut in – and I wondered how he could tell, since I was not in uniform, and my Northern accent was stronger than is commonly found amongst commissioned men. I was pleased, anyhow.