Andrew Martin: Death on a Branch line

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.

After the platform, the ‘down’ line divided, one track running into a three-road siding with a stack of general railway rubbish piled between the tracks — baulks of timber, rusted track shoes and the like. There was a small goods warehouse, not much larger than the station house, with a weighbridge outside it.

The ‘down’ platform over-opposite contained nothing but a single bench, with more cornfields beyond.

The bicyclist, wheeling his machine, advanced upon us and gave not so much as a nod as he passed on his way. Was he off to silence John Lambert? His machine made the whirring sound of a dragonfly. I was wondering whether I ought to pursue and question him when a sudden bark of laughter came from the woods ahead of us.

At first, I thought this came from the signal box, which was half in the woods, and raised one storey off the ground on stone arches. (This, I supposed, so as to give the signalman a clear view of the trains arriving and departing through the trees.) The signalman stood at the top of the wooden staircase that led to the high door of the box. He did not look like one of the usual solid sorts employed in signalling: he was thin with a straggly beard, no cap and a uniform worn anyhow.

But when the laughter came again, I knew it had not come from his lips, but from those of another lounger on a level with him but on the other side of the tracks. This scrawny youth I took to be the lad porter at Adenwold. He sat like a crow on the little iron platform built onto the top of the pole that held the signals controlling the station. He was on a level with the treetops, yet slightly in advance of the trees, giving him a view of the whole station and the village hard by. And he was smoking.

He called across to his partner the signalman: ‘Reckon this pair are thinking, “Crikey, where’ve we pitched up?”’

‘Reckon so,’ the signalman called back.

‘Who’s that?’ asked the wife, screening her eyes and looking up towards the signal gantry.

‘He ought to be down here giving a hand with our bags,’ I said, ‘not cackling in the bloody trees.’

There was a movement from the direction of the booking office, and I saw a fat man turning in the doorway. I made towards him, passing the open doorway of the waiting room where stood one giant black bench with horsehair bursting through holes in the seat cover.

The complications of light (too much of it outside, too little of it inside) meant I could make out little more than a silhouette in the booking office, but I knew the man for the station master by the glint of brass buttons on his tunic.

‘Your porter’s not up to much,’ I called across to him, but there was no answer, only a sort of rumble and whistle from within the dark room. I set down my bag and walked over.

‘I say, mate,’ I began, ‘I’ve never seen the like of…’

The words died on my lips as I looked inside the booking office.

It was a sort of wood-smelling hovel. There was a counter with an ABC telegraph machine on it. But there was so much clutter on the floor in front of the counter that I supposed most passengers had their tickets served out through the doorway. There was a wide cabinet fixed to the wall, and a clock beside it. A tall sloping desk held many papers and tattered books, but a good many more books lay on the floor: Wagon Book, Transfer Order Book, Delivery Book, Goods Not Reserved Book — all of these were on the dusty floorboards, and it was all wrong. It was like seeing a Bible on the floor of a church.

The fat man stood guiltily in amongst this wreckage, as well he might do. One visit from a company auditor and he’d be stood down on the spot. He was no smarter in appearance than his two juniors in the trees, but in manner he was the opposite. The sweat rolled off him, and he looked scared. He was standing beside a small table, and here was the queerest thing of all, for on the table top (which was covered over with a green cloth) were perhaps sixty or seventy tiny leaden soldiers set out in a battle scene. I looked at the man, and his eyes flickered towards me, then away. We were both struck dumb, save for the fact that a kind of regular, desperate whistle escaped from the man’s throat as he laboured to breathe in the heat.

I said, ‘Your lad porter, Mister…’ at which he gave a start and a small cry of ‘Oh yes?’

He looked at me with great anxiety, practically trembling.

‘You ought to know that he’s sitting at the top of the signal pole and cheeking the passengers,’ I said.

‘Leave off, Jim,’ came the voice of the wife from the platform. ‘Could you just ask the gentleman where we might get a bed for the night?’

‘I sent the boy up to oil the lamps,’ said the station master. ‘He’s… he’s still up there, is he?’

He had a high-pitched voice, and was better spoken than I had expected.

‘He’s nattering away to the signalman, who’s also fifteen foot up,’ I said.

‘Well,’ said the station master, ‘they like to keep a look-out, you know.’

‘What for?’

‘Well… trains.’

‘So they can ignore them when they come in?’

‘We’ve just one more through this evening,’ said the station master, and you’d have thought from his tone that every one that came by was a torture to him. He looked strained all to pieces — to the point where I felt it wrong to keep on at him about the slackness at his station.

‘Do you know if there’s an inn with beds roundabout?’ I asked him in a kindlier tone.

‘Oh,’ said the fat official, and he began wiping his forehead with the fluttery fingers of his right hand. ‘The Angel,’ he said. ‘They’ll do you pretty well there.’

‘Is it the only inn?’

‘It is.’

I looked again at the books on the floor, and saw again the anxiety in the man’s face as I did so. I felt I ought to account for the clutter in some way.

‘Having a bit of a clearout, are you?’

‘Oh,’ the station master said again, and it came out as a sort of surprised hoot, ‘… no.’