Andrew Martin - The Blackpool Highflyer

'Cape gooseberries from the stores' the wife called out.

The store meant the Co-op.

'Are we to have gooseberry pie?' I called back.

'They're a delicacy just as they are' she said.

She always bought things for tea that weren't quite the thing, and she always bought them from the Co-operative Stores. She was a great co-operator, but she liked the idea of it more than the actual buying, so we'd quite often end by going out for a knife-and-fork tea.

'Five pounds for information' the wife was saying. 'Twenty would be more like it, but that would be too go-ahead for the Yorkshire and Lancashire Railway. Why, it would be twenty pounds less in the pockets of the directors!'

'It's the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway' I said. She always got that wrong – on purpose, I believed.

I ate a gooseberry and was rather knocked. No pips. But I would rather have had a chop.

I walked back into the parlour, and the gooseberries were at once forgiven. I even forgot about the accident for a second, for the wife was standing and smiling, looking just the size and shape of a person you could put your arms around.

'Oh yes?' I said, half smiling myself, but a little nervous at the same time.

'Two items of news' she said. 'Number one. Do you remember that I said I might have let the room?'

'Yes.'

'Well, the gentleman called this morning to confirm that he would be taking it.'

We kissed over that. We'd had all on with this let: adverts in the Courier week after week at half a crown a go. The wife had seen five or six folk over it, and every one she said would turn out a flitter. Unknown to her, I'd also written up adverts and placed them about the Joint in hopes a railwayman might be interested. We were handy for the station, after all.

'He's coming on Saturday and has sent the ten-shilling deposit. He has even begun getting his mail sent here.'

We looked across to the old mantelshelf. We had up there the wife's gold crucifix on a chain, which hung across our marriage lines, and a picture showing two kittens playing with a flower, and words along the bottom reading: 'Never a rose without a thorn' – this bought on one of the few occasions that the Halifax Co-op had run to art.

In front of the picture was the little fat envelope that I knew contained my Railway Magazine, which would have arrived that day, and a letter addressed to 'Mr George Ogden' care of 'Top Floor Apartments, 21 Back Hill Street.' I picked it up.

'It came by the five o'clock,' said the wife, meaning the 5 p.m. delivery that brought most of our letters and packets.

'He's giving out that he's taken apartments,' I said. 'It's an apartment at best, and I would have thought it was more accurate to say that it was a room, and a pretty small one at that.'

'Well it's a very good job you weren't put in charge of letting it out,' said the wife.

She stood up and smoothed the green sash around her waist, letting me see her trimness. I liked the way I was not supposed to notice what she was about in this.

'Would you care for a stroll?' she said. 'And I'll tell you my other news.'

I never knew what was going forward with the wife, but on occasions like this I expected her to say that she had fallen pregnant. One day she had given me a most mysterious look, and said that we must clear out the foreign stove immediately because it was dangerous, and I had been ready for it then.

I looked on the back of the envelope for the lodger, and saw that it had been sent by the 'Institute for the Diffusion of Knowledge'. 'He's quite a cultural sort, is he?' I asked.

She gave some thought to this, and as she did so a hundred possible images of this Ogden formed in my mind.

'No,' she said at last. Then: 'Are you ready for off?' She had her bonnet in her hand.

'What line is he in?'

'He works for your show' she said.

'The Lanky?' I said, wondering whether he'd seen one of my notices down at the Joint.

She nodded, saying, 'Come on now, bustle up.'

'Engine man?'

She shook her head. 'Certainly not,' she said. 'He tells me he has very great prospects.'

'But what is he now?'

'Ticket clerk,' she said.

There were battalions of clerks at the Joint. I would nod at the odd one, but they were all in a different world.

We stepped out of the door, and the wife turned to me before we'd gone three paces along the street. She was holding a folded piece of paper, which she passed to me. It was a very short letter: 'We have decided,' I read, 'to give you the situation of office clerk at our mill on the terms named, that is?1 15s. per week starting wage. We would suggest you commence duties on Monday next.'

I would not continue to mope over the accident. I kissed the wife, saying: 'I knew you would do it.'

When I'd brought her up to Halifax just after we were married, I'd said she shouldn't work, but had soon thrown up the sponge over that particular battle. In some northern towns, if a man let his wife take a job, folks would turn up their noses at him, but in Halifax the women worked because the mills needed them. And the wife went her own way in any case. To her, typists were the best thing out because they were part of the modern world. She'd been doing a course at the technical school, typing and shorthand, and was up to… well, a certain amount of words a minute. A lot of words as far as I knew. But when she'd gone to see about any situation there'd always been someone else who could do more, and the letters sent back had always begun: 'We have filled up the situation coming vacant…' She'd had dozens of those, and the more she got, the harder she grafted at her shorthand and typing.

Shortly after she'd started I had bought her an India rubber, and she'd said, 'Thank you very much,' while opening the window and shying it all the way to Hill Street. 'I will never get on with one of those in the house,' she'd said, to which I'd replied, 'Well how will you remove your mistakes?' 'By not making them,' had come the answer.

I had never seen anything bounce like that India rubber.

For weeks afterwards, I would find half-done letters about the house that she'd brought back from the technical school. 'Dear Sir, My directors wish me to convey to you…'; 'My directors wish to inform you that the matter you name…' – all with imaginary directors named and supplied with hundreds of initials. Or: 'Replying to your letter of the 5th inst, our reqxxxxmentx…' And then might come a long line of bbbbs or!!!!!s, for there was a lot of ginger in the wife.

It had not been easy for her to come to Yorkshire from London, and at first she had seemed in a daze, and, when not in a daze, blue. The rain was like prison bars. She told me she thought that Halifax and places around were like Red Indian villages thrown up all in a moment on the side of a hill. To her, coming from London, they were fly-by-nights, not real.

Slowly, she had begun to make her corner. Through ladies at the parish church – to which we went most Sundays, the wife to pray, me to guess the engines coming into the Joint (which was just over opposite) by their noises alone – the wife had joined the Women's Co-operative Guild, which had suited her philosophy to a tee. Equal fellowship of men and women in the home, the factory and the state: this was their line, and it was all quite all right by me, except it meant I would frequently miss my tea, for the wife would be off to some talk on 'Cheaper Divorce', or 'The Air We Breathe', because they were not afraid of tough subjects. I would then go off to the Evening Star or to the Top Note Dining Rooms, which was where the two of us seemed now to be heading.

We walked on through the little streets between our house and the middle of town. It was very hot, but there was nothing in these streets to catch the gleam of the evening sun. You'd see children in all the back alleys. The poorer sort were barefoot, and the wife would say, 'Poor mites, I don't know how they manage to live.'