Andrew Martin: The Blackpool Highflyer

'Did you find anyone in want of a ticket?' I asked him.

'Not so far.'

'It probably wouldn't do to carry on looking,' said Clive.

Lowther sighed. He'd struck a loser with us. He'd have been better off on that Leeds train he'd been after boarding.

We were back at 1418 by now, watching all the skylarking excursionists. A game of cricket had been got up in the shadow of the half-wrecked engine; somebody was playing a mouth organ. I asked a gang of them who were just lying about: 'Why do you all have these rosettes?'

'It's the white rose of Yorkshire,' said an excursionist. 'It shows we're from Hind's Mill in Halifax, and that we're to be served a free tea and a parkin at the Tower when we get to Blackpool.'

'If…' said one of the excursionists, very slowly.

'Your governor wasn't wearing one,' said Clive.

'Well,' said the same excursionist, 'don't think that means he won't be getting a free tea and a parkin at the Tower.'

'Rum,' said Clive, as we walked on.

'I wouldn't work in a mill for fortunes,' I said, and then I felt quite lost because for the first time in my life, I wasn't sure that I wanted to work on the railways.

In the distance ahead I could see Reuben making his slow way back to the train, this time by the side of the track. He'd learnt his lesson about walking on sleepers. You could always bank on Reuben to get there in the end. My guess was that he'd be carrying the chit from the signalman that would let us move on. As I watched, he picked up one of the detonators he'd laid a few minutes before, so I swung myself back up onto the engine.

The fire was in good order, so I picked up the Courier.

'Hundreds of detectives guard the King of Spain' I read, but couldn't be bothered to find out why. I leant out and looked along the track. Clive was in front of the engine talking to a lass, so things were going on as usual with him.

How was it, I wondered, that Clive had seen the stone so early? I'd been looking out, my eyes were Ai, and I'd not been able to make it out. There again it had been lying flat on the rails. It might not have tripped us up after all; we might have gone clean over it.

I opened the fire doors and pitched the Courier in. It fluttered like a bird for less than a second, and was gone.

You'd read about railway wreckers from time to time: little articles in the corners of newspapers. I had an idea about the death rate on the railways: as a passenger, the chances against being killed were 1 in 30 million. I'd read that somewhere in the Railway Magazine.

Wreckers… They wanted to make a train jump – for fun. I banged the fire doors shut. They were kids; or drunks. Drunken kids.

We were a fair distance from either Salwick or Kirkham, so anyone putting that stone on the rails would have a chance of not being seen; there again you'd do well to have a motorcar if that was your programme. And while you weren't likely to strike a great crowd hereabouts, you'd be exposed to the view of the odd individual for a long time. The stone had been put on one of the fastest stretches of line to be found, so it would have been known that any train coming to meet it would be doing so at a lick. Well, they would have known it if they'd any knowledge of railways.

I stood up to reach for my tea bottle, and saw through the glass that Reuben was playing the gooseberry, interrupting Clive and the woman on the track ahead. Clive was nodding, so I reckoned we'd been given permission to take our train on.

And then there was a woman, her head below the level of my boots, looking up. Her hat was off. She did not look like a person on an excursion.

'Will you come along here?' she said. She was crying. She had a face that should have been happy. Should have been pretty too – would have been when she was younger. It was a sharp, small face. She looked like a sort of older fairy.

'Someone hurt?' I asked, and she nodded.

I put down my tea bottle on the sandbox. Then, with a guilty feeling, I remembered the first-aid or ambulance box that ought to be in the locker of any engine. I opened the locker door, and there it was: a wooden box with the word 'accident' hand-painted on the lid. I caught it up, jumped down from the engine and went after the woman.

As she walked, the words were coming between sobs: 'I didn't want her down… didn't want her stifled and jostled in that way… it was cooler up… so I left her on the seat. Well, she was sleeping…'

As she spoke, I opened the box. There was a bottle of carbolic, a roll of bandage (not over-clean), a tub of ointment of some kind, and a little book: What to Do in an Emergency by Dr N. Kenrick F.R.S.E. etc. Price one shilling. I flipped it open as I followed the woman along the side of the carriages: 'Treatment for the Apparently Drowned'. 'Drowning is a very frequent accident,' I read. Not on the bloody railways it isn't, I thought. But this wasn't a railway book at all. I read on, feeling vexed: 'Cases of Poisoning… A List of Poisons.'

We came up to the fourth rattler from the engine, and someone was saying: 'Oh she's been terribly bashed.'

I pulled myself up to the compartment and there was a woman lying across the seats on one side, with three others standing over her, blocking my view of her head and face. They all had the rosettes on; the rosettes were too big, and there were too many of them for this small space. The women shifted, and I got a proper sight of the one lying down: she was very beautiful, with green eyes and fair hair. I could picture her, not in a mill, but as the good fairy in a pantomime, and she looked a little like the woman who had come for me. But as I looked, she moved her head slightly and vomit rolled from her mouth. The stuff was pink. It spread across the red cloth of the seat.

'Oh!' said one of the women, 'and her so neat in all her ways!' She fell to mopping at the vomit with a shawl.

There was a boy on the opposite seat with a dog alongside him. On his knees was a book: Pearson's Book of Fun. I looked at him for a second. He was staring straight ahead and his white rosette was bent, as if he'd tried to fight it off. The woman who'd come for me was in the carriage too, talking in a low voice to the women around me. She turned to me and said: 'She was reaching for her box on the luggage rack when the great jerk came. It was to get a book down for her boy. We think she's taken a concussion, but she's not too poorly.'

'Let me see,' I said, 'I have an ambulance box.'

At which the woman lying down was sick once more.

She gave me a half-smile as the woman with the shawl began mopping again. She said something and the woman with the shawl replied: 'You are not holding up the excursion, love.'

'No,' I said, 'there's other things doing that. The engine's come off the tracks,' I added, speaking directly to the woman lying down, but she'd closed her eyes by now.

'Just you wait 'til you see that ocean, love,' said the woman with the shawl. 'Just you wait until you do. Like nothing on earth, it is. Why, it never ends you know.'

She turned to me: 'She's never seen the sea, you know. She's a widower, and she's always stayed at home with her boy when we've had excursions in the past. She particularly wanted this compartment because it had views of the sea.'

Above the seats, there were photochrome pictures of the Front at Blackpool.

I said, 'I think the boy should climb down… And the dog.'

'Why?' said another of the women. 'Whatever are you going to do?'

They all looked at the ambulance box that was in my hand. The rosette on the bosom of the woman lying down rose and fell in an uncertain way.

I turned to the lad and said, 'Want to see the engine, mate? She's a Highflyer, one of Mr Aspinall's… quite a beast, you know.'

The kid just stared back. He had a complicated face, the sort that can frown without trying. He also had too much hair, and his coat was too short, and too thick for the weather.