Andrew Martin: The Blackpool Highflyer

That's what I'd found, having looked in the book for reassurance. The woman who'd come to collect me from the engine had been right, and that was all about it. I'd read the passage time and again as the engineers had jacked up the front of 1418 and got it back on the rails, hoping that somehow the words would change, and the meaning bend the more I read it over.

There was to be a Board of Trade inquiry, and the smash had set the police on the move after a fashion. A constable had come to Sowerby Bridge Shed and questioned Clive and myself. Clive had kept pretty quiet, but I'd spoken up to the copper, talking about how the grindstone might have been got to the line, mentioning the motorcar flying past. I wanted salt put on those who had done it. But I had the notion that the constable wanted as little information as possible, because information meant hard graft for him.

I folded up the paper. The mill girl who'd fallen had not been named but I'd learnt it while waiting for the ambulance to come along the meadow track: Dyson. Margaret Dyson, weaver. And the boy she'd left behind was Arnold Dyson.

The ambulance had taken her, and the boy too, rocking over the meadow. We'd started away ourselves then, rolling at five miles an hour – owing to that cracked front wheel – into Blackpool Central. We'd got in two and a half hours late with the 8.36 coming behind, and down by the same amount. The Hind's lot would have missed their teas under the Tower, and the white rosettes would have gone for nothing. But I guessed they would soon have another taste of Blackpool, for any good-sized mill sent its people there at wakes, and the Halifax wakes was in the second week of July, less than a month off.

I put down my pint pot, and my eye fell on the folded Courier once more, bouncing from the words 'Robbed Another Lady' to 'Giant Strawberries Expected' to 'Excursionists Alarmed'.

A North Eastern train carrying excursionists from York and district to Scarborough was required to brake with unwonted suddenness before Mai ton yesterday, as a large branch lately fallen from a tree lay on the line ahead of it. One man, who appeared to have hurt his back in the sharpness of the jolt, was removed by ambulance staff to the hospital at York. No other passenger sustained injury beyond a serious shaking.

The travellers, who were members of excursion clubs at York, were delayed somewhat but nonetheless enjoyed a full four hours to sample the delights of Scarborough before their return.

This train had been heading to the east coast, we'd been heading west, and it had been on the North Eastern, not the Lanky. But it was an excursion, just like ours: a special train. No connection had been made between the two items. According to the Courier they were not connected. I'd seen the editor of that paper about town: a big chap with a silk beard and a silk hat; I'd seen him stepping in and out of the Imperial, and he looked nobody's mug. But how much thought had he, or the fellows on his paper, given over to the matter?

A branch lately fallen from a tree… It had a kind of hollow ring to me: words too easily put together.

I put the peg in after the second pint, as usual, and walked back out into Horton Street. At the bottom of the road, Sugden was sitting on his cart, dreaming of a pint of plain. The dazzle was gone from the day but the heat had not abated. It checked me as I started to walk, and seemed to be slowing down the smoke from the mill chimneys on Beacon Hill.

Back Hill Street is not far above the Joint as the crow flies. It wasn't the best part of town, and it wasn't the worst. We were more fortunately placed than many working people, as I supposed. I had twenty-five shillings a week. I would have been better dressed on the rates of the Great Northern, but it wasn't bad; and the wife had come into fifty pounds on the death of her father.

Our house in Back Hill Street was No. 21. It was an end- terrace, but we weren't side to side with the others. Instead we looked outward and down, so we fancied we were like the prow of a ship sailing into the next street, Hill Street, which was like a continuation of Back Hill Street but with houses of a better class: bathrooms, gardens and electricity laid on.

The house was probably made with the leftover bricks of the terrace: an odd piece, so to speak. There were the two rooms and a privy downstairs and two more biggish rooms up. An outside iron staircase leading to the bigger of the two upstairs made the house more like a place of work than a home, but it was ideal for letting. This was the main reason the wife had wanted the place, although she hadn't said so to the house agent. I used to fancy she was a little ashamed of landladying, even though it was how she'd got her money down in London too.

The wife called the outside stairs 'the balcony'. I would stand on it with one of my small cigars, which she didn't like in the house, and look out at the backs of Back Hill Street. There would be washing on all the lines. When she'd first come up to Halifax the wife had said every day was like a washday. Now every day was a drying day.

Back Hill Street… It was just two rows of net-curtained windows to me. One net curtain – at No. 11 – had a fishing rod propped against it. Everyone who lived there had lived there for ever, except for me and the wife, so, while we were pleasant and gave our 'Good mornings' or 'Good evenings' to whoever we passed by, we didn't really 'neighbour'.

They were a daft lot living there really, as far as I could make out, and seemed dafter still in the light of what had happened to Margaret Dyson. Your typical household in Back Hill Street might be one half clerks, but let down by the other half, who would be weavers. Front steps were likely cleaned at night, in secret, so nobody could say for certain that a skivvy hadn't done it. We were the exceptions over this, for the wife just didn't clean the front step. We had our net curtains downstairs of course, but the wife didn't bother with them up, and we were alone in that as well.

I let myself in. The wife was in the chair by the stove reading the Courier. I had told her all about the grindstone on the line, but not about my efforts in the carriage. I suppose I just didn't want her to think she'd married a chump; or worse still a killer.

'Your accident's been reported here,' she said happily, from behind the pages. 'It seems you did very well to stop in time.'

She turned the pages of the Courier. It was only one article out of many to her. I wondered if she'd clapped eyes on the item about the Scarborough trip. It wouldn't do to let on about it.

The parlour was painted green. It was meant to be the finished job but always looked like an undercoat to me. Having pushed the boat out for the boiler, we were light on furniture: we had the cane-backed chair the wife sat in, and the red sofa. There was a continental stove instead of a fire, and we meant to have that taken out and the old fireplace brought back into use. The old mantelshelf still stood, and the old Couriers were put beneath it, ready for the far-off day when the fireplace would go back in, and the other far-off day when the weather would be cold enough for it to be used. That was the house in which we were to make our future, and to the wife it was too important a matter to be rushed. We had a tea caddy in the bedroom in which, on the wife's orders, we were saving for all manner of household goods of a superior kind.

'They ought to give a bigger reward,' she said.

I walked through to the scullery, and the jug, basin, towel and soap had been laid out by the wife as usual. It was always Erasmic Soap, 'The Dainty Soap for Dainty Folk'. The wife wanted me double clean, for she knew I would always scrub down at the shed after booking off, but she hated the smell of the axle grease and the yellow soap I used to take it off at work. In fact, she didn't want me a railwayman at all, and if I was clean she could forget I was in that line, at least for a while. To the wife, trams were the thing. She was all for things of the future.