Andrew Martin - The Necropolis Railway

First class. Saturday Night Mack could be standing guard over me. For a second I could not recall whether he was a bad man or a good man, and then it came to me that he was good, that he was off the hook like the men of the half-link. If I carried on living they could be my friends and my landlady could be my best girl, for this all made my mistake in visiting the night-house seem a very small matter. It was the sort of thing a fellow might do because he was alive, and being alive was good.

I slid my hand under my coat and into my waistcoat pocket. My landlady's advertisement was in there. I wanted to go back to the summer pictures of Grosmont in my head, but Saul Whittaker had gone, and the whole of the North Eastern Railway with him. I was alive until I died, and stuck with it.

The journey to the Necropolis – and the hole in the ground waiting for me there – was one of forty minutes, and I must have had most of those. My one hope was Saturday Night Mack. I slid the advertisement from my pocket, then through the crack of light, and waited. But as the minutes passed a terrible picture came before my mind's eye: of Saturday Night Mack reading Hoity Toity Bits with the paper so close up to his face that all was quite blocked out but 'PRIZE OF AN EIGHT-ROOMED HOUSE: ANYONE CAN WIN IT AND LIVE RENT-FREE FOR LIFE'. I felt myself sinking into the softness of the velvet, and becoming rather velvety myself. My head was going away again and I did not mind. I seemed only to be able to breathe out, as though in small soft gasps. I felt a change in the heartbeat of the train, and we came to a stop, and it seemed as though I too had come to a stop. I did not breathe, and I could not tell what was me and what was not me in the world of the coffin.

The train started again, but I was beyond thinking why, or wondering which signal had halted us. Was it the trains that were scared of the horses or the horses that were scared of the trains? The question kept going round and around, and I could not answer it, and it did not matter. There was a train somewhere, far away on the cliffs, but I was down on the beach with a crazy person and the tide coming in. Sometimes I was under it and sometimes on top, but the crazy person it did not affect. After a while I began to be more under it than on top, and I seemed to become uncoupled from the train because it went on its own way, and the question stopped being a question but became just words, before long becoming only sounds, after a while becoming not even that.

The noises slowly returned, becoming words again, but this time they were the words of Saturday Night Mack, muttered between panting breaths, 'Diamonds… diamonds… big as beans!' he was gasping, but then in a different voice, a worried whisper, he said, 'Half a mo,' and it was with the wrenching cry of a rooster and a great upward surging feeling that I seemed to shoot out of the coffin when the lid came off.

In fact, it was not at all like that: I remained exactly where I was, stuck by blood, watching Saturday Night Mack with his screwdriver in his hand swerve and fall across me before rolling away onto the carriage floor.

The head of Mack came back up after a while, and looked very ill indeed. 'No diamonds,' I said, but I believe it did not sound like that to Mack because of the way that my mouth was.

Wednesday 30 December 1903 -Monday 4 January 1904

I was in a green ward so full of plants it was like a garden. There were three pillars in amongst the plants which in fact were chimneys with firesides front and back. Ladies in white walked between the plants carrying medicines, and the ladies were so beautiful they made the medicines look precious. Other people moved around on wheels, and everybody kept quiet most of the time, but it somehow came to me that I was in St Thomas's Hospital, which was where the London and South Western always took their accident cases if they could. I was in Purvis Ward, called after the sister, Elizabeth Purvis, but which of the beauties she was I could not say, although again it came to me that she had arranged for this ward to have the biggest of the hospital Christmas trees, and that there had been presents from it.

Over my head was an electric light that moved – all for me. All the time beneath my bandages there seemed to be distant violins, which in the middle of the afternoon and the middle of the morning would fade to almost nothing, but at meal times were joined by louder instruments, drums, and the sight of everybody moving much more. But I did not eat for two days.

The side of my head was all sewn, and painted with carbolic. A man came several times to see it. He was called Dr Stone, and I did not like his name in case he hit me over the head with it. Once he came and lifted the gauze and said, 'We had a marathon of sewing with you, Mr Stringer.' There had been so much, they had given me ether – of which I remembered a thing that was rubber with metal behind: a dream machine (for it had given me plenty) that had fitted over my face so well it might have been made for me.

Later Dr Stone told me he had had to do more than just sew me. He had had to dig a hole in my head to pull the bones away from the brain, and I had had more ether for that.

I sat up one morning and there were the Houses of Parliament, with the boats racing back and forth in front of them, all in complete silence. After a while I got the idea that there was a visiting hour, but I went to sleep in the middle of all nonetheless.

The Houses of Parliament had disappeared when I woke up, and there was a supper of boiled ham next to me, along with a glass of beer. There were white screens around my bed, and the electric light was on. I had the feeling of late evening, and of Sister Purvis being close by. Standing at the end of my bed was the Governor, my landlady, and the policeman I had talked to at Nine Elms – the one who looked like a sea captain. Across all the years since then, I have always thought of him as the Captain, and it is possible that he actually was one – a captain of police, I mean, because they do have them.

At the moment I opened my eyes, he was looking at my boiled ham and beer so hungrily that he smiled when our eyes met. I started to tell all – for now I seemed to have everything straight – but I had only got over that it was Stanley who had crowned me and put me in a coffin, when they told me to stop, probably because things weren't coming out very clearly.

'Put it down as points,' said the Captain, and his voice was much lighter and less of a growl than I would have guessed. 'Give each point a number.'

They all went away, and a little while later the Captain came back with a pencil and a piece of paper which he put by my bed. It was funny to watch him creep towards me and creep away again, thinking that I was asleep. It was very good paper that he gave me. Across the top it said in fancy letters, 'From St Thomas's Hospital', and I thought about using it to write to Dad. It will just about make his day if I do that, I thought, but then I decided that he would probably not like to learn that I was in hospital, however beautiful the paper.

The next evening the same thing came about, except that I was eating my supper – steak and kidney pudding, this time – when the Captain and the Governor came along. I had my list of points but I think I went from one to three, so they stopped me again.

The third day brought hot pot, and it was all gone and the glass of beer was empty when the Governor and the Captain appeared again, and this time they had a third person with them – a man whose job was to write.

I would have liked to have had my diary by me, but it had gone. Stanley had taken it, along with my replacement pocket book and the brake handle, before putting me in the box. What he would have made of the writings in it I could not guess, for they were mainly scribbles, and mainly, until Stanley got himself in my sights, wrong. I was sure I had everything straight now, in any case.