Brensham Village (12 page)

The section of permanent way which ran north and south from Brensham was said to be one of the longest straight stretches in the country. The expresses gloriously thundered along it at seventy-six miles an hour, and more than a score of times in each twenty-four hours the glasses
rattled in Jim Hartley's bar, and the old pub shook with the tremor of their passing. The gangers who looked after this very fast and important sector were justly proud of the permanent way or, as they called it, the road. They would lean on their picks and watch the express go by, hammer hammer along the lines they'd laid, seventy-six point five miles an hour for five and three-quarter miles with never a curve or a gradient, they would listen for the slight change in the rhythm as the train passed over the bridge, the huge and splendid
snort
! as it roared through the station; and they would think ‘She couldn't do that if it weren't for us. She couldn't touch seventy-six if the road wasn't: perfect.' I knew two of these men fairly well: George Hard-castle and David Groves. Both were oldish men; both had worked on the Brensham road since their boyhood. At fifty-five they walked, on the average, ten miles a day down the line; and the length of their stride even when they were walking along the village street was the exact unvarying distance between the sleepers so that you could tell they were gangers by the curious rhythm of their pace. Both were men of enormous integrity; their job was a labouring job but they did it with a craftsman's pride. The line which to the rest of us was no more than two sets of rails running through a cutting and along an embankment was to them as diverse as a landscape; they knew it yard by yard and from yard to yard it was variable, here was a sandy patch, here was a bit of gravel, here was clay, here was a wet stretch adjoining a culvert which must be examined every day for the faintest sign of a crack or a subsidence. Nor were they concerned with the road alone; their territory extended to the fence on either side of it, they must scythe the grass in the cuttings, lay the hedges, and make sure that the fences were secure against cattle. It was within their province, even, to trap or ferret the
rabbits which made their buries on railway property. Both were great rabbiters, and since by custom they were allowed to set their traps and snares in the fields adjoining the line, they were able to earn a little beer-money in seasons when rabbits were in demand.

They needed it; for gangers are not very well paid. The engine-drivers, who were the little lords of the railway line, to whom Brensham was but a signal and a station and who thundered splendidly past in their fiery chariots, earned more than twice as much as David and George; and who knows whether they carried a heavier responsibility or exercised a greater skill? One day George's sharp eyes spotted a tiny trickle of fresh soil in the embankment near to the culvert. There was a very slight crack above it: only a foot long, scarcely an inch wide, but George suspected trouble and he ran to the signal-box and got on the telephone. When the four-twenty-eight down express came along she found the signals against her; she was flagged over the culvert at five miles an hour. But when George and his inspector examined the crack afterwards they found it was both longer and wider, and a new crack had appeared above it. By day and by night, turn and turn-about, George and David watched beside that little crack; and finally the Company sent a special train with two hundred tons of rubble to shore up the embankment. One winter morning, when the job was nearly done, David relieved George at six o'clock. It was dark and cold, and perhaps George was tired and sleepy from sitting over the brazier. He set off down the six-foot way to go home. He knew to the minute, of course, the times of all the passenger trains which passed along his sector and he certainly knew that the parcels express was due at six-eleven; but a high wind was blowing, which roared almost as loud as a train through the tall elms in the coppice above the embankment.
It happened that there was a light engine coming along the up-line; George saw it in good time and stepped out of its way - into the path of the down express.

David Groves found him later and I don't think he ever quite got over that experience; for a man's body is demonstrated to be a pitifully frail thing when it encounters a great mass of steel hurtling along at seventy-six miles an hour. And George had been his companion and best friend for nearly forty years. He carried on with his job, of course, but we noticed that when he brought his bait into the Adam and Eve he ate alone and in silence; and when the expresses went by with a snort and a rattle he would sometimes start, as if he had suddenly remembered how they could hurl a man out of their terrible way as a man might flick a troublesome fly.

And David began to look old now, at fifty-five. He'd had a hard life, hard from the beginning; for at the age of sixteen he'd been hired to a farmer for a whole year for the sum of eighty shillings. Although he was so patient and uncomplaining, and so slow of speech and unready with a quick answer, you could always rouse him to dispute with you if you spoke of the Good Old Days. ‘Maybe they were good for some, sir. I can tell 'ee they weren't for us. Up at five to do the milking, dry bread and a slice of fat bacon for breakfast, then a ten-mile round with the milk, a bite of bread and cheese and a glass of cider, then more milking and another ten-mile round. A bit of a sit-down in the kitchen, a bite of supper, and then a hard bed: seven days a week. I dunno how much butter we helped to make every week, but I know we never tasted it; fat bacon was all the grease we got on our bread.' When he was seventeen he went to work for the railway; and for many years after that his wages as a platelayer were sixteen shillings a week. His wife fell ill, and became in the end a permanent invalid;
his son was a cripple who couldn't earn anything towards his keep. It was always a hard struggle to make ends meet, and David never had a penny to spend on himself. ‘They talk about Charity in the Good Old Days,' he would say, ‘but I never saw much of it myself. I had sixpence from the parson once or twice, and a bag of coal at Christmas. We didn't often see any meat, and we still never tasted butter!'

But as the years went by wages improved and the working day became shorter, so that he had a chance to dig his garden in the summer evenings; he'd never had time for that before. At the age of fifty-five he was earning a little more than two pounds a week, and would have thought himself comfortably off but for the shadow of old age which lay ahead of him. He'd never been able to save anything; and the company which he had served so long and faithfully provided no pensions for their servants in the lower grades when they were worn out and old. So David couldn't have retired even if he'd wanted to; and he patiently carried on as he'd done ever since he was promoted from platelayer to ganger, ‘walking his stretch' every day and in all weathers, on Sundays as well as weekdays, for rather less than fifty shillings. His back became more bent and his legs more stiff from treading the sleepers; but his sharp eyes that could see a rabbit-track in the cutting forty yards away still kept faithful watch along the road for the rot in the timber or the fault in the steel, for the wet patch in the clay or the displaced brick in the culvert or the tell-tale seeping of sand from a crack in the embankment. And thanks to David Groves and others like him the great expresses still roared through Brensham station at seventy-six point five miles an hour.

Those expresses never stopped at Brensham. We set our watches by them, and that was all they meant to us, unless some labouring lad, watching the blurred lights tearing past on a winter's evening, and catching a glimpse of the people in the carriages, who'd been in Scotland perhaps for breakfast and would be in Bristol before midnight - unless some such lad standing in a muddy gateway felt the spirit of adventure stirring within him, and upped and away next morning all because of the swift splendid train.

But for most of the villagers the goods trains were much more important than the expresses; Brensham's prosperity was bound up with them. They carried away in season, to the north and to the south, the strawberries, the cherries, the plums, the apples, the pears, the sprouts, the onions and the cabbages upon which nearly half the inhabitants depended for their livelihood. At plum-picking time there was even a special which picked up a load each day at six-thirty and delivered our Pershores and Victorias to the northern cities in time for market next morning.

Upon one famous occasion Alfie Perks drove this train. It was during the General Strike; and Alfie and several other market-gardeners had volunteered to act as porters and load their own produce into the trucks. Thus it came about that Alfie found himself, on the third morning, temporarily in charge of the station; for the station-master had joined the strikers. The six-thirty duly arrived, but its driver who happened to live at Elmbury, jumped down off his engine and declared that he was sick of being a blackleg and was now going home.

‘Hey,' said Alfie, ‘you can't do that. What about my lettuces?'

But the driver, bearing the little black box which engine-drivers carry, was already on his way out of the station.

‘My mates call me a blackleg,' he declared. ‘Can't let my mates down.'

‘What about letting down us chaps? My lettuces are helluva perishable,' Alfie shouted after him; but it was no good, he was over the bridge and walking rapidly towards Elmbury. Alfie rang up the Junction, ten miles up the line, and asked them what he should do. They told him that they could find an amateur driver to take the train up north, but they possessed no means of transporting the driver to Brensham. ‘If the train could only get to us,' they told him, ‘we could probably send it on.'

‘How the hell do you expect it to get to you?' asked Alfie, ‘call it, and perhaps it will come.' He was angry; he had forty crates of lettuce in his dray and they would be worthless in twenty-four hours. He went back to the engine and talked to the fireman.

‘Can you drive this thing?' he asked.

‘Yes,' said the fireman. ‘It's easy.'

‘Well, unless you're going on strike too,' said Alfie, ‘you'd better bloody drive it.'

‘Can't do that,' said the fireman. ‘It's against company's regulations
and
the Union. More than my job's worth.'

‘Can you show
me
how to drive it?'

‘Sure, I can do that.'

So Alfie loaded up his lettuces and off he went. He'd never even driven a lorry before; in fact, he'd never driven anything but his old horse which looked rather like a rocking-horse and was appropriately named Dobbin. But the fireman condescended to take off the brakes for him, and put them on when the train reached the Junction, and the rest, said Alfie, was helluva easy. There was a shortage of produce in the Manchester markets next day, and his
lettuces made the best price he'd ever had. 'Twas a pity, he said, the Strike looked like ending; or he'd have bought his own railway engine and delivered his stuff personally.

So, you see, the railway brought both tragedy and comedy to Brensham. Our lives were bound up with it as they were bound up with the river and the hill. I have seen the effect of the charabancs and the motors on a main road village near Elmbury; I have watched them slowly suck its blood so that in a few years the village had no real life at all except a kind of spurious weekend life which was that of its parasites. When they went away on Monday there was nothing but a sham village, a mere husk, consisting of petrol-stations, two deserted tea-shops, a pub full of chromium-plating and ill-kept beer, a tea-garden with yellow-striped umbrellas over the tables, and Ye Olde Blacksmythe's Shoppe where an indifferent craftsman made curios. It was a dead village which on Saturdays and Sundays and Bank Holidays was grotesquely galvanized into activity in the fashion of a Zombie. The parasites had sucked it dry.

But the railway wasn't parasitic on Brensham; instead of sapping its vitality, it actually made the pulse of the village beat faster. And it robbed us of nothing, except a few moments of our quietude now and then. Nor was that a perceptible theft; for the people who lived along the line didn't wake up when the midnight express hammered past; they only woke up if it failed to pass, and listened to the silence, and looked at their watches, and wondered what had happened to make it so late.

The second pub, as you walked down the village from the Adam and Eve, stood close to Mrs Doan's Post Office, and almost opposite the entrance to Magpie Lane. It was bigger than either of the others, and it had a sizable back room where Cricket Club and Farmers' Union meetings and the annual dinners of organizations such as the British Legion were held. It was more modern than the Horse Narrow and the Adam and Eve: it had a garage at the back, and advertised ‘Bed and Breakfast, h and c'.

Notwithstanding, it was an unlucky pub. It had had a succession of landlords, some good and some bad, but none of them had managed to make a fair living out of it. This was partly due to its situation in the middle of the village; for the Horse Narrow and the Adam and Eve stood like sentries at either end, and offered a strong challenge to thirsty travellers approaching from either direction. Also, at the time I am writing of, it was suffering from the aftereffects of having had for three years the worst landlord in Brensham's history, a villainous, get-rich-quick towny fellow whose notion of a country inn was a place where people from the City spent illicit weekends and were charged double prices for the privilege. In consequence, he spent a good deal of his time giving evidence at the Divorce Court (which he thoroughly enjoyed) instead of attending to his legitimate business in the bar.

Now nobody could say that Brensham was a puritanical village; indeed I think our illegitimate birth-rate was rather high and we certainly saw little harm in our young lovers' midsummer mischief so long as they did not do too much damage to the crops. We disapproved of the dreary divorcees at the Trumpet not because of their morals,
which were no concern of Brensham, but because of their manners, which grossly offended us. So the Trumpets few ‘regulars' began to drift away to the other pubs, and although the landlord didn't mind this in the summer he began to notice the effect of it in the long, dark winter evenings, when there were no weekenders and even if there had been the gloomy spectacle of Brensham's flooded river, muddy lanes and fields of rotting sprout-stems would have promptly ended their romance.