Wasn’t there some old Greek tragedy in which a band of women tore a civil authority into small pieces because he had no gold braid on his cap? I’m pretty sure that the Ancient Greeks did not wear official caps, but the principle is the same. Ever since 1926 I can never forget that under those appealing faces lurks a profound contempt for the opposite sex.
Perhaps it was nearer the surface then than now. There were still quite a lot of virgins about, and their dreams were of marriage and a home of their own. For the inadequately educated girl few other dreams had a hope of fulfilment; professions, black-coated or brass-hatted, were all out of her reach. No wonder she had a latent, feline resentment of the pretensions of the male.
Why do I choose 1926, you ask. Because that was the year of the General Strike and a call for volunteers to man the public services. Among the misty memories of hundreds of old Londoners will be one of a giant: of a 4–4–0 Great Western locomotive stopped two yards from the mouth of the east-bound tunnel in Earl’s Court station. At a platform meant for trains of the District Line skittering like mice from one hole to another was this great, green monster which had never moved without space and due ceremony. The arch against which it would have been driven, had the six-foot driving wheels made half a revolution more, was lower than the boiler. This was before the rebuilding of the station and the approach from the west was open.
I was the guard of the empty train behind the engine. I had volunteered to wheel hand-trucks about as a porter, but when I ran into an old schoolfellow on Paddington station he appointed me to be his guard. Jimmy Fell was a railway engineer on leave from the wilds of Africa. He had been working with black labour a year or two longer than was good for him and felt imperial. He once abandoned me in the Exeter station buffet and I only found my own train because an amateur shunter had run him into the engine sheds by mistake.
He had driven all kinds of locomotive in his time, so the Great Western gave him a mainline express and the County of London to pull it. He treated her as his own pet car, and when he wasn’t on the foot-plate he was wandering about inside her guts like Jonah with an oilcan. I call it an express, but all the signals were permanently at danger and we used to feel our way down to Devon from block to block, stopping to negotiate with other speculative railwaymen whenever we seemed to be on a line where we had no right.
After ten days or so of this, the Company chose us to take an excursion to Pangbourne. Yes, they actually wasted time on an excursion. It was a gesture, you see. Sir John Hardy always gave the saleswomen of his suburban branches an outing in the same week of June and, being proprietor of Models Ltd and on the board of the Great Western as well, was determined upon Business as Usual. The nation was paralysed, but he wouldn’t disappoint his ‘girlies’ as he called them.
Well, the Great Western were moved by this touching faith in their organisation, so they agreed to the excursion. Britain with her Back to the Wall. They ordered the line to be cleared to Pangbourne and at 10.30 a.m. we pulled out of Paddington with the trustworthy Jimmy Fell at the levers and four full coachloads of chattering girlies between myself and him. Sir John and his managers naturally went by car. Their lives were of value.
We reached Pangbourne about midday. Our average of twenty-five miles an hour was excellent considering that Jimmy had climbed down twice to see which way the points were set and had been grazed by half a brick that was meant for the fireman. We never had the slightest trouble with the strikers – we were free entertainment for dull days – but our fireman thought he was entitled to call them names which would earn him half a brick at any time. He was a sort of fascist – or whatever they labelled themselves in those days – and all out to smash the reds. In private he sold silk stockings from door to door and he was hungry for any job that called for more muscle but just as little brain. He used to splash himself with oil and coal dust to look like a real fireman. He didn’t. You might have taken him for a tramp who had been sheltering from the rain in a garage pit.
The girlies skipped off to a tent by the river to hear Hardy’s annual speech and put away some lunch. Flags waved gaily over the white canvas and a little brass band played a welcome of the latest popular songs. It was a blazing June day with thunder in the air and when we had run the train into a siding we ourselves went to the local pub for beer and sandwiches. The bar had a few jokes at our expense – four coaches of women among three men and so forth. We didn’t think them very funny, for there was something unnatural about those two hundred female passengers, the old catching the giggles from the young. We were uneasy as if there had been a wagon load of explosives just behind the engine. Perfectly safe, of course. But one is appalled by sheer quantity.
At three o’clock we went to work again. At first sight the task of getting the train from the down to the up line with the County of London at the right end appeared nearly hopeless; but Jimmy was a positive chap with a commanding manner, ready to take responsibility. An invaluable quality in Africa, I expect. He ran the Holyhead boat train into the only other siding, blocked a down freight, borrowed its locomotive and by occupying most of the main line between Pangbourne and Reading had hitched his County of London to the front of his own train. The girlies encouraged us with cheers and laughter, lined up on the platform and singing all the songs played by the band. They were tousled and shrill and the cheap make-up sold by Models Ltd was running in the heat.
While they climbed into the coaches, Sir John, who had been watching our manoeuvres with a sightseer’s interest and a large glass of port, paced up the platform and made a little speech to Jimmy on his patriotism and what-not, shaking his hand with genial condescension. He mistook the fireman for the real article and congratulated him on not being led away by subversive and anti-Christian agitators. He made his money, I believe, in Australia where a strike’s a strike and could not be expected to know that English labour leaders were more likely to be fervid chapel-goers than Marxists.
When this moving ceremony was over and the doors were shut and Sir John and his managers waving goodbye till next year, the County of London whistled and drew out of the platform in smart mainline style. I just had time to wave the green flag and blow my own little whistle, but I doubt if anybody was taken in.
Before we were fairly out of the station Jimmy stopped with such a jerk that an empty oil drum charged down the guard’s van towards London by itself. I looked out of the window. A down train was creeping at us on the up line. We had forgotten one set of points after all our shunting, and the new arrival was proceeding with caution in search of authority.
While Jimmy and his vis-à-vis straightened matters out, the girlies flowed back onto the empty platform and began to dance. There was a lot of horseplay and shrieking, for they had the place to themselves. Sir John and his henchmen had left, and I kept discreetly to my van. I don’t know if you have noticed that young women, by the mere fact of being in a group and unrestricted, can reach a state of innocent excitement that would take the ordinary man three or four double whiskies on an empty stomach.
The intrusive train passed on its correct line, and Jimmy and the fireman returned to the locomotive. I shepherded the girlies back into their compartments and walked down the train shutting doors and turning handles. We were forbidden to start till all handles were in a horizontal position. A strict rule. Even Jimmy observed it.
When I was halfway down the last coach I heard giggles behind me and turned round. The passengers had opened the doors again.
‘Now then, young ladies!’ I said.
I thought my voice had just the right note of tolerant authority. They thought so, too. They thought I was perfect in the part. One of the girlies hollered:
‘Ooh! Ain’t ’e a duck!
I trotted back up the train with proper brisk officiousness and shut the doors. They fell in with my absurd wishes. There was no question of a struggle with door handles or direct disobedience; but just as soon as I was a dozen compartments up, the doors began to open behind me – one at a time, as neatly as a line of poppers bursting open from the bottom when you’ve nearly done them up to the top.
I stood by the locomotive wondering what a guard did next. Hitherto my job had been easy. I had to manhandle the contents of the van, check the waybills, brake whenever I got an S.O.S. from Jimmy and sometimes inspect tickets. With the ordinary mixed bag of passengers points of discipline did not arise and I was accustomed to think myself as good a guard as another. But now I was conscious of being a plain chap in flannel trousers and a sports coat.
Jimmy said I lacked character. He put his driver’s cap on the side of his head and walked down the platform. He was lean, brown and clean-shaven, a maiden’s dream born and fashioned for a uniform. The overalls of an engine driver were not, however, the right uniform; he looked too much like a film star in a stirring drama of life on the rolling rail.
‘Ladies,’ he appealed, mounting a luggage barrow, ‘you’ve been given a nice day and we have to go back to London. Now be sensible and don’t behave like babies!’
‘A-oh bybies!’ protested a voice, half-yearning, half-insulted.
Somebody else started a first-class imitation of a baby crying and they all joined in. You never heard such a row. Then they chose to regard Jimmy as the baby (for he was eminently motherable) and the more excitable spirits leaned out of the windows and made gestures of maternity at him. Jimmy turned white and strolled – yes, strolled – back to the County of London. I think they must teach administrators of the African Empire a special walk for the casual entering of cannibal villages. He started the train. They were all safely inside and shut the doors themselves as soon as we gathered speed.
At Reading the staff of the junction had forgotten the existence of the excursion, and we were held up. But Jimmy didn’t stop. He thundered slowly ahead at walking pace and occasionally, if it seemed likely there might be an obstacle, he reversed, keeping his beloved engine plunging back and forth as if he had been a dutiful gigolo guiding his grandmother through a crowded ballroom. The girlies stuck their heads out and yelled encouragement but didn’t dare to step out on platform or line.
Once clear of Reading we ran along with professional smoothness. There was no indiscipline except on the part of one young woman who tried to work her way along the footboard to the guard’s van. I spotted her in time, and didn’t try any ‘dear young lady’ on her. I opened fire with a paperweight and shouted that if she didn’t get back into the train I should aim to hit next time. That worked. But my civil authority had gone. We normally obey a bus conductor or a guard or any honest fellow with braid on his cap just as unthinkingly as sheep a dog, but the moment his authority is tested it ceases to exist and passes to the armed forces of the Crown – or to a paperweight.
At Maidenhead we had to stop; some damned fools were marshalling a milk train and had tied up the line. The girlies flooded out onto the station and started to dance. No passengers were about, only the usual skeleton staff of amateurs. The excitement was still spontaneous, much too spontaneous, but its direction seemed to have been taken over by one Rhoda as ringleader – a magnificent creature, loudly dressed with the luxurious figure of a roly-poly angel sitting on a cloud, but the face, I tell you, of an ageless mule. Lord, how she must have despised men! Unaccountably cold and conceited she must have thought us.
Led by Rhoda, those sales ladies cleaned up the station. They formed into clusters and played ring-a-ring-a-roses around every defenceless man on the platform until the whole lot had sheepishly taken refuge in the ticket office. They didn’t run, you understand; they just drifted away on business and found that business, as it might be accidentally, behind a door that could be locked. You know the feeling of being followed through a field by a large herd of trotting bullocks. You don’t run away, but you do climb the nearest gate rather than the farthest.
Jimmy and the fireman took refuge in noise and fog, making the County of London spout steam from its private parts. I can’t tell you the mechanics of the process, but he caused it to throb and rejoice in its strength, pawing the lines and crying ‘Hah’ like the war-horse in Job. The girlies kept at a respectful distance. As for me, I climbed down to the track and watched through the intervals between the coaches. Whenever I caught a predatory female eye I started to tap at the wheels with a hammer. They left me alone feeling, I suppose, that I knew what I was doing and that it was necessary to their journey.
Up to this point it had been all clean fun. Men do, after all, arouse a certain pity in the female breast along with the contempt. Since they so obviously had the upper hand they would have been quite content to treat us with good-humoured scorn if an official of their own sex had not interfered. She was the amateur ticket-office clerk, and I imagine she had been calling those male colleagues who kept drifting into the office on improbable excuses a bunch of incompetent cowards. At any rate she was a woman of character and she was having no nonsense on her station. She marched out to deal with this impertinent excursion and began to round up the girlies with all the efficiency of a games mistress in her playing field. At that I began to tap my wheels more industriously than ever. When I thought it safe to look up again, Rhoda had crowned her with a fire-bucket and she was quietly crying in a puddle of water. The girlies paid no further attention to her. They were busy smashing the slot machines and helping themselves to chocolate.
This was going too far. I shouted ‘All aboard!’ waved my flag and blew a blast on the whistle. The line was not clear, but Jimmy caught on and put up a convincing show of a train just about to leave. The great driving wheels began to move and the artificial fog was shattered by one colossal whoosh of steam.
They were just piling into the compartments when Rhoda spoiled the picture.
‘You stay there, mister,’ she carolled. ‘We’ll get in when we’re bloody well ready.’
That called our bluff of course. We couldn’t start without them – or rather it had not yet occurred to us that we could.
It was then that our fireman lost his temper. His disdain for Jimmy and myself had been growing; after all he had been shooed away from doors by busy housewives throughout the suburbs whereas Jimmy had only to overawe a cheerful gang of black railwaymen. He got down from the footplate and walked along the platform, wiping his hands on a sodden yard of oily cotton waste. A horrid weapon against best frocks in a rough-and-tumble.
‘Get on in, you silly bitches!’ he roared.
His cave-man stuff damn near worked. The girlies were so startled that they began to get into the train. His silk stockings had taught him one of the elementary facts about women.
‘Come on, Ma!’ he ordered Rhoda, who was rather hesitantly standing her ground.
She was only about nineteen and that ‘Ma’ infuriated her. It struck her right on the secret sore of her spirit. She snatched his oily rag and wiped his face with it.
That was the detonator in the wagon of gelignite. It exploded. All the worry about fathers and brothers and sweethearts on strike, all the year spent behind counters controlling their natural instincts to be rude to customers who were rude to them, all was released in one blast of females over that fireman. Before we could get up to the rescue they had dragged him into a compartment. They were screaming with rage. I suppose the only people who hear that sound are the officials of a women’s prison. There was no doubt that the fireman would be for it if we couldn’t pull him out.
It was no good calling for police; there weren’t any. We dived under the train and opened the door which gave on to the tracks. The fireman’s legs were poking out from cascades of loosened hair and still waving feebly. We took a leg each and heaved, and he came out leaving his jacket and shirt behind. On our rush to the engine his trousers dropped off him – not round his ankles, I mean, but vanished, disintegrated.
When we were all safely on the footplate, Jimmy opened up his steam screen to throw off the pursuit and we started. This time there was no bluff for them to call. They appreciated that we were running for our lives and didn’t care how many of them were left behind. So far as I could see, they all managed to come aboard. I wiped the worst of the bloodstains and muck off the fireman and dressed him in Jimmy’s spare overalls. He had only lost shreds of skin from his scalp and all his members were present and correct. He gibbered a bit, as was not unnatural, and kept grabbing at me.
‘I’m not stopping till we get to police,’ said Jimmy, setting his jaw.
I agreed with him. Anything was better than loosing our four hysterical coachloads into a London unprotected.
Jimmy had the County of London pounding along at a steady forty. It was risky but we had the mainline to ourselves and could see a mile ahead. Maidenhead had held us up quarter of an hour longer than was necessary. All went well till we were just outside Ealing. There our faithful engine took a horrible lurch to starboard and nearly flung us off the footplate. By the time Jimmy had jammed on the brakes and cut the speed down to ten miles an hour, we were careering through a goods yard surrounded by acres and acres of trucks. We could now hear the turmoil in the coach next to the engine. Somewhere they were still singing songs; somewhere they were shrieking with alarm; somewhere they were yelling foul abuse at the driver and his mates.
Our line was clear. Lord knows for what mysterious traffic the points had been set. Once we were in a cutting between houses where the rails were rusty with disuse and once running alongside a racecourse of District lines, all of them electrified. The County of London was bouncing like a dinghy in a tide-rip. She squealed, rocking round switch-back curves. I could see that Jimmy was in agony, for he loved that locomotive and the driving of it, but a look at the fireman was enough to keep us going.
We must have been dodging through the inner suburbs for a good ten minutes when we staggered over an incredible cluster of points and saw a deserted station ahead of us.
‘Royal Oak?’ Jimmy asked, as if he had just sighted the coast of America.
‘Must be,’ I answered confidently.
Of course that was absurd. When you are running into Paddington on a fast express Ealing and Royal Oak go by in two flashes; but we hadn’t the faintest notion where we were, and it never occurred to us that we had left the Great Western system altogether for outer space. We decided that we had merely taken a very roundabout route to Royal Oak and we blessed that route since Paddington and whole posses of police could be only two minutes away.
Jimmy opened her out a little, and it was then that we saw a modest notice of EARL’S COURT and the mouth of the east-bound tunnel. We managed to stop a matter of two yards from it and made one collective jump for the stairs dragging the fireman between us. We were away before the terrors behind us could do more than half open the doors.
I heard that when the strike was over the County of London could not be returned to her home without a crane and a breakdown gang. The professional railwaymen said it was impossible to drive a 4–4–0 locomotive round those curves. I dare say it is. I swear the leading bogey jumped the track once and then bounced back again.
What happened to the girlies? Demurely working at the counters of Models Ltd, I suppose. But in my opinion it was no coincidence that next week the railwaymen were so horrified by anarchy that they voted to return to work.