The Railway Man Page 3

  And just like species in their habitats, these creatures with their gleaming layers of paint and elegant steel and brass mountings had often still to be tracked to their native ranges. We talked the language of birdwatchers: rare engines were ‘elusive’ or ‘difficult’. The world of railways was as surprising and complicated as the natural world: there seemed to be more kinds of locomotive than there were different birds in the Lothian Hills. There were at least 28,000 steam engines in Britain on the main lines; and several thousand more in private employment, cast-offs and survivors from the big lines working for breweries, mines, ironworks. The LNER, my local railway, had been built up from great lines like the North British Railway and tiny local companies like the East and West Yorkshire Union Railway, four battered engines lugging coal between some pitheads and the sea.

  I rescued the most obscure railway in the British Isles from oblivion by writing a little article about it for Railway Magazine when I was sixteen. On Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands, I found some overgrown tracks of a tiny 2-foot gauge running from chromite quarries in the island centre to the nearby pier. Stocky little ponies were pulling ramshackle wagons full of the chrome-iron ore in hot July sunshine. In another part of the island I found more lines radiating out from another chromite pit, the workings completely derelict. The tracks were covered in rough grass and nettles and dockweed; the rusty side tipping wagons were lying in the positions in which they had been abandoned by the side of the track. I felt I had reached the ultima Thule of the railway world.

  For me it was a question of mapping and understanding that man-made world, of tracing the genealogies of engines, designs and companies. My habits of precision and of needing to know where I was, which may have attracted me to the spider’s web of railways in the first place, would later get me into the most awful trouble on the worst railway in the world, but that need to locate myself and to imagine ways of escape would never leave me. And I was drawn to the railways so much that they have been a backdrop to almost every turning-point in my life, and have led me into unhappiness and torment, as well as some of the only real contentment I have ever known.

  * * *

  Railways are an intensely personal mania, but I was always aware that mine was not exactly a secret passion. Train study was one of the most popular pastimes in Britain. There were always other boys, standing stiffly alert, taking notes and photographs, on platforms, on sidings, at level crossings out in the country. Guardedly, we traded information. We would hear of curious sightings, of locomotives straying out of their areas like big birds blown off course by a storm. The storm was an economic one, homogenizing the local railway systems in the face of the world slump; for the moment, the Depression and all it brought with it was our opportunity. We didn’t hear the storm coming closer.

  We got permits to visit engine sheds and workshops; saw still, silent herds of the great locomotives in sidings on Saturday afternoons or Sundays. There was a fine illicit thrill about climbing aboard the platform of a steam engine, nine or ten feet off the ground, and standing in front of the wall of instruments, the gleaming levers, throttles and stopcocks that regulated so much power.

  We thought of ourselves as being involved with these smoky vehicles of change, we never saw ourselves as just standing on the ends of platforms crossing numbers off a list. We didn’t tolerate frivolity, or drinkers or the unserious. But machines don’t make good companions, and it is true that I spent much of my youth alone, cycling between stations on roads that could be grey and wet in autumn and winter, with often only a distant relationship to my fellow enthusiasts. It isn’t much wonder that I was so easily recruited into the Chapel – but that was later.

  Meanwhile, attendance at the Royal High School became more and more of a penance. Many of the boys delivered by tram on the 1st October 1924 continued to be unhappy ten years later. The attitude of many teachers towards pupils was deplorable. They seemed to regard us as something of a nuisance and an interruption to their daily routine; collectively to have been unaware that children and their interests had any connection with the employment of teachers.

  There were exceptions. One devoted history teacher came up with a scheme by which any pupil who discovered a genuine error in any history text would be awarded an extra 1 per cent in the term examination. The enthusiasm with which his pupils combed their texts for mistakes was impressive, though there were rumours that their parents had been drawn into the research. Inevitably, a market economy developed around this precious information. Confident boys placed suspected errors on the market, charging rates that varied with the probability of acceptance. It was good practice for life, of a kind.

  The school’s emphasis on classics was less useful for the world we were about to enter. By the time I was fifteen, my father had to ask the Rector to make special arrangements to allow me to study history and geography instead of Greek. But as the final examinations approached, I knew that my prospects of formal academic success were slim.

  On holiday in the autumn of 1935, my father saw an advertisement for a Civil Service competition for a single appointment as a sorting clerk and telegraphist in the GPO in Edinburgh, and announced that I should apply. Sons in those days did exactly what their fathers told them to do, or at least I did, so at the age of sixteen I sat the examination. I took first place in the city, to my own astonishment and my family’s, and on the morning the brown envelope came my father told me that I could leave school that day.

  I went to the Rector’s office and told him that I was going. The Rector, a very elevated person named Dr King Gillies told me in omniscient tones that I was being very foolish, that I could expect only to become a butcher’s delivery boy – the ultimate social disgrace. I spoiled his day by showing him the letter from the Civil Service Commission. And so my formal education ended.

  I still think I would have made a reasonably good butcher’s boy.

  Early in January 1936, I started to study at home for the next grade of the Civil Service. I had a couple of months before I started work. I also began to explore the Lothian Hills and the coast, cycling to small harbours and old docks, to obscure sidings that were said to contain interesting survivors of early locomotive classes. These were rehearsals for later marathon rides around the kingdom on my brief holidays from the Post Office. I thought that I might never have so much completely free time at my disposal again. I was right.

  In the year of the Popular Front in France and of the Spanish Civil War, the year Japan began its assault on China, I was going on even longer excursions. In 1937, on my annual holiday from what was then a not very fulfilling job, I cycled all the way to the English Channel and back – a 1000-mile round-trip down the west coast, and back up the east coast via Newcastle and Berwick. I did it completely alone. I was barely aware of what was happening thousands of miles away in Asia. I had no politics; I was an only child.

  It is strange, looking back now, to think of those boys at school to whom I was never really close. Men born ten years after me could speculate idly about their schoolmates, but that option was closed to me by events in China and Central Europe while I was growing up. I know exactly what happened to each of my contemporaries. Of the twenty-five of us in our final year at school, only four survived the war. But there is no justice in statistics, and by some arbitrary chance not one of the twenty-two young men in my officer class at Catterick was killed.

  * * *

  You had to start at the bottom in the Post Office, just as my father had done nearly forty years before. I became a sorter of mail, and after a week’s training I was put on the lowest rung of the Civil Service ladder, from which I was destined to become successively Senior Sorter, Postmaster and so on.

  A worker called Bobby Kinghorn, who I would later meet under very different circumstances, took me in hand and showed me how to survive without working too hard, and I put his good advice to use on the main shift from 7.30 in the morning until 3.30 in the afternoon, six days a week.


  I had to open parcels from overseas so that customs could inspect them, then laboriously tie them up again. They also assigned me to the football pools section, where a dozen sorters filtered millions of coupons being sent out to the punters who were hoping to get rich from their predictions of the scores of the coming Saturday’s soccer matches. All this waste paper, victim of the laws of probability, would have to be sorted, bundled and bagged for movement to Waverley Station, where it would be loaded on to trains heading out to towns in the borders and further south.

  I was now drawing a big circle around Edinburgh of places to which return journeys could be made by bicycle on early summer evenings, and I’d escape to some point on it every afternoon. So many miles, so many lonely sightings of worked metal and quiet satisfaction at another unusual entry into my orderly classification of the world. Ordnance Survey maps helped you to identify half-forgotten branch lines, perhaps some colliery where there might be a couple of engines whose identity and even whose existence would be unknown to anyone outside the colliery itself; but some of the sidings were so obscure that they did not appear on maps, and there was no alternative but to search them out.

  I learned in the Post Office that obsession can take many forms. One much older man became something of a special friend. He had been unemployed for most of the previous five years and had become a communist. He became obsessed with our ignorance of the names of places to which the pools envelopes were being sent. His need for order and his conscientious devotion to the job drove him to make, in his own time, over a period of weeks, a card-index of every British place-name he could find, as an aid to sorting the pools mail. Anything less like the behaviour of a communist militant is difficult to imagine; but perhaps this innocent card-index man would have found a different outlet for his obsession if the circumstances had been different.

  Some flavour of the austerity and discretion of the workplace in the 1930s remains with me in the memory of a colleague called Wendy, from whom I took over duties in the motor transport section after I passed the clerical officer’s examination in late 1936. One lunchtime she failed to return to the office. Such was our respect for punctuality that I began to imagine that she had had an accident, or been kidnapped. In a manner of speaking she had suffered both fates: she had used her lunch hour to get married.

  My job was now to maintain the records for the Post Office Telephones’ vehicles all over the south east of Scotland. We had to watch out for things like excessive fuel consumption, breakdowns and accidents. This was my future now: the minute administration of Post Office machinery, counting and accounting in careful detail for the public’s means of communication and the people who kept it running.

  The life that awaited me if I had not broken from it can be guessed at in the story of the file on expanding shelter for our vehicles in the Edinburgh area. I wrote minutes, memos, drew up lists of suitable premises. In 1948 I went back briefly to the Post Office after leaving the army, after a war in which millions of people had died cruel and pointless deaths, in which I had been shattered psychically and physically. On my first day back in civilian employment the file on garage accommodation was solemnly handed to me. It had not been opened for almost a decade. Time had stopped in this fusty government office while for me it had accelerated beyond reason.

  Some inkling of dread must have percolated into me back in 1936, because I decided to make another move. I realize now, looking back, that for all my conformity I was looking for something more satisfying, more wholly absorbing than the set lines of my life could offer; in my own way I was very ambitious. I decided to take evening classes in telegraphy and telephony. My father thought that this was most irregular, wanting to switch from the office grades to the technical, from the supervisory to the practical. We were staff, we did not work with our hands. But with that stubbornness which I would later learn much more about, I went ahead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I GREW UP IN a world in which tinkering and inventing and making were honoured pastimes. My father, though he was not a telegraph engineer, liked to experiment with technical equipment. In the early 1920s he and his friends Mr Weatherburn and Mr Patrick were building a wireless, which they kept in Weatherburn’s house.

  It sat on a table in a room cluttered with glass valves, flex, pliers, copper wire, soldering irons and screwdrivers. There was a strange burning metallic smell, a smell of glue and oil. I could touch the dark rolls of thick sticky tape, but was warned not to touch the big black dials with their pointers turned to the brass buttons set into the wood panel. Three beautifully-milled brass cylinders, detectors for those mysterious waves that I couldn’t see as they rolled into the lighted room, were set into the polished mahogany of the box. The front panel was studded with protruding, fragile looking valves, switches and dials, and polished brass terminals. I could see the delicate metal in the bulbs of the valves. The whole apparatus looked at once ridiculous and awesome. It was like an unfinished toy, but also an engineered aesthetic tool, something crafted and heavy. Its front sloped back like the stand used for the big Bible in church.

  My father placed a pair of heavy headphones around my ears, and I heard, through the hiss and buzz of far-off energies, a disembodied human voice. Somewhere a long way away a man was sending his words into space and they were somehow being collected here and narrowed through my ears alone.

  In the worst times, much later, when I thought I was about to die in pain and shock at the hands of men who could not imagine anything of my life, who had no respect for who I was or where I had come from, I might have wished that my father had had a different passion. But after the First War, technology was still powerful and beautiful without being menacing. Who could have thought that radio telegraphy, a simple channelling of ethereal lines of force, could cause terrible harm? It was a wonderful instrument by which people could speak to each other, and I knew that up on the hill in Edinburgh Castle there was a station of the BBC speaking calmly and authoritatively through educated English voices about the weather, the news and the Empire.

  By the time I started my own radio course in 1940 I had already heard Adolf Hitler’s voice coming out of my father’s radio, an endless rhythmic scream full of strange crescendos. Hitler was not only the most powerful man in Europe, he was also clearly mad. None the less the threat his voice contained seemed as far away as all radio voices.

  I got stuck into the electrical rote-learning that the Post Office Telephones arranged for its staff. We had to memorize complicated circuits and patterns of valves. A typical exam question might be ‘Reproduce the Circuit for the No. 2A Switchboard’, which was a bit of a labyrinth. The radios of the late Thirties were large heavy pieces of equipment, not quite as massive and unwieldy as Mr Weatherburn’s home-made wireless, but solid and imposing for all that; and I began to learn how they worked and how they should be maintained. We also learned about telephones, morse signalling and telegraphy. I was moving on, but I can’t have been content.

  * * *

  My mentor in the Post Office, Bobby Kinghorn, was a friend of the kind that a lonely young man makes in his first job: older, wise to the routines of the office, giving off the air of a vigorous, if slightly mysterious, life outside it. I knew he was interested in religion, and once I lent him my father’s copy of Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome, one of those accounts of conversion that English Catholics delight in. Kinghorn never returned it, to my father’s considerable anger. But my colleague had, as it turned out, taken a very different path to Belloc’s.

  My only vivid religious memory from my childhood is of being a choirboy in the Episcopal Church at the age of eleven or twelve. I remember the music and the division of the choir into cantoris and decani, and that I was assigned to the cantoris. What happened, therefore, came as much as a surprise to me as it did to my parents, who had grown used, if not exactly reconciled to my relentless exploration of Britain for unusual machines.

  On summer evenings you could see a great variety of trains a
t a station in the west of Edinburgh called Dalry Road. It had an island platform in the middle of tracks that ran past it from east to west, and off beyond the tracks were engine sheds and repair works. Sometimes you would see outside its longest shed a string of pre-First-War engines, stubby six-wheeled locomotives of the defunct Caledonian Railway nose to tail with their high steam domes and thin quaint chimneys.

  One Sunday, I stood on the island in the warm dusk, surrounded by empty tracks stretching off on either side, waiting for a train that might have some exotic engine at the head of it. The old railway systems were dissolving fast now, and anything might be coming through, a strange engine of the former London and North Western Railway, perhaps?

  I was approached by an older man who struck up a conversation about trains and about recent sightings at this very station. He was a gangly clothes-pole of a man, a long coat flapping around his shins. I thought he was simply a fellow obsessive and we talked politely about rare southern birds and dying Highland breeds. He really did seem to know a great deal about locomotives. Then, once he had hooked me, the talk turned to religion, and he was so hypnotically persuasive that the transition didn’t seem abrupt. In those days, steam locomotion and the divine were not as far apart in my imagination as they should have been.

  Today, a man accosting a youth at a spot like this would arouse suspicions of only one kind, but this man had no carnal intentions at all. He was simply after my soul. His name was Jack Ewart and he belonged to Charlotte Baptist Chapel, a famous independent evangelical church in Edinburgh. He could talk, he could seduce you with talk of love and compassion and salvation, that subtle mixture of flattery and fear that the apostle of any sect learns to use. I found myself, a lonely and impressionable young man, being drawn into the reassuring and comforting world that glowed in his voice. It seemed to offer fellowship and certainty.