Read Online The Blackpool Highflyer by Andrew Martin - Free Book Online Page A

got on before the railways and the excur­sions started.
    'I could make a stew at the start of the week,' the wife was saying, 'and it would keep. Do you like stews?'
    'Yes,' I said firmly.
    'What kind? What do you like in them?'
    'I'm not faddy. Anything at all. You should buy the meat on Saturday night.'
    'Oh’ she said suspiciously. 'Why?'
    'It's cheaper then.'
    She said she'd think it over.
    The wife was smiling. She had taken off her hat, and as we came to the tram halt, I thought: she looks still more fetching without it, and will look more fetching again when she puts it back on, and so on for ever. She was wrong over trams, how­ever, which were forever either racing or jerking to a dead halt. They seemed to go on by jumps, and I found myself - for the first time ever - a little anxious riding one.
    We got off at the Joint, and as usual the wife paid no atten­tion. She did not like railway lines, partly because her house in London had been underneath one. When I first took up lodgings there (for she was my landlady before she was my wife) I used to say: 'What do you expect, living in Waterloo?'
    We took the little stone tunnel that went under the plat­forms of the Joint, and under the canal basin, and under the Halifax Flour Society mill, and a good deal else beside. We came out and began climbing the Beacon, going by the one zigzag lane - half country, half town, with rocks lit by their own gas lamps, and sometimes black thin houses like knives along the way. There was one mill above us all the time as we walked, and this was our goal.
    Just then a bicyclist came crashing along. 'Evening!' he called, which was gentlemanly of him because by the looks of things he had all on staying alive. I thought his lamps were going to shake right off his machine, and he did look worried, but he wanted to keep up the speed. All my work started and finished down in that groove he was racing towards. There was too much life down there, and too much death too, because that's what the smoke was, and the black smuts floating along: that was your death certificate coming towards you. One in thirty million passengers might be killed on the railways, but your chances of coming a crop­per if you worked on the railways, or anything that moved, were a good deal higher, and you could not avert what was coming.
    The black mill was right above us now, made up of three buildings chasing each other in a circle, like a castle in a child's story book. A fellow in a gig was waiting outside in the darkness. As we looked on, a small door within the main door opened; light came out like something falling forwards and just stayed there for a while.
    Presently, an old man emerged from the door, walking with two sticks. Well, he was practically a spider, or a little rickety machine. The man in the gig climbed down, and he didn't help the old man, but walked alongside, looking on very closely. He did give him a hand up into the gig, though. The old man was wearing a heavy black coat in spite of the heat, a high white collar that shone like moonlight, and a black necker. He looked all ready for death. His face was small and crumpled, almost a baby's again; he had one lock of no-colour hair going across the top of his head and, as he took his seat in the gig, this fell forwards like the chinstrap of a helmet or the handle of a bucket.
    'What's the name of this show?' I asked the wife.
    'Did I not tell you?' she said. 'It's Hind's Mill.'
    I looked at the wife, but decided to hold my tongue for the time being.
    'That must be Mr Hind Senior,' said the wife. 'He's the chairman and founder.'
    As we watched, the manservant leant across to put the old man's hair straight, like somebody training a vine. Then the mill door closed and the light went. A moment later, the trap rattled off into the hot night.
     
Chapter Five
     
    The rest of the week I spent dreaming back and forth on the Rishworth branch, and trying to read a book by a fellow called Rider Haggard,