'Where you off to?' shouted the fish-eating kid.
I said, 'Waterloo,' sounding not like myself, but even the horse seemed to have heard of the place for he set off without coaxing.
There were just too many people in London, and that was all about it. Sooner or later, I thought as we rolled away from
King's Cross, they will have to bring this madness to a halt and get everything put straight. All the buses were marked 'Vanguard' and there was no end of motor cars. There was no end of everything else either, so that after a sprint of a start we soon settled down to a crawl, and I added a second half crown to the one I already had in my hand for the fare, fearing the price might be to do with time spent as well as distance covered.
After twenty minutes or so we came up to the river, which was something more like ten rivers side by side, all brown and glittering and packed with rolling, smoking boats, with big factories on the Waterloo side. Through a gap between two of them, I could see the engine shed of Waterloo rising above the factories and houses like a lot of giant greenhouses at an angle to the river, but the greenhouses gave out after a while, and then there were metal girders, and the automatic hammer was somewhere in there: you'd hear the bang, and then the black cloud would come up after every one.
On the other side of that rusty bridge - and I believe that in my excitement I forgot to breathe all the way across - I realised I had gone from what they called the Northern Division to the Southern Division, and when I remembered that Rowland Smith lived in the Northern Division yet
worked
in the Southern Division, I began to think of that gentleman as being even grander than I had already imagined, and resembling the Colossus of Ancient Greece who stands over whatever river it may be.
We came onto what I now know as Westminster Bridge Road, where trams were surging up to the people like steeplechasers. We had also struck the smell of Waterloo, which came from the station and the chimneys on the river. It was the smell of bad beer, or good pickles, or something that kept you thinking, mingled with engine smoke and another smell that was like the sea captured by factories.
We carried on under a long, low viaduct with a slow-goods hammering overhead, and when we emerged I saw a great vibrating building with steam and smoke rushing out of a line of chimneys. I had thought this would be another factory, but a sign on the roof told me it was the 'Lambeth Skating Rink'. We did not reach that building, however, but turned sharp right, going immediately under another black viaduct with another goods pounding overhead. This viaduct was enormous, and, when we came out from under, the day was not as bright as it had been before.
This dark street, which was called Lower Marsh, was all in the shadow of that great viaduct, and so the people there lived in a world of under and over: under went the houses and shops, the pubs, the people and the lines of stables, and over went the trains with a constant clanging. The shops spilled out into the street and had more goods outside than in: everybody was selling everything to everybody else, and everybody was shouting to make themselves heard over the trains. The most important thing in the street apart from the viaduct seemed to be a round pub called the Citadel: a big, orange-glowing beer-barrel sort of a place with a sign saying Red Lion Ales and Reid's Stout over and over again -
1
would soon learn that in London they are never happy to just do something once.
Above the pub, above the street, and really above all, was the great station itself, the spider in the middle of the viaduct web. I knew it to serve the grandest railway in the world, the London and South Western, and yet I was surprised, for there was nothing glorious to it. Waterloo seemed to have no front and no back. It did have a roof - in parts - but there were many huge tarpaulins rising and falling in the dirty breeze over the rambling mass of bricks and glass. Under these great tents, I was sure, they were making the station bigger still, and I did not doubt that it would finish up the mightiest in the Empire. Already, as I knew from
The Railway Magazine,
Waterloo received 700 trains every day, compared to 250 at King's Cross. St Pancras received
...
a good many, I did not know the exact number, and I realised, alone in the dark little cab, that it would be a very long time before I would be able to look it up, for I had only brought the latest two numbers of
The Railway Magazine
in my box.
But there was no time to fret over that because the cab man called down to me through his hole. He might as well have been talking in a foreign language, but did not sound happy, so I gave him the two half crowns, thinking: well, he'll give me some of it back, at any rate. Having taken the money, though, he just opened the door. I thought: he'll hand over the change when I've stood down; it's probably that way about with hansoms. I climbed down in front of a pharmacy that seemed entirely given over to selling Vianola Soap, and watched the cab man turn in a circle, thinking: as the horse turns he'll count out the change, but the fact of the matter was that he was lighting his pipe as the horse walked, and then he was gone altogether, and the whole of my five shillings with him. I did not have much time to worry about this, though, because I now saw a sign that hit me like a bullet: Hercules Court.
I cannot now say how, on the journey down from Yorkshire, I had thought my lodge and my landlady might actually be because any memory of it has been blotted out by the thought of how they actually were. The lodge was on a corner, half in Lower Marsh and half in Hercules Court. The wall facing Lower Marsh was covered in posters, all saying, 'Smoke Duke of Wellington Cigars', except for one going out on a limb with 'Stower's Lime Juice, No Musty Flavour'. I knocked on the door of this giant cigar box and a lady opened it, releasing a smell of wash day. She was certainly not from the common run of landlady, and while she did not look well-to-do, she looked clever - her faded skirts did not matter. Her eyes were very large and yet she herself was very small, and that to me was the right way about. It would have been very easy to lift her up, I thought, but I perceived instantly that nobody would ever dare to try.
She stood aside and looked away as I dragged my box through the doorway. On the floor was brown linoleum, and the wallpaper was black, with big, glowing orange flowers. This continued up the stairs, which were so narrow that my landlady's skirts touched both walls at once. She opened a door and showed me into a room.
'It's quite commodious,' I remarked after a while, for this was the best that could be said. The wallpaper was a design of roses on a trellis; there were two windows opposite each other, not at all clean. I walked towards one of them and my landlady said, 'As you see, they give on to the garden.'
There being no grass or plants of any description, but just bricks and a coal shed, this was more of a yard, I thought. I knew about yards because we had one at home. Immediately beyond this one was a brick wall that must have been sixty foot in height, if not greater, with an oil lamp burning towards the top of it. I was just trying to think of a way of asking about it when the landlady said, with a faraway look, 'Soap works. You'll have no trouble from it.'
There was a truckle bed and a broken bamboo table with a candle end in a saucer. No gas. There was one picture over the bed which showed a glum sort of castle in a brown field with two sad-looking men standing alongside it. I walked a little way towards the bed, and saw that underneath this scene were the words 'Harrow School,
1723'.
My landlady said, 'It's a pound down,' and then, as I gazed at a small pool of water on the floor,
‘I
believe that you have a start on the railways?'
'I'm to begin as a cleaner,' I said.
But people don't understand how it lies with engine cleaners - they didn't then and they don't now - and I could never leave it at that. 'Cleaning', I went on, as my landlady looked down at her boots, 'is the first stage on the road that leads to firing an engine. After some months, I anticipate becoming a passed cleaner, which will mean I can do some firing duties, and then, if all goes satisfactorily, I will perhaps move on to driving on a low link: shunting work, I mean, little goods and the like. At the top of the mountain that I am endeavouring to climb -'
At that, she flashed a look at me: a kind of warning I suppose it was, looking back. But I pressed on.
'At the top of that mountain are the express drivers, the ninety-mile-an-hour chaps, that is, and I have the confident expectation of becoming one of those myself, but I will have to spend many years proving that I'm the right sort, and if I have faults my watchword will have to be that I will seek to mend one every day.'
'Yes,' she said at length, 'well, it's a pound down.' She would have no fussing about; she wanted the money in her hand. I paid up, and she wrote me a receipt there and then, very fast and determined. As she wrote, leaning on the mantelpiece, she explained the rules of the house while I looked at the water on the floor, then up at the crack in the ceiling from where it came. There had been one other gentleman staying in the lodge - a schoolmaster who rode a bicycle - but he was leaving that day. Like this gentleman, I could have my laundry done if I left it out on a Friday evening. Wash day was Saturday. Today was Saturday but there would be no more done since the boiler had just been drained.
In the kitchen, my landlady said, there was hot water that could be brought up in bowls, and some margarine, bread and preserves to which I could help myself. I asked whether there was cocoa, and she said, 'No.' I said I was partial to it in the mornings, especially Rowntree's, at which she gave me such a look that I immediately added that I could do quite well without after all.
This lodge, she then told me, was owned by her father and he also owned another lodging house in which he lived and where she spent most of the week. He was not well, and presently kept no servants: there had been a skivvy for both houses but she was sick, therefore my landlady spent a good deal of time at her father's place. But she would be in this lodge every Saturday to do the washing - for the other did not have such a good kitchen - and to collect the rent.
When she had left, I quickly unpacked my box. Then, to put me in the right frame of mind for my new life, I sat on the truckle bed and began reading, in one of my two
Railway Magazines,
a long article about one David Hughes, 'A Great Western Railway Engine Driver Who Received the Royal Victorian Medal'. Seldom has any driver put up harder running than Mr Hughes over any territory, but it was difficult to give him my full attention, what with all the shouts and screams and railway clamour around me. After a while I took up my two numbers of
The Railway Magazine
and tried to stand them on the mantelshelf with a lump of coal as a prop, but they would not stay upright, not being bound, as all my others were in the regulation red leather, all standing proudly in rows on the shelves of my cosy little bedroom in Baytown. But I tried hard not to think of that.
Every now and again, as I brushed the dust off the mantel and thought, despite myself, of the balmy life I had left behind, there would come a great smashing wave of laughter and shouting rolling out of the pub just along the road. This presently mingled with another train thumping over the viaduct, and the clanging of a church bell.
It was only four o'clock. But it was four o'clock in Waterloo.
Chapter Two
Monday 16 November
On my first morning I climbed out of bed at five, an hour before my alarm rang, and put on the old black suit of Dad's that I would be wearing for work. He'd said I ought to wear a collar and tie, and I'd said that sort of thing was for the porters, the little men of the railways, and that I would not keep a collar on my shirt but would wear a kerchief, and we had agreed on that. I had two caps with me down in Waterloo: my best cap and my other one. As it was my first day and I was nineteen and felt myself on a heavenly mission, I stood up, put on my best one, and prepared to look in a glass to see how much I resembled a fellow of the right sort. But there was no looking glass, and it would have been too dark to see into one even if there had been, which was all just as well.
Then I sat back on my bed and watched my new alarm go around to six o'clock. It
did
go off at six, which made me feel a juggings for not trusting it, but I had a dread of having to be woken by a call boy on my first day.
I stepped out of the front door, and there was my welcome to Waterloo: a man in an Ulster, stiff with mud, was banging a metal bar against the iron ladder that went up the side of the viaduct. The fellow was saturated, and the queer thing was that he quite looked the part, for his coat was bell-shaped and swung in time with his blows. Above him, the cold wind raced under and over the dirty tarpaulins that bandaged Waterloo.
I turned away from this scene and, thinking things would pick up with the sun, I began to walk. It took me one day to realise that the quickest way from Waterloo to Nine Elms Locomotive Shed was along the river. On that first morning, however, I attempted to walk there through ordinary streets, following the viaducts whenever I thought I might not be going right, but this proved no simple matter since they were tangled up with the buildings. The dismal streets were full of dark warehouses instead of ordinary houses, and full of men and their horses and waggons bringing things into Waterloo or taking them away and making a great din about it, and what with the noise, the strangeness of the streets and my fearfulness of being late, I was in a very fretful condition when I finally came upon the main gates of Nine Elms.