The Railway Girl. Nancy Carson
din of the locomotive, Lucy Piddock turned her head to watch, stepping back from the platform’s edge. She urged her friend Miriam Watson to do likewise with a token pull on her arm. The engine and its unholy racket, offensive to the ears, passed them slowly, delivering its string of coaches to precisely where the rest of the passengers were waiting. As it groaned and hissed to a halt, Lucy smiled at Miriam, opened the door of an empty third class compartment and allowed Miriam to step up inside before her. They were going home after browsing the shops in Dudley.
‘How did we manage to get about before we had the railway?’ Lucy remarked as she and Miriam sat facing each other next to the window. The railway line had been open four years and Lucy did not yet take for granted the novelty of it, nor the convenience. ‘We’d never have gone to Dudley before of a Saturday afternoon, would we?’
‘Better than walking to Stourbridge,’ Miriam agreed. ‘It’s a tidy walk to Stourbridge from Silver End … especially if you got a nail sticking up in your boot.’
‘I sometimes wonder if it’s quicker to walk down to the main station past the castle or this one.’
‘Depends where you am when you’m done, I reckon,’ Miriam surmised. ‘Which end o’ the town you’m at. Neither station’s close to the shops, but you don’t have to put up with going through that dark tunnel when you go from this one.’
‘That’s true,’ Lucy agreed. ‘And it costs a bit less.’
She gazed out of the carriage window onto the platform, while Miriam took off her boot and rubbed her bunion where the offending nail was puncturing it. A young guard, smart in the livery of the Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway and wearing a cheese-cutter cap, checked the door to the compartment of the four-wheeled coach. He caught Lucy’s eye through the window and smiled, giving her a waggish wink that made her insides churn, then pressed on to check the forward coaches.
‘Miriam, did you see that chap?’ Lucy asked with a broad grin. ‘The guard. I fancy him.’
‘Trust you to fancy somebody you’ll never see again.’
‘Course I shall see him again,’ Lucy said with a certainty that defied argument. ‘He’ll be coming back this way in a minute to get back in his guards’ van.’
‘Well, you ain’t gunna get the chance to talk to him. The train’ll be pulling out in a minute.’
Lucy shrugged. ‘I only said I fancied him. I didn’t say as I wanted to have a chat about the weather, or whether the Queen and Prince Albert will have more children.’
‘Ain’t there no decent chaps where you work?’ Miriam enquired. ‘We’ll have to get you fixed up with somebody soon, else you’ll end up an old maid.’
‘Chaps don’t seem to fancy me, Miriam. I reckon I ain’t pretty enough. Let’s face it, I wasn’t at the front of the queue when they was giving out pretty faces.’ Lucy saw the guard returning and perked up at once. ‘Aye up! Here he comes again. Have a peep at him.’
As he passed the window he turned and smiled once more, so both girls grinned and waved saucily.
‘Well, he seems to think you’m pretty,’ Miriam said. ‘He seems to fancy you. He was smiling at you, not me.’
‘I bet he’d be a bit of a gig as well.’ Lucy felt herself reddening. ‘I hope he gets off the train again at Brettell Lane.’
‘Well, I ain’t hanging about just to see if he does. Get yourself a local chap, Luce. That guard might come from Worcester or even Oxford for all you know. It’d be no good courting somebody from Worcester or Oxford. You want a chap to be where you am. Somebody who can sit with yer nights on the settle, and tickle your feet for a bit o’ pleasure and comfort.’
They heard a whistle, and the locomotive huffed, hauling them forward, slowly at first but quickly picking up speed.
‘Oh, I give up on chaps,’ Lucy pouted. ‘I never seem to get anybody. What’s wrong with me, Miriam?’
‘Nothing, you daft sod. There’s nothing wrong with you. And besides, you am pretty, even if you don’t think so. You got a good figure. You got lovely dark hair and big blue eyes.’
‘Pale blue eyes!’ Lucy repeated with exasperation. ‘I wish I’d got brown eyes like you, or dark blue ones like a baby’s. Pale blue eyes look that washed out. Even green eyes would be better than pale blue.’
‘Be thankful for what you have got, Luce. A good many would be glad of your eyes and your looks.’
‘Then if I have got decent looks, why can’t I get a chap? Have I got a dewdrop dithering off the end of my nose that I don’t know about? Have I got a squint? Do I smell, or something?’
Miriam chuckled. ‘Course not. Anyroad, if you stunk I wouldn’t come a-nigh you.’
‘So what’s up with me? I swear I’ll step out with the first chap as ever asks me, even if he’s the ugliest, vilest freak ever to have worn a pair of trousers … I will … I swear.’
Miriam laughed again. ‘You ain’t that desperate.’
‘Yes, I am. It’s all right for you. You got Sammy Osborne. And before him you had Jimmy Sheldon … and Lord knows who else before him. Crikey, you must’ve collected enough men’s scalps to make a rug.’
‘Oh, Lucy …’ Miriam chuckled and sighed. ‘Somebody’ll come along and sweep you right off your feet.’
‘And that’s just what I want. Somebody to come along and sweep me off my feet, before I’m stuck up a tree and too old. Before I have to start reading the deaths regular to see who’s just become a widower … Oh, no,’ Lucy added after a moment’s pondering. ‘On second thoughts I could never lower myself to go with a chap who’s second-hand.’
‘What’s the rush? I sometimes think as men ain’t worth the bother anyroad. They can’t wait to bed yer, buying yer presents and giving yer all that fancy sweet talk just to get you there. And then, when they’ve had yer, they treat yer like flipping dirt.’
‘I’m sure they ain’t all like that,’ Lucy said distrustfully, and fell quiet.
The train rumbled over the towering wooden construction that was Parkhead Viaduct and she gazed through the window at the busy network of canals that converged beneath it, and at the area’s countless smoking chimney stacks, without really seeing any of it. She was deep in thought, grieving over the imagined monumental flaw in her looks or demeanour that rendered her positively repulsive to men. Even though no such flaw existed, Lucy was lacking in self-confidence because she firmly believed otherwise. This erroneous conviction compounded the problem, rendering her a little bit reserved, which men interpreted as being ‘stuck-up’. And what ordinary factory wench had the right or reason to be stuck-up?
Lucy was not yet twenty years old and most of her friends the same age were courting. Some were even wed. This fact nagged at her, not incessantly, nor obsessively, but sometimes; and this moment was one such time. But when she was among her own friends and family, and not blighted by misgivings over her fancied inadequacies, she was good company, bright and amiable, and even witty on occasions.
‘I think I ought to try and get out a bit more,’ she said to Miriam, releasing herself from her depressing daydream. ‘I think I should try and mix more with folk.’
‘You mean mix more with men,’ Miriam corrected with a knowing look. ‘I don’t know what you’m worried about. Are you sure there’s no men where you work?’
‘None as I’d want. There’s Jake Parsons who’s too old, Bobby Pugh who’s too ugly, Georgie Betts whose feet are too stinky … Then there’s Alfie Mason who’s got a wall eye and a hair lip … Oh, and Ben Craddock who never stops farting.’
‘You’m too fussy.’
‘I could afford to be fussier,