The Stationmaster’s Daughter. Kathleen McGurl
Ted Morgan, the stationmaster at Lynford station, had reached the not-insignificant age of 40 years without believing in love at first sight. Indeed, he wasn’t sure he believed in love at all; that is to say, not the romantic variety. You loved your parents, your siblings, and children (if you had any), of course. And you could be infatuated by a member of the opposite sex. But romantic love was a notion he’d had no experience of, and therefore was disinclined to believe in.
Until, that is, he’d first laid eyes on Annie Galbraith, and love – he could not call it anything else – hit him between the eyes with all the force of a Manning Wardle 2-6-2 tank engine.
Annie was slim, shorter than him by a foot, blonde of hair and blue of eye, her face shaped like a perfect heart. She held her head high as if to make herself taller, giving the impression of someone who was superior, as she was to him, in every way. She arrived each morning on the 08.42 from Michelhampton, strode purposefully through Ted’s little branch-line station with a neat black handbag hooked over her arm. In the evenings she returned three minutes before the 17.21 was due to depart. She sat in first class – where else for such a goddess? – in a seat on the left-hand side, one which afforded the best views across the Dorset countryside, on the forty-minute journey to Michelhampton. She had been travelling on these trains every weekday for the past four months, and in all that time he had only ever said three words to her. The same three words, over and over. In his head they were, ‘I love you’, but they came out of his mouth as ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ when he inspected her ticket each day. The weekly ticket that, he knew, she bought from the ticket office at Michelhampton, from the lucky, lucky clerk there, who had the pleasure of the longer and more involved interaction associated with purchasing a ticket.
Still, gazing at the ticket, holding it when it was still warm from her own fair hands (that were sometimes encased in soft leather gloves, though not now that the season had progressed towards spring), was a thrill in itself. And then, when he’d completed his check, he could raise his eyes to hers, smile, and say those three words, and she’d nod and take the ticket from him, then turn and hurry onto the platform where the train was waiting. Once, she almost smiled back at him. Twice, she’d said thank you. And on another occasion, when she was a minute or so late, he’d held the train and ushered her onto it as she scurried through the station, her heels clip-clopping on the station’s tiled floor. He’d waved her away as she reached for her ticket, and she’d smiled for sure that time before wiping the back of her hand across her brow as she boarded the train as if to say phew! Thank goodness she’d made it, and all thanks to Ted!
He’d discovered her name a month or so after she’d begun commuting regularly. He knew the names of most regulars; certainly those who lived in Lynford or Berecombe, and many of those who lived in Coombe Regis. Michelhampton was larger, further off, and not a place he’d regularly visited himself, so he wasn’t as well acquainted with passengers who came from there. In the summer season, most of his passengers were holidaymakers and day-trippers, changing onto the branch line from the main line at Michelhampton.
He wasn’t proud of the way he discovered her name. It was a quiet Monday morning, and she was the only passenger alighting from the 8.42. He’d watched her from the door of the station as she walked up the lane towards the village. Then, on a whim, his next duties not being for thirty minutes when a goods train was due, he locked up the station and followed her, at a respectable distance, telling himself he needed to buy some bread and a chop for his dinner, and now was a good time to visit the village shops. She was a little way ahead of him, and he turned a corner only just in time to see the hem of her dress disappearing into the National Provincial Bank. Did she work there? Ted had to know. He removed his stationmaster’s peaked cap and followed her inside. Perhaps he could pretend he had some banking business to do, ask about opening a savings account or the like. He usually did his own banking at the Midland Bank, a little further up the High Street.
‘Hey, Annie! How was your weekend?’ Ted heard a girl cashier call out, as the object of his attention disappeared through a door marked Private. A supervisor came up behind the girl. ‘Now then, Muriel, attend to this gentleman. You can catch up on Miss Galbraith’s gossip during your lunch break.’
Ted suppressed a smile. So his angel’s name was Annie Galbraith. He stepped up to the counter and spoke to the cashier for a few moments about the interest rates available on savings accounts. He was furnished with a leaflet, and left, promising to think about it and return at a later date. He had no further glimpses of Annie, but it was enough. He knew her name. This evening when he checked her ticket, he could say to her, ‘Good evening, Miss Galbraith.’ If he could pluck up the courage to do so, that is.
Eventually, he did, but not until about a week later, when an unseasonably warm day had filled him with vigour, emboldening him just a little. He’d felt himself blush to the roots of his hair as he’d greeted her from the morning train, with a cheery, ‘Good morning, Miss Galbraith.’ She’d stared at him for a second, then recovered her manners and nodded an acknowledgement with a smile, before hurrying through the station as usual.
That smile. He treasured it. Every tiny, brief second it had been upon him.
*
Ted had been stationmaster at Lynford for fifteen years. He’d worked on the railway for eleven years before that – starting as a porter up the line at Rayne’s Cross when he left school aged 14, before being promoted to stationmaster aged 25, the youngest and proudest stationmaster in the whole of Southern Railway at that time. Then, he’d moved to Lynford, where a single building functioned as both station and stationmaster’s house. There was a ticket office where his Stationmaster Certificate hung proudly behind the counter, a ladies’ waiting room, ladies’ and gents’ water closets, a small sitting room, kitchen and scullery downstairs. Off the sitting room a narrow staircase rose, twisting back on itself to reach a tiny landing, which led to two small bedrooms. Ted slept in a single bed in the larger of the two, and used the other one for storage, though he cleared it out whenever his sister and her children came to visit. It was a small home, but adequate for his needs.
Behind the station was a goods yard – a siding ran off the main line and stopped inside a large shed. Here, the daily goods trains were shunted and the goods unloaded from wagons directly into trucks, to be delivered locally. Coal came once a week, and the other days brought various different commodities – groceries, goods for the various Lynford shops, occasional livestock bought at markets by local farmers. A larger station would have employed a dedicated goods yard manager, but here, it was Ted’s job to organise the goods yard, marshalling the trucks and carts as they turned up to deliver or collect goods, operating the hoist that was used to lift crates off wagons and onto trucks. He was aided in these activities by Fred Wilson, a skinny, sallow, surly lad of 18, who was officially employed as a porter, but in reality took on any job that needed doing, albeit usually with poor grace. ‘I’m supposed to be a porter,’ he’d grumble, when Ted called on him to help unload a goods wagon. ‘If I gets me uniform mussed up on the wagons, Ma will have me guts for garters. And that’ll be all down to you, Mr Morgan.’
‘Take your jacket off then, lad,’ Ted would reply, every time he heard this grumble. ‘And put on a set of overalls.’
‘They’re as mucky inside as the wagons are on the outside.’ And Ted would roll his eyes at the boy and get started himself on the task at hand. Fred would soon join in, still muttering but eventually getting the job done.
Every day the post came by rail, too, and Ted brought them into the ticket office, where the Lynford postman collected them for onward delivery. A bundle of morning newspapers arrived on the 07.42, and was left in the ticket office until the newsagent’s paperboy collected them on his bicycle with its enormous wicker basket balanced on the back.
There was always something that needed doing, from early morning till mid-evening, in and around the station and goods yard, and of course all of it had to fit around the arrival and departures of the dozen trains a day between Michelhampton and Coombe Regis. Some services were quiet, almost empty, in the winter months, but summer brought an influx of holidaymakers and day-trippers. Most went through to Coombe Regis, but some would stop off at Lynford for a few hours,