The Baghdad Railway Club (2 page)

Aleppo – which I’d never heard of either – turned out to be in ‘Upper Syria’. One part of the Berlin–Baghdad railway came down – rather shakily – from Turkey and went there. It then drifted right towards this place Nusaybin, which was in ‘Upper Mesopotamia’. The other part crawled up from Baghdad towards a spot called Samarrah, petering out somewhere between there and a spot called Tikrit. Both Samarrah and Tikrit sat on another, more wriggly hand-drawn line signifying the River Tigris. Baghdad itself was on that river, as were the only places marked on the map as being
south
of Baghdad, namely Kut-al-Amara and Basrah.

Downes, having regained his seat, watched as we passed the map amongst ourselves. ‘The labour on the Nusaybin stretch’, he said, ‘is supplied by British prisoners of war, taken after the fall of Kut, then force-marched north.’ Again he eyed us individually, as though asking each man: ‘You can see that I’m crocked. But what are
you
going to do about it?’

The fellow who’d said he hadn’t heard of Aleppo – and who had the map in his hand just then – spoke up again.

‘But hold on, chap,’ he said, ‘you’re being too depressing. Don’t you read the papers? Townshend’s gone. Maude’s the chap now, and the War Office is giving him everything he wants. Part of his army’s outside Kut as we speak. He’s already nibbling at the Turks, and the big push up from Basrah is bound to come soon, then we’ll be into Baghdad and running the whole show in Mespot.’ He flicked the back of his hand against the pessimistic map, making a sharp crack that threatened to tear it.

The name of Kut was just then in all the newspapers, as it had been nearly a year before. On that previous occasion, our forces under General Townshend had been besieged there, and had finally surrendered, not that any such word had appeared in print. Instead there had been talk of ‘the end of a heroic defence’ or ‘the conclusion of a siege’. Now we seemed likely to have our revenge, and Kut, gateway to Baghdad, would soon fall.

‘If we take Baghdad . . . where does all this leave the Berlin–Baghdad railway?’ It was the inquisitive kid in the muffler who spoke (and he still wore the muffler, too).

‘Up the pole!’ said the bluff man. ‘It’ll be the
British
–Baghdad Railway!’

He was pleased with that, and he looked round at us all.

‘Tell that to the British prisoners blasting tunnels in the Anatolian mountains,’ said Downes, and the bluff fellow scowled.

. . . And he did not clap when Short rose to his feet to give the vote of thanks to the speaker, and to say that next week’s talk would be on ‘Byways of Bradshaw – some curiosities of the railway timetable’. The War Relief collection was taken, and the audience filed out. But not the quiet man who’d given me the cigarette. He was talking to Downes, who at first was standing, painfully, with his stick, but the other politely urged him to sit down. It seemed that, in his quiet way, he had a good deal to say.

I trooped down the stairs behind Short and his friend in the muffler, who said, ‘Shouldn’t all that have come under Official Secrets? It was a bit near-the-knuckle, anyhow. And did you hear that fellow sticking up for Johnny Turk? I suppose they “didn’t have any choice” about giving our boys what for in Gallipoli?’

‘Apparently’, said Short, ‘Mr Hayward does a very good skit about a rather dim fellow who comes up to London from the country, and buys a ticket for the Central Line on the Underground. He says to the clerk, “But there’s no destination stated.” “That’s correct,” says the clerk, “all our tickets are alike.” “But how,” says the rather dim fellow, “will I—”’

‘“. . . Will I know where I’m going?”’ put in the younger man. ‘It’s an old joke.’

And he was still scowling.

In our third-floor room at the Midland Grand Hotel, the wife was looking down at the carpet with arms folded in disapproval.

‘You’d have thought it would be a
fitted
carpet,’ she said, kicking away at the end of it.

I ought to have known that, given the chance to have a holiday in one of London’s premier hotels at someone else’s expense, she’d object. She was a snob like Dad – the trouble was, she was snobbish about his snobbery.

‘I think the rooms above have only got linoleum,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s no comfort to me,’ said the wife. She walked over to the window, and pulled back the curtain. ‘And what’s
that
?’ she said, looking down.

‘The Midland Road goods yard,’ I said. I’d been watching it myself from the window a moment before. Assorted lights burned down there: orange-glowing braziers, the red and green lamps of low signals. The pilot engine had been nudging a rake of twenty empty coal wagons, as though positioning them to the very inch, and the great gouts of steam that had come rolling up through the blackness had seemed to signify the tremendous
brainwork
involved rather than the mechanical effort.

‘Well we’ve got an excellent view of it,’ said the wife. ‘I suppose they’ll be shunting all night?’

It was difficult to think of an answer to that, apart from ‘Yes’.

It was a good room, I thought: the wallpaper was the colour of a sweet wrapper: red and green stripes, nicely offset by the black wrought-iron fireplace, where a strong fire burned.

‘What was the talk like?’ I enquired, for the wife had gone to a talk as well, on what we had decided would be the ‘cheap night’ of the three we were to spend in London.

‘It was called “Problems of the War”. And it was extremely rambling – went on for two hours.’

She looked harder through the window. ‘I believe they’re just moving those wagons about for the sake of it. The problem of the war’, she said, sitting down on the bed with a sigh, ‘is the
war
.’

The talk she’d attended had been given by some London sub-division of the Co-Operative Society. She worked for the Co-Operative Women’s Guild in York, and the movement generally was pushing for a scheme of food rationing. Since the Co-Operative stores did not make a profit (but redistributed income to their members), they could afford to come out against profiteering and unequal distribution of food. But the wife found the whole matter ‘a great bore’, and had admitted as much to me.

The complications of war politics had drained away some of her radical energy. She was still part of the push for women’s suffrage, but her particular group had dropped most of their campaigning for the duration. She might go either way – towards the all-out anti-war camp of the Independent Labour Party, or into the bloody Conservative Party for all I knew. Certainly she was coaching up our boy, Harry, for the best of the York grammar schools; she’d been overjoyed when I’d received my commission, and when we’d booked into the hotel, and the clerk had said, ‘Mr Stringer, is it?’ she’d cut in, saying, ‘
Captain
. . . Captain Stringer.’

She was now stretched out on the bed with her book. She was reading
Little Women
, and not for the first time. It was her protest book. If I saw it in her hand – it or
The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw
– then I knew I was in for the silent treatment. She was boycotting love-making – this ever since I’d been to the medical board and received the option of rejoining my unit in France or going for a four-month spell of officer training at a pleasant-sounding place in the countryside (for it seemed I could either
learn
how to be an officer, or just go off and
be
one). I had opted for the front.

‘You don’t want people to think I’m a shirker, do you?’ I’d said, to which the reply had come, ‘You’ve done your bit, Jim. You’ve got half a hundredweight of metal in your leg.’

From the Midland Road goods yard came a repeated rapid clanging, and the pilot engine gave three shrieks of its whistle, as though in panic.

‘Let’s go for a drink,’ I said.

‘Where?’ said the wife, not looking up from
Little Women
.

‘Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s about a dozen bars downstairs.’

‘There
are
. There
are
about a dozen . . . And don’t call them bars.’

But she’d put down her book.

She got up and I watched her change her dress. When she’d finished, she said, ‘I’m not drinking alcohol, you know.’

We went out of the room, along the corridor a little way and came to the great wide curving staircase. There were lifts at the Midland Grand, but the staircase was the big draw. It seemed to come down from the heavens, for the ceiling of the stairwell above was painted pale blue and decorated with gold stars. The balustrades were all fancy ironwork. Electric chandeliers swung over our heads as we descended past plaster carvings and assorted artworks. The hotel was like a cathedral in the days when they were still painted – a cathedral with electric light and giant steam radiators. Half the guests seemed to be treading the staircase and looking about in wonder, for nobody
talked
on the staircase. You got the idea that having descended, people turned about and ascended again, just for the thrill of it. About half the men on the staircase were in uniform, and most were with women. A fellow captain came towards me, and we smiled. The captain’s wife looked at my wife’s dress and vice versa. As we crossed with the other couple, the wife put her arm in mine – which meant that her dress had beaten her opponent’s.

Piano music floated up from . . . was it the coffee lounge, or the men’s smoking room, or the women’s?

‘There’s a man in the billiard room’, I said, ‘who’s paid to chalk up the scores. He’s called Bartlett. He was in France himself and he stopped something at Loos.
He
has a lot of metal in him as well, and he says he gets a terrible pain whenever it’s foggy.’

‘How do you know?’

‘How do I know what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know . . . That he’s called Mr Bartlett.’

‘Because he introduces himself to the players before the game. If he just started chalking up your scores
without
introducing himself that would be rude.’

‘Is that all he does?’

‘He also puts up the war news in the Mahogany Room.’

‘Then let’s not go there.’

We were just then coming around the final bend in the staircase so that the whole ground floor came into view, which was a series of islands, each one with its potted palm, a cluster of chairs . . . or perhaps just a small palm on a stand next to a single man in an armchair. Almost anything you could do in any of the lounges – smoke, drink, eat, read the paper – you could also do out here, on public show. As we stepped off the staircase, a man in uniform, unaccompanied by a woman, stepped on to it – a dark, pleasant-looking, modest sort of chap with a cigarette held in long fingers and a rolled-up magazine under his arm. He gave the quickest of glances to the wife, but not to me, and only when he’d gone past did I identify him – and this by the particular tang of the cigarette smoke trailing behind him. It was the fellow from the Railway Club talk: the man who’d seemed to have a soft spot for Johnny Turk.

I turned around, but he gave no glance back.

On the ground floor, we drifted over towards the dining room and I read the menu mounted on the stand outside. The wife looked it over, and it was all a matter of ‘potages’, ‘poissons’, ‘relevés’, all in French. But then a man in a tail-coat blocked our view of it: ‘Will you be joining us‚ sir? Madam?’

‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘we’ve already eaten.’

I didn’t let on that we’d had steak and onions on the Euston Road, but the man smiled in such a way as to suggest that he knew anyway.

‘You should have said, “No thanks, we’ve already
banqueted
,”’ said the wife, as we drifted off.

We went into one of the coffee lounges, where I told the wife she
would
be drinking alcohol, and ordered, at a cost of nine shillings, what turned out to be only a half bottle of champagne.

‘I thought the price was a bit too reasonable,’ said the wife, when it arrived on its tray, looking rather small – not that she took more than half a glass herself, but it was enough to get her started on a bit of York gossip.

‘You know that Mrs Knight-Squires is working as a tram driver?’

‘No, I did not.’

I
did
know that Mrs Knight-Squires was a patron of the Co-Operative Society, even if she was too grand ever to shop at a Co-Operative store, and altogether the most unlikely socialist imaginable. I also knew that the York Council Transport Committee had been hoping to train up women to replace the men who’d gone off to France.

‘She passed a test, and they put her on directly. The number nine, you know, so she’s up and down the Hull Road all day.’

‘Lot of pubs on that route,’ I said, ‘pretty low ones as well.’

The wife nodded, took a quick sip of champagne.

‘Doesn’t bother her in the slightest.’

‘But how does she cope with all the drunks?’

‘Well of course, she has a big strong conductor to deal with
them
,’ said the wife, ‘. . . her good friend Mrs Gwendolyn Richards.’

She burst out laughing, and looked all around the coffee lounge; then she burst out laughing again, at the end of which she was rather red. After our drink, we took another turn through the entrance hall, and the islands of seats were more populated now.

‘Shall we go back up?’ said the wife, which was a promising remark.

We closed once again on the foot of the staircase, and I noticed a strange little set-up that didn’t seem to have been there before. It was a wooden replica of an Arab’s tent, or something of the kind. It was brightly coloured, with a fairground look to it, and a dome on the top that finished in a point. The signs announced ‘Cigarettes from the East’, and ‘Coffee from the East’. A man stood inside the wooden tent. He wore a stripy tunic shirt that came down to his knees, with perfectly normal trousers and boots beneath. He was quite dark-skinned. Well, he was ‘from the East’ (I supposed).

‘Coffee?’ he said, ‘cigarettes . . . from the Biblical lands?’

I was about to decline, but he pressed the matter.

‘For after dinner, perhaps? I trust you are enjoying your stay, sir?’