The Somme Stations Read Online Free

two blokes who looked like gypsies – dark, and long-haired; they were railwaymen, but dressed anyhow, in oldcorduroy suits. That was one privilege of the permanent way men; another was that they could enter a station by walking on the tracks. There weren’t too many besides those.
    I walked through the ticket gate, with hands in pockets. It was something to be able to saunter in and out of the principal traffic centre of the North without needing a ticket; it was something to be a three pound ten a week man set fair for promotion to inspector. It was something, but not enough. I had been growing bored, and the thought of fighting in a war excited as well as scared me. For much of the past few years, I had lived a quiet life under the iron station arches, like Jonah sleeping in the belly of the whale.
    I crossed in front of the bookstall. ‘A Railway Battalion’ I read, on the board advertising that day’s Press . I walked through the booking hall, with the ticket windows on each side. The glass above was cleaner here, there being no engines, and the light was bright blue. This was the clean side of the station – and filled at all times with the echoing voices of the ticket clerks, who had to shout through the ‘pigeon holes’ in the window glass.
    ‘First Class return?’ I heard a clerk calling out to a man in a dinty bowler. ‘That’ll be four pounds ten and six!’
    Dinty bowler turned his head aside, thinking it over.
    ‘Maybe not, eh?’ the ticket clerk yelled through the glass.
    Beyond him, in the hot darkness of the booking office, I saw the ticket office deputy superintendent. I saw him in profile. He was not shouting, but smoking a pipe and staring into the middle distance. He was of an age with me but looked older; a little overweight, freckled, with wavy red hair – and quiet natured, evidently something of an intellect. He’d once said something about Homer, the ancient Greek, and so the ticket clerks all called him ‘Oamer’. I couldn’t recall his right name. Would he be going off to fight? He was the wrong shape for a soldier, and that was fact.
    I walked on towards the booking hall doors, which were all propped open for ventilation. Beyond lay the rushing trams and cabs and the high, blue sky of York. I made for the middle doors, and there I coincided with the Chief, who was coming in, but before I could speak to him, the station runner came up. The runners were generally just ‘The Lad’, but the better – or better liked – ones would graduate to a name, and this one was William, and was famed for the speed with which he charged about the place. He handed the Chief an envelope, and the Chief hardly looked at it, but asked William, ‘You’ve seen about the battalion?’
    ‘Signed up this morning, sir,’ said William, and he was out through the doors. The Chief and William, I recalled, had a special connection, William being in the Riflemen’s League, and an enthusiast for military matters generally, as you could tell by his highly polished brass buttons and his keenness on calling blokes ‘Sir’.
    ‘Isn’t he too young?’ I asked the Chief.
    ‘How old is he?’ asked the Chief, in a sort of daze.
    ‘I believe he’s seventeen,’ I said.
    The Chief now glanced down at the envelope he’d been handed. He seemed miles away, as he frequently did.
    ‘They’ll ask William his age,’ said Chief, tearing open the envelope. ‘If he says he’s seventeen … they’ll ask him again.’
    ‘But what about his height?’ I said.
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘He’s too small. He’s never five foot three.’
    ‘How do you know?’ said the Chief, looking over the letter. ‘Have you fucking measured him?’ he added, looking up. Which question was immediately followed by another: ‘Can you ride a horse?’
    ‘Who? Me?’ I said.
    ‘Aye,’ said the Chief, thoughtful-like, reading again.
    What in buggeration was he on about?
    ‘I’m signing up for the new battalion,’ I said,