The women are the most embarrassed by the ensuing silence. The mother sends Patsy to the buffet bar to buy a chocolate biscuit with her new coin, and in a low voice the teacher asks the mother the sex of her little child. The mother, also in a low voice, explains that she thinks there is too much sex nowadays, that her mother never mentioned it, that Patsy will make up her own mind as soon as he’s old enough to choose. The teacher nods approvingly, but says in her experience children are grateful for a little guidance. The mother disagrees; says that all a child should learn from its parents is proper manners; says at least Patsy won’t turn into one of these dreadful women’s lib ladies — or a teddy boy. The old man surprises them by saying suddenly,
“A cat.”
“What’s that Dad?” asks his daughter.
“Teddy boys were forties,” he explains, “Beatniks fifties. Hippies sixties. Mods and rockers seventies. Punks eighties. And now they call themselves cool cats.”
“Are you sure?” asks the teacher, “There have been so many strange names for young people — skinheads, bobby-soxers, flappers, knuts, mashers and macaronis — that I’ve started thinking of them as youths. The police reports always call them youths.”
“And quite right too!” mutters Mr Dear, and would say more but again the musical warbling introduces the firm friendly voice.
“Good day good people — Captain Rogers here. We are making excellent time. On our left we are flashing past the reforested bings of the outer Bundlon slag depot, on our right are the soya fields of the British Golliwog Jam Corporation. I regret that a special stock-market news flash has obliged us to raise the price of coffee to two point forty pounds a cup—” (the passengers’ cries of rage and disgust drown the announcement for a while) “—biscuits are expected to remain stable at least as far as Shloo. Passengers with an interest in transport will not need to be told that today is a special one for British Rail. In one and a half minutes it will be precisely the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the exact moment when Isambard Kingdom Brunei—” (“Brunei!” gasps the teacher) “— tapped the last ceremonial rivet into the Grand Albert Royal Pennine Suspension Bridge: the first broad-gauge box-girder suspension bridge in the history of engineering. To honour the occasion we will now play you The Railways of Old England, orchestrated and sung by Sir Noël Coward. Through the length and breadth of Britain, in trains trundling through the lonely Pass of Killiecrankie or thundering across the Stockport viaduct, passengers are rising to their feet to hear Noël Coward sing The Railways of Old England.”
There is a preliminary rolling of drums with a sombre yet challenging blast of trumpets. Mr Dear, Mrs Dear and the teacher rise to their feet and the mother seems about to do so when the old man hisses, “Miriam! Patsy! Stay exactly where you are.”
“Excuse me sir,” cries Mr Dear, “Are you not going to stand?”
“No I am NOT!”
“Oh please sh dear!” whispers Mrs Dear to her husband who cries, “Shut up dear, I will not sh! You sir, I gather are one of those left-wing militant extremists who yearn for a discredited Bolshevik railway system. Well the British railway system has no harsher critic than myself. I was sorry when they nationalized it, saddened when they axed off the branch lines and appalled by how long the government took to restore it to a responsible private company. But despite its grisly past our rail system was built by a combination of Irish brawn, Scottish engineering and English financial daring which made us once the foremost steam railway empire in the universe. Does this mean nothing to you?”
“Don’t talk to me about British Rail!” yells the old man over Noël Coward’s brittle patriotic tenor, “I worked all my life for British Rail. I was a fireman from the old LMS days to when they brought in bloody diesel! British Rail was destroyed by people like you — bloody accountants and lawyers and retired admirals on the board of directors—”
“That’s ludicrous!” cries Mr Dear, and “Stop it Dad!” cries the old man’s daughter, but nothing stops the flood of his articulate wrath: “—when they nationalized us the government said ‘British Rail belongs to the people now’ but who did we get on the new board of directors? Linesmen? Footplate men? Station-masters? Did we hell! We got the same old gang — stockbrokers, lieutenant colonels, civil servants with posh accents, the gang that eventually sold us out to the car manufacturers, the building societies and the oil corporations!”
“I am not listening to you!!” cries Mr Dear.
“I never thought you would,” says the old man chuckling and picking up his paper again. The music has stopped. The others sit down, Mr Dear looking as if he would prefer to do something more violent. There is another embarrassing silence, then the teacher slips across the aisle to Patsy’s seat and tells the old man quietly, “I was to a large extent entirely on your side in that little exchange, even though I stood up. I like the tune you see, and old habits die hard. But the title was inaccurate. Our railways are British, not English.”
She slips back to her seat as Patsy approaches shouting, “Mum Mum Mum!”
Patsy, terribly excited, is closely followed by a tall, lean, mildly amused looking man who says, “Good day good people! Does this small person belong to any of you?”
“Patsy,” says the mother, “Where have you been?”
“Wandering far too near the engine for anyone’s good,” says the stranger.
“How very naughty of you, Patsy. Thank the nice man for bringing you back.”
“But Mum!” says the child excitedly bumping its bottom up and down on the seat, “Nobody’s driving this train! The driver’s cabin’s empty! I looked inside!”
Mrs Dear gives a little gasp of horror. The mother says severely, “Patsy, that’s not a very nice thing to say, not with that bad rail accident in America last week. Apologize at once.”
“But Mum, it really was empty!”
“Dear, I’m terribly worried,” Mrs Dear tells her husband who says, “Don’t be stupid dear, the kid’s obviously gone the wrong way and blundered into the guard’s van.”
The teacher points out that the stranger said he found Patsy near the engine, but “The child knows nothing about mechanics!” declares Mr Dear, “Hardly anyone knows anything about mechanics nowadays. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that modern trains are driven from an obscure cabin somewhere in the middle.”
“And it wouldn’t surprise me!” cries the old man violently, “To learn that British Rail has sacked all its drivers and never told the public a word about it!”
The women gasp in horror, Mr Dear snorts, the stranger laughs and tries to speak, but the old man talks him down: “You needed a driver in the days of steam — two of them counting the fireman — tough men! Strong men who knew the engine and could clean it themselves, and grasped every valve and stop-cock like it was the hand of a friend! Men who felt the gradient through the soles of their boots and heard the pressure in the thrusts of the piston. But nowadays! Nowadays it wouldn’t surprise me if the driver of this so-called train wasn’t lying back with a glass of brandy in a London club, watching us on a computer screen and half sloshed out of his upper-class over-educated skull!”
“You’re wrong and I can prove it,” says the stranger. They stare at him.
At first sight there is nothing unusual in this man whose modest smile seems to apologize for his slightly taller than average height. The large pockets, the discreet epaulets of his well-cut, dove-grey jacket would look equally inconspicuous in a cinema queue or an officers’ mess, yet he faces the six pairs of enquiring eyes with a relaxed and flawless confidence which so acts upon two of the women that they sigh with relief.