The sun was trying to force its way through the glass roof of the platform, making a greenhouse of the place. Next to Clive was a blackboard on which the stationmaster himself, Mr Knowles, had written, 'special train', it said, then came heaps of fancy underlinings, followed by 'Sunday 11th june, hind's mill whit excursion to blackpool'.

After writing it, Knowles had turned on his heel and walked off. He might have given me a nod; I couldn't say. I'd nodded back of course, just in case. I'd heard that Knowles had started at the Joint by redrawing all the red lines in all the booking-on ledgers so as to shorten the leeway for lateness, and there he was: marked down for ever as hard-natured. But I thought he was all right. He knew his job. If he wanted a word with the guard of a pick-up goods, he'd be waiting on the platform exactly where the van came to rest. If the brass bell wanted shining he knew it, and just where the nearest shammy was kept.

Clive called up, so I leant out the side and looked along the platform. The clock said just gone five after, and we were due off at nineteen past. We had eight flat-roofed rattlers on, one with luggage van and guard's compartment built in. Most of the excursionists were up by now, but a couple of pretty stragglers were coming along carrying between them a tin bathtub piled with blankets and food. 'You never do know when a tin of black treacle isn't going to come in,' said Clive, and there was one, rolling about on top of the bathtub goods. Clive always had an eye out for the damsels. In society you might have said he was a rare one for the fair sex. At Sowerby Bridge Shed, though, which was the shed for the Joint, they called him 'cunt struck', and I believe he was the only engine man there not married. He lived by himself in a village I didn't know the name of, and came into the shed every morning on his bike.