The Enginemen, Chapter 3 'James Peplow'

Glossary
Austerities – Freight locomotives built as cheaply and quickly as possible during the war to move essential armaments and other heavy freight.

American ‘Consolidations’ – USA built similar heavy freight locos shipped across the Atlantic destined for the European war zones, but used temporarily in the UK before being shipped across the channel.

Double-home – a roster which involved driver and fireman spending the night away from home and returning the next day.

Pannier tanks – a small 0-6-0 tank engine whose water tanks were secured over the boiler like a pannier on an animal. The former GWR built hundreds of them.

Diagram (Locomotive) – the planned work for a locomotive for a specified length of time, which the depot was meant to adhere to.

225psi – 225 pounds per square inch steam pressure – the maximum full pressure for a Castle’ class boiler.

‘K’ notice – a weekly published list of track engineering works which required speed restrictions that drivers were required to read daily when they signed on duty.

Chapter 3: James Humphrey Peplow

James Peplow lived alone. He had not always been so isolated, although during the final five years of his mother’s life he had been seemingly free of real human contact. His mother, Daisy, née Spencer, had married his father, Alfred, when she was already past her fortieth year, and James was born a year later. He was her only child. It had been a difficult birth and the doctor told her that it would be dangerous to conceive another. He was a spoiled child, his mother was very protective of him, she was nervous on his behalf. James caught this contagious disease, worried when others were carefree, did as he was told, lest worse befall him.

When he was a man, he was over anxious about his mother’s health, and she became a hypochondriac. At least, she was until her mind began to drift and she showed the early signs of Alzheimers. She would not be persuaded to go into a nursing home, she clung to him, she blackmailed him with her tears. So he hired a woman to come in each day he was on duty, but she came after he left for duty, and had to be gone before he returned. They communicated essential information about his mother’s drugs and disposition in short pencilled notes. She died when she was eighty. Father had long since gone. He was wounded at Ypres, and was sickly for a few years, expiring when James was fourteen, in 1924. Mother Daisy had taken in washing for the neighbours, did a little sewing to make ends meet.

Then, in the depth of the Depression her own father had died and left her, his only remaining relative, a tidy sum, sufficient to remove any financial worries. This came too late. She was set in her ways, she continued laundering and sewing all through the Second World War, she would not leave her terraced house in Kennington, although the bombs fell all around her. James stayed with her, he was then a fireman at Old Oak Common, a reserved occupation. He fired ‘Austerities’ and those American ‘Consolidations’ that spent a few months hauling ammunition trains from camouflaged factories in the West Country to Southampton Docks, ready for the Normandy landings.

After the war he was away more often, a top link fireman, on double-home jobs to Plymouth, Swansea and Chester. He wrestled with poor coal, run down locomotives, and even when he was not away the night, he would come home hours late, delayed by track blockages and failed locomotives. She worried for him more than in the war. He tried to tell her the reasons for his lateness but she did not understand. She would stand at the front door on the pavement and watch the homecoming men, waiting for James. She would not prepare the meal until she spied him. Then she would spend the evening apologising because his meal was late.

They had a proper bathroom installed in 1950. They did not need the small third bedroom which served as storeroom for Alfred’s old clothes and cricket almanacs which Daisy had never allowed James to sort through and throw away. He prevailed on her only when he returned each night filthy, coal dust seeping into every pore despite attempts at cleaning up at the depot when signing off. Even she recognised that the tin bath in front of the living room fire was inadequate, especially as she would make herself scarce in the cold sitting room or bedroom while James soaked away the dirt and aches. The storeroom was now what had once been the outside lavatory, the bathroom had been modernised once more in 1956 after Daisy’s death. James had inherited a substantial sum, as well as the house, as Daisy had spent so little, so the first thing he did was to get the bathroom redone, a large mirror covering one wall, a new bath, a proper bathroom carpet instead of that awful linoleum.

James had not married. He had never had a girlfriend. For the first few years after his father died, when he was a teenager, his mother made him feel guilty if he spent time out instead of keeping her company at home. They listened to the radio. They played simple card games, read books. On a Saturday he would watch cricket at the Oval if Surrey were playing at home, or go to Clapham Junction and watch trains instead. His mother made him sandwiches and he would buy a bottle of Tizer. He would be back in time for tea, sharp at six o’clock, he could not wait to see the end of the day’s cricket in case his meal grew cold and his mother scolded him. On a Sunday his mother made him attend the Sunday School at the Baptist chapel although she did not go to church herself. She thought it would teach him to be obedient. He gave up when his father died and she never made a fuss because it meant he stayed at home with her. He missed out on joining the thriving youth club where he’d have met plenty of girls. Instead he used to walk his mother on a Sunday afternoon down to the Thames and along the bank to Battersea Park. When he joined the railway, he would volunteer for Sunday duty whenever he could, he told his mother that he was needed.

He became a driver in 1951, when he was forty one years old. He spent hours preparing main line engines for other drivers to take over for the glamorous runs. He graduated to driving pannier tanks, shunting Acton Yard, or taking the pick-up freight to Park Royal, or Greenford, or West Ealing. He would spend days shuttling to and fro between the depot and Paddington station with empty carriages. Occasionally he would relieve foreign depot drivers at the terminus and bring their polished steeds, ‘Kings’ and ‘Castles’, back to the shed for cleaning out the fires and filling the water tanks before returning them to Paddington again, ready for their next foray to Plymouth or Swansea. Sometimes he would spend all day sitting on a ‘Castle’ at Ranelagh Bridge in case a foreign engine needed replacing for a return leg of its diagram. He could not relax, his engine had to be ready to go with little notice, so the fire had to be kept live and free from clinker, the boiler filled with water, steam pressure needle near the magic 225psi mark.

These were regular turns, eight hour shifts, no overtime. He did not need the extra money, but he did need the ability to forecast his shifts as his mother’s health began to deteriorate. At first he would just find her sitting on the doorstep looking for him whenever he returned home. She would say nothing, look at him blankly.

One day a neighbour said, “Do you realise your mother spends hours waiting for you on that doorstep? Sometimes she sits there ten minutes after you leave the house and stays there the rest of the day. She even brings her lunch to the door and eats it, her eyes never stop searching for you.”

James was aghast and from that time he hired a carer to see to his mother’s needs while he was at work. He grew confident that the young woman could be relied on to cover the basics. He began to offer her extra hours occasionally so that he could go out. Sometimes he would go for long solitary walks to ease the frustration of what he considered to be his captivity. They used to listen to music on the radio, his mother thought it was ‘posh’ music, although James knew it was only the more popular classics. Now he could bring long-playing records back from the library, he began to experiment. It did not matter now whether his mother liked it or not, she seemed indifferent to anything he did. He bought tickets to the Festival Hall and listened to live music. He found he liked modern music, the rhythms and discords of Stravinsky and Shostakovich. He once told his fireman, a youngster who had been more conversational with him than his usual more taciturn mates. It was in vain, the young man thought Shostakovich was a more sophisticated swear word.

On his Rest Days, he walked along to the cricket, sat often in solitary silence in one of the lesser stands mid-week. Then Surrey began to win matches, won the County Championship. More people came, watched Bedser, Lock and Laker, Peter May. Still he kept his own company in the crowd, satisfied that he was out of the house, was free for a few hours before duty called once more. In the evenings he would try to read, but his mother was restless, he needed to watch her and constantly heed some small insistent querulous moan, often lacking any sense. He began to read newspapers instead of books, as he could interrupt his train of thought more easily. He would bring two or three papers home, he began to do their crosswords, read the business pages, looked at the stocks and shares. He invested a little of his nest-egg, not too much you understand, he was risk-averse. But he could watch daily his little group of shares rise and fall in value, it was absorbing, it became an essential element of his daily round, although he had more than enough for all his thrifty needs. Then he was moved up to the next senior link, driving long distance freight and parcels trains, the occasional passenger stopping train to Reading or Oxford. His mother was really not his mother any more, an empty shell requiring constant but anonymous attention.

He progressed to No.3 link, the mainline passenger turns. He was hardly ever in. The carer began to complain that she had a life to lead, she was not prepared to spend all her waking hours looking after a woman with whom she could have no discourse. James solved this problem by hiring a second carer. Because they were bored, he accepted their offer to do some household cleaning, some laundry. They were pleased, James was quite generous as long as he was free to pursue his own fancies. He began to be obsessive about his own fitness. He was concerned that he might put on weight now that the daily vigorous exercise of firing was no longer his responsibility, so he began running along the embankment to the Festival of Britain site on the South Bank by Hungerford Bridge or the other way towards the Battersea Festival Park. Sometimes he ran before breakfast if he was on late turn. On other occasions he was home by mid afternoon and ran in the gathering dusk, side-stepping homegoing commuters scurrying on their way to Waterloo station.

Then Daisy died. He was upset at first, felt guilty that he had given her so little of his time, resented the amount he had bestowed her. He paid for the best coffin, an extravagant wreath of lilies to rest upon the bier, but there were few mourners. The two carers came, a distant cousin he’d not been in touch with for twenty years. He thought of asking the Minister from the Baptist chapel he’d attended as a boy. Then put it out of his mind, it was ridiculous, it was over thirty years since he’d been there, his mother had never entered the building except for the annual nativity play when he’d performed. So the local vicar presided, mumbled a few words in eulogy gleaned sparsely from James, who was hard put to think of any interesting things to say about his mother. Probably the two carers knew as much as he.

He paid the two women off. They offered to continue the cleaning and laundry, but he refused. The house was now his private domain. He took a week’s leave - he was owed weeks of outstanding leave by the company, which he’d never bothered to demand - and cleared out all her clothes. She had few other belongings, but those she had were disposed of also. He gave the carers the pick, then the Salvation Army collected the remainder. He bought himself a modern expensive music centre and over twenty long-playing records of his favourite classical pieces. He moved out her old bed and installed himself in the main bedroom, using his old room as study, library, escape from the demands of daily routine. He was extremely tidy, no day went past before everything was dusted, put back in order if he’d selected a book or played a couple of records. He made a habit of eating in the canteen at Old Oak whenever he could, cooking simple meals at home when necessary. He did not eat in restaurants.

He took a holiday for the first time in ten years. He spent a week hillwalking in Cumberland, Scafell Pike, the Gables, round deep dark depressing Wastwater. He went out of season, so he only saw other lone walkers like himself. They nodded, acknowledged one another, but avoided deeper contact.

Then Philip Doig had come on the scene and from this time on he was to be partner to his own locomotive, ‘Raglan Castle’. He rose early, waking long before his alarm rang out. He went into the bathroom, bathed, dried himself and wiped the condensation from the mirror which occupied one wall and magnified the size of the small room to twice its size. He stared at his naked body. For a fifty year old he thought he was still in reasonable shape. He had no paunch, he was not a beer drinker like so many of his colleague drivers, and he now took exercise every day. He had purchased a set of bathroom scales and weighed himself religiously each day. If he exceeded his regular 11st 12lbs, even by a single pound, he punished himself by forcing himself to jog an extra mile, irrespective of the weather. He extracted the cut-throat razor from its container, sharpened it noisily on the coarse razor strop which hung upon the bathroom door, lathered well, and shaved the stubble from his cheeks, chin, upper lip and neck and adam’s apple. Then he flicked at a few hairs growing from his chest. He hated body hair except in the proper places. He prided himself on the smoothness of his body, despite his manual occupation, only his calloused hands bore witness to his twenty years of shovelling coal. He was different to his colleagues, not vulgar like many of them with their swarthy overmuscled bodies, tattoos on arms and flanks and buttocks that he’d observed with disgust in the depot locker room.

He packed a small bag with sandwiches, a flask of coffee - he objected to the unhygienic custom of brewing tea in a billy can balanced on the shelf above the firebox door with sizzling water from the hosepipe straight from the engine’s boiler. He added a clean shirt and underpants, pyjamas, for the 7.55 Paddington turn meant an overnight stay in Swansea, one of several lodging turns in this new roster. He selected the appropriate Working Timetables for the Paddington - Didcot, Didcot - Severn Tunnel Junction, and the final section on to Swansea, and the sheet of paper on which he had written in biro the passing and station times of the train he was to drive.

It was still dark when he walked briskly to Oval tube station to catch the first Northern Line train to Waterloo where he changed to the Bakerloo Line, as far as Willesden Junction. With the first light now beginning to glow behind him, he turned into the gates at the head of the driveway into the depot and began the familiar descent into the cauldron of locomotives being made ready for the day’s activities. Smoke rose from several of the cowls on the shed roof, fudging the purity of dawn. James strode directly to the lobby window, signed on, checked the notice board for any last minute additions to the ‘K’ notice he’d already studied, which had published planned temporary speed restrictions required for track repairs. He then made his way to 5008, which was in the mainline roundhouse, smoke drifting strongly from the double-blastpipe, as the loco had been prepared for him by a junior driver. His mate was nowhere to be seen, he thought, he should be already on the engine, tending the fire, hosing and sweeping the footplate.

He stood by the shed door and stared at his engine, bathed in the soft morning light. The copper cap to the chimney gleamed, the brass safety valve cover and the beading over the splashers were burnished, the nameplate and cabside brass numberplate were spotless. She looked magnificent. For better, or for worse, he’d made his choice. She was his.