Free Days of Your Fathers by Geoffrey Household Page A

with the luxurious figure of a roly-poly angel sitting on a cloud, but the face, I tell you, of an ageless mule. Lord, how she must have despised men! Unaccountably cold and conceited she must have thought us.
    Led by Rhoda, those sales ladies cleaned up the station.They formed into clusters and played ring-a-ring-a-roses around every defenceless man on the platform until the whole lot had sheepishly taken refuge in the ticket office. They didn’t run, you understand; they just drifted away on business and found that business, as it might be accidentally, behind a door that could be locked. You know the feeling of being followed through a field by a large herd of trotting bullocks. You don’t run away, but you do climb the nearest gate rather than the farthest.
    Jimmy and the fireman took refuge in noise and fog, making the County of London spout steam from its private parts. I can’t tell you the mechanics of the process, but he caused it to throb and rejoice in its strength, pawing the lines and crying ‘Hah’ like the war-horse in Job. The girlies kept at a respectful distance. As for me, I climbed down to the track and watched through the intervals between the coaches. Whenever I caught a predatory female eye I started to tap at the wheels with a hammer. They left me alone feeling, I suppose, that I knew what I was doing and that it was necessary to their journey.
    Up to this point it had been all clean fun. Men do, after all, arouse a certain pity in the female breast along with the contempt. Since they so obviously had the upper hand they would have been quite content to treat us with good-humoured scorn if an official of their own sex had not interfered. She was the amateur ticket-office clerk, and I imagine she had been calling those male colleagues who kept drifting into the office on improbable excuses a bunch of incompetent cowards. At any rate she was a woman of character and she was having no nonsense on her station. She marched out to deal with this impertinent excursion and began to round up the girlies with all the efficiency of a games mistress in her playing field. At that I began to tap my wheels more industriously than ever. When I thought it safe to look up again, Rhoda had crowned her with a fire-bucket and she was quietly crying in a puddle of water. The girlies paid no further attention to her. They were busy smashing the slot machines and helping themselves to chocolate.
    This was going too far. I shouted ‘All aboard!’ waved my flag and blew a blast on the whistle. The line was not clear, but Jimmy caught on and put up a convincing show of a train just about to leave. The great driving wheels began to move and the artificial fog was shattered by one colossal whoosh of steam.
    They were just piling into the compartments when Rhoda spoiled the picture.
    â€˜You stay there, mister,’ she carolled. ‘We’ll get in when we’re bloody well ready.’
    That called our bluff of course. We couldn’t start without them – or rather it had not yet occurred to us that we could.
    It was then that our fireman lost his temper. His disdain for Jimmy and myself had been growing; after all he had been shooed away from doors by busy housewives throughout the suburbs whereas Jimmy had only to overawe a cheerful gang of black railwaymen. He got down from the footplate and walked along the platform, wiping his hands on a sodden yard of oily cotton waste. A horrid weapon against best frocks in a rough-and-tumble.
    â€˜Get on in, you silly bitches!’ he roared.
    His cave-man stuff damn near worked. The girlies were so startled that they began to get into the train. His silk stockings had taught him one of the elementary facts about women.
    â€˜Come on, Ma!’ he ordered Rhoda, who was rather hesitantly standing her ground.
    She was only about nineteen and that ‘Ma’ infuriated her. It struck her right on the secret sore of her spirit. She snatched