Free Days of Your Fathers by Geoffrey Household Page B

his oily rag and wiped his face with it.
    That was the detonator in the wagon of gelignite. It exploded. All the worry about fathers and brothers and sweethearts on strike, all the year spent behind counters controlling their natural instincts to be rude to customers who were rude to them, all was released in one blast of females over that fireman. Before we could get up to the rescue they had dragged him into a compartment. They were screaming with rage. I suppose the only people who hear that sound are the officials of a women’s prison. Therewas no doubt that the fireman would be for it if we couldn’t pull him out.
    It was no good calling for police; there weren’t any. We dived under the train and opened the door which gave on to the tracks. The fireman’s legs were poking out from cascades of loosened hair and still waving feebly. We took a leg each and heaved, and he came out leaving his jacket and shirt behind. On our rush to the engine his trousers dropped off him – not round his ankles, I mean, but vanished, disintegrated.
    When we were all safely on the footplate, Jimmy opened up his steam screen to throw off the pursuit and we started. This time there was no bluff for them to call. They appreciated that we were running for our lives and didn’t care how many of them were left behind. So far as I could see, they all managed to come aboard. I wiped the worst of the bloodstains and muck off the fireman and dressed him in Jimmy’s spare overalls. He had only lost shreds of skin from his scalp and all his members were present and correct. He gibbered a bit, as was not unnatural, and kept grabbing at me.
    â€˜I’m not stopping till we get to police,’ said Jimmy, setting his jaw.
    I agreed with him. Anything was better than loosing our four hysterical coachloads into a London unprotected.
    Jimmy had the County of London pounding along at a steady forty. It was risky but we had the mainline to ourselves and could see a mile ahead. Maidenhead had held us up quarter of an hour longer than was necessary. All went well till we were just outside Ealing. There our faithful engine took a horrible lurch to starboard and nearly flung us off the footplate. By the time Jimmy had jammed on the brakes and cut the speed down to ten miles an hour, we were careering through a goods yard surrounded by acres and acres of trucks. We could now hear the turmoil in the coach next to the engine. Somewhere they were still singing songs; somewhere they were shrieking with alarm; somewhere they were yelling foul abuse at the driver and his mates.
    Our line was clear. Lord knows for what mysterious traffic the points had been set. Once we were in a cutting between houses where the rails were rusty with disuse and once running alongside a racecourse of District lines, all of them electrified. The County of London was bouncing like a dinghy in a tide-rip. She squealed, rocking round switch-back curves. I could see that Jimmy was in agony, for he loved that locomotive and the driving of it, but a look at the fireman was enough to keep us going.
    We must have been dodging through the inner suburbs for a good ten minutes when we staggered over an incredible cluster of points and saw a deserted station ahead of us.
    â€˜Royal Oak?’ Jimmy asked, as if he had just sighted the coast of America.
    â€˜Must be,’ I answered confidently.
    Of course that was absurd. When you are running into Paddington on a fast express Ealing and Royal Oak go by in two flashes; but we hadn’t the faintest notion where we were, and it never occurred to us that we had left the Great Western system altogether for outer space. We decided that we had merely taken a very roundabout route to Royal Oak and we blessed that route since Paddington and whole posses of police could be only two minutes away.
    Jimmy opened her out a little, and it was then that we saw a modest notice of EARL’S COURT and the mouth of the east-bound