All Hello’s Night

Harold Benjimin Harrigan was a loner. He had been a loner all his life. At school, he had merged into the background but did well enough to apply for a few good jobs. He wasn’t a handyman but had one redeeming skill that set him apart. It was the inability to become bored with repetition.

He landed a job with the London City Council. It was probably because nobody else was interested in being in charge of the public toilet maintenance, mainly making sure that they were cleaned regularly and ordering the tons of toilet paper.

He commuted from Witham Station into London, and back, every weekday, without fail. He had been doing this for some forty years. He lived in the house where he had been born, not far from the station, on Avenue Road. Pride of place, over his mantlepiece, was a fish that he had caught when a young boy, fishing at Maldon.

In those days, there was a railway line that ran from Braintree to Maldon, through Witham, and his father would take him on fishing trips. That was BB, or Before Beeching. They were the times that he remembered with fondness, tempered with the sadness of losing both parents in the nineties.

This evening was cold, with the Weather Forecasters predicting snow. It was October the thirty-first and he had worked late, hoping to get home after all the pesky kids had given up and gone to bed. He made it a policy to work late every Halloween and the nights before Christmas.

When the train pulled into Witham Station, he got out and felt suddenly tired. As others left the platform, he went and sat on a bench to get his breath back. After a while, he closed his eyes. That’s when he heard the sound of a train whistle, one that could only be made by a steam train. He looked to the north, and there it was, coming around the bend towards the station from the Braintree line. He watched, in wonder, as the familiar 2-4-2 engine pulled a few carriages into the station and stopped. He could smell that peculiar mixture of smoke, steam and oil. As his eyes moved away from the engine, he could see people waiting for it. Doors opened and they got on. There was a door, very close to where he sat, which was open, with the bright light on the carriage shining on the plush seats of first-class.

Intrigued, he got up and went to the train, then got into the compartment and tried the comfortable seat. The door shut and the train pulled out of the station, with that wonderful chuff-chuff that almost made him cry. As it gathered speed, the conductor came by the compartment.

“Hallo, you're Harold Harrigan?”

“Yes, but I don’t have a ticket.”

“You, sir, have a free pass, and a new job waiting for you.”

“A job?”

The conductor gave him a devilish grin.

“Yes, my chief soul counter has been promoted. You will fit the bill admirably.”

Just before midnight, the Station Master, on his final round of the night, saw a figure, sitting on one of the benches. The man had one of the happiest smiles that the Station Master had ever seen, fixed on his stone-cold face.

Marianne Gregory © 2024