His words were cut off by the screech of the approaching train’s whistle, the swoosh of steam and the protest of huge wheels grinding to a halt. Doors slammed, greetings were called out, passengers jumped down from the train. The platform ticket holders surged forward hallooing with varying degrees of eagerness, claiming their people.
Lily ticked them off in her head as they made contact. ‘Well, I got three out of five right, Stan,’ she muttered.
The two maids were suddenly three — peas in a pod, twittering with excitement.
A podgy seven-year-old squealed in delight at the sight of his bicycle and shook off the attentions of his mother and his nanny.
A heavily moustached survivor of some ancient war was helped out of a first-class compartment by two porters. He placed himself with a harrumph of greeting into the hands of the flunky with the clipboard.
But she’d been wrong about the dark-haired ‘valet’. To Lily’s surprise, an elegant young lady teetered up on high heels and flung herself into his arms, instantly elevating him from a role of subservience into a matinee idol. Lily watched their embrace for a moment, enthralled, with a mixture of wonder and envy.
The young man in spats, scanning the platform anxiously, had yet to make contact.
It was Stan who spotted them first.
He pointed and mimed a message above the din. Two children were getting hesitantly out of a third-class carriage. The older one, a girl of about eleven with badly plaited pigtails hanging down her back, turned and helped her brother to jump down on to the platform. Lily noticed, with a stab of pity, that the girl was smiling, trying to make a game of it for the little boy. The pair stood for a moment, reeling back from the assault of the noise, sniffing the warm sooty air like wild creatures. They were poorly dressed: the girl was wearing a grey cardigan with holes in the elbows over a drooping cotton frock, while the boy’s clothes were a size too big for him. Their shoes were fastened with baler twine and worn down to nothing at the heels. They were both very skinny. They were also by themselves.
Lily watched as they tried with a pathetic sense of duty to slam shut the heavy door behind them and failed to move it. They gave up, looked about them to see if their shortcoming had been noted and braced themselves to face a new and probably hostile world. Hand in hand, they stood, each clutching a small parcel done up with string.