Chapter Eight.
My Patient, the Driver.
I wish I could put Solomon Gann before you in the flesh; for a finer broad-shouldered specimen of humanity I never saw. He was gruff, bluff, swarthy; and rugged as his face was, it always bore a pleasant smile, just as if he had said to you, “Ah! all right; things are rough; but I’m going to take it coolly.”
And he was cool; nobody cooler—even in cases of emergency; and a better man for an engine-driver could not have been chosen.
I first met Solomon Gann in connection with an accident at Grandton, where I and other surgeons were called in to attend the sufferers by a collision with a goods train. After that I attended him two or three times; for he came to me in preference to the Company’s surgeon, and he used to give me scraps of information about his life, and tell me little incidents in his career.
“Glorious profession, ain’t it, Sir,” he said. “Grows more important every day, does the railway profession, and is likely to. Ah! people in our great-grandfathers’ days would have opened their eyes if you had talked about being an engine-driver; and I ain’t much like a four-horse mail coachee, am I? Rum set out, the rail. Not so many years back, and there wasn’t such a thing; and now it employs its thousands, beginning with your superintendents, and going down through clerks, and guards, and drivers, and so on, to the lowest porter or cleaner on the line.
“I’ve had some experience, I have. I was cleaner in the engine-house afore I got put on to stoke; and I’m not going to say that engine-drivers are worse off than other men because I happen to be one: for we want a little alteration right through the whole machine: a little easing in this collar; a little less stuffing there; them nuts give a turn with the screw-hammer; and the oily rag put over the working gear a little more oftener, while the ile-can itself ain’t spared. Don’t you see, you know, I’m a speaking metaphorically; and of course I mean the whole of the railways’ servants.
“The Public, perhaps—and he’s a terrible humbug that fellow Public—thinks we are well paid and discontented; and leaving out danger, let me ask him how he would like to be racing along at express speed through a storm of wind and rain, or snow, or hail, for fifty miles without stopping, blinded almost, cut to pieces almost; or roasting on a broiling summer’s day; or running through the pitchiest, blackest night—Sunday and week-day all the year round. ‘Well, you’re paid for it,’ says the public. So we are, and pretty good wages as times goes; but those wages don’t pay a man for the wear and tear of his constitution; and though there’s so much fuss made about the beauty of the British constitution, and people brag about it to an extent that’s quite sickening, when you come down to the small bit of British constitution locked up in a single British person’s chest—him being an engine-driver, you know—you’ll find that constitution wears, and gets weak, and liable to being touched up with the cold, or heat, or what not; and it’s a precious ticklish thing to mend—so now then!
“We don’t want to grumble too much, but railway work isn’t all lying down on a feather-bed, smoking shag at threepence an ounce, and drinking porter at threepence a pot in your own jugs; we have to work, and think too, or else there would soon be an alteration in the companies’ dividends. Accidents will happen, do what we will to stop ’em, and there’s no mistake about it, our accidents are, as a rule, bad ones—terrible bad ones, even when life and limb don’t get touched. Only an engine damaged, perhaps, but that can easily wear a thousand pound; while a hundred’s as good as nothing when a few trucks and coaches are knocked into matchwood. Then, too, when we have a bad ‘pitch-in,’ as we call it, look at the thousands as the company has to pull out for damages to injured folks. One chap, I see, got seven thousand the other day for having his back damaged; and I don’t know but what I’d think it a good bargain to be knocked about to that tune. But, there, they wouldn’t think my whole carcase worth half as much. But our work ain’t feather-bed work, I can tell you; and as to risk, why, we all of us come in for that more or less, though we get so used to it that we don’t seem to see the danger.
“Oh! you’ll say ‘Familiarity breeds contempt,’ or something else fine; but just you come and stoke, or drive, or guard, or be signalman, or pointsman, every day of your life, and just see if you’ll pull a blessed long face and be seeing a skillington with a hour-glass in one hand and a harpoon in t’other, ready to stick it into yours or somebody else’s wesket every precious hour of the day. It’s all worry fine to talk, but a man can’t be always thinking of dying when he is so busy thinking about living, and making a living for half-a-dozen mouths at home. I like to be serious, and think of the end in a quiet, proper way, as a man should; but it’s my humble opinion as the man who is seeing grim death at every turn and in every movement, has got his liver into a precious bad state, and the sooner he goes to the doctor the better. ’Taint natural, nor it ain’t reasonable; and though we often get the credit of being careless, I mean to say we don’t deserve it half the times, and the very fact of often being in risky places makes you think nothing of ’em. It’s natural, you know, and a wonderful wise thing, too; for if we were always to be thinking of the danger, it’s my belief—my honest belief—that your railway accidents would be doubled; for the men would be that anxious and worried that they would work badly, and in a few years knock up altogether, with their nerves shattered to pieces.