“Gentleman in uniform in those days. Short corduroy jacket, trousis, and weskit; red patch on the collar with F.E.R., in white letters, on it, and a cap with the same letters in brass on the front. Sort of combination of the useful and ornamental, I were, in those days.
“Nice life, porter’s, down at a small station with a level crossing. Lively, too, opening gates, and shotting on ’em; trimming lamps, lightin’ ’em, and then going up a hiron ladder to the top of a pole to stick ’em up for signals, with blue and red spectacles to put before their bulls’ eyes, so that they could see the trains a-coming, and tell the driver in the distance whether it was all right.
“Day-time I used to help do that, too, by standing up like a himage holding a flag till the train fizzed by; for it wasn’t often as one stopped there. Sitting on a cab’s lonely on a wet day; but talk about a lonely life—porter’s at a little station’s ’nough to give you the horrors. I should have tried to commit sooicide myself, as others did, if it hadn’t been for my taters.
“Yes—my taters. I had leave to garden a bit of the slope of the cutting, and it used to be my aim to grow bigger taters than Jem Tattley, at Slowcombe, twenty mile down the line; and we used to send the fruit backwards and forrards by one of the guards to compare ’em. I beat him reg’lar, though, every year, ’cause I watered mine more in the dry times; and proud I was of it. Ah, it’s a werry elewating kind o’ pursuit, is growing taters; and kep’ up my spirits often when I used to get low in the dark, soft, autumn times, and get afraid of being cut up by one of the fast trains.
“Terribly dangerous they are to a man at a little station, for he gets so used to the noise that he don’t notice them coming, and then—There, it would be nasty to tell you what comes to a pore porter who is not on the look-out.
“I had a fair lot to do, but not enough; and my brightest days used to be when, after sitting drowsing there on a barrow, some gent would come by a stopping train—fishing p’r’aps, and want his traps carried to the inn, two miles off; or down to the river, when our young station-master would let me off, and I stopped with the gent fishing.
“Sometimes I give out the tickets—when they were wanted; but a deal of my time was take up watching the big daisies growing on the gravelly bank, along with the yaller ragwort; or counting how many poppies there was, or watching the birds chirping in the furze-bushes. I got to be wonderful good friends with the birds.
“We had a siding there for goods; but, save a little corn now and then, and one truck of coals belonging to an agent, there was nothing much there. There was no call for anything, for there would have been no station there only that, when the line was made, the big gent as owned the land all about wouldn’t give way about the line going through his property unless the company agreed to make a station, and arrange that he could stop fast trains by signal whenever he wanted to go up to London, or come down, or to have his friends; for, of course, he wouldn’t go by the penny-a-miler parliamentary that used to crawl down and stop at Gravelwick.
“We had a very cheerful time of it in the early days there afore you know’d the place, me and the station-masters—young fellows they used to be—half-fledged, and I saw out six of them; for they used only to be down there for a short time before they got a change. I used to long to be promoted, and tried two or three times; but they wouldn’t hear of it; and the smooth travelling inspector who used to come down would humbug me by telling me that I was too vallerble a servant to the company to be changed, for I acted as a sort of ballast to the young station-masters.
“This being the case, I got thinking I ought to get better pay, and I told him so; and he said I was right, and promised to report the case; but whether he did so or didn’t, and, if he did, whether he made a load enough report, I don’t know; ’tall events, I never got no rise, but had eighteen shillings a week when I went on the line, and eighteen shillings a week when I came off, five years after.