Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of an Irish Navvy

by Patrick MacGill

And none of us is to blame.'"

—From Songs of the Dead End.

The law has it that no man must work as a platelayer on the running lines until he is over twenty-one years of age. If my readers look up the books of the —— Railway Company, they'll find that I started work in the service of the company at the age of twenty-two. My readers must not believe this. I was only eighteen years of age when I started work on the railway, but I told a lie in order to obtain the post.

One day, five weeks following my return from the Argyllshire moors, and long after all my money had been expended on the fruitless search for Norah Ryan, I clambered up a railway embankment near Glasgow with the intention of seeking a job, and found that a man had just been killed by a ballast engine. He had been cut in two; the fingers of his left hand severed clean away were lying on the slag. The engine wheels were dripping with blood. The sight made me sick with a dull heavy nausea, and numberless little blue and black specks floated before my eyes. An almost unbearable dryness came into my throat; my legs became heavy and leaden, and it seemed as if thousands of pins were pricking them. All the men were terror-stricken, and a look of fear was in every eye. They did not know whose turn would come next.

A few of them stepped reluctantly forward and carried the thing which had been a fellow-man a few minutes before and placed it on the green slope. Others pulled the stray pieces of flesh from amidst the rods, bars, and wheels of the engine and washed the splotches of blood from the sleepers and rails. One old fellow lifted the severed fingers from the slag, counting each one loudly and carefully as if some weighty decision hung on the correct tally of the dead man's fingers. They were placed beside the rest of the body, and prompted by a morbid curiosity I approached it where it lay in all its ghastliness on the green slope with a dozen men or more circled around it. The face was unrecognisable as a human face. A thin red sliver of flesh lying on the ground looked like a tongue. Probably the man's teeth in contracting had cut the tongue in two. I had looked upon two dead people, Dan and Mary Sorley, but they might have been asleep, so quiet did they lie in their eternal repose. This was also death, but death combined with horror. Here and there scraps of clothing and buttons were scrambled up with the flesh, but all traces of clothing were almost entirely hidden from sight. The old man who had gathered up the fingers brought a bag forward and covered up the dead thing on the slope. The rest of the men drew back, quietly and soberly, glad that the thing was hidden from their eyes.

"A bad sight for the fellow's wife," said the old man to me. "I've seen fifteen men die like him, you know."

"How did it happen?" I asked.

"We was liftin' them rails into the ballast train, and every rail is over half a ton in weight," said the man, who, realising that I was not a railway man, gave full details. "One of the rails came back. The men were in too big a hurry, that's what I say, and I've always said it, but it's not their fault. It's the company as wants men to work as if every man was a horse, and the men daren't take their time. It's the sack if they do that. Well, as I was a-sayin', the rail caught on the lip of the waggon, and came back atop of Mick—Mick Deehan is his name—as the train began just to move. The rail broke his back, snapped it in two like a dry stick. We heard the spine crack, and he just gave one squeal and fell right under the engine. Ugh! it was ill to look at it, and, mind you, I've seen fifteen deaths like it. Fifteen, just think of that!"

Then I realised that I had been saved part of the worst terror of the tragedy. It must have been awful to see a man suddenly transformed into that which lay under the bag beside me. A vision came to me of the poor fellow getting suddenly caught in the terrible embrace of the engine, watching the large wheel slowly revolving downwards towards his face, while his ears would hear, the last sound ever to be heard by them, the soft, slippery movement of that monstrous wheel skidding in flesh and blood. For a moment I was in the dead man's place, I could feel the flange of the wheel cutting and sliding through me as a plough slides through the furrow of a field. Again my feelings almost overcame me, my brain was giddy and my feet seemed insecurely planted on the ground.