As we pumped our way into Harecastle Tunnel, a feeling of foreboding took such a hold on me that I was within seconds of calling out to Eben Ramsfoot to lift Florrie Granville off the rails, turn her around and head straight back out. Once inside, with the tunnel opening (visible by the bright moonlight of the pre-dawn sky) growing smaller and more distant, I fought, too, the urge to turn around and see what awaited us within; true, one might expect to hear a steam-powered locomotive in the still, dark air before dawn, but the thought of the impact that sixty-mile-an-hour steel might have on flesh and bone, and the diverse points at which a pumping wagon could enter a human body with sufficient pounds of force behind it, were not what was playing most upon my mind.
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The Newton Heath Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Football Club didn’t worry me. Why should they?
“Got a pretty good record against the railways sides, ay we?” smiled Eben as we walked into Bushbury sidings towards his unassuming pump wagon.
“We do, ar,” I replied with a wink. The FA Cup victory against Stafford Road was still giving us smug warmth, seven years after the event.
Eben had been using Florrie Granville to get to away games with his mate, Jeb Bleeson, for a number of years. Officially still the property of the London and North Western Railway, it had developed a fault on one of its axles and been quietly forgotten in a dark corner of the sidings until the two restored it, gave it a lick of paint and named it after the girlfriend of Jeb’s whose father had found him employment on the railways. Jeb was currently unwell with the consumption and Eben had offered me his place over dominoes at the Noah’s Ark the previous Wednesday, on the understanding that a member of the Loyal and Distinguished Pedallers would likely possess the required stamina. He and Jeb tended only to use Florrie for local games, but had decided to head to Manchester despite the distance, due to the fact that Newton Heath’s ground was slap-bang next to the sidings at North Road. Eben was well acquainted with the signalmen on the line as far as Stoke, and it was one of these, Les Reeder of the Norton Bridge box, who offered to smooth things over as much as he could for the rest of the route. However, though the organization seemed a little skittish, it was not our reliance on the kindness of strangers that was playing most on my mind as we entered Harecastle Tunnel.
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It was by a roaring fire at Norton Bridge signal box that I’d heard the story of Clay Collier, a golem fashioned from local materials by Ruben “The Master” Abadi. Abadi had fled the Odessa pogrom in 1821, renounced his rabbinical vocation and found work in the pot-banks of Longport, but he found it difficult to fill his Sundays. On one particularly tedious weekend, he’d taken some clay to the canal tunnels, mixed it with coal from one of the side canals and fashioned a golem which suffered from hydrophobia, panicked, knocked him into the cut and fled to the longest and darkest of the nearby railway tunnels. Nicknamed “Clay Collier” by the locals, the golem could shapeshift, and it would hide by pressing itself into the walls of the tunnel shelters, only to leap out and surprise engine drivers, suicides or the kind of slothful Stokie pedestrian that takes a two-mile shortcut in a railway tunnel rather than climb a hill. Over tea, oatcakes and Senior Service, Les had shown me scars from his own encounter with Clay Collier while working on the P-way as a younger man.
Yer dunner fergat summat lark that.
“Sav’nteen stetches, I had. Yer dunner fergat summat lark that.”
Once we’d finished our tea Les wished us luck and sent us down the steps with a brand new leather football which he’d bought for a nephew of his in Macclesfield. We were to hand this in to Josiah Broom at Macclesfield signal box when we arrived there for a brew.
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Opposite me, Eben Ramsfoot’s bobbing face grimaced with the effort, illuminated by the intermittent glow of a churchwarden pipe that rarely left his lips. “Give it some ‘ommer, Gonby,” he barked from the other side of his mouth, “we want a pint when we get there, don’t we?”
I looked at the walls as we passed them, though they might have been the most starless recesses of space for all I could divine. When would Clay Collier appear? Could he outrun a pumping wagon? Was he endowed with speech or sight, so that we might reason with him?
On and on went the tunnel; Les Reeder had calculated two miles but it seemed much longer, and on my frequent looks around I saw no evidence of an end to it. My body was tense from fear, which made pumping all the more difficult, and in Eben’s eyes there was a longing, a need for resolution, discernible even in the dim glow from his pipe.
Crash!
I felt my back slam against a wall and then my face hit ballast. The whirring wheels of a derailed Florrie Granville sounded for what seemed like an age. Though I knew I was in danger, I couldn’t move, and lay still until I heard a match strike and smelt the first sweet wafts of Brown Flake coming from Eben’s pipe. Then came a loco’s whistle, and I stirred myself quickly and followed Eben to a shelter. Though it sounded near, there was no visible sign of the train until suddenly the wall we’d crashed into receded and in the consequent flash of dawn’s early light we saw an engine and six coal wagons bustle past us with sooty coughs. The “wall”, meanwhile, had adopted an anthropic form and stood at the entrance to the tunnel, some eight feet tall and four feet wide. It had only indentations where its eyes should have been yet we felt watched. We were certainly trapped. The Florrie Granville lay safely on the down line, but when we went to set it back on the the tracks the golem extended one of its legs and stopped our progress. “Can we go, please?” I shouted, but it did not answer.
“We’ve got a game to get to,” explained Eben, to no avail.
“We’ve got a game to get to,” explained Eben, to no avail.
We were stuck, it seemed. The ball Les Reeder had given us lay nearby. I inflated the pig’s bladder and tied the laces, then kicked the ball towards Eben, my only purpose being to pass the time, for I saw no opportunity for egress, and merely hoped that the golem would surrender us in time. Eben was game, passed it back, and within a few minutes we were having quite the kick-about, Eben even putting his pipe down and making heavy breath noises to imitate the sounds of a crowd: ooh, aaaaah, yeeeeaaaaah! (this sounded quite good in the echo of the tunnel). A whistling then came from the south. We took shelter again but this time the golem extended his leg and dragged the Florrie Granville out of the tunnel and knocked it up the embankment to safety. The train to Manchester chugged away without incident and when we looked again, the golem had transformed itself into a flat floor with two smaller golems at each end. These figures waved their arms in the air and waggled a foot each. Immediately I took them the football, and watched as the figures kicked, threw and headed to each other in joyous silence. Eben, meanwhile, had warily made his way to the pump wagon, and was lifting it carefully back onto the rails. The golem kids paid no heed to our movements, and within a minute we were on our way north again. Though their playful movements could be ambiguous, I was sure I saw one of the figures wave goodbye.
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The rest of the journey was less eventful (though a rather unpleasant conversation with the signalman at Macclesfield still comes to mind quite readily), but it was desperately hard work. Time was by now of such import that we couldn’t afford to stop for refreshment on the very few occasions it was offered. We got to the wagon works with twenty minutes to spare, had four well-earned pints in the Railway Hotel and got onto the ground just in time to see the complete ninety-minute mauling.
While it’s true that the pitch did our silky passing game no favours (it appeared to have been prepared with a plough rather than a mower), there can be no excuses for such an off-day. The normally solid Billy Malpass was at fault for at least seven of Newton Heath’s goals, and when we did make the ball stick up front, Wykes and Lawrence were continually befuddled by the bobble. In the end we felt fortunate to keep the score down to 10-1. After a return visit to the Railway Hotel we hit the rails, flying through Harecastle without incident and stopping only at Norton Bridge to tell tales of Clay Collier and explain about the football, Les Reeder being, I am pleased to relate, a great deal more understanding in the matter than the choleric Josiah Broom.