I remember it distinctly, to this day. It was New Year’s Day, 1965. A watery sun shone down from a nervous sky. My dad drove me to the breaker's yard. I had planned my visit carefully, to coincide with the Public Holiday, for no-one would be at work then. If I could find a means of entering the yard, I should be able to wander the perimeters unopposed. Such an activity was normally frowned upon by the owners and workers and young and curious misanthropes like me were quickly shown the door, or the boot. I was fourteen years old and hadn’t yet come across the term ‘risk management.’ Around one side of the yard was a flapping piece of corrugated iron, under which I could crawl, having first squeezed my rucksack through. I cut a rather more svelte and mobile figure in those days.
I had always loved steam locomotives, ever since I could walk and talk. I used to think that they were living, breathing things, almost human. From the age of about six, my dad would take me to the overbridge that looked out upon Percy Main Motive Power Depot and I would feast my eyes on the stud of ex-London North-Eastern Region J27 and Q6 freight locomotives fussing about in the shed sidings, or dozing inside the shed itself, those at rest occasionally panting, gasping and wheezing like overheated, asthmatic dogs. And, in 1965, these glorious sights were all coming to a sad end.
I was alone in this huge yard. Giant cranes like swooping sauropods stood silent guard over their slumbering charges in this elephant’s graveyard of steel and steam. In the middle of the yard was a veritable Vesuvius of locomotive parts – smokeboxes, fireboxes. superheater tubes, bits of frames, clack valves, snifting valves, pumps, valves and a myriad other parts that went to make up these simple, splendid kettles on wheels.
I was excited, but I was also afraid. I could hear the hollow, echoing sound of my own footfalls as I walked around the yard. I was terrified of being discovered, of having to run away with my bulky rucksack strapped across my back. I might fall on one of the uneven sleepers and break my leg, or worse, my neck. I need not have feared – I could have picked up any of the discarded safety valve bonnets and conducted a drum solo on it for all that anyone knew I was there.
Finally, I came upon the sight that had drawn me there in the first place. Standing on its own in a siding was a 'streak,' a class A4 pacific. I regarded her with awe. Her driving wheels were taller than me and even at that young age I was pushing six feet tall. Her hinged access door to the smokebox was propped open. She was dirty, rusty and forlorn. She had been disgracefully run down in the months leading to her withdrawal from service. Her tender had gone, and the cutters had nibbled at her front bogie and middle driving wheels, like a squirrel nibbling at walnuts, so that she could better negotiate the tight curves on the way to her final resting place, amongst the Vesuvius of bits.
She awaited her fate with great dignity and fortitude, I thought. Some fellow train-spotter had climbed into the smokebox aperture and had chalked two eyes on the smokebox door, one of which was shedding tears. Underneath, he had written ‘Please don’t let me die.’ My sadness was almost unbearable.
I reached out and caressed her buffer beam. It was smooth and cold to the touch. I clambered aboard the footplate and looked at all the controls, imagining myself at the regulator and speeding through Grantham at close on 100 miles per hour, with the mellifluous steam-whistle echoing through the docile Lincolnshire countryside.
All was quiet, all was calm. She had dropped her fire for the last time and she deserved to go to her fate in peace, without a young, star-struck interloper leaving his virgin fingerprints on her exhaust injectors and firebox door. I climbed down and left the scrapyard without once looking back.
Now, as I sit here in my study, surrounded by a thousand photographs and a million memories, I am once more transported to that scrapyard and, as I touch my cheek, I find again that it is smudged with soot.
