BEGINNING THE NEW YEAR

I

We are a stolid and a taciturn race, we of the Five Towns.  It may be because we are geographically so self contained; or it may be because we work in clay and iron; or it may merely be because it is our nature to be stolid and taciturn.  But stolid and taciturn we are; and some of the instances of our stolidity and our taciturnity are enough to astound.  They do not, of course, astound us natives; we laugh at them, we think they are an immense joke, and what the outer world may think does not trouble our deep conceit of ourselves.  I have often wondered what would be the effect, other than an effect of astonishment, on the outer world, of one of these narratives illustrating our Five Towns peculiarities of deportment.  And I intend for the first time in history to make such a narrative public property.  I have purposely not chosen an extreme example; just an average example.  You will see how it strikes you.

Toby Hall, once a burgess of Turnhill, the northernmost and smallest of the Five Towns, was passing, last New Year’s Eve, through the district by train on his way from Crewe to Derby.  He lived at Derby, and he was returning from the funeral of a brother member of the Ancient Order of Foresters at Crewe.  He got out of the train at Knype, the great railway centre of the Five Towns, to have a glass of beer in the second-class refreshment-room.  It being New Year’s Eve, the traffic was heavy and disorganized, especially in the refreshment-room, and when Toby Hall emerged on to the platform again the train was already on the move.  Toby was neither young nor active.  His years were fifty, and on account of the funeral he wore broadcloth and a silk hat, and his overcoat was new and encumbering.  Impossible to take a flying leap into the train!  He missed the train.  And then he reflectively stroked his short grey beard (he had no moustache, and his upper lip was very long), and then he smoothed down his new overcoat over his rotund form.

‘Young man,’ he asked a porter.  ‘When’s next train Derby way?’

‘Ain’t none afore tomorrow.’

Toby went and had another glass of beer.

‘D—­d if I don’t go to Turnhill,’ he said to himself, slowly and calmly, as he paid for the second glass of beer.

He crossed the station by the subway and waited for the loop-line train to Turnhill.  He had not set foot in the Five Towns for three-and-twenty years, having indeed carefully and continuously avoided it, as a man will avoid the street where his creditor lives.  But he discovered no change in Knype railway-station.  And he had a sort of pleasure in the fact that he knew his way about it, knew where the loop-line trains started from and other interesting little details.  Even the special form of the loop-line time-table, pasted here and there on the walls of the station, had not varied since his youth. (We return Radicals to Parliament, but we are proud of a railway which for fine old English conservatism brooks no rival.)