Chapter Seventeen
Boys Will Be Boys
Having left Edith, Mary and Sybil to their own devices, both Matthew and Tom remained singularly unaware of the drama which was now unfolding behind them, first in the salle d'attente and thereafter out on the platform.
By now, Matthew and Tom had finally reached the gleaming, cream lined, dark brown locomotive, where a column of black smoke, now thicker than ever, was still pouring forth out of its chimney. Trails of white steam momentarily lifted the safety valves and hissed from the piston chests. And, although neither Danny nor Robert spoke French, in fact probably only knew half a dozen words between them, by the time their fathers duly arrived, by means of sign language, it seemed that the two boys had somehow managed to elicit an invitation from the driver to come up onto the footplate.
"Da, Da, it's a Superpacific!" yelled Danny enthusiastically. Can we go up Da? Can we?" he asked excitedly of his father.
"May we, please father?" asked Robert politely, but for all that he could not hide the eager anticipation in his voice.
Matthew and Tom exchanged amused glances.
"And what if we said no?" chuckled Tom.
"Da! Yous wouldn't, would yous?"
Entering into the spirit of the occasion, Matthew grinned broadly.
"And just what would your darling mother have to say if she were here, Robert? You remember the awful fuss she made when she saw you riding on the roadmen's traction engine down in the village at Downton?"
Robert nodded his head slowly.
"Yes... but... but that... that was only because she was visiting old Mrs. Hughes at her cottage. Otherwise she wouldn't have seen what I was..." Robert blushed red, faltered, and then fell silent.
"Does that somehow make a difference?" asked Matthew gently. Tom saw the corners of his friend's mouth twitched expressively.
"Well she..." Robert looked hesitantly at Danny, who mouthed something silently to his cousin and nodded his head encouragingly.
"Well... well... she isn't here now, is she father?" asked Robert, his courage bolstered by the presence of his cousin and friend. He tried to keep his voice sounding matter-of-fact, hoping that might help to settle the issue; which, to Robert's intense amazement and delight, indeed it jolly well did.
Amused by Robert's decidedly pragmatic approach to the problem of his mother and her views of what was and was not proper, Tom and Matthew tried their very best to keep straight faces, but it was a hopeless task.
"No she isn't!" agreed Matthew with a laugh.
"And what your lady mother doesn't know about..." Tom chuckled.
Robert laughed too. He loved his Uncle Tom dearly, and for many reasons, the chiefest of which being that whenever his uncle was about, Robert's own father was always so happy and apt to enter into all kinds of fun and appropriately named tomfoolery of which Robert's aristocratic mother would decidedly not approve.
The sixth earl of Grantham, whose spoken French was more than adequate to do justice to the present situation, quickly established from the engine driver of the express that he was indeed agreeable for the two young boys to join him and his fireman up on the footplate for a few minutes and without further ado, the two boys scrambled excitedly up the steps and into the cab of the huge locomotive.
Once inside, rather self-consciously, Danny and Robert shook hands with the driver and his fireman, who by means of sign language, they established were named Pierre and François, both of them clad in the customary blue caps and overalls, their faces blackened with coal dust and soot, streaked with sweat, François wearing his regulation driver's goggles.
In front of them, Danny and Robert were now confronted with a bewildering display of glass dials and gauges, along with a mass of gleaming brass and copper pipe work. Beneath their feet, on the floor of the cab, were pools of sooty water mixed with coal dust. The air reeked of hot oil and grease and, from somewhere close at hand, there came the ever-present hiss of steam.
Here on the footplate, the heat from the engine was tremendous, almost overwhelming, which only intensified still further when Francois opened the door to the firebox, indicating to Robert that, if he wished he could help load in some of the coal briquettes from the tender.
The loaded shovel proved too much for Robert on his own, as it undoubtedly would have for Danny too, but together, the two boys managed successfully to load a couple of full shovels' worth of the dirty black briquettes into the fiery furnace of the grate, earning a thumbs up from Francois, who, indicated that if the boys, now wearing his and Pierre's dirty blue caps, were willing to stay on the footplate all the way to Paris, and shovel coal between them, then he could then go to sleep for the entire journey.
It was just at that precise moment, while Danny and Robert were carefully weighing up the merits of Francois's tongue-in-cheek suggestion, that from somewhere, seemingly close at hand, apparently from directly below the cab of the locomotive, down on the platform, a regal voice cut through the swirling cloud of steam and smoke on the footplate and broke into the two boys' reverie.
"Robert? Where are you?"
"Cripes!" Robert pulled a horrified face, mouthed "Mama" at his cousin, while young Danny tried his very best to stifle a fit of giggles.
Glancing down from their unrivalled vantage point up on the footplate, Danny now espied the rapidly approaching figures of both his aunt and his own mother. Evidently Aunt Mary was on the warpath, and had come in search of her errant, eldest son.
A moment or two later and his aunt, accompanied by Danny's mother both reached the engine where they stopped and looked about them.
"Where on earth can they have got to?" asked Mary slightly querulously.
"Well, Tom and Matthew did both say they were taking the boys down to see the engine. And this is the engine, so..." offered Sybil.
"Yes, thank you. Sybil. I am not completely stupid. And while I may not know about classes, wheel arrangements and all the other inconsequential details that Matthew and Robert seem to so much enjoy discussing, I am quite capable of recognising a steam engine when I see one".
"Well then they must be here somewhere. After all, they said..."
"Sybil, darling, I know what they said they were going to do, but when your husband and mine get together, they start behaving just like a pair of overgrown schoolboys and quite frankly anything is possible. I would have thought that by now even you of all people would have realised that".
From their steamy eerie, and thus privy to this entire conversation, Matthew and Tom were doing their very best not to laugh and betray themselves, when Robert suddenly took it upon himself to unilaterally break cover.
"I'm up here, Mama" replied a disembodied voice from somewhere far above Mary's head.
"And just where precisely is up here?" asked Mary in an imperious tone, looking all about her, and trying to pinpoint exactly from which direction her son's voice had come.
At that, in an attempt to be helpful, his face begrimed with coal dust and oil, Robert, still wearing Francois's dirty blue cap and now Pierre's goggles as well, stuck his fair-haired head through the side window of the cab of the enormous locomotive and, with a beaming smile, gazed down happily upon his horrified mother.
"Hello, Mama!" he called breezily down from his lofty perch on the footplate.
"Robert Crawley! What on earth are you doing up there? Dear God, just look at you! You're absolutely filthy! And what's that you're wearing on your head?" demanded Mary in a thoroughly appalled tone.
But before Robert could even begin to answer his mother's salvo of questions, let alone comply with her peremptory instruction, Mary had another equally burning question for her son.
"I have the distinct feeling that I shall regret asking you this Robert Crawley, but just where is your father?"
"Oh, I'm up here too, Mary". So saying, Matthew stuck his head through the same window as his son and grinned broadly down at his horrified wife. But then, oddly enough, instead of Mary now venting her annoyance on Matthew, she seemed to suddenly relent, smiled broadly up at her husband and son, and simply shook her head in mock disbelief.
Sybil, who by now had come to stand by her eldest sister, grinned equally broadly as she looked first at Mary, and then up at both Robert and Matthew.
"One for the album I think! Now, don't move, either of you" she called cheerfully, as from down below them on the platform, Sybil hurriedly focused her younger son Bobby's Beau Brownie on the grinning faces of the sixth earl of Grantham and his equally contented elder son and heir.
"Sybil! Don't you dare! Whatever will Mama think?" pleaded Mary. But by then it was too late. Sybil had already pressed the shutter.
"And if you two are up there, then I suppose Tom and..." began Sybil.
"Hello Ma!" sang out Danny happily. "Da and me were up here too!"
Still wearing Pierre's cap, and like his cousin grinning broadly, his face equally begrimed with coal dust and oil, on hearing his mother's voice, young Danny Branson now thrust his head out through the same cab window as both his uncle Matthew and his cousin Robert, to be followed a moment later by the smiling face of his equally laughing father.
"There, what did I tell you?" asked Mary, but then, at the sight of Matthew, Tom, Robert and Danny grinning like a quartet of contented chimpanzees, Mary countess of Grantham found she could contain herself no longer, and broke into peals of ringing laughter.
"Honestly! Just look at the four of you!"
"Smile for the camera!" laughed Sybil, as once again she pressed the shutter.
Up on the footplate, over the heads of their sons, Matthew and Tom now exchanged astonished, questioning glances.
"Well" said Matthew, nodding his head down towards where Mary and Sybil were still standing chatting and laughing on the platform below, "that went off rather better than expected. After all, Mary's not normally that forgiving of our antics, now is she?"
Tom shook his head.
"No, she isn't. So, I find myself asking why" he said thoughtfully.
Author's Note:
Available in five different colour combinations, the Beau Brownie camera was in production between 1930 -33. It differed little from the popular Box Brownie camera only insofar as it possessed a new doublet lens.