Little Brayford, by Cecil Wainwright
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
Mr Septimus Gedge had been station master at Little Brayford for twenty-two years, and in all that time, he liked to say, no train had left his platform a second before its time or a second after it. He wore a frock coat with brass buttons and carried a silver watch on a chain as thick as a child’s finger, and he consulted it so often that the village said he had worn the numbers off. He kept a list of rules pinned up in the booking hall. Rule Four said that no hinge, lock or bolt on the premises was to be oiled except by the station master personally, because oil, in the wrong hands, was a menace.
On the morning in 1907 that Lord Hemsby was to arrive by special train to open the new cattle market, Mr Gedge rose at four. He rehearsed Thaddeus Finch, the porter, who was fourteen and had large ears, eleven times. ‘You will stand there,’ he said, ‘and you will not speak. When his lordship steps down, you will take his bag. You will not drop it. You will not breathe on it. Is that understood?’ Thaddeus said it was. Mr Gedge looked at his ears and sighed.
The special was due at a quarter past two. At ten past, Mr Gedge went into the lamp room for the green flag, which he kept in a locked drawer, and the lamp-room door, which nobody but he was permitted to oil and which he had been meaning to see to since Whitsun, swung shut behind him and stuck.
Thaddeus heard the knocking. He went to the door and pulled at the handle. It did not move.
‘Finch!’ came the voice from inside. ‘Fetch the blacksmith! No. Fetch a crowbar. No, stay where you are. The train, Finch. The train!’
Thaddeus looked down the line. A smudge of smoke was rising over the beet fields. He looked at Mr Gedge’s red face pressed against the little window in the door. Then he ran to the porters’ room, took out the old green flag that was used for polishing the brass, shook the dust out of it, and walked back onto the platform.
The special came in at a quarter past two exactly. Thaddeus waved it down with the polishing flag. He opened the carriage door, took his lordship’s bag without dropping it or breathing on it, and saw the party through the booking hall and out to the waiting motor car. Lord Hemsby, a small, cheerful man in tweed, gave him a shilling and asked where the station master was.
Thaddeus thought about Rule Four. He thought about the face at the glass.
‘Attending to the lamps, my lord,’ he said. ‘He’s very particular about the lamps.’
‘Quite right,’ said Lord Hemsby. ‘Give him my compliments. A beautifully run little station.’
It took the blacksmith forty minutes to get the door open. Mr Gedge came out with cobwebs on his frock coat and looked at Thaddeus, and at the polishing flag leaning in the corner, and at his own silver watch, for a long time. Then he went into his office without a word.
The next morning the lamp-room door had been oiled; it swung open at a touch. Rule Four had disappeared from the booking hall. And in the station log, under the entry for the special train, in Mr Gedge’s upright copperplate, Thaddeus found the words: ‘Arrived 2.15. All correct. S. Gedge.’ Underneath, in slightly smaller writing, someone had added: ‘Assisted by T. Finch.’
“Mr Gedge is presented as a ridiculous character whom the reader can only laugh at.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.
120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 1.3 Critical reading and comprehension, covering 1.3.1 Identifying and interpreting themes, ideas and information, 1.3.2 Reading in different ways for different purposes, 1.3.4 Supporting a point of view with textual evidence, and 1.3.6 Reflecting critically and evaluatively on text. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.