The Trouble with Tom Read Online Free PDF Page B

were-one, two, three men. AU gathered around where the gravestone used to be. Albert squinted harder. It looked like they were . . .
    Digging.

Committed to the Ground
    THE MORNING OF November 21,1819, brought a mist off the Mersey and swirling over Liverpool piers, fogging the early morning's frenetic haulage off merchant vessels: bales of cotton and tobacco from Georgia, sacks of sugar from Haiti, crates of pepper and tea from Bombay-men sweating under their loads; horses stumbling; commands punctuated by tubercular coughs of city air fouled with coal. Towering above it all at the riverside was the newly built Customs House, a commanding Regency pile of porticos and pillars capped by a mighty dome. It was there to put arriving passengers in awe of the nation's mercantile might, and in its grand yard the excise officers awaited to put them in awe of government regulations as well.
    The cargo of the Hercules was next on their slate: it had been docked for a couple of days now, and its waiting crates were pried open and bills of lading scrutinized. But if there came to be a strange pause in the proceedings, customs officials could be forgiven for any hesitancy about the next passenger in line. "William Cobbett," read the name on the passenger manifest.
    A middle-aged man, slightly portly and clearly brooking no nonsense, stood before them. The yard filled with a crowd eagerly craning inward to gape-they had, upon the ship's docking on Monday, cheered Cobbett from the dock and through the streets of Liverpool, all the way to the inn where he was lodging. Now they watched as his numerous trunkloads of heavy luggage were examined by the officers. Clothes, personal effects, books, papers . . . yes, yes. Plant cuttings? Well, that was to be expected, as the fellow was also a noted author on horticultural matters. But then the officers arrived at a wooden box. The passenger watched gravely and closely as the excisemen pried it open and reached inside. And then, from within its depths, the crowd saw an object emerge into the cold winter light.
    A human skull.
    Cobbett gazed upon it, and then upon his inquisitors.
    "There, gentlemen," he announced, "are the mortal remains of the immortal Thomas Paine."
    This place is utterly dead. Brit Rail's diesel rattle builds up and shudders the train out of Wanborough Station, leaving me to regard an increasingly silent landscape of trees, hedges, and English gardens. Wanborough's not much of a station. In fact, I'm the only person here at all. The last ticket-window clerk left in 1987, and now the doors to the station house are locked: peering in through a gap in its blinds, I can see that its two doleful rooms are emptied out and covered with dust, shredded wires dangling grimly out of the walls. OFFICE TO LET, announces a sign.
    If you lay down right here on the platform and took a nap, it might be a very long while before anyone noticed you. This part of Surrey, just past an isolating ridge known as the Hog's Back, has some of the quietest and most thickly forested expanses in all of Southern England. And yet modest country places like these can hide a great deal: Saxons left barrows here, and Romans dumped sacks of gold coins in the ground. During the war, an engineer died when a Luffwaffe pilot bombed this stretch of the railroad tracks, but he was not the first to go; two other men were killed here in 1891, building a little railway station that there was no real need for in the first place. The tenant of nearby Wanborough Manor, as it happens, was the private secretary of Prime Minister Gladstone, and the cabinet thought it'd be jolly convenient to put a station near his house. And so it is that we are outlasted by our impulsive acts: the secretary is gone, but his station and its ghosts remain.
    Though the station is named after the local manor, the train actually serves the tiny hamlet of Normandy. It's a quiet and ancient place, quite possibly one of the smallest villages in Britain to