Tickets, Please!

'Tickets, Please!'
D. H. Lawrence
1919

There is in the North a single-line system of tramcars which boldly leaves the county town and plunges off into the black, industrial countryside, up hill and down dale, through the long, ugly villages of workmen's houses, over canals and railways, past churches perched high and nobly over the smoke and shadows, through dark, grimy, cold little market-places, tilting away in a rush past cinemas and shops down to the hollow where the collieries are, then up again, past a little rural church under the ash-trees, on in a bolt to the terminus, the last little ugly place of industry, the cold little town that shivers on the edge of the wild, gloomy country beyond. There the blue and creamy coloured tramcar seems to pause and purr with curious satisfaction. But in a few minutes-the clock on the turret of the Co-operative Wholesale Society's shops gives the time-away it starts once more on the adventure. Again there are the reckless swoops downhill, bouncing the loops; again the chilly wait in the hill-top market-place: again the breathless slithering round the precipitous drop under the church: again the patient halts at the loops, waiting for the outcoming car: so on and on, for two long hours, till at last the city looms beyond, the fat gasworks, the narrow factories draw near, we are in the sordid streets of the great town, once more we sidle to a standstill at our terminus, abashed by the great crimson and cream-coloured city cars, but still jerky, jaunty, somewhat daredevil, pert as a blue-tit out of a black colliery garden.
To ride on these cars is always an adventure. The drivers are often men unfit for active service: cripples and hunchbacks. So they have the spirit of the devil in them. The ride becomes a steeplechase. Hurrah! we have leapt in a clean jump over the canal bridges-now for the four-lane corner! With a shriek and a trail of sparks we are clear again. To be sure a tram often leaps the rails-but what matter! It sits in a ditch till other trams come to haul it out. It is quite common for a car, packed with one solid mass of living people, to come to a dead halt in the midst of unbroken blackness, the heart of nowhere on a dark night, and for the driver and the girl-conductor to call: 'All get off-car's on fire.' Instead of rushing out in a panic, the passengers stolidly reply: 'Get on-get on. We're not coming out. We're stopping where we are. Push on, George.' So till flames actually appear.
The reason for this reluctance to dismount is that the nights are howlingly cold, black and windswept, and a car is a haven of refuge. From village to village the miners travel, for a change of cinema, of girl, of pub. The trams are desperately packed. Who is going to risk himself in the black gulf outside, to wait perhaps an hour for another tram, then to see the forlorn notice 'Depot Only'-because there is something wrong; or to greet a unit of three bright cars all so tight with people that they sail past with a howl of derision? Trams that pass in the night!
This, the most dangerous tram-service in England, as the authorities themselves declare, with pride, is entirely conducted by girls, and driven by rash young men, or else by invalids who creep forward in terror. The girls are fearless young hussies. In their ugly blue uniforms, skirts up to their knees, shapeless old peaked caps on their heads, they have all the sang-froid of an old non-commissioned officer. With a tram packed with howling colliers, roaring hymns downstairs and a sort of antiphony of obscenities upstairs, the lasses are perfectly at their ease. They pounce on the youths who try to evade their ticket-machine. They push off the men at the end of their distance. They are not going to be done in the eye-not they. They fear nobody-and everybody fears them.
'Halloa, Annie!'
'Halloa, Ted!' 'Oh, mind my corn, Miss Stone! It's my belief you've got a heart of stone, for you've trod on it again.'
'You should keep it in your pocket,' replies Miss Stone, and she goes sturdily upstairs in her high boots.
'Tickets, please.'
She is peremptory, suspicious, and ready to hit first. She can hold her own against ten thousand.
Therefore there is a certain wild romance aboard these cars-and in the sturdy bosom of Annie herself. The romantic time is in the morning, between ten o'clock and one, when things are rather slack: that is, except market-day and Saturday. Then Annie has time to look about her. Then she often hops off her car and into a shop where she has spied something, while her driver chats in the main road. There is