The Man Who Took Notice of All the Notices

My Uncle Tom worked on the railway. It wasn’t a big station. Only about two trains a day stopped there; and Tom was a station master, a chief porter, and a signalman – all in one. In fact, Tom did any work that came along, and there wasn’t a happier man in the whole England.

The chief cleaner (Tom) cleaned the waiting room of the station every day; the chief ticket collector (Tom) sold and collected the tickets – sometimes there were as many as four tickets a day – and the chief clerk¹ (Tom) counted the money every evening.

Tom ran the station very well. He was very strict about the rules. He knew what a passenger was allowed to do and what wasn’t; where a passenger was permitted to smoke and where smoking was forbidden.

He was there for fifty years and then he had to retire. The representative of the Railway Company thanked Tom and gave him a small check as a present. Tom was very pleased but he said: “I don’t need money, but can I have, instead, something that will remind me of the happy days I have spent here? Could the company let me have a part of an old railway carriage, just one compartment? It doesn’t matter how old and broken it is. I want to put it into my back garden and every day I could go and sit in it.”

About a week later, a compartment was sent to him. Tom put it into his back garden, cleaned it, painted it and polished it.

One day, about a year after Tom retired we decided to visit him. It was a bad day for a visit, it was raining hard. We knocked but there was no answer. We went into the garden, sure enough, he was there, but he wasn’t sitting in the carriage, he was outside, on the step of the carriage, smoking a pipe.

“Hello, Tom,” I said, “why are you sitting there, why don’t you go inside the carriage out of the rain?” “Can’t you see?” – said Tom, “the carriage is a non-smoker!”

Note: ¹clerk – зд.: бухгалтер.