Family

Last Sunday afternoon, late. The train is crowded. Luggage everywhere and no seat to be had when I get on at Bristol after a few days at my cousin's place. Not my favourite part of the journey, this, but fortunately it doesn't last long. Twenty minutes at most, then a change. I share the stretch of grimy corridor with a father and two sons. The father, late thirties, jeans, sweatshirt with a logo. The boys maybe ten and eight. The father asks if they are in the way, offers to help me with my suitcase. A Welsh accent. He seems kind.

The two boys chatter, looking out the window, pointing at trains, carriages, signs. Look over there, Dad. Is that the same train we saw at Swansea? It would have to be a very long train if it's the same one, says their father. Laughter. Oh Dad.

The older boy starts to talk to me, unprompted. Quick, darting speech. I notice the bulky dental braces.

"We're going to Maesteg". The Valleys. "We've been to see our cousins in Durham". That's a long way, I say, I did the journey myself a few months ago.

"I know. We've been travelling all day". He turns back towards his brother and the window.

Rail travel may be a novelty for both boys. There is something old fashioned about their excitment and keen interest in everything on the other side of the glass, with nary a computer game or ipod to be seen. I watch them with mixed emotions - happy, wistful, sad, who knows - their lack of cool is very endearing. As is their confidence in each other's company. Their security in being part of a unit.

Newport. The father offers to open the carriage door. People start to board, pushing. Almost dark. Goodbye, I call as I get out. A faint reply is just audible over the blaring cacophony of the station loudspeaker.

Viaduct

Circumstances seem to require you to make a fairly major decision. So you do. Then you are persuaded to unmake it. Loose ends abound. Bah. One of the hardest delusions to relinquish is the stubborn, nagging belief that life should at all times be tidy.

****

Back to last weekend.

Durham. We imagined we would be impressed by the cathedral and the castle as indeed we were, especially by the former which is extraordinary and moving and deserves a blog post of its own. Maybe another time.

But very, very early on Sunday morning, sneaking out alone, it was the railway viaduct - a Victorian engineering masterpiece that rarely makes the tourist brochures - that worked the unlooked for magic. I love the cathedral-like curve and sweep of the arches, the regularity and strength of the massive stone supports, the combination of stone and brick, its grace and scale.











It dwarfs the houses beneath ...



and the castle on the horizon.

On the prowl on the scruffier side of town, absorbed in colour and light and shade and camera angles. No traffic. Empty beer cans in the gutter. Two men, obviously friends, walk their dogs.

Proximity

You’ve been travelling since that morning and now the sun is going down behind the hill at the end of a limpid autumn day and along with a dozen others you’re waiting at the little Victorian station at Great Malvern for the final train to take you home. Last leg of the journey.

The body itches and aches with travel fatigue, a day of sitting too long, not moving enough. You walk along the platform, pulling the suitcase behind you, and take a few photographs. It has been a good few days away, a respite from the reports of financial meltdown and a reminder of reality, of the nuts and bolts of living in close proximity with another person for more than three hours at a time. It can be done.

Back to the bench. Two teenagers walk over and sit down. Extremely 21st century, boyfriend/girlfriend, pale, dressed in black with spiky hair and a clusters of metal studs in nose, mouth and ears, they exchange sentences in a desultory fashion. At first sight they seem edgy, hostile even, yet their conversation becomes surprisingly conventional. College. Examinations. Friends. How to navigate through the next seven days without upsetting the parents.

You’re not used to young people these days except as the collective subject of doom-ridden news items. In spite of wariness and mammoth preconceptions, you warm to these two.

Nothing to fear here. Nothing to envy either, not really.

Behind us the cool moon rises, almost full.

Train (Updated)

Update: I also love synchronicity. Today's issue of the Guardian contains an absorbing article on Edward Thomas. Poetry. Therapy. Ecology. Makes me want to read more.

I love train travel.

Apparently a serious expansion of the rail network is planned for 2020 or thereabouts. Good. In addition to the high speed lines though, what about re-opening at least some of the branch lines that were closed (thank you Dr Beeching) in the 1960s? They will probably be needed sooner or later.

****

It is indeed late June, so an unashamedly famous ode to a now-defunct country station about an hour's drive from here, on one of those vanished local lines. The poet, Edward Thomas, was killed in battle in 1917 during the First World War. (He was born in the same year - 1878 - as my grandfather: the latter had a defect in one eye and so was excused the call-up).

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Some one cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and around him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


The context of the war has turned the poem into an elegy for lost innocence and a world that never really existed. Yet its real theme is the wonder of the present moment. And the power of the unexpected.

A sudden halt. High summer. A hiss of steam, and the observation that (I think) makes the poem: the clearing of the throat. The song of the blackbird.

It takes shock or ecstasy or good company to jolt me into the present moment, application and some kind of faith to live in it on a daily basis, if only for seconds at a time. Even as a child - little worrier that I was, living in a stressful home - I found it difficult. No guarantees. No wonder so few manage it. No wonder I tried to escape.

One minute, one second at a time. Feel. Breathe. Sing.

Photograph uploaded at Poems and Prose by Kendrive.The original station sign, preserved in a nearby bus shelter.