When Memory Lane gets closed for alterations

The feature that most struck me about the railway station in the city of Basel, northwest Switzerland, when I first went there, was its restaurant. Or perhaps, for a place that grand, I should say dining hall. A wonderful place, with wooden panelling, a high ceiling, and massive paintings of Swiss scenes on the walls. 

One of those places where you might go – and I did, on more than one occasion – just for the pleasure of eating there, even though you weren’t actually travelling to somewhere else. Even back in the early eighties when I first discovered the place, it had a sense of nostalgia to it, one of the last of the grand dining rooms out of all those that once adorned the great railway stations of Europe and America.

I’ve written about it before. I told the story of my mother’s discovery of the place. It came soon after the Second World War, when she was able to leave England for the first time as an adult, and indeed for the first time since she’d been a small child, after the nearly six years when Britain was isolated by the fighting. 

Arriving there from a night train early one morning, she went to the dining hall and ordered breakfast. For someone from Britain, still suffering from food rationing, what she was served was extraordinary. An entire basket of bread. Heaps of butter. Milk with cream floating on top of it. 

It was a great way to mark the start of a holiday from suffering Britain. And, when I last wrote about it, I pointed out that it was still just as it had been seventy years earlier when my mother visited it. That, though, was then. In February 2017. Not when we popped in this week, on our way to our old home and to our many friends in Strasbourg, in Eastern France.

A major part of moving to a new country is learning a different set of customs. One of the things the Spanish authorities, or at any rate the authorities in Madrid, do in a way I can only describe as idiosyncratic, is closing roads. You may be driving along a Madrid street in a relaxed way, turn a corner and find a couple of crash barriers drawn across the road, with the word ‘cortado’ (cut or closed) on them. Maybe there’s some work to be done on the street. Maybe there’s just something or more likely someone more important that requires it. Usually there’s a cop or two standing by and, as a naïve Englishman already surprised by the lack of diversion signs before I got to the closure, I might ask one how I’m supposed to get to where I’m going.

“By a different route,” he’s likely to tell me.

If I press the matter, he might add.

“You’ll have to go around.”

That’s bad enough when you’re talking about a physical road on a physical journey. It’s so much sadder when the closed road is Memory Lane.

Glory and grandeur gone

The dining hall in Basel station is no more. The great Swiss supermarket chain Migros has taken it over. Now it’s a central stand selling the traditional Basel open sandwiches surrounded by benches and functional tables around the outside. Not a shade on the genteel and relaxed atmosphere of an old-style railway dining hall with its uniformed waiters and glistening cutlery, now replaced by harassed counter staff who didn’t even know what the place had once been, and by little plastic forks and knives in cellophane wrapping.

All that’s left of the old grandeur is the paintings on the walls.

Pomp and Pleasure of the Past

The open sandwiches are wonderful, but that doesn’t even begin to make up for the loss of the grandeur of the past. Memory Lane closed for alterations. And those alterations were to its very soul.

Fortunately, I was able to indulge in a far more satisfactory visit to Memory Lane when we arrived at the station in Strasbourg. Apart from its being the evening rather than the early morning, the atmosphere was identical to a memorable previous occasion I’ve described before. The same high cupola of glass. The same dusty platform. The same sunlight flooding the place.

Memento of a memorable moment

It was early in the century. My son Michael was on his way to a military base to fulfil his duty on behalf of the great nation to which Strasbourg now belongs, France, despite all the efforts, in earlier and worse times, of its neighbour, Germany.

Danielle and I had made sure our second and third sons had British nationality. This was so that they wouldn’t have to do French military service. By the late nineties, it lasted ten months and was a waste of time when it wasn’t positively dangerous (even without a war, there are always casualties, most of them avoidable, in organisations as chaotic as armies).

With British nationality safely acquired, we could arrange for them to have French nationality too, without exposing them to the risk of being called up in France. 

I’d taken out French nationality as well, as anti-Brexit insurance, which I’m glad to have, now that I live in Spain. I, however, was well past military age. Our sons, on the other hand, needed the protection that British nationality provided.

“If called, I’ll do my military service in Britain,” they could have said, as their elder brother had. That seemed to satisfy the French authorities, even though they knew there was no peacetime conscription in Britain.

Michael was going though, all the same. Mostly because a lot of things became easier in France once you’d done your service. Mainly, though, it was because the ten months for which military service had lasted in the nineties had been reduced after 1998 to just a single day of training in 'defence and citizenship’. Still a waste of time, but at least it wasn’t a lot of time.

As we stood on that platform in Strasbourg station, waiting for Michael’s train to come in, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of tradition, of an age-old custom between fathers and sons. I turned to him and shook his hand.

“Son,” I said, “remember that what you are doing today you are doing for France. Do nothing that will bring dishonour to our beautiful colours.” 

He shook my hand back.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” he assured me, “I’m sure it’ll all be over by Christmas.”

It was too. He was home that evening.

Lovely to be able to pop up Memory Lane, mercifully still open in Strasbourg station, and relive that moment.