Travelling with a storyteller on a night train from revolution

If I remember, I had to run for the train. Miss it and I’d be travelling through the night, or waiting until the following day. This train would get me there after midnight, but at least well before breakfast time.

I was heading for Hull, in Yorkshire, from London. If I was late, it was probably because this was the time, forty years ago, when I was heavily involved in activism for the far left, and I’d been busy forwarding the revolution. A revolution which, in case you hadn’t noticed, didn’t happen despite my efforts. I was convinced it would, but in a top-down Cult, you can convince yourself of anything.

It was a time when I read quite a few books of Lenin’s. I remember almost nothing about them, just that they were stiflingly boring but had sonorous titles.

Far from difficult to put down
And eminently forgettable

One title I liked was The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Few people today have any idea who Mr Kautsky was, and fewer would feel it worth spending thirty seconds on Wikipedia to find out. But Lenin wrote ponderously against him, itself a characteristic of the hard Left: it spends far more time denouncing its ‘renegades’ and ‘traitors’ than its enemies.

When it comes to wiping those backsliders out, I reckon a cruel but effective method would have been to start reading them Lenin’s works. They’d be begging for the firing squad in no time at all. Or at least for a pen to sign any confession put in front of them.

Another title that sticks in my memory is Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. I remember not a word of the contents, but the title remains relevant today: there is something infantile about the far Left, to which I then belonged. But, like St Paul, when I became a man, I put away childish things. Then, however, I saw things as through a mirror darkly, and felt sure, as do so many today who should know far better, that wishing for change yourself was enough to make it happen.

I was on my way to Hull to see a fellow wishful-thinker of the Left. However, since she was also my girlfriend at the time, I don’t think the activity for which we were getting together was exclusively the advancing of socialism. Which was another reason, I suspect, why I was anxious to get there before tonight had become irretrievably tomorrow morning.

In my hurry, I’d taken no reading material with me. Not even Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which wouldn’t have been the best way of passing the time on the journey (what on earth does the title mean, anyway?), but might have been better than just looking out of the window. Fortunately, a fellow passenger in my compartment took pity on me.

“I’ve just bought two books. You can read this one, if you like.”

Practically impossible to put down
and far more memorable than Lenin

It was Nevil Shute’s The Chequerboard. I’d never read any Shute before. I’d probably never even heard of him. But within minutes, I’d fallen for the story and simply couldn’t put it down. In fact, handing the book to the generous passenger when he left the train, was a painful experience. It took me a while – well, I had a revolution to organise and more Lenin to read – but within a few months I found the time to pop into a bookshop and buy a copy of the book, to finish it.

The thing about Shute is that whatever you think of his writing, he was an extraordinary storyteller. And in The Chequerboard he gives that skill plenty of scope: as well as the protagonist’s own story, the framework for the novel, we get the stories of the three men he sets out to track down. They’re finely constructed, compelling tales, a pleasure to read at any time, especially in a train running through the featureless landscape of night-time England.

The kindness of the stranger in my compartment is a memory I treasure. So is my pleasure in reading Shute. I’ve consumed a great many of his novels since then, and re-read several of them many times, though none so much as The Chequerboard.

My daughter-in-law Sheena, knows how much I like the book. She also knows that I’m working to improve my Spanish. So, when she saw a copy of Tablero de Damas, the 1951 Spanish translation, she snapped it up for me.

Found for me by Sheena in Madrid
where she lives with my son and new granddaughter

As she says, there’s something to be said for reading a book you already know, in a language you’re trying to learn: you don’t have to struggle to understand the story and can concentrate on the words. Since they’ve been written by a native Spanish speaker, I’m sure they’re good enough to help me with the language.

Although what gives reading the book additional spice is seeing how awful the translation is: librero (bookseller), for instance, for ‘bookmaker’ (someone who takes bets, for instance on horse races), of ‘cutting corns’ (removing calluses of dead skin) rendered as selling agricultural products.

But that just makes re-reading the book all the more fun. As does the memory of the strange times, and the kind circumstances, in which I read it for the first time. Especially as it was so much more entertaining than my usual reading.

Thank you, Sheena. Thank you, Spanish translator. Thank you, stranger on a train.

And thank you, of course, Nevil Shute.

They evoke and inspire, the stations of modern pilgrimage

My love affair with certain modes of public transport continues to strengthen and deepen. Not planes of course, those ghastly flying cigars they stuff you into with far too little space for comfort. You only put up with them for the sake of getting somewhere wonderful, like Barcelona or Berlin, and I've been on flights which I'd have willingly left even for Kinshasa or Kabul.

Nor do I mean those other packed cigars, underground trains. But real trains, the overground ones, only occasionally generate anything less than unmitigated delight. Not least for the little gems to which they sometimes lead us.

Take Barnstaple, for instance, where I went last week. You start by taking the main line to Exeter, insofar as the South West of England, as remote as it's beautiful, can be said to be on the main line to anywhere. Then you change onto a branch line on which the only surprise is that the engines aren't driven by steam. You make lengthy stops at various stations to let trains coming the other way go past.

Barnstaple is near the North Devon coast, from where the locals say that if you can see the coast of South Wales, then it's going to be raining soon. And if you can't see the coast of South Wales, it's raining already.

Barnstaple Station stands for an unchanging world.
And has changed its signs to prove it

I didn't see the South Wales coast (I didn't bother to look: it was raining). What I did see was the sign outside the station with its evocation of a bygone, more innocent world. That green, those pleasantly flattened white logos, so much more attractive than ghastly monstrosities such as the symbol of the London Olympics, the very brand name, conjured up memories of my long-lost youth.

'British Railways' it proclaimed. How appropriate in this pleasant backwater, firmly attached to tradition and essentially conservative. Except it was the Conservatives, led by their harridan leader Margaret Thatcher, who did away with British Railways. There is no such organisation any more.

Except, apparently, on the Barnstaple branch line. Showing that not all conservatives agree with the Conservatives. A most ingenious paradox for those who collect such things.


Barnstaple's salute to long-lost British Rail
Because looking backwards isn't always Conservative

This week I was up in the opposite part of the country, both physically and metaphorically, in Hull, or Kingston upon Hull to give it its full name. In the old industrial heartland of the North, in Yorkshire, Hull has known better times and is climbing back towards better times again.

Reaching the station on Sunday, I was reminded of another trip decades ago when I'd forgotten to bring a book for the journey, but a fellow-passenger lent me a copy of The Chequer Board. It was my introduction to Nevil Shute, an appalling writer and outstandng story-teller. For me, Hull is forever associated wth the charm of the book and the bitter frustration of having to give it back when its owner left the train, before I could finish it and long before I'd reached Hull.

But Hull is associated with a much finer writer, the city's best known son, at least since the great anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce. Philip Larkin is the poet who wrote those resounding words, 'they fuck you up your Mum and Dad'. Frankly, I can't blame my Mum or Dad for my fucked-up state, and if my sons suffer from any particular fucked-uppery, they can take the responsibility onto their own shoulders and sort it out themselves.

Still I like the poems, and I like the statue of the poet striding across the concourse at Hull station, his dynamic posture underlining his, the railways' and the town's thrusting approach to the future.

Larkin striding out, underlining the dynamism of the railways.
And of course of Hull

Larkin's reputation has been somewhat tarnished by the stash of pornography found in his house after his death, but if you ask me that was just his last joke on all the worthy commentators for whom the discovery made enthusiastic eulogies rather difficult.

A dynamic poet with feet of clay in the North, conservative resistance to Conservatism in the South. Travelling the tracks keep me instructed and amused.