Journey

Getting on the train at home station. Some squawking on the platform. Recognized the strain in her voice, looked around. A woman, middle years, fretting over seats. The train nearly full but there WERE single and even double seats empty. “Is this First Class?” she asked, standing in the middle of a perfectly ordinary, Second-Class carriage. Why do you want First Class? I want to get a decent place to sit. Clearly unused to rail travel. Quiet, she must have found a place to sit. I returned to my book. Suddenly, two minutes our departure time, she calls out the door to a man on the platform. “What are you messing about at? Get over here NOW!” Obedient, he comes. Some conversation, then she leaves the train while he boards. “Love you,” he says. “Love you,” she smiles through tears, and I see that she is much younger than I had thought. “See you in nine to twelve months,” he says, his voice breaking slightly. Sudden panic as he turns to sit in the carriage. “I need a pen!” She has no pen. A fellow passenger gives him a cheap Biro, reassures him she doesn't want it back. He rearranges the luggage rack, making space for the larger case-on-wheels she had brought on board, and finally subsides to a seat with the pen and a tabloid newspaper's crosswords. The journey is as usual: quiet, slow. I read, and think about the notes I'm making for my mother's biography. Arriving at the major station, he alights too, and, panicking, runs from one guard to another. One tells him, “Platform mumble.” He shouts, “What?” “Nine!” Dragging the uncomfortable heavy case-on-wheels, one wheel on the platform, one in the air, he charges helter-skelter along the platform, shouting “Where is Platform Nine?”at us, the other passengers. I'm ashamed to say I shrug. Someone points to the East. He makes for the bridge and lugs his bag up and over as fast as he can. And that's the last I see of him. Thin, hatchet-faced, a plain man travelling. No phone, no car, no education, his precious newspaper buried safely in that heavy case. My connecting train is moderately busy. Manoeuvering my bulky bag along the train, wedging in doorways, and narrow gap, shoulders aching. Find a seat for the bag and a seat for myself and I'm in an odd little compartment with some seats bus-fashion, two and two and two facing backwards, with on the other side of the compartment four seats sideways – room for a wheelchair, which space is in fact occupied by an overweight child of about 50. Down's? Wheelchair-bound, with her carer alongside. “The train will be setting off in six minutes,” says Carer, a middle-class woman in sensible shoes and culled hair. “December the twenty-fifth has been with us for cent'ries,” announces the child. “Do you open yours at eleven?” Houses and bright green lawns roll by. Fields so bright in the sunshine that they seem to be luminous. Train in the opposite direction roars by. I notice that my handwriting is developing larger loops as a market garden rolls past. “Cattal now, Marie.” “Cattal?” What a strange name for a village. I sketch an odd-looking barn for a model town I'm working on and wonder if the train's toilet is safe to use. Plane trails in the sky look like train tracks as they shred and drift. ,morphing slowly into pearl-hung lace. Fields here are not so green, brown of earth mixing with new-sprouting winter crops. Clumps of trees punctuate the hedgerow lines at random; clusters of rickety barns made of corrugated – metal? Looks like cardboard. Marie is quiet, lulled by the motion of the train. Houses again. Back gardens, ranging from the sublime to the neglected, each one a private universe unto itself. Poplars and finely tuned lawns, bins and washing lines. The Guard places a ramp opposite a brightly flowered station flower bed, and Marie and her carer leave.