by James Birk
Chapter 25
It was a thirty minute walk through the city centre from my flat to Cardiff Central Station and I normally would have entered into this with relish, being an enormous fan of the sights and sounds of my nation’s capital, however, for a number of reasons I decided to forego this pleasure in favour of getting the bus.
Firstly I was running late, which was usually only a crime I associated with work, as an adventure such as the one I was about to embark upon would ordinarily have had me out of bed at the crack of dawn and seated in a café, munching on a bacon sandwich in one of the numerous greasy spoons or fast food establishments that greeted me en route to the station. However I had never been on a trip of this magnitude before, and as well as the usual ‘passport, tickets, money’ check that was always my mother’s pre-holiday mantra, I needed to make sure I had packed all my running gear and a suitable array of clothing should all my plans in the French capital come to fruition. After several paranoid bouts of unpacking and repacking my battered grey holdall, I found that I didn’t have a great deal of time before my heavily discounted train ticket to London became invalid and I would have to pay the extortionate fare for the subsequent train, which would also throw my Eurostar connection into doubt.
I could ease my fears by getting on a train at the much nearer Queen Street station and changing at Cardiff Central, but on lifting my bag, I realised it was going to be a struggle to carry it even for the ten minute walk to Queen Street, and the bus seemed like the best option in theory.
‘In theory’ did not, alas, always translate to ‘in practice’ and after waiting diligently at the bus stop across the road from my building, with several other concerned commuters for fifteen minutes, for a bus that was supposedly going to appear within two minutes according to the digital display attached to the shelter, I was eventually greeted by a vehicle that was so full that even if I had been willing to pretend to be a sardine for the duration of the journey through town, health and safety laws would not have allowed it and the driver would only let one person onto the bus before closing the doors and driving away. Panic started to grip me but fortunately that old adage about waiting all day for one before two come along at once proved to be true, and a much emptier carriage arrived only one minute later, which I gratefully boarded.
Aside from poor punctuality, a further problem with the Cardiff bus service was an insistence on making prospective passengers pay for their journey with the exact change. I had been aware of this rule prior to boarding, but it had been so long since I had used the service that my memory failed me and I hadn’t prepared for it. I was subsequently forced to use a two-pound coin to pay for a one-pound-fifty journey, much to my chagrin.
I was hurled into my seat as the bus sped away, only to notice that there was a rather pungent odour coming from the seat directly behind me. I glanced quickly round to see a dishevelled man with a runny nose and a slightly manic look in his eyes. He was also mumbling obscenities under his breath and rocking back and forth. We briefly made eye contact and I spun back to a forward facing position in haste. I looked around the bus and realised there were a number of empty seats available, but I suspected that I couldn’t really change seats without offending the gentleman behind me and, although I wouldn’t normally have let this affect my decision unduly, the muttering suggested some sort of mental instability and that struck me as exactly the kind of person that I definitely wouldn’t want to insult. Besides, the journey was only around ten minutes and I was sure I could cope for that long. Sadly the lights were against us and the journey took fifteen minutes, by which time the muttering had become much more audible though still incomprehensible. He disembarked one stop before me, for which my nostrils were eternally grateful. I watched him amble his way along the pavement attracting openly scornful stares from some youths and it occurred to me that he probably wasn’t really that dangerous at all. I wondered what his story was. For all the disappointments and setbacks that I perceived in my life, I was doing a lot better than he was. Had that always been the case, or had he once been on a similar path to me, a youth full of untapped potential, brimming with hope and ambition, only for life to deal him an even worse hand than the mediocrity I felt that I had been handed.
Life could certainly have been worse; I reflected as the bus pulled off and disappeared from view.
Cardiff Central Station seemed excessively busy for a Friday morning, but the Easter holidays were upon us, and as there seemed to be quite a lot of young people, I guessed that there were a fair number of university students making return journeys to their homes for the break.
I had a few minutes to spare before I needed to board my train, so I purchased a lad’s mag from one of the station shops, and sat in the station café nursing an overpriced coffee. I started reading an interview with a minor female celebrity that I had never actually heard of. She didn’t have much of interest to say, but she did look good in the skimpy underwear she was wearing in the pictures that went with the piece.
Eventually my train was announced and I made my way through the ticket barriers and up the stairs onto the heaving platform one just as the ten twenty-five Swansea to London Paddington train pulled into the station. My seat was reserved in Coach A, and unfortunately I found myself at the wrong end of the train, by Coach H. I forced my way through the melee, tripping over suitcases and small children until I eventually joined the scrum of people trying to get into my carriage.
I noticed an extremely attractive blonde girl heading into the same coach as me and secretly prayed that I would be in the adjoining seat to hers, but to no avail, as I found myself instead sitting next to a stern looking business man, who had already taken over most of the available space with his brief case and laptop bag, despite the clearly displayed notice that my seat was reserved and was consequently almost certainly going to be occupied. He regarded me as though I was something he had just scraped off the bottom of his well-polished shoe as I attempted to negotiate my way into the pew. I glanced around and realised that as well as making me a hefty saving on my ticket price, booking ahead had also guaranteed me a seat, as the train was full to capacity and there was now standing room only, although I did notice a significant number of unoccupied ‘reserved’ seats, which none of the standing people dared to take for fear of being ushered away by the rightful occupants, even though those rightful occupants didn’t look likely to appear imminently. Eventually one man was brave enough to sit down, and though he wasn’t asked to move for the entire journey, I noticed that he never really looked completely at ease.
For some unexplained reason the train sat on platform one for a full ten minutes after it’s scheduled departure time before easing itself, in no apparent haste, out of Cardiff Central. Cramped and uncomfortable, I pulled out my magazine and semi-consciously ogled another scantily clad minor celebrity. My thoughts were elsewhere though, as I excitedly began to visualise my impending Gallic adventure.
According to the announcement from the conductor, and one or two barely noticeable signs, Coach A was one of two ‘quiet’ coaches on the train. The other, was coach G in first class, but for those of us with too little money to afford such luxuries, coach A was our only haven from noise. The rules of the quiet coach did not stretch as far as a ban on talking to your fellow passengers, but there was a ban on using mobile phones and playing personal music devices at an inappropriate volume. I hadn’t actively requested a seat in the quiet coach when I booked my ticket, but I was relatively glad of it, as for the most part I was hoping simply to drift off and daydream my way to London. However, several passengers seemed unaware of the restrictions placed upon them and at varying stages of the journey a few people were having overly loud phone conversations, a large number of which seemed to be business related. One man, seated a few rows behind me, was particularly ignorant of the rule, and from just before Newport until shortly after Swindon he was engaged in one phone call after another in which, amongst other things, he advised someone called Brian that he woul
d pass the details of the project onto Nigel and get Carol to fax over the documents in the morning. Even were he not so flagrantly flouting the Quiet Zone regulations in place he would have been irritating, but as it was, he was displaying downright arrogance. Eventually an elderly man, who had it seemed, specifically chosen to sit in Coach A so as so avoid such idiots, actually got out of his seat, walked over to the offender and calmly chastised him. Such was the quiet dignity of the veteran that the younger man meekly apologised and ceased his antisocial behaviour. It struck me, however, that without such citizen’s arrests, there was no obvious way for Great Western to enforce their own rule, which surely made the whole enterprise a little bit pointless.
The journey passed with no great haste, and the train seemed only to get busier with each stop. Around Didcot Parkway, I attempted to make my way to the buffet but to no avail, as having managed to squeeze through the congested aisles as far as Coach C, the mass of bodies in the way became impassable. I was pleasantly surprised on my return to Coach A to see that no-one had attempted to steal my seat, although my neighbour had taken the opportunity to encroach on some of the space that I had spent the previous ninety minutes trying to win back off him. Eventually the train chugged into Paddington Station only thirty minutes late and after a mysterious ten minute stop on the outskirts of London that was never explained to us by the train staff. I disembarked and joined the end of the enormous queue of fellow voyagers that slowly snaked its way up platform nine, moving all the more slowly because of a fairly paranoid approach by the rail companies that had resulted in the need for tickets to be checked before, during and at the end of journeys. Having negotiated this unnecessary final ticket inspection, I took a moment to enjoy the impressive scale of Paddington station, which had always filed me with awe on childhood Christmas shopping trips to the British capital and was no less impressive now. I suspected that the majority of Londoners currently passing through it had no strong feelings about it one way or another, but for me it was genuine spectacle and source of mawkish nostalgia.
Not being a resident of London, I had never bothered to acquire an Oyster card, however when greeted with the difference in price between a single fare on the London Underground when armed with that card, compared to the price I was now being asked to pay, I realised why my brother had advised me to get one. Unfortunately, with time running out for me to make my Eurostar, and with no idea exactly how long tube journeys took, I grudgingly handed over the astonishing fee and went through my third barrier of the day and into the dark heart of London.
As I stood on an overcrowded platform waiting for the Circle Line to take me to St Pancras a loud speaker announced to anyone who cared to listen, that all underground trains were currently running a good service. It occurred to me that it was a pretty sorry state of affairs when a good service was not obvious and needed to be pointed out to the customer.
The train arrived and was far too full to board, however most people still tried with the consequence that I watched bemused as respectable middleclass and middle aged business men and women abandoned dignity (and possibly oxygen) and crushed themselves into unreasonable positions just to avoid a further two-minute wait, which was the advertised time for the follow up service.
Granted the next train took a fairly long two minutes to arrive, but it was significantly emptier, to the extent that I was able to secure myself a seat after only two stops of standing up. As the train shot through the subterranean tunnels it occurred to me that once again Londoners seemed blasé by the fact that they were actually underground. On a train. Which struck me as actually pretty amazing when I thought about it.
Though steeped with it’s own history St Pancras was a very different kind of train station to Paddington, the relatively new international area was plush, modern and cosmopolitan, ready to greet visitors freshly arrived from the continent. I instantly fell in love with it. For all its contemporary design, it still had all of the romance and nostalgia that I would have expected from a station that served as a gateway to Europe. I was aware that Eurostar used to depart from Waterloo (which may have been a little awkward for our Gallic cousins, given the outcome of the battle it was named after) but St Pancras seemed a more than suitable place for me to begin my European adventure. Although the Eurostar was still a train, it was in a different class entirely from the Great Western on which I had travelled from Cardiff. From the moment I inserted my ticket into the gate that let me into the departure lounge, all the way through the security checks and passport control, I felt an almost childlike enchantment, reminiscent of the Christmases of my youth. Every time I heard an announcement in English it was followed by the equivalent in French (at least I assumed it was the equivalent, although I had no certain way of knowing) and I recalled the excitement and anticipation of my first ever holiday abroad. It had only been a rainy camping holiday to Brittany when I was ten years old, but to me it had been the most thrilling experience imaginable for those fourteen wet and windy days.
When it came time to board, I didn’t mind at all that there were hundreds of other people alongside me, or that it was just as much of a scrum to physically get onto the Eurostar as any other mode of public transport I had used that day (although I did note with envy that the first class passengers were being helped with their luggage by friendly smiling staff who were notably absent from the standard class carriages).
What I found particularly enthralling was the range of different accents and languages being spoken around me as I located my seat (once again missing out on sitting by a pretty girl by only a few rows and instead having to contend with a sullen looking adolescent boy, who I took to be French because of the bright yellow trousers he was wearing). A smattering of GCSE French did little to help me to understand much of what was being said by my fellow passengers, a smattering of GCSE Welsh did nothing at all to improve matters.
The seats were no more comfortable than anything I had previously experienced, the train had a fairly bland interior, and I could imagine that I would become distinctly unimpressed if this was a regular routine, but nothing could dampen my spirits. The news that we were about to depart came bilingually over the speaker and the train glided out of St Pancras, effortlessly, with a nonchalance that I felt no British train could carry off.
The first part of the journey passed uneventfully. The youth next to me flouted Quiet Coach Directive Number Two by playing his music too loudly, but Eurostar did not have a particular policy about this so I did my best to ignore him. I had not yet had lunch and an announcement about the buffet car roused my interest, so I went to investigate. After a fairly unsteady walk through three crowded carriages I found the appropriate wagon. I was not disappointed, it was as cosmopolitan an array of sandwiches and snacks as I had ever encountered, with many brands that I had never seen or heard of, although with distinctly familiar packaging. It seemed fairly obvious to me that Croky crisps were none other than Walkers in disguise for example, but I had never had the joys of Cote d’Or chocolate before and decided that I needed to try it there and then, but I needed something more substantial too, and selected an odd looking sandwich which had ham and Emmental cheese as filling (Emmental, not Cheddar – how exotic!) and a strange looking bread that was labelled as pain suedois (which I later translated as Swedish bread. I hadn’t known Sweden was famous for its bread, I had always thought they just did moderately priced self-assembly furniture). It was not cheap, but I gladly paid the price and savoured my new discoveries at one of the available eating stations in the car (they weren’t really tables and there were no chairs to sit on but their purpose was clear). Perhaps it was the novelty value alone, but both sandwich and chocolate bar were nothing short of delightful.
I returned to my seat and flicked through my magazine for a while, before a joint Anglo-French announcement revealed that the pinnacle of the journey was imminent. We were about to go under the Channel. As it turned out the excitement came more from the idea of going under the Channel rather t
han the actual experience as it really just felt like we were going through a long tunnel. One American tourist seated a few rows behind me remarked to his young son that he had thought that we would actually be able to see the water all around us when we were crossing the sea, and while this was a preposterous idea for all kinds of reasons, I did find myself agreeing mentally that actually his idea was a lot cooler than the reality.
Any sense of disappointment was soon washed away however as soon we were in France. Admittedly, it didn’t look hugely different to Britain, at least not through the windows of a speeding train, but I was thrilled by just knowing that I was in a different country for the first time since an ill-advised lad’s holiday to Magaluf the summer after I had completed my A-levels, just under twelve years earlier, that had resulted in me losing my bearings, my wallet and my dignity at various stages of the holiday but sadly not my virginity, which had really been my sole objective on the trip.
The bilingual voice welcomed us to France, although I noted that whereas before it had been English followed by French before the tunnel, it was now the latter which took precedence and English was now the translation.
Worn out by the excitement and with nothing better to do with an hour and half still remaining on the journey, I found myself drifting off to sleep. After what seemed like only seconds, I was awoken by another announcement.
‘Madame et Messieurs, bienvenus à Paris…’
I didn’t need the English translation that time.