An Audience with an Elephant

by Byron Rogers

  Thus North London Railways have taken up the rails between Watford Junction and Croxley Heath, so their Ghost Train is not a train at all but a bus which runs once a week at twenty past six in the morning. And there is one beyond this again. The 06.48 a.m. Derby to Sinfin Central train service, which once carried factory workers, is not even a bus, it is a TAXI. These moments of lunacy at dawn should long ago have been immortalised in film comedy, for you can imagine what the late great Will Hay, playing a taxidriver, would have made of the farce enacted once a week at dawn in the forecourt of Derby Station.

  ‘Sorry sir, you may not hire this taxi. Yes, I know the law too, and of course it is your privilege to report taxi drivers for refusing a fare. But this is not a taxi. It was a taxi five minutes ago, and it will be a taxi again in half an hour, but at the moment it is a train. It became a train at eighteen minutes to seven, and no, my name’s not Cinderella, sir. I know it may not look like a train to you. I know it doesn’t run on rails. But that’s what it is, a T-R-A-I-N. And puff puff to you too, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  Apart from some local people and rail enthusiasts crazy enough to get up at these ungodly hours, nobody knows about the Ghost Trains of old England, even when, as in the case of the Stockport to Stalybridge, this is a ghost at tea-time.

  ‘It’s worth going on, if only for the station buffet at Stalybridge,’ said Pip Dunn of Rail Magazine.

  ‘Fair enough, but can you imagine anyone writing 2,000 words on a 20 minute train service?’

  ‘We do that all the time here,’ said Mr Dunn.

  You will gather from this that the idea to ride the Ghost Train did not originate with me. It was something I agreed to do, then put off until finally it became an embarrassment. And so it was that having driven 250 miles, I sat gloomily on Platform 3a, watching as the rain thickened and the tower blocks of Manchester went out one by one.

  ‘Afternoon.’

  He was in his late thirties, a thick set man in a leather jacket and jeans, a haversack over one shoulder. I had company on 3a.

  ‘Excuse me asking, but you wouldn’t be taking the 3 o’clock to Stalybridge?’

  ‘I certainly am,’ said the man, sounding like Oliver Hardy.

  ‘What for?’

  This is the Policeman’s story. He was travelling through Manchester, he said, he had time to kill, and, for old time’s sake, wanted to see what had become of a train he had last taken 20 years before. No, he hadn’t told anyone of his plan. People would think him mad, said the policeman. One odd thing though, there were just two stations on the route, and even when he had used the service regularly, he had never seen anyone alight, or waiting, at Reddish South or Denton.

  ‘Just one question, do you love railways?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the Policeman.

  It was five minutes to three now, and an elderly lady and what looked like her son had turned up. A guard came, his two flags protruding from a satchel. ‘No sign of the train is there?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know where it’s got to.’ Three o’clock came and went. At four minutes past, there was an announcement. ‘For all those awaiting the 3 o’clock to Stalybridge, we are sorry for the delay.’ Nothing unusual about that, it was what came next which was so strange. ‘The full extent of the delay will be given as soon as possible.’ All other announcements about delays had given reasons and times. ‘Due to signalling problems the So and So is running ten minutes late. We apologise.’ But the station authorities themselves did not know what had happened to the Ghost Train.

  ‘Is it usually late?’ I asked the old lady.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  And this is her story. It was all her fault, she said. Her grandfather had had a model railway in his garden, with trains big enough to sit on, so, when she had a family of her own, her idea of a day out was to take her two boys on a train. It did not matter much where the train went, nor did it now when she was old and they took her. Her bearded son listened impassively. She had passed her enthusiasm on to them, she went on, and his brother was even keener than he was. Most summers they went on the Stockport to Stalybridge at least three times, in winters less. Why, they had even met a lady on it once, who had actually wanted to go to Stalybridge, someone with a suitcase.

  ‘You haven’t been before?’ she asked me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you haven’t been to Stalybridge Buffet?’

  ‘No.’

  She and her son exchanged glances, and the two smiled. Stalybridge Buffet, I gathered, seemed to be some rite of passage awaiting me at the end of the line.

  ‘Here she comes,’ shouted someone, and out of the mist came a fussy little diesel, not only 20 minutes late but a train out of time altogether, the line having never been electrified. I had not seen one of these in 20 years. It stopped and some twelve people, most of whom I had not noticed on the platform but who seemed to have been beamed down like the crew of the Starship Enterprise, got on. Only they did not get on the way people normally do, they piled on board, the old lady amongst them, like children on a school trip or soldiers going on leave, as though terrified they might be left behind.

  I found myself in one of the two elderly carriages with three men who, to my amazement, told me they worked for the railways. One was a signalman, another an engine driver, and the third a younger man just about to join. All had come a long way for these 20 minutes to nowhere, one from Accrington, another from Reading, the third from Swindon.

  ‘Why?’ echoed the Engine Driver. ‘For this. Listen.’ He lifted his hand. The little diesel was shifting from side to side like a sprinter in the blocks, every bolt vibrating. ‘Oh, you old mechanical thing,’ he said fondly. ‘That’s why I come. This is real . It is one of the last Class 101 DMU’s in service.’

  ‘So you’ve been before?’

  All three grinned. ‘We come as often as we can,’ said the signalman, a sharp man, his hair in a pony-tail, not at all the sort of chap you would expect to spend his day off crossing England to travel 12 miles on an old train. It was then I realised I was in the company of a species I had thought extinct, railway men who loved railways. I had met one or two in the old days, rural stationmasters who spent their lives growing roses on their platforms, ticket collectors more immaculate than Guardsmen, but had assumed their pride had been destroyed by privatisation and by its bleak new ruling class of accountants and PR men. So it had survived, not at the top, but as Rome in its decline had survived, in centurions still at their post peering across some frontier. As the poet Robert Graves wrote, A rotten tree lives only in its rind.’ And I started to suspect I might enjoy my afternoon.

  The brakes were released and with a lurch we were off. Peering into the murk, I felt a hand on my shoulder. ‘You do realise you are on one of the highest viaducts in Britain,’ said the old lady. ‘In a moment you will see the Pennines.’ The two of us stared out together. ‘Ah,’ she said, like Tommy Cooper when one of his tricks had gone wrong. ‘No you won’t.’

  We came to a station and one of the railway men opened the window, something you can still do on this train. ‘Anyone getting on?’ asked his friends. He shook his head, ‘No,’ he said, as happy as any man confirming an article of faith. ‘Hang on though, the guard has just got out.’ They watched him standing in weeds waist high, an explorer in some lost city of the Incas. In all the years they had travelled the line, they said, no one had ever seen a living soul on Denton Station. But then people can grow up in Denton and not even know they have a station. My own cousin has. ‘Are you sure you didn’t dream this journey?’ he said.

  The green was all round us now, and deepening over hanging trees, neat suburban hedges, overgrown verges, a world of willows and elder. I did not have not a clue as to where I was, or later, where I had been, when I retrieved my car from Stockport and drove between factories to Stalybridge, a journey which, curiously, took me over an hour.

  ‘See that?’ the Signalman was pointing to a signal-box. ‘That’s Denton Junction,
that is, until eighteen months ago the last signal-box in Britain with gas lighting.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to explain to anyone your fascination with railways?’

  ‘No,’ said the Signalman. ‘That would be pointless.’

  ‘Put it this way,’ said the Engine Driver. ‘The train might be noisy and rattly to you, but that’s why we’ve come. We work in an industry that’s done away with smoke and which is now trying to do away with sound. Everything has to be silent and brilliantly white. We are here because modern life is wrong.’

  The train pulled into Stalybridge, but when I looked back through the rain I saw that the destination indicator on the front cab said Ormskirk. By that stage I was prepared to believe anything, for by the time I turned round again most of the passengers had vanished, apart from the old lady, her son and the Signalman who were hurrying towards the station buildings.

  The Buffet at Stalybridge is one of the few free houses in the rail network. A narrow little room, it has not changed much since it was opened in the 1880s, and still has an open fire. But that was not the first thing I noticed. On the bar was a barrel of homemade perry. Perry is my favourite drink, but in 40 years of perambulation through licensed premises I had not seen it for sale anywhere outside the pear orchards of Herefordshire, even there never in a pub.

  ‘Oh, we always have a barrel of perry,’ said the Licensee.

  I had a pint, and it smelled of elderflower. The next time I went to the bar I saw they also did wheat beer. Wheat beer is that lovely white beer brewed in Belgium and Germany, but which in this country is difficult to get outside London. Wheat beer, my second most favourite drink, is something for which I have often driven 20 miles.

  ‘Wheat beer, please.’

  ‘What kind would you like?’

  ‘Which kind would I like? How many have you got?’

  ‘Eight.’

  Men have always fantasised about Journey’s End, the great good place where wishes are met. At different times, and in different cultures, this has been the Happy Isles, the Land of Cockayne, in Welsh, Afallon, the Isle of Apples, Brigadoon, the Blue Rock Candy Mountains: it is just that no traveller who looks for it can find his way there. But say there was a train out of place and time, a train that went nowhere and never came back.

  ‘Usually we have 20 guest beers a week,’ said the Licensee.

  ‘I knew you’d like it here,’ said the old lady. Here at the quiet limit of the world’s end.

  Dead Writers Society

  OT EVERYONE CAME to lunch. The Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society, having found the nearest pub, disappeared into it. They felt they owed this to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, explained their chairman, a kinsman. ‘He was a drunk who was thrown out of five European countries.’ The Dylan Thomas lot, as might be expected, had not turned up, and John Clare had wandered off somewhere. But the Brontës came, from moors where the footpath signs are now in Japanese, also Fanny Burney and Jane Austen from the rectories, sitting together straight-backed and demure at the tables reserved in a café in Tesco for lunch. In Tesco... you might like to think about that for the moment. Book a table at Le Gavroche and nobody would think you in the least odd. It is when you encounter people who have booked tables in Tesco that the suspicion comes you are among no ordinary humankind.

  A rosy-cheeked countryman from the Richard Jefferies Society. Ageing lads in tweeds sporting the Housman Society tie of a team ploughing, and a lady from the Mary Webb Society, small, sharp-featured, unsmiling, looking as though she could spot doom at a hundred yards. It was a march past of the enthusiasts, only one man’s enthusiasm is not another’s. In Tesco, Sherlock Holmes confessed that he had never heard of John Clare, William Barnes, Beddoes or Ronald Firbank (‘Isn’t he an actor?’). Douglas Warren, representing the Sherlock Holmes Fellowship of London, looked up from his shepherd’s pie. ‘I’m not a literary man, I’m a civil engineer.’

  The Alliance of Literary Societies, representing a collective membership of some 20,000, meets just once a year, but for that day, that one remarkable day in a Unitarian chapel in Birmingham, English literature is laid out in front of you like a stock market index. Who’s in, who’s out, whose reputation is enjoying a tidal wave of popularity (prompted by such events as Colin Firth emerging from a lake in a diaphanous shirt in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice), it is all there in the number of books on the little stalls, the opulence of the journals published by the various societies, even in the alacrity, or the lack of it, with which members have paid their annual subscriptions. ‘Not heard from the Edward Thomas Society this year,’ said Bill Adams, the Alliance secretary. ‘He can’t be doing too well.’

  The Eng. Lit. industry, however its academic practitioners present it, is basically an exercise in share pushing. You find your writer, preferably dead, even more preferably forgotten, then you promote him through little essays bristling with footnotes; ‘The effect of Welsh metrical form on Dylan Thomas’; ‘Arthur Machen, a late Gothic phenomenon’. And it doesn’t matter that Dylan Thomas never read a line of Welsh poetry or that Machen once calculated that 40 years of writing had brought him £635: sleek careers can be founded on them. It matters even less that your writer may be just as forgotten afterwards, for who can measure popularity?

  During last month’s meeting the Alliance held a raffle and the prizes were books contributed by the different societies; a Virago paperback of Mary Webb, a critical analysis of Rider Haggard. Both were new. But among them on the table was Portrait of a Village by Francis Brett Young. I picked this up and turned to the publication date, 1957. Not new. One society had not provided a book at all but a bottle of wine, probably the Thomas Lovell Beddoes lot, the chairman of which had told me it had been a toss-up between forming a fine wines society and one to honour the poet. His being in print is the least of their worries.

  ‘I know it sounds terrible but I haven’t heard of some of these chaps, let alone read them,’ said Mr Adams. ‘Who was David Jones?’

  ‘He was a poet who went to bed for the war,’ I said. ‘He’d been on the Western Front, and when the Second World War broke out felt he had had enough.’

  The Alliance was founded in 1973 when Bill Adams’ wife, Kathleen, incensed to hear that one of Charles Dickens’s houses was about to be demolished, wrote a letter to The Times suggesting literary societies join together to provide a corporate voice. A dozen societies wrote in and for fifteen years, with Mrs Adams as secretary, this was the Alliance. They had no money, no committee, but they had an effect. ‘A petrol station was going to be built in Nuneaton in Warwickshire next to George Eliot’s childhood home, and they all wrote to the borough council. Now a council doesn’t mind in the least if local people call them philistines, but they mind very much when people from all over the country do. We heard no more about the petrol station.’

  At that stage it was a self-help society. Things changed dramatically in 1989 when the Birmingham and Midland Institute offered the Alliance a home, at which point Mrs Adams bowed out and her husband, a retired civil servant, took over. Bill, a cheerful red-faced gentleman, had a list. Every literary society he had ever heard of or read about was on his list, and Bill wrote to them all.

  Some writers attract followers as jam attracts flies. There will always be a Byron Society for there will always be wistful upper-middle class ladies with time on their hands. There will always be large men with moustaches to form the Kipling Society, and passionate ladies trying to contact Emily Brontë by setting their palms on her grave. Most may no longer be young but their enthusiasm is far beyond that of the teenagers who follow pop stars. These are the ultimate fans.

  A curator of Hardy’s cottage once told me that a few months after he and his wife moved in, a letter came from three men asking if they might stay the night. They were planning to reenact Hardy’s visit to Cornwall and his meeting with his first wife, which became the poem ‘As I Set Out for Lyonesse’. He and his wife were so startled by the request they agreed, and watched incredu
lously as three men stumbled out into a winter dawn, lurching through muddy fields, for they avoided 20th-century roads, to catch whatever westward train at Dorchester that the President of the Immortals, and British Rail, still provided.

  Enthusiasm for the Alliance was never in doubt. It was just that the societies were fragmented until Bill Adams wrote. And wrote. And wrote again. Eighteen months ago there were just 37 societies in the Alliance. Now there are 73. Members of one join another or go on to form a new one of their very own. Their constitution was drafted by Mrs Adams who, after 25 years as chairman of the George Eliot Fellowship, knows more about such things than anyone living. The result is that literary societies are rising out of the earth as soon as a writer is in it, and this summer the Philip Larkin Society holds a conference at the University of Hull which it has called ‘New Larkins for Old’.

  Not everyone replied to Mr Adams. The Trollope Society, mainly consisting of Tory MPs, did not reply. ‘They’re so grand, one wonders if they’ve read the books,’ said Kathleen Adams. ‘On television John Major, a member, gave an impression of Septimus Harding playing the violin. Septimus Harding actually played the cello. It does make you think.’ The Arthur Machen Society lost the letter. The society commemorates a writer, one of whose books was described as ‘the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable work yet seen in English’, and it is the only literary society in which the members are more famous than the man himself. Its president is Barry Humphries, and other members include Carmelite friars, tree surgeons, a Korean called Williams, the man who wrote the music for The Silence of the Lambs, and a publisher of comics who, seeking to extend his range of characters, added the Chief Constable of Manchester to them, only to have the Obscene Publications Squad steam in through the front door. With such a membership it is understandable that the secretary mislaid Bill Adams’s letter, but it too joined this year.

  Some, however, were too deep in shadow, like the Stenbock Society, set up ‘for the promotion of the morbid and perverse in literature’, also to study the life and works of Eric Stenbock, Estonian count and decadent poet, who is buried in a double grave in Brighton – though only one name, his, is on the headstone. The mighty Brontë Society joined, with its 4,000 members and fifteen paid officers. Twice the size of the next society, the Jane Austen, it even has an education officer whose job it is to attract the young. Most literary societies gave up long ago on the young, but the Brontës, with houses called Wuthering Heights mushrooming in the Tokyo suburbs, can afford a missionary.