A Book of Railway Journeys

by Ludovic Kennedy

  PAUL THEROUX,

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  The former pleasures of railroad eating: menu on the Orient Express, 6 December 1884

  RESTAURANT CAR

  Fondling only to throttle the nuzzling moment

  Smuggled under the table, hungry or not

  We roughride over the sleepers, finger the menu,

  Avoid our neighbours’ eyes and wonder what

  Mad country moves beyond the steamed-up window

  So fast into the past we could not keep

  Our feet on it one instant. Soup or grapefruit?

  We had better eat to pass the time, then sleep

  To pass the time. The water in the carafe

  Shakes its hips, both glass and soup plate spill,

  The tomtom beats in the skull, the waiters totter

  Along their invisible tightrope. For good or ill,

  For fish or meat, with single tickets only,

  Our journey still in the nature of a surprise,

  Could we, before we stop where all must change,

  Take one first risk and catch our neighbours’ eyes?

  LOUIS MACNEICE

  4. A view from the window

  There were women, but they were old, shawled against the sun and yoked to green watering cans in trampled corn fields. The landscape was low and uneven, barely supporting in its dust a few farm animals, maybe five motionless cows, and a herdsman leaning on a stick watching them starve in the same way the scarecrows—two plastic bags on a bony cross-piece—watched the devastated fields of cabbages and peppers. And beyond the rows of blue cabbage, a pink pig butted the splintery fence of his small pen and a cow lay under a goal of saplings in an unused football field. Red peppers, as crimson and pointed as clusters of poinsettias, dried in the sun outside farm cottages in districts where farming consisted of men stumbling after oxen dragging wooden ploughs and harrows, or occasionally wobbling on bicycles loaded with hay bales. Herdsmen were not simply herdsmen; they were sentries, guarding little flocks from marauders: four cows watched by a woman, three grey pigs driven by a man with a truncheon, scrawny chickens watched by scrawny children. Freedom, women, and drinking was Nikola’s definition; and there was a woman in a field pausing to tip a water bottle to her mouth; she swallowed and bent from the waist to continue tying up cornstalks. Large ochre squashes sat plumply in fields of withering vines; people priming pumps and swinging buckets out of wells on long poles; tall narrow haystacks, and pepper fields in so many stages of ripeness I first took them for flower gardens. It is a feeling of utter quietness, deep rural isolation the train briefly penetrates. It goes on without a change for hours, this afternoon in Yugoslavia, and then all people disappear and the effect is eerie: roads without cars or bicycles, cottages with empty windows at the fringes of empty fields, trees heavy with apples and no one picking them. Perhaps it’s the wrong time—3.30; perhaps it’s too hot. But where are the people who stacked that hay and set those peppers so carefully to dry? The train passes on—that’s the beauty of a train, this heedless movement—but it passes on to more of the same. Six neat beehives, a derelict steam engine with wild flowers garlanding its smokestack, a stalled ox at a level crossing. In the heat haze of the afternoon my compartment grows dusty, and down at the front of the train Turks lie all over their seats, sleeping with their mouths open and children wakeful on their stomachs. At each river and bridge there were square brick emplacements, like Croatian copies of Martello towers, pocked by bombs. Then I saw a man, headless, bent over in a field, camouflaged by cornstalks that were taller than he; I wondered if I had missed all the others because they were made so tiny by their crops.

  There was a drama outside Nis. At a road near the track a crowd of people fought to look at a horse, still in its traces and hitched to an overloaded wagon, lying dead on its side in a mud puddle in which the wagon was obviously stuck. I imagined its heart had burst when it tried to free the wagon. And it had just happened: children were calling to their friends, a man was dropping his bike and running back for a look, and farther along a man pissing against a fence was straining to see the horse. The scene was composed like a Flemish painting in which the pissing man was a vivid detail. The train, the window frame holding the scene for moments, made it a picture. The man at the fence flicks the last droplets from his penis and, tucking it in his baggy pants, begins to sprint; the picture is complete.

  PAUL THEROUX,

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  TO A FAT LADY SEEN FROM THE TRAIN

  O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

  Missing so much and so much,

  O fat white woman whom nobody loves.

  Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

  When the grass is soft as the breasts of doves

  And shivering sweet to the touch?

  O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

  Missing so much and so much?

  FRANCIS CORNFORD

  THE FAT WHITE WOMAN SPEAKS

  Why do you rush through the field in trains,

  Guessing so much and so much.

  Why do you flash through the flowery meads,

  Fat-head poet that nobody reads;

  And why do you know such a frightful lot

  About people in gloves as such?

  And how the devil can you be sure,

  Guessing so much and so much,

  How do you know but what someone who loves

  Always to see me in nice white gloves

  At the end of the field you are rushing by,

  Is waiting for his Old Dutch?

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  With Zola to visit Flaubert and Maupassant at Rouen

  Easter Sunday, 28 March 1880

  Today we set off, Daudet, Zola, Charpentier, and I, to dine and stay the night at Flaubert’s house at Croisset.

  Zola was as gay as an auctioneer’s clerk going to make an inventory, Daudet as excited as a henpecked husband out on a spree, and Charpentier as merry as a student who can see a succession of beers coming his way. As for myself, I was happy at the prospect of embracing Flaubert once more.

  Zola’s happiness was marred by a great preoccupation, the question whether, taking an express train, he would be able to piddle in Paris, at Mantes, and at Vernon. The number of times the author of Nana piddles or at least tries to piddle is quite incredible.

  Daudet, a little tipsy from the porter he had drunk with his lunch, started talking about Chien Vert and his affair with that mad, crazy, demented female, whom he had inherited from Nadar: a mad affair, drenched in absinthe and given a dramatic touch every now and then by a few knife-thrusts, the marks of which he showed us on one of his hands. He gave us a humorous account of his wretched life with that woman, whom he lacked the courage to leave and to whom he remained attached to some extent by the pity he felt for her vanished beauty and the front tooth she had broken on a stick of barley-sugar. When he decided to get married and had to break with her, he was afraid of the scene she would create in a house where other people were living, and took her into the heart of the Meudon woods under the pretext of treating her to a dinner in the country. There, among the bare trees, when he told her that it was all over, the woman rolled at his feet in the mud and snow, bellowing like a young heifer and crying: “I shan’t be nasty to you any more, I’ll be your slave...” Then they had supper together, with the woman eating like a workman, in a sort of stupid bewilderment. This story was followed by the account of his liaison with a charming young thing called Rosa, and the description of a night of passion they spent in a room at Orsay shared with seven or eight companions who in the morning cast a slight chill over the poetry and frenzy of their love by piddling at length into their chamberpots and farting noisily... A love that was rather frightening in its unhealthiness and vulgarity.

  “Here we are, look, just past the bridge.” It was Zola’s voice telling us to look out for his house at Medan. I caught a glimpse of a feudal-looking
building which seemed to be standing in a cabbage-patch.

  Maupassant came to meet us with a carriage at Rouen station, and soon we were being greeted by Flaubert in a Calabrian hat and a bulky jacket, with his big bottom in a pair of well-creased trousers and his kindly face beaming affectionately.

  Sunday, 23 November 1890

  Did not sleep all night, for fear of not being awake at the early hour fixed for our departure. At three o’clock, looked at my watch by the light of a match. At five o’clock, out of bed.

  Finally, in the filthiest weather imaginable, there I was in the train for Rouen, with Zola, Maupassant, etc.

  I was struck this morning by Maupassant’s unhealthy appearance, by the thinness of his face, by his brick-coloured complexion, by the marked character, as they say in the theatre, which he had taken on, and even by his sickly stare. It seemed to me that he was not destined to make old bones. As we were crossing the Seine just before Rouen, he pointed to the river shrouded in fog and exclaimed: “It’s rowing in that every morning that I have to thank for what I’ve got today!”

  E. AND J. GONCOURT,

  Journals (trans. R. Baldrick)

  Another visitor to Rouen

  After we had looked at the Church for a little time we mounted the omnibus to go to the railway station where we were to take train to Rouen—it was about 5 miles I should think from Louviers to the station. What a glorious ride that was, with the sun, which was getting low by that time, striking all across the valley that Louviers lies in; I think that valley was the most glorious of all we saw that day, there was not much grain there, it was nearly all grass land and the trees, O! the trees! it was all like the country in a beautiful poem, in a beautiful Romance such as might make a background to Chaucer’s Palamon and Arcite; how we could see the valley winding away along the side of the Eure a long way, under the hills: but we had to leave it and go to Rouen by a nasty, brimstone, noisy, shrieking railway train that cares not twopence for hill or valley, poplar tree or lime tree, corn poppy, or blue cornflower, or purple thistle and purple vetch, white convolvulus, white clematis, or golden S. John’s wort; that cares not twopence either for tower, or spire, or apse, or dome, till it will be as noisy and obtrusive under the spires of Chartres or the towers of Rouen, as it is under Versailles or the Dome of the Invalides, verily railways are ABOMINATIONS; and I think I have never fairly realised this fact till this our tour: fancy, Crom, all the roads (or nearly all) that come into Rouen dip down into the valley where it lies, from gorgeous hills which command the most splendid views of Rouen, but we, coming into Rouen by railway, crept into it in the most seedy way, seeing actually nothing at all of it till we were driving through the town in an omnibus.

  WILLIAM MORRIS,

  from S. LEGG (ed.),

  The Railway Book (1952)

  A Trip to Paris and Belgium

  LONDON TO FOLKESTONE

  A constant keeping-past of shaken trees,

  And a bewildered glitter of loose road;

  Banks of bright growth, with single blades atop

  Against white sky: and wires—a constant chain—

  That seem to draw the clouds along with them

  (Things which one stoops against the light to see

  Through the low window; shaking by at rest,

  Or fierce like water as the swiftness grows);

  And, seen through fences or a bridge far off,

  Trees that in moving keep their intervals

  Still one ’twixt bar and bar; and then at times

  Long reaches of green level, where one cow,

  Feeding among her fellows that feed on,

  Lifts her slow neck, and gazes for the sound.

  Fields mown in ridges; and close garden-crops

  Of the earth’s increase; and a constant sky

  Still with clear trees that let you see the wind;

  And snatches of the engine-smoke, by fits

  Tossed to the wind against the landscape, where

  Rooks stooping heave their wings upon the day.

  Brick walls we pass between, passed so at once

  That for the suddenness I cannot know

  Or what, or where begun, or where at end.

  Sometimes a station in grey quiet; whence,

  With a short gathered champing of pent sound,

  We are let out upon the air again.

  Pauses of water soon, at intervals,

  That has the sky in it;—the reflexes

  O’ the trees move towards the bank as we go by,

  Leaving the water’s surface plain. I now

  Lie back and close my eyes a space; for they

  Smart from the open forwardness of thought

  Fronting the wind.

  I did not scribble more,

  Be certain, after this; but yawned, and read,

  And nearly dozed a little, I believe;

  Till, stretching up against the carriage-back,

  I was roused altogether, and looked out

  To where the pale sea brooded murmuring.

  REACHING BRUSSELS

  There is small change of country; but the sun

  Is out, and it seems shame this were not said.

  For upon all the grass the warmth has caught;

  And betwixt distant whitened poplar-stems

  Makes greener darkness; and in dells of trees

  Shows spaces of a verdure that was hid;

  And the sky has its blue floated with white,

  And crossed with falls of the sun’s glory aslant

  To lay upon the waters of the world;

  And from the road men stand with shaded eyes

  To look; and flowers in gardens have grown strong;

  And our own shadows here within the coach

  Are brighter; and all colour has more bloom.

  So, after the sore torments of the route—

  Toothache, and headache, and the ache of wind,

  And huddled sleep, and smarting wakefulness,

  And night, and day, and hunger sick at food,

  And twenty-fold relays, and packages

  To be unlocked, and passports to be found,

  And heavy well-kept landscape;—we were glad

  Because we entered Brussels in the sun.

  DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

  Dickens at Calais

  Calais up and doing at the railway station, and Calais down and dreaming in its bed; Calais with something of “an ancient and fish-like smell” about it, and Calais blown and sea-washed pure; Calais represented at the Buffet by savoury roast fowls, hot coffee, cognac, and Bordeaux; and Calais represented everywhere by flitting persons with a monomania for changing money—though I never shall be able to understand in my present state of existence how they live by it, but I suppose I should, if I understood the currency question—Calais en gros, and Calais en detail, forgive one who has deeply wronged you.—I was not fully aware of it on the other side, but I meant Dover.

  Ding, ding! To the carriages, gentlemen the travellers. Ascend then, gentlemen the travellers, for Hazebroucke, Lille, Douai, Bruxelles, Arras, Amiens, and Paris! I, humble representative of the uncommercial interest, ascend with the rest. The train is light to-night, and I share my compartment with but two fellow-travellers; one, a compatriot in an obsolete cravat, who thinks it a quite unaccountable thing that they don’t keep “London time” on a French railway, and who is made angry by my modestly suggesting the possibility of Paris time being more in their way; the other, a young priest, with a very small bird in a very small cage, who feeds the small bird with a quill, and then puts him up in the network above his head, where he advances twittering, to his front wires, and seems to address me in an electioneering manner. The compatriot (who crossed in the boat, and whom I judge to be some person of distinction, as he was shut up, like a stately species of rabbit, in a private hutch on deck) and the young priest (who joined us at Calais) are soon asleep, and then the bird and I have it all to ourselves.

  A stormy nigh
t still; a night that sweeps the wires of the electric telegraph with a wild and fitful hand; a night so very stormy, with the added storm of the train-progress through it, that when the Guard comes clambering round to mark the tickets while we are at full speed (a really horrible performance in an express train, though he holds on to the open window by his elbows in the most deliberate manner), he stands in such a whirlwind that I grip him fast by the collar, and feel it next to manslaughter to let him go. Still, when he is gone, the small small bird remains at his front wires feebly twittering to me—twittering and twittering, until, leaning back in my place and looking at him in drowsy fascination, I find that he seems to jog my memory as we rush along.

  Uncommercial travels (thus the small small bird) have lain in their idle thriftless way through all this range of swamp and dyke, as through many other odd places; and about here, as you very well know, are the queer old stone farmhouses, approached by drawbridges, and the windmills that you get at by boats. Here are the lands where the women hoe and dig, paddling canoe-wise from field to field, and here are the cabarets and other peasant-houses where the stone dove-cotes in the littered yards are as strong as warders’ towers in old castles. Here, are the long monotonous miles of canal, with the great Dutch-built barges garishly painted, and the towing girls, sometimes harnessed by the forehead, sometimes by the girdle and shoulders, not a pleasant sight to see. Scattered through this country are mighty works of Vauban, whom you know about, and regiments of such corporals as you heard of once upon a time, and many a-blue-eyed Bebelle. Through these flat districts, in the shining summer days, walk those long grotesque files of young novices in enormous shovel-hats, whom you remember blackening the ground checkered by the avenues of leafy trees. And now that Hazebroucke slumbers certain kilometers ahead, recall the summer evening when your dusty feet strolling up from the station tended hap-hazard to a Fair there, where the oldest inhabitants were circling round and round a barrel-organ on hobby-horses, with the greatest gravity, and where the principal show in the Fair was a Religious Richardson’s—literally, on its own announcement in great letters, THEATRE RELIGIEUX. In which improving Temple, the dramatic representation was of “all the interesting events in the life of our Lord, from the Manger to the Tomb”; the principal female character, without any reservation or exception, being at the moment of your arrival, engaged in trimming the external Moderators (as it was growing dusk), while the next principal female character took the money, and the Young Saint John disported himself upside down on the platform.