by Alexei Sayle
Once we were on board, already hungry and tired even though we had only travelled two miles, there appeared a second reason for hysteria. Joe would get Molly and me seated in our compartment with all the luggage and here we would slump, breathless and sweaty, recovering from the trauma of the trip to the station. While my jumper would be askew and my shirt collar sticking up at an odd angle, and Molly’s cotton summer dress would be wrinkled, her red hair in a mad tangle and her glasses steamed up, Joe invariably looked dapper and cool. With his thinning hair brushed back from his high, intelligent forehead, in his tweed jacket, high-waisted, pleated-front trousers and shiny brown brogues, he appeared calm and fresh as if he was a professor looking after a couple of refugees who had recently had a tough time at the hands of fascist insurgents. But Joe wouldn’t sit down. He would stand between the seats, then look thoughtful for a second, turn and go out into the corridor with Molly shouting after him, ‘Joe! Where are you going? Joe, where are you going? Lexi, where’s Joe going?’
Making vague mumbling noises, my father would walk up the corridor to the door at the end of the carriage. From there he would step off the train and, once on the platform, make for the locomotive to see if he knew the driver of our express. Because he was a railway guard my father had a disturbingly casual attitude to the business of getting on and off trains. After he had left us in the compartment Joe would sometimes wait until the train was actually moving, the guard having long blown his whistle and the last door having been slammed, before nonchalantly swinging himself on board the final carriage at the last possible second. We often didn’t know whether he had actually managed to get aboard the train because he wouldn’t join us in our compartment until well after we had left the station and were huffing through the sandstone tunnels that ran under Crown Street. This gave rise to a good deal more screaming. ‘Joe! Where’s Joe? Where’s your father? Joe! Joe! Lexi, your father’s been left behind! He’s been left behind! Lexi, we’ve left your father behind!’ Sometimes, as the train was moving out of the station, we would look through the window to see Joe wandering along the platform back towards the ticket barrier as if he had decided at the last minute to go home, taking our tickets, passports and spending money with him. But he always managed to come smiling up the corridor a few minutes later.
The journey to London took four hours, and by the age of seven I took pride in the fact that I was familiar with all the landmarks on the line to Euston. There wasn’t another kid in school who knew this route like I did. Edge Lane Station, where a government minister named William Huskisson, the first victim of a rail accident, had died was where we came out into the daylight. Next we rushed up on to an embankment from which we could see below us the terraced streets of South Liverpool, slate roofs and red brick. These quickly gave way to suburban homes, semis with curved metal windows and big back gardens. Soon after we would be thundering over Runcorn bridge that spanned the Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal.
If the crew on the train was a Liverpool one then we probably knew the dining car staff, and if it was lunchtime, once we had left Runcorn behind we would rise from our seats to go and get a free meal in the restaurant car. By this time the three of us would be extremely hungry as we had been awake since 4.30 a.m. and had only eaten a bit of a boiled egg. I learned to measure out the journey by that meal. After Crewe there were lush green fields and soup. Roast beef, peas and gravy were served at the same time as the Universal Grinding Wheel Company at Stafford went by And you could eat a whole sherry trifle and still be passing the sprawling GEC factory outside Rugby.
After lunch we would return to the compartment while the south Midlands reeled past. When the Arts and Crafts hen sheds of the Ovaltine Farm came into view you knew it was time to start getting your stuff together because London was only half an hour away These hen sheds, with their giant painted tableaux of rosy-cheeked maidens clutching bundles of malt, had been constructed in fields outside Abbot’s Langley in the 1930s. I always tried to see if there were any buxom maids emerging with baskets of eggs, or indeed any sign of hen occupation in the sheds, but eventually came to the conclusion that they were empty and had been built there just to give Ovaltine the impression of rustic healthiness to passing railway passengers. I decided the drink was probably manufactured in some giant sprawling factory on a shabby industrial estate next to a disused canal.
At Euston Station we would say goodbye to the guard, the driver, the fireman and the dining car crew, the last people who knew who we were. Then, passing through the stone arch, we were alone in London. A red-haired woman, a smiling man and a little olive-skinned boy.
From time to time, depending on the connections we needed to make with ferries or trains, we might spend the night in London, staying in a small hotel in Pimlico that sometimes advertised in the Daily Worker. But this time we were trying to get to Paris by nightfall as we had to catch a train early the next morning. Consequently we took another taxi from Euston, racing across London to Victoria Station. Molly had no sense of direction but that never stopped her from having vehement opinions on what route a cab should take, so our cross-town journeys could often be made more fraught by my mother having a violent row with the driver. On this occasion we didn’t have much time to make the boat train to Dover so she kept uncharacteristically quiet.
The taxi took us down a long tree-lined avenue of deep red tarmac at the end of which there was a huge, squat, stone-faced building, hiding its ugliness behind gilded railings. ‘That’s Buckingham Palace, that is!’ the driver said with pride in his voice. He seemed shocked when, rather than the expressions of delight or interest that he was used to from out-of-towners, there were scowls, a look of pure hatred and mutterings of ‘Parasites’ and ‘Thieves’ directed towards the home of the royal family from the trio in the back of his taxi. Soon we were back in busy, traffic-choked streets and edging our way under the fretwork canopy of Victoria Station.
The terminus had two distinct sides, possessing wildly different characteristics. One part dealt with the dull, suburban halts of the home counties — Maidstone, Brockley, Whitstable and Sevenoaks. It was neat and subdued, thronged with bowler-hatted city clerks and demure female typists. The other half had platforms dedicated solely to trains that connected with the Channel ferries and thus with the continent of Europe. On these platforms, segregated from the rest, the English Channel seemed an almost tangible presence, as if there was a tang of the sea in the air and seagulls weaving amongst the iron rafters of the high station roof. There were money changing booths and a feeling of decadence. Men wearing raincoats of an alien cut lurked in the entrance of the news cinema, as did women with bright red lips, brittle blonde hair and tight skirts who seemed far too friendly.
In the raffish half of Victoria Station, towards evening I would always see waiting on Platform 2 the blue and gold carriages of the Night Ferry Service run by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Looking impossibly luxurious, this sumptuous train travelled overnight to Paris Gare du Nord, the carriages being loaded and unloaded on to a special ferry while the passengers slept in their own private compartments on crisp cotton sheets. No other train was allowed to use Platform 2, so during the day it remained empty, but on others there slid in and out the brown and cream Pullman coaches of the Golden Arrow, a luxury first-class service complete with its own special bar car called Le Trianon that ran to Dover Marine, where it connected with a first-class-only ferry.
Our free passes did not allow us to take any of these fabulous trains. We had to haul our suitcases past them, skulking like displaced persons to platforms so distant and insignificant that they had letters attached to their numbers. There we would cram ourselves on to the ordinary boat trains that rattled through the South London suburbs and into the green fields of Kent, passing hop poles and oast houses before pulling first into Dover Town, then backing out again to rattle and sway into Dover Marine right alongside the ferry that was going to take us to France.
Although it wa
s happening on the edge of England, this going into a station one way and then reversing out seemed to be the beginning of continental Europe. In plain old Britain you always entered a station and then left it in the same direction. But abroad, in mysterious and mystifying Europe, your direction of travel and who you travelled with were a much more complicated and ever-changing affair. On a foreign train you would often enter a station one way, then exit it from the direction in which you had come, travelling backwards as if you were being sent back home having failed some test or, more worryingly, as if you were now, without leaving your seat, somehow on the wrong train. Even when you were going in a straight line there would be long, mysterious waits accompanied by enigmatic clankings, violent shuntings and inexplicable bangings.
Sometimes you would walk down the train to find that the carriages that had been there were now gone. Looking for food, you might discover that the buffet coach had vanished, to be replaced by two wagons crammed full of soldiers in battledress carrying rifles who said nasty, confusing things to you in strange languages and then laughed in an unfriendly manner. Or, wandering towards the front of the train, you might encounter a car in which all the blinds to the compartments were drawn, suggesting that every kind of unfathomable depravity or cruelty was taking place within. Once in a while you realised that, at some point during the journey, the entire rest of the train had been removed and we were now in what had become the last coach of a considerably shorter train. If you walked down the corridor you were able to see through a long narrow rear window, beside the shuttered connecting door, the track receding and home reeling away into the falling night.
The crossing to France took an hour and a half. When the boat docked at Calais, porters dressed in overalls of a particular shade of blue that you never ever saw in Britain, a blue that the French had even given a special class-war name to — bleu de travail or worker’s blue — swarmed aboard yelling, ‘Porteur! Porteur!’ Each wore a peaked cap adorned with a brass badge with a number engraved on it. They took your luggage and gave you a matching brass tag which you exchanged for a fee once you were through customs and passport control. The next time you saw your luggage it was in your train compartment with the chalk cross of the customs inscribed on it, like the home of a plague victim.
We had no sooner settled on to the deep green seats of the SNCF train to Paris than Joe said he was going to get off to find us a snack, as we hadn’t eaten since lunch on the Red Rose Express. This time the train did actually leave the station, accompanied by much screaming from my mother, with Joe still clearly chatting away to the man in the platform kiosk. We steamed a few metres up the line and waited for a minute or two next to a white-painted concrete fence on the other side of which was France: a cobbled street lined with bars and tiny shops and vans driving up and down, vans that looked like little Nissen huts bouncing up and down on their soft springs.
The train then returned to a different platform at Calais Maritime and Joe climbed aboard clutching three baguettes containing salami that smelt of abroad. We all knew that the Paris boat train left the station and returned to a different platform, but me and Molly always worried that this time might be the time when it decided not to do that, that this time it would head straight for Paris without stopping at Calais Maritime. Joe, on the other hand, always believed that it would come back.
I had inherited neither Molly’s nor Joe’s attitude to foreign travel. My father’s approach was to expect that everything would turn out well in the end, and if there was a problem he would rely on the affability of others to correct it. My mother’s response was to go insane, often without provocation, and then in between to exist in a state of unsettling serenity I inhabited an uneasy middle ground between these two extremities, suspecting that at any moment people might start either disappearing or screaming.
By now I understood that the notion that the Sayle family was a family that went abroad was very important to us. In some ways it defined who we were. We thought of ourselves as not being like the rest of the population of Anfield, ignorant and gullible people who believed what they were told by the TV news and went on holiday for two weeks in a caravan in Morecambe. And now we were going to Czechoslovakia, a place so foreign it had a ‘z’ in its name! I understood all this and tried to embrace it, but I did feel sometimes that it was hard enough to understand what was going on in Anfield — why was that boy saying this? What reason did that girl have for showing me that? What did all the teachers want? Why was everybody shouting? — without us travelling a thousand miles to the east. It was dawning on me that life could be baffling and scary even when most things were familiar and I spoke the language, but our family persisted in going to places where just about everything was alien. The smells were different — Gauloises cigarettes, coffee, sewers and onions. The cars were different — in Britain most of the cars were modelled on the British Museum (a large classical portico and a substantial building to the rear, with wood panelling and leather seating) but these French cars were bizarre things with flimsy doors, corrugated sides and seats of canvas. In France there seemed to be about nine different kinds of policemen. When British police cars drove along they rang a little bell as if everybody was being told dinner was ready in a boarding house, whereas these French police cars had sirens that sounded like a goat being slaughtered and you heard them all the time — ‘nee naw, nee naw, nee naw!’ And abroad just about everybody seemed to be carrying a gun — not just the police and gendarmes, but there were soldiers everywhere. And of course all these armed men spoke a different language, so incomprehension here, across the English Channel, was likely to get you shot.
We crawled across the flat fields of the Pas de Calais until small silver suburban trains began to swarm around us like pilot fish and we were suddenly on the edge of Paris. Around a curve in the track I suddenly saw the Eiffel Tower. It was gigantic and looked just like the photos of itself, but I didn’t know what to feel about the Eiffel Tower — as far as I knew, the party didn’t have a line on it. At the Gare du Nord we disembarked from the boat train, and as all the English speakers scattered we were submerged in the evening crowds of hurrying French. The three of us descended into the Métro, bought tickets of green cardboard at a reduced price and rode a couple of stops on rattling wooden carriages with silvery chromed door handles to the district of Montmartre. Montmartre itself, with its steep streets flowing like frozen rivers of cobblestones away from the basilica of the Sacré Coeur, shining white and lustrous in the summer night, was a disappointment. It bore very little relation to the restaurant of the same name on the Tottenham Court Road.
The night was spent in a small hotel and the next morning we travelled on from the Gare de L’Est to Germany. We arrived in Nuremberg in the late afternoon with a couple of hours to kill. To pass the time the three of us tried to visit what was probably a beer hall, but they wouldn’t let a child in. Fortunately there was a charity for displaced persons in the station, and due to me and Molly’s woebegone appearance they gave us a refugee’s meal of black tea and rye bread. Then we caught a train ultimately bound for Belgrade in Yugoslavia.
I had by now grown used to foreign border crossings. They weren’t quite as elaborate as the ones you got at Channel ports — those between European countries were a bit like a visit to a hospital for the results of some tests you probably didn’t really need. Everybody sat in a row and a man came in with your documents, and there was always a tense moment before he told you everything was all right and one time out of a hundred it was bad news for somebody else. The frontier between the Federal Republic of Germany and Czechoslovakia must have been more tense than most, seeing as it was the border between two nuclear-armed, competing ideologies which were constantly threatening to destroy each other. But I don’t honestly remember it being different from any of the other crossings we had made.
I do recall that once we were inside Czechoslovakia the German Railways locomotive was uncoupled and steamed away, heading westwards, returning to
its homeland. Our train without its locomotive seemed suddenly decapitated and lifeless, and so in the quiet of a summer afternoon we climbed down on to the platform and waited. The carriages we were in had begun their journey the day before in some distant part of northern Germany as clean as you would expect from the railways of that freshly scrubbed country, but, even by the time it reached Nuremberg, like any transcontinental express it had turned into a clammy mess. Even if nobody in your compartment was eating biscuits, after a few hours biscuit crumbs would magically appear on your seat, crushed in little gritty piles on the floor or somehow down the back of your jumper.
We were happy to stretch our legs and get a breath of fresh air, strolling up and down the low platform. On all British stations the platforms were high, making the track itself a forbidden and dangerous thing, but abroad, particularly the further east you got, they were often no higher than the kerb at the side of the road, as if it was no big thing to step on to the silver rails.
After a few minutes of waiting an apparition steamed into view Over the coming years I was to become familiar with the steam engines of the East in all their forms, whether it was sticking my head out of the window into the cold snowy air and seeing the squat engine curving away around the track as it pulled us up into the High Tatra mountains and smoke blew into my face, or watching them huffing past the window of hotel rooms, or being conducted around the plants where they were made. But this was my first sight of a locomotive from the Soviet Bloc, and it was magnificent and alien. Sticky and black like a hot summer night, with massive air deflectors attached to the side of the boiler, an enormous single headlight just below the chimney and a large red star in the centre of the smokebox. I think it might even have been flying red flags from the front bogie as it snorted towards us, inky smoke pouring into the sky, seeming to embody all the industrial might and threat of rampant socialism. From the border we travelled through countryside not much different from that which we had seen outside the windows in Germany — the same onion dome churches, the same ornate villas and the same haystacks. And finally, as evening descended, we reached journey’s end: the town of Karlovy Vary, known to English travellers, for whom it had been a popular destination in the nineteenth century, as Carlsbad.