by Jan Morris
The Eurostar was obliged to saunter rather between London and the coast, the track not being up to the train’s potential 180 m.p.h., but I didn’t mind that. I rather liked the sensation that we were in no particular hurry, as we ambled through the Kentish hopfields, but viewed the whole 180 m.p.h. business as a trifle arriviste. In the same way the train seemed to take the tunnel itself casually in its stride. I hardly noticed it. One minute we were loitering through the Garden of England, the next we were sprinting through Belgium, eating lunch. It hardly seemed worth making a fuss about.
It was only when we debouched in Brussels that it all came home to me. I hadn’t seen the sea! This was a peculiar and ambivalent feeling. I didn’t know whether to be exhilarated or deflated, to be here in a foreign city, after so many thousands of ancestral years, without having seen salt water on the way. It was like treading on a step that wasn’t there. The young Evelyn Waugh felt rather the same when, in 1930, for the first time he flew across the English Channel, instead of going by ship – ‘when one has got accustomed to a certain kind of approach … a new route seems very unconvincing’. But as a historical revelation I don’t think his experience matched mine.
10 Some resonances
Generally the big trains of Europe, even the newest, lack the immense magisterial authority of American trains, which crawl over their enormous landscapes as though they own the prairies. European trains never have so far to go, and their wagons are smaller, and their locomotives less grandiose, and their whistles pettier. It is true that if you are French, seeing from your motorway one of the Trains à Grande Vitesse, the TGV expresses, hurtling through a countryside two or three times faster than you can drive, is likely to make you proud of your country, like L. R. Bultoen in Antwerp’s cathedral; but for me the romance of the European railroads lies less in the trains themselves than in the grand roll-call of their destinations. The network is staggering, and some stations have machines by which you can, at the press of a button or two, plan spectacular trans-European routes. You can get on a train at Constanta, on the Black Sea, and, give or take a few changes, get off again at Thurso at the very northern tip of Scotland. A train from the Peloponnese will eventually unload you in Lapland. It is theoretically possible to travel on a single ticket from Lisbon to Tallinn. Pack a picnic hamper for the journey in Thessalonika, and you could finish it off in Cork. In the days when Europe was still divided by the Iron Curtain, the international expresses could carry with them more disturbing resonances. I remember seeing a train that had arrived at Berlin from Moscow, on its way to Paris: and sensing, as I walked down the platform along the length of it, suspicious or bewildered eyes staring out at me from stuffy overcrowded sleepers – as if I might somehow have the power to send the whole train back again, sullenly to return to the dark side of the continent.
11 Little trains
The little trains of Europe, on the other hand, beat anything in America, and were properly celebrated by Charles Aznavour in a French song greatly popular in the 1960s. Europeans, it seems, have a weakness for old steam trains, which is perhaps why a schoolchild’s silhouette of an old puffer is still the conventional warning sign of a level crossing. In Spain in the 1960s I used to see excited parties of aficionados from Germany, Sweden or Britain waiting camera-slung beside the railway tracks to see the mighty brass-bound steam locomotives which then hauled the Spanish expresses. No such leviathans are still in regular service, but all over the continent small steam trains are affectionately operated. There are delightful narrow-gauge trains in North Wales: for years, in that region of chapel austerities, the only place one could buy a drink on Sundays was in the bar-car of the little Ffestiniog Railway passenger train. Through the streets of the spa town of Bad Doberan, on the Baltic coast of Germany, an antique steam train routinely trundles, picking up housewives with their shopping-baskets, dropping salesmen with their briefcases. In Leipzig there still stands the magnificent railway station that my mother knew, all twenty-six tracks of it; but down the road they cherish the quaint steam trains which irregularly come and go from the modest castellated depot of the old Bavarian Railways. As for the network of steam trains that operates in the Harz Mountains, in the days of the Cold War these proved so popular among spenders of hard currency from the West that the frontier was especially eased to allow entry to their admirers.
In French Haute-Savoie we lived near a village called Sixt, at the end of a valley which had been, until the present century, particularly remote and insignificant (when John Ruskin found his way there in 1844 all he said was that its wild strawberries tasted of slate). In 1858 an English family built a chalet in the foothills above, for the sake of the Alpine climbing, staying there for several generations; and besides taking a grand piano up there, and a billiard-table, and producing a book about the place (The Eagle’s Nest, by Alfred Wills, 1860), they were instrumental in connecting Sixt with the outside world. This they achieved by sponsoring a little electric train, which ran all the way up the middle of the road from the Swiss frontier, and when we lived there it was still working. It was half a train and half a tram, I suppose, its rolling-stock looking like a couple of superannuated streetcars from some distant metropolis. Nothing could be more charming than to see this little equipage, on a white wintry day, bustling up from Annemasse with its complement of shoppers, farmers and schoolchildren, blowing a whistle sometimes in rather a wistful way. It was not a steam train, however, and when I returned to Sixt long afterwards I found it had bustled its last.
12 The hush of the platform
At the start of my fifty years the steam trains were not curiosities or tourist attractions, but were everyday means of transport. What I remember best about travelling on branch lines in those days is the sudden quiet which seemed to descend whenever the train stopped at a country station, day or night – not the eerie silence of the frontier that we experienced at Dôle, but a gentle rustic stillness that I associate in my memory with the rolling of milk-churns. Often nobody joined the train and nobody left it, and we simply waited for a moment or two, to fit the timetable, I suppose, or load the churns. The little engines did not snort and cough, like the locomotives of big international expresses, but just stood there amiably hissing, and sometimes one heard murmured rustic exchanges on the platform outside, or a couple of railwaymen conversing as they walked by with their lunch-boxes, before the guard blew his whistle and the train almost imperceptibly moved on again. In his poem ‘Adlestrop’ the Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas immortalized this sense of hiatus – ‘The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat./ No one left and no one came’ – and I do not doubt that everywhere in Europe, wherever the tank engines took their three or four coaches down winding lines to rural places, people knew that hush of the down platform.
13 From When We Dead Wake, 1882, by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Peter Watts
MAJA: Why did it stop like that, if there was nothing there?
PROFESSOR RUBEK: I don’t know. No one got off and no one got on, but the train stood there, silently, for what seemed like hours. And at every station I heard two railwaymen walking along the platform – one of them carrying a lantern – and they mumbled quietly to each other in the night, without expression or meaning.
MAJA: Yes, you’re right; there are always two men talking …
14 Near-calamity on the old Orient Express
We used to take the old Orient Express to Venice, in the days after the war, when travel by car was a more demanding alternative, and I had a disagreeable experience on it once. My partner and I, leaving our two small boys sleeping peacefully in our compartment, made our way to the dining-car, two or three coaches back, and ate our supper. When we started to return to our beds and our children we found a communicating door had been locked, and we were unable to get through. Presently the train stopped at one of those high Swiss stations, just before a tunnel, so we jumped out and ran along the platform to get to our own coach. Just as we began to climb the steep iron steps to the
carriage door the train started to move off again. It was very dark. It was very cold. The tunnel entrance was very near, and we could not open the door to get in. The corridor of the coach was jam-packed with standing passengers, blocking the door and looking out at us in stunned astonishment as we gesticulated at them through the night. They seemed paralysed by our appearance there. We shouted – we banged on the window – we hung on desperately – the train gathered speed – the people gaped – the dark hole of the tunnel approached – calamity on the Orient Express! In the nick of time two dark unshaven men forcefully pushed their way through the corridor crowd to open the door and hoist us inside. They were Turkish migrant workers, they told us, returning to Istanbul from Germany for their holidays. Our children slept through it all, and for twenty years and more loved to be told the story.
15 Pathos and banality on the new Orient Express
Later I travelled more than once on the tourist-dedicated Orient Express of the 1980s. I found it sad. It had been intensely hyped as the last of the classic travel experiences – ‘Stepping back into the Golden Age of Travel’: gleaming Pullman coaches, courteous waiters, ladies in evening gowns, gentlemen in black ties, sophisticated Americans from the 1930s, cocktails in the piano bar before dinner, such were the suggestions of its publicity. But it was not really like that. The coaches certainly gleamed, but lacked air-conditioning or showers, rolled about a lot, and were heated in an all too classical way by a coal-burning stove at the end of each corridor. The music of the piano bar was electronically amplified. The Americans were scarcely Cole Porters or Scott Fitzgeralds (two of them missed the train at Innsbruck, on one of my journeys, having gone into town in search of hamburgers). The poor ladies from Harrogate or High Wycombe, who had won their trips as prizes in office competitions, perhaps, or had been given them as diamond-wedding presents, were certainly dressed to the nines with wraps and patterned stockings, but must have been disconcerted to find the Cocktail Hour dominated by the sort of men they might just as well have met at Rotary dinners. Here are three conversational fragments I jotted down, during my steps back into the Golden Age of Travel:
¶ ‘I’ve always said,’ observed one American matron to another, ‘I’m not going to be a possessive mother, because his was’ – and she jerked her head towards her husband in the next seat. For a moment or two, as the train ploughed on, rattling the soup-spoons, the two ladies eyed him speculatively. ‘He’ll be no good to us in Venice,’ said the first.
¶ Young English wife, on her honeymoon I guessed: ‘Oh, look at the castle. Isn’t that a lovely castle?’ Young English husband: ‘It’s a castle. A castle is a castle. You’ve seen castles before.’ She relapsed into a thoughtful silence. He returned to his thriller.
¶ An American man, to me: ‘You gotta read this book, I’ve been reading it all the way since London. It’s called God Owns My Business. God Owns My Business, that’s the title. This guy who wrote it, he’s a very low-key man, but he’s got a sign above his store, “Christ Is My Manager”. When do we get to Innsbruck? We might get a hamburger there.’
So we proceeded, not terribly fast, towards Italy. The banality and pathos was all inside the train. From the outside the Orient Express really did look a paragon of wealth and urbanity. People in the fields seemed to watch us pass without envy or resentment but only in simple pleasure, waving enthusiastically now and then to see such an exhibition of style sweep by. Well, you’ve seen people waving before, haven’t you? He’ll be lost with those gondolier people. ‘Christ Is My Manager’, in big letters there above the door.
16 Into the space age
Years ago, when the TGV trains were new to me, I stood on a platform at Dijon in Burgundy admiring the Paris express which, vibrating slightly with the whirr of its generators, stood there waiting to leave. I had never seen one before. It was like something out of the future, with its big snout-nose slightly battered by the elements, like an airliner’s, and its air of brooding power. As I stood there two elderly women stepped into one of the coaches, taking not the slightest notice of the bulbous space-age ambience as they found themselves seats well-placed, I suspected, not for observing the landscape, still less for inspecting the equipment, but for eyeing other passengers. I walked to the far end of the platform to watch the train leave, with a jerkless and inexorable rumble, and as the great thing accelerated swiftly past me, its wheels gently humming, I caught sight of the two old ladies at their window. They did not seem in the least anomalous. They were talking hard, looking speculatively around the coach, and knitting.
17 Over the hump
If you stand on the summit of the hill called Tryvannshøgda, near Oslo in Norway, and look directly north, you seem to be surveying a limitless wilderness. In winter everything is white with snow, and the ridges, lakes and valleys stretch away apparently trackless towards the Arctic Circle and the Pole. The country looks more or less uninhabited, and by most European standards it is. Yet even as you stare aghast at the uninviting scene, one of the most heroic trains in Europe is chugging its way clean over those mountains from Oslo the capital to Bergen the second city, passing through 189 tunnels on the way. You can make the journey far more easily by air, but a ride on the Bergen Express is worth doing anyway. It is no TGV, being a sedate handful of carriages which, if not actually made of wood, feel as if they ought to be, drawn at a moderate speed by an electric engine. It is amply supplied with food and drink, pressed upon you by a solicitous lady attendant, and it gives you glimpses of the whole Norwegian spectrum.
At the start, as you climb out of Oslo into the hills, and the attendant brings you a preliminary coffee, everything out there looks neat and ordered: neat little gardens, neat little houses, laundry hanging apparently frozen stiff from washing-lines, delightful children scrabbling about in the patchy snow or leaping over garden fences to invite their neighbours out to play. In no time, though, you are in that wilderness. The attendant offers you a ham sandwich. The train climbs very steeply, and soon it looks as though everything has been permanently abandoned. Houses lie up to their eaves in snow. Bumps in the snow seem to indicate buried cars. Huge snowdrifts rise all around the track, and if there are any roads out there there is nothing at all to be seen of them. ‘Please O God,’ you may find yourself saying, as the attendant wonders if you would care for a piece of cake, ‘don’t let the train break down!’ Almost at the highest point of the journey an alarming branch line suddenly peels off and appears to plunge headlong into the void, hurling itself catastrophically towards the fjord you can just see, a splash of deep blue, far down there at the foot of the precipice. ‘More coffee, then?’ says the attendant.
Very soon you are on the way down again, on the other side of the Norwegian massif. The snowdrifts shrink, houses emerge again, there are touches of green, the first cars appear, the first tidy suburbs, the first children clambering over garden fences to invite their neighbours out to play. The neatness comes back, the orderliness, the reassuring ordinariness of life, and punctually on time the train pulls into the station at Bergen, where it is almost certain to be raining, because in Bergen it always is. ‘Don’t hurry,’ says the attendant. ‘Finish your coffee.’
18 Tail-lights
Roads down the border between Germany and Poland sometimes cross railway lines. Some are big main double tracks, but some are branch lines, and in my memory at least these always seem to run away into dark forests. What a shudder those rails give me! Hardly more than half a century ago the extermination trains passed this way out of Germany towards Auschwitz and Treblinka: I seem to hear still the moans of the poor Jews crammed in their filthy cattle-trucks, and the laughter of the men of the police battalions in their guard-vans behind, and the hollow snorts of the steam locomotives as they plodded away into the woods. I have never seen a train on one of those lines, but I have often imagined red tail-lights swinging away into the darkness.
19 Funiculì, Funiculà
I cannot begrudge myself one short paragraph about
the funiculars, cog and rack railways of Europe, because I love them – not the myriad daring mountain trains, but the modest usually old-fashioned mechanisms which give a special cachet to a few privileged towns and cities here and there. At Zagreb a minute funicular connects the lower and upper towns: it is only a couple of hundred yards long, steeply rising towards the baroque towers above, and if you saunter too idly up the street towards its waiting carriage the conductor will tap urgently on his glass window, to tell you to hurry up. At Salzburg a train whisks you operatically above the Mozartian domes and gilded towers of the city, preferably encrusted in snow and glinting in winter sunshine, precipitously to the Hohensalzburg Fortress. At Budapest a meticulously reconstructed Victorian funicular travels from the Chain Bridge almost to the gateway of the Royal Palace on the Buda hill, and makes you wonder if Franz Josef himself, just for the fun of it, ever rode in its bottom car to see the city retreating so spectacularly below. At Bridgnorth in England a track with a gradient of two in three, connecting the lower town with the High Street on a ridge above, is comically matched by the tower of the castle, which was blown up during the English Civil War and is now slumped at an angle three times greater than that of the leaning tower of Pisa. And at Venice, where there is certainly no rack railway, you may well be reminded on an August evening of the most famous of them all; for echoing down the Grand Canal, around a little fleet of gondolas, through the sultry city come the strains of one of its favourite melodies, sung with quavering gusto by an elderly tenor to doting groups of tourists – Luigi Denza’s paean to the old Vesuvius railway, faintly at first, out of sight, until the flotilla turns into a rio to pass beneath the very bridge over which you are sentimentally leaning. Then the veteran serenader, catching sight of you above, offers you a courtly bow, possibly blows you a kiss between phrases, and lets loose, just as he passes into the shadow of the bridge, upon the grand chorus of the piece – ‘Iamme, iamme, via montiam su là./ Iamme, iamme, via montiam su là./ Funiculì funiculà funiculì funiculà./ VIA MONTIAM FUNICULÌ, FUNICULÀ!’