Metroland

by Julian Barnes

Eventually, we were driven reluctantly to testing one another. This we did at Toni’s home, in what we judged to be laboratory conditions. This meant that for pictures, we thumbed in earplugs; while for music, we bound our eyes with a rugger sock. The experimentee would be given five minutes’ exposure to, say, Monet’s ‘Rouen Cathedral’, or the scherzo of Brahms PC2, and then consider his response. He would purse his lips like a wine-bibber and pause reflectively. You had, after all, to axe away all that form-and-content analysis stuff they taught at school. We were after something simpler, truer, deeper, more elemental. So, how did you feel, and what changes would happen if you continued with the prescription?

  Toni would always answer with his eyes closed, even after a pic. He would frown until his eyebrows met, wash a quiet ‘Mnnnnnn’ round his mouth for a bit, and then deliver:

  ‘Skin tension, mainly in legs and arms. Thighs rippling. Exhilaration, yes I think that’s right. Aspiring thorax. Confidence. Not smugness, though. More a sort of firm bonhomie. Up to an amiable épat, at least.’

  I’d note all this down in our ledger, on a right-hand page. The left already contained the source of the inspiration: ‘Glinka, R. & Lud. ov. Reiner/Chi SO/RCA Victrola; 9/12/63.’

  It was all part of our drive towards helping the world understand itself.

  5 • J’habite Metroland

  ‘Rootless.’

  ‘Sans racines.’

  ‘Sans Racine?’

  ‘The open road? The spiritual vagabond?’

  ‘The bundle of ideas wrapped up in a red spotted handkerchief?’

  ‘L’adieu suprême d’un mouchoir?’

  Toni and I prided ourselves on being rootless. We also aspired to a future condition of rootlessness, and saw no contradiction in the two states of mind; or in the fact that we each lived with our parents, who were, for that matter, the freeholders of our respective homes.

  Toni far outclassed me in rootlessness. His parents were Polish Jews and, though we didn’t actually know it for certain, we were practically sure that they had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto at the very last minute. This gave Toni the flash foreign name of Barbarowski, two languages, three cultures, and a sense (he assured me) of atavistic wrench: in short, real class. He looked an exile, too: swarthy, bulbous-nosed, thick-lipped, disarmingly short, energetic and hairy; he even had to shave every day.

  Despite the handicaps of being English and non-Jewish, I tried to do my bit in a Home Counties sort of way. Our family was small, but there was enough tepidity of feeling to effect a widish diaspora. The Lloyds (well, our Lloyds, my father’s Lloyds at least) came from Basingstoke; my mother’s family from Lincoln; relatives skulked incommunicado in several counties, lying low at Christmas, turning up with sulky regularity at funerals, and, if pressed, at weddings. Apart from Uncle Arthur, who lived within Sunday-afternoon distance, they were inaccessible; which suited me fine, as I could pretend they were all picturesque rustics, gnarled artisans or homicidal eccentrics. All they had to do was fork out at Christmas, and fork out money, or at least something that was convertible.

  Like Toni, I was dark, but several inches taller; some would have called me skinny, but I preferred to think of myself as having the whippy strength of a young sapling. My nose, I hoped, still had a bit of growing left to do; my cheeks were free of moles; occasionally, a squad of acne would make its listless progress across my forehead; my best feature, I believed, was my eyes – deep, saturnine, full of secrets learned and not yet learned (at least, that was how I saw them).

  It was a low-key English face, which suited the low-key sense of expatriation common to all who lived in Eastwick. Everyone in this suburb of a couple of thousand people seemed to have come in from elsewhere. They would have been attracted by the solidly built houses, the reliable railway service, and the good gardening soil. I found the cosy, controlled rootlessness of the place reassuring; though I did tend to complain to Toni that I’d prefer something

  ‘… more elemental. I wish I were, oh, somewhat more sort of bare and forked.’

  ‘You mean you wish you were somewhat more bare and fugged.’

  Well, yes, that too, I suppose; at least I think so.

  ‘Où habites-tu?’ they would ask year after year, drilling us for French orals; and always I would smirkingly reply,

  ‘J’habite Metroland.’

  It sounded better than Eastwick, stranger than Middlesex; more like a concept in the mind than a place where you shopped. And so, of course, it was. As the Metropolitan Railway had pushed westward in the 1880s, a thin corridor of land was opened up with no geographical or ideological unity: you lived there because it was an area easy to get out of. The name Metroland – adopted during the First World War both by estate agents and the railway itself – gave the string of rural suburbs a spurious integrity.

  In the early 1960s, the Metropolitan Line (by which the purist naturally meant the Watford, Chesham and Amersham branches) still retained some of its original separateness. The rolling-stock, painted a distinctive mid-brown, had remained unchanged for sixty years; some of the bogeys, my Ian Allen spotter’s book informed me, had been running since the early 1890s. The carriages were high and square, with broad wooden running-boards; the compartments were luxuriously wide by modern standards, and the breadth of the seats made one marvel at Edwardian femural development. The backs of the seats were raked at an angle which implied that in the old days the trains had stopped for longer at the stations.

  Above the seats were sepia photographs of the line’s beauty spots – Sandy Lodge Golf Course, Pinner Hill, Moor Park, Chorleywood. Most of the original fittings remained: wide, loosely strung luggage racks with coat-hooks curving down from their support struts; broad leather window straps, and broad leather straps to stop the doors from swinging all the way back on their hinges; a chunky, gilded figure on the door, 1 or 3; a brass fingerplate backing the brass door handle; and, engraved on the plate, in a tone of either command or seductive invitation, the slogan ‘Live in Metroland’.

  Over the years I studied the rolling stock. From the platform I could tell at a glance a wide from an extra-wide compartment. I knew all the advertisements by heart, and all the varieties of decoration on the barrel-vaulted ceilings. I knew the range of imagination of the people who scraped the NO SMOKING transfers on the windows into new mottoes: NO SNORING was the most popular piece of knife-work; NO SNOGING a baffler for years; NO SNOWING the most whimsical. I stowed away in a first-class carriage one dark afternoon, and sat bolt upright in the soft seat, too frightened to look around me. I even penetrated, by mistake, the special single compartment at the front of each train, which was protected by a green transfer: LADIES ONLY. Having only just caught my connection, I fell panting into the silent disapproval of three tweeded ladies; though my fear was cooled less by their silence than by my disappointment that the compartment contained no special appurtenances indicative, however obliquely, of just what it was that made women different.

  One afternoon, rolling home as usual on the 4.13 from Baker Street, I had finished my prep and my thoughts, and was staring at the purply-red skeleton map of the line, which occupied the central slot beneath the luggage-rack. I was checking off the stations like rosary-beads when a voice on my right said

  ‘Verney Junction.’

  He was an old sod, I thought; dead bourgeois. The embroidered sun shining out of his slippers was the nearest he got to energy and life, I thought. Bet he was syphilisé. Pity he wasn’t Belgian. He might be Belgian. What had he said?

  ‘Verney Junction,’ he repeated. ‘Quainton Road. Winslow Road. Grandborough Road. Waddesdon. Never heard of them,’ he stated, sure that I hadn’t. Old sod. Well, too old to hate really. Commuter’s uniform; umbrella with a gold spoke-ring; brief-case; looking-glass shoes. The brief-case probably contained portable Nazi X-ray equipment.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Used to be a great line. Used to have … ambitions. Heard of the Brill Line?’ What was he after? Rape, abduction? Be
tter humour him, otherwise six months and I’d be plump and ball-less in Turkey.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Brill Line from Quainton Road. All the Ws. Waddesdon Road. Wescott. Wotton. Wood Siding. Brill. Built by the Duke of Buckingham. Imagine that. Had it built for his own estate, you see. Part of the Metropolitan Line for thirty years now. Do you know, I went on the last train. 1935, ’36, something like that. Last train from Brill to Verney Junction. Sounds like a film, doesn’t it?’

  Not one that I’d go to see. And certainly not if he asked me. He must be a rapist; anyone who spoke to kids on trains obviously was, ex hypothesis. But he was a rickety old fugger, and I was on the platform side of the train. Also, I had my umbrella. Better talk him out of it. They sometimes turn nasty if you don’t talk to them.

  ‘Ever been first class?’ Should I call him Sir?

  ‘This was a grand line, you know. The Extension Line they used to call it’ (was he getting dirty?) ‘this part out from Baker Street to Verney Junction. There used to be a Pullman car’ (was he getting round to my question?) ‘right up until Hitler’s war started. Two Pullman cars in fact. Imagine – imagine a Pullman car on the Bakerloo Line.’ (He laughed contemptuously, I sycophantically) ‘Two of them. One was called the Mayflower. Can you imagine that? Can’t remember what the other one was called.’ (He tapped his thigh with a bunch of fingertips; but this didn’t help. Was he getting dirty again?) ‘No, but the Mayflower was one of them. The first Pullman cars in Europe to be hauled by electricity.’

  ‘No, really? The first in Europe?’ I was almost as interested as I pretended to be.

  ‘The first in Europe. There’s a lot of history in this line, you know. Heard of John Stuart Mill?’

  ‘Yes.’ (Of course not)

  ‘Do you know what his last speech in the House was about?’

  I think I must have shown that I didn’t.

  ‘The House of Commons. His last speech? It was about the Underground. Can you imagine that? The Railway Regulation Bill, 1868. An amendment was moved to the bill making it obligatory for all railways to attach a smoking carriage to their trains. Mill got the bill through. Made a great speech in favour of it. Carried the day.’

  Jolly good. It was jolly good, wasn’t it?

  ‘But – guess what – there was one railway, just one, that was exempted. That was the Metropolitan.’

  You would have thought he’d been down there himself voting in eighteen whatever.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ah. Because of the smoke in the tunnels. It’s always been a bit special, you see.’

  Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Only four stations to go anyway. Maybe he was quite interesting.

  ‘What about those other places? Quinton whatsit.’

  ‘Quainton Road. They were all out beyond Aylesbury. Waddesdon, Quainton Road, it went, Grandborough, Winslow Road, Verney Junction.’ (If he went on like this, I’d cry) ‘Fifty miles from Verney Junction to Baker Street; what a line. Can you imagine – they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a Channel Tunnel to the Continent. What a line.’

  He paused. An empty school playground flitted by; a metal merry-go-round draped with washing; the flash of a windscreen.

  ‘They never built the Outer Circle either.’

  He was an elegiac old fugger, that was for sure. He told me about workmen’s fares, and electrification, and Lord’s Station, which was closed when war broke out. About someone called Sir Edward Watkin, who had some plans or other; some ambitious old turd, no doubt, who couldn’t tell Tissot from Titian.

  ‘It wasn’t just ambition, you see. There was confidence as well. Confidence in ambition … Nowadays …’ He spotted the reflex glaze-over which my face always gave when I heard that last word. ‘Don’t sneer at the Victorians, my lad,’ he said sharply. Suddenly he sounded as if he was turning nasty again; maybe he was a rapist; maybe he realised how I’d outwitted him. ‘Look at the things they did instead.’

  What, me, sneer at the Victorians? I didn’t have enough sneer-room left. By the time I’d finished sneering at dummos, prefects, masters, parents, my brother and sister, Third Division (North) football, Molière, God, the bourgeoisie and normal people, I didn’t have any strength left for more than a twisted pout at history. I looked at the old fugger and had a go at an expression of moral outrage; but it wasn’t one my face was much good at.

  ‘You see, it wasn’t just the people who built the railway and ran it. It was everyone else as well. You probably aren’t interested,’ (Christ, he did go on, didn’t he?) ‘but when the first through train from Baker Street to Farringdon Street arrived, the passengers cleaned out the restaurant buffet at Farringdon Street in ten minutes flat,’ (maybe they were hungry because they were scared) ‘ten minutes flat. Like a plague of locusts.’ He was almost talking to himself now, but I thought it wise to slot in another question, just to be on the safe side.

  ‘Is that when they called it Metroland?’ I asked, not really sure when I was talking about, but taking care not to sneer.

  ‘Metroland? That nonsense.’ He turned his attention to me again. ‘That was the beginning of the end. No, that was much later, some time during the war before Hitler’s. That was all to please the estate agents. Make it sound cosy. Cosy homes for cosy heroes. Twenty-five minutes from Baker Street and a pension at the end of the line,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Made it what it is now, a bourgeois dormitory.’

  It was as if someone had dropped a bag of cutlery inside my head. Hey. Christ. You can’t say that. It’s not allowed. Look at yourself. I can call you bourgeois; well, I think I can anyway. You can’t call yourself it. It’s just not … on. I mean, it’s against all the known rules. It’s like a master admitting he knows his own nickname. It … well, I suppose it can only be answered by a non-conventional response.

  ‘Aren’t you a bourgeois, then?’ I inventoried to myself his clothes, voice, briefcase.

  ‘Ha. Of course I am,’ he said lightly, almost gently. His tone reassured me; but his words remained a puzzle.

  6 • Scorched Earth

  Toni and I worked hard at deconditioning. After a thoughtful session of Bruckner (‘Lowering of pulse; vague tugging inside chest; occas. shoulder-jerks; foot-twitching. Go out and beat up a queer? Bruckner 4/Philh./Columbia/Klemperer), or when we were too tired to go out for a mild épat, we’d often come back to the same theme.

  ‘One thing about parents. They fug you up.’

  ‘Do you think they mean to?’

  ‘They may not. But they do, don’t they?’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not really their fault, is it?’

  ‘You mean like in Zola – because they were fugged up in their turn by their parents.’

  ‘Good point. But you’ve got to blame them a bit, haven’t you? I mean, for not realising they were being fugged up, and going on and doing it to us as well?’

  ‘Oh, sure, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t go on punishing them.’

  ‘You had me worried for a bit.’

  Every morning, at breakfast, I would gaze disbelievingly at my family. They were all still there, for a start – that was the first surprise. Why hadn’t some of them run off in the night, wounded beyond endurance by the emptiness I divined in their lives? Why were they all still sitting where they’d sat the morning before, and looking as if they’d be perfectly content to be back there again in another twenty-four hours?

  Across the table, my elder brother Nigel gazed over the top of his Weetabix at a science fiction mag. (Maybe this was how he controlled his existential discontent: by escaping into New Galaxies and New Worlds and Astounding Realities. Not that I’d ever asked him if he suffered from existential discontent; if anything, I rather hoped he didn’t – these things can get too popular.) Next to him, my sister Mary was also staring over the top of her breakfast, reading the pepper and sal
t. It wasn’t because she hadn’t yet woken up properly: at dinner she read the knives and forks. One day she might graduate to the backs of cornflake packets. She was thirteen and didn’t talk much. I thought she looked more like Nigel than me: they both had bland, soft-featured, unresentful faces.

  On my right, my father had The Times folded back at the stock-exchange prices and was murmuring his way down them. He didn’t look like me either. For a start, he was bald. I suppose the cast of his jaw was a bit like mine, but he certainly didn’t have my profound, questing eyes. From time to time he would toss my mother a dutiful question about the garden. She sat on my left, brought the food, answered any questions, and chivvied us gently through the largely silent meal. I didn’t look like her either. Some people said I had her eyes; but even if I did, I didn’t have anything else.

  Could it be that I was really related to all of them? And how could I bear not to point out the obvious differences?

  ‘Mum, am I illegitimate?’ (Normal conversational pitch)

  I heard a slight rustle to my left. Both my siblings carried on with their reading.

  ‘No, dear. Got your sandwiches?’

  ‘Yeah. You sure there isn’t a chance I’m illegitimate?’ I waved an explicatory hand towards Nigel and Mary. My father cleared his throat quietly.

  ‘School, Christopher.’

  Well, they could be lying.

  Parenthood, for Toni and me, was a crime of strict liability. There didn’t need to be any mens rea, just the actus reus of birth. The sentence we doled out, after giving due consideration to all the circumstances of the case and the social background of the offenders, was one of perpetual probation. And as for ourselves, the victims, the mal-aimés, we realised that independent existence could only be achieved by strict deconditioning. Camus had left everyone else on the grid with his ‘Aujourd’hui Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier.’ Deconning, as we called it, savouring the pun, was the duty of every self-respecting adolescent.