Westmorland Alone

by Ian Sansom

  ‘Scotch Corner?’ I said.

  MacDonald had seen me. He stared for a moment in surprise and then smiled a dark smile and began making his way hurriedly through the traffic. I had less than two minutes. If I stayed with Miriam and Morley and the car we wouldn’t be going anywhere fast.

  I had a choice. I could either make a run for it or …

  ‘The Battle of Scotch Corner is correct!’ said Morley. ‘You know, perhaps you’re finally getting to grips with this stuff, Sefton. We’ll also have a look at the Stanwick fortifications, which are about five miles north-west of Scotch Corner, and which I think I’m right in saying form the most extensive Celtic site in Britain—’

  ‘I think I might get the train, actually, Mr Morley, and meet you there.’

  ‘The train?’ said Miriam.

  ‘Ah!’ said Morley. ‘You’re thinking of the Settle–Carlisle line, Sefton, are you not? Possibly the greatest railway line in the country. A sort of railway companion to our Great North Road journey?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking, Mr Morley.’ MacDonald was twenty yards away and closing fast. ‘I would just need some money, to—’

  ‘Of course,’ said Morley. ‘Good thinking, Sefton. I think it would certainly add immeasurably to the book if you were to travel by train, we were to travel by car, and then we could compare notes when we arrive in Westmorland and—’

  ‘I really need to go now though.’

  Morley consulted his two watches – the luminous and the non-luminous dials.

  ‘Yes, the seven fifteen, would that be it?’ He had – naturally – memorised most of Bradshaw’s. ‘If you hurry you might just catch it.’

  ‘I’m going to catch it.’

  ‘Good, now let’s give the man the means, Miriam, shall we?’

  Miriam looked at me suspiciously but nonetheless began rooting around in her handbag.

  ‘And the camera, Miriam, give him the camera. Come on, hurry!’

  ‘The new Leica, Father? But I thought I might—’

  ‘Now, now, Sefton is our photographer. We did buy the camera for him. It’s the new Leica, Sefton. I was particularly impressed by the set-up we saw in Devon, and I thought perhaps you might enjoy using it. Give you something to play with on the train.’

  ‘I’m sure Sefton will find something to play with on the train,’ said Miriam, handing over the camera and a handful of cash. ‘That should be enough to cover a third-class fare, Sefton. You’ll be travelling third class, of course?’ Miriam smiled at me.

  ‘For colour?’ said Morley. ‘Yes, good thinking, Miriam. Travelling with the people. Ours is a people’s history, after all.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  MacDonald was just five yards away. I could see the veins throbbing in his neck and his eyes bulging.

  ‘I think we’ll beat you to it,’ said Miriam, but I didn’t answer: I had already begun to run.

  ‘Sefton!’ shouted Miriam after me. ‘Where will we see you?’

  ‘Appleby!’ cried Morley. ‘The county town of Westmorland! We’ll meet you at Appleby, Sefton!’

  I ran into the station, shouting to the porters for the seven fifteen: they pointed me to platform 3. I ran past the ticket inspector and made it to the last carriage of the train, where a young mother was struggling to get on with a young girl and a baby. The guard was calling the departure as I managed to lift up the girl and slam the door behind us – and the train shuddered forward.

  I stood for a long time at the window looking out for MacDonald, but there was no sign of him. I must have lost him in the crowd.

  Satisfied, I made my way to a compartment, squeezing past fellow passengers and their luggage. There was the woman with the baby and the child.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ said the little girl. ‘It’s the nice man, Mummy.’

  The young woman smiled at me warmly.

  ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for helping.’

  ‘The baby will cry,’ said the little girl. ‘But all babies cry. What’s that?’ she asked, pointing at the Leica.

  ‘It’s a camera,’ I said.

  ‘What’s a camera?’

  ‘It’s something that you can take pictures with.’

  ‘Like a drawing?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose.’

  ‘Is there a pencil inside it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s not a pencil.’

  ‘Is there a pen?’

  ‘No, there’s not a pen either.’

  ‘Is there paint?’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Do you want to see?’

  The girl looked at her mother, her mother nodded, and the little girl came and sat close to me; as we left London I showed her how to open the camera, how to check the shutter and the focus and how to frame a photograph. I took her photograph and she took mine.

  ‘Are you coming with us?’ asked the girl. ‘Mummy, can the man come with us?’

  ‘The man is on his own journey,’ said the mother. ‘He’ll be going somewhere himself.’

  ‘We’re going to Carlisle,’ said the little girl. ‘Where are you going?’

  I looked at her. I felt suddenly exhausted. ‘I don’t know, actually,’ I said. ‘I don’t know where I’m going.’

  ‘You’re funny,’ said the girl. ‘You’re a funny man!’

  ‘He’s just tired,’ said the mother. ‘Let him rest now.’

  CHAPTER 3

  72 MILES, 1,728 YARDS

  IT WOULD NOT BE an exaggeration to say that Morley was obsessed with the Settle–Carlisle line. He was obsessed with a lot of things, of course, but the Settle–Carlisle remained for him one of the great foundation stones – ‘one of the canonical lines’, he famously called it – of England. I have no doubt that if he could have seen the destruction later wrought upon the railways he would not have despaired: he simply would not have let it happen. There would have been campaigns, organisations, books, leaflets, marches on London, a popular uprising: Mr Beeching would have taken one hell of a beating.

  After our trip to Westmorland, Morley revised and updated his famous book, 72 Miles, 1,728 Yards (1935), in which he describes the route of the Settle–Carlisle line, mile by mile, yard by yard, tunnel by tunnel, viaduct by viaduct, every gradient, every ascent, every twist and every turn. I doubted that the new edition would sell a single copy. It became a bestseller. His most popular lecture series – by far – during our time together was on the Settle–Carlisle line, more popular than the ‘World of Wonders’ series and the ‘Home Husbandry’ series combined, more popular even than the infamous ‘Communism, Fascism: What Exactly is the Difference?’ lecture, which always drew a crowd (and which, indeed, on a number of occasions, caused a riot). In the Settle–Carlisle lectures he lovingly described the planning and construction of the line, its maintenance, and its day-to-day operations, beginning and ending with a sing-song recitation of the names of all the stations: Settle, Horton-in-Ribblesdale, Ribblehead, Dent, Garsdale, Kirkby Stephen, Crosby Garrett, Ormside, Appleby, Long Marton, Newbiggin, Culgaith, Langwathby, Little Salkeld, Lazonby and Kirkoswald, Armathwaite, Cotehill, Cumwhinton, Scotby, Carlisle. Anywhere north of Watford the recitation of the station names alone would often earn him a standing ovation. (Admittedly, the lectures tended to be less popular in the Home Counties, though they played surprisingly well in London.)

  Indeed, in recognition of his work promoting the railway industry in general and the Settle–Carlisle line in particular the big four railway companies – the old LNER, and the GWR, the LMS and SR – awarded Morley in 1939 a fat little golden locket, inscribed with his name, on a chain. He needed only present the locket to a ticket inspector on board a train to be granted free first-class travel the length and breadth of the country. Morley cared almost nothing for awards and baubles: one bathroom at St George’s was rather eccentrically papered with moulding black and white certificates and citation
s that might more usually have been proudly framed and displayed, and a crusty old armoire in a guest bedroom served as storage space for his various medals, statuettes and gifts ‘in recognition of’, many of them featuring depictions of pens and quills carved in marble, onyx, or, in one case – after our trip to Durham – made out of coal. Morley referred habitually to such awards and honours as ‘chaff’ and, occasionally, as his ‘pointless paper empire’.fn1 But the Big Four locket travelled with him everywhere until the day he died.

  According to Morley in 72 Miles the Ribblehead viaduct was one of the modern wonders of the world, and the route of the Settle–Carlisle line ‘a journey into the heart of England and Englishness’. (He also made this claim, it should perhaps be conceded, about the west Norfolk coastal route, the GWR journey down to Devon, the Esk Valley line, and the all-electric Southern Belle route from Victoria to Brighton.) Describing the Settle–Carlisle line he rose to sweeping rhetorical heights:

  There is perhaps not even in Switzerland, nor in India, nor indeed in our own green and pleasant land, a more magnificent journey than that through the great valley of the Ribble, and on round the broad shoulder of the mighty Whernside at Blea Moor, on through the valleys of the Dee and Garsdale, up and over the watershed to the summit at Aisgill, and then through the justly named Eden Valley towards Carlisle. If the good Lord Himself had been a railway engineer during the glory years of the mid- to late nineteenth century, he could not have plotted a finer route.

  ‘The Settle–Carlisle line is not a journey by rail,’ he famously concludes 72 Miles. ‘It is the journey of a soul.’ There was perhaps a slight tendency in all his work for Morley to wax unnecessarily lyrical but in his great paean to the Settle–Carlisle line his prose found its proper subject. The book combined perfectly his poetic instincts with his obsessive practical concerns. He was an expert on every aspect of the line, from the ‘long, tall’ Douglas fir and Baltic pine sleepers, to the ‘doughty’ granite chipping ballast, the ‘proud’ stations, the tunnels, the viaducts and the signals. And of course, alas, he became an expert on its tragedies.

  I can imagine the journey that Miriam and Morley enjoyed on the way to Westmorland, the same journey as all our journeys: Morley seated in the back of the Lagonda, among his books and writing requisites, Hermes typewriter wedged into position on the portable desk, sharp pencils at his elbow and paper conveniently to hand, pouring endlessly forth like some magic fountain. His voluminous notes on the journey – including a ton or more of notebooks and index cards and papers for the putative book on the Great North Road, never published – are housed now, along with all his other manuscripts, in Norwich. There, in his favourite county, the ‘still centre’, the reader might recreate that journey from London to the Lakes, from the Whittington Stone at Highgate Hill, ‘memorial to Britain’s most benevolent citizen’, through the beauty of Welwyn village, home to Edward Young, author of Night Thoughts, and, according to Morley, echoing Dr Johnson, ‘perhaps England’s most defected genius’, and on and up past the famous Folly Gateway at North Mimms, stopping off for refreshments at the Roebuck at Broadwater, past the Caxton Gibbet, and on and on past Retford, Bawtry and Doncaster. Morley has often been described – and dismissed – as a mere antiquarian, a provincialist, a dull draftsman, a ‘topophiliac’, in the words of one particularly patronising critic in the Listener, devoted to places rather than to people, but he was also interested in the everyday lives of men and women, and in the chronological as well as the chorological: indeed, a part of his research for the Great North Road book includes dozens of typed pages on the history of the St Leger race, held annually since 1776, when it was won by a brown-bay filly sired by the mighty Sampson; the notes, like Morley, go on and on, and range wide and deep, a complete portrait of people in a landscape, a Brueghel in words. He was, in all his books, and certainly during my time with him compiling The County Guides, a celebrant of all that was living – though in reality our business was often with death.

  My guess – though I can’t confirm it – is that it was probably Miriam who spotted the train in the distance. She wouldn’t have wanted us to beat her to Appleby. I can imagine her tossing back her head and stamping her elegant foot hard on the pedal. We must get there before him. Thank goodness she didn’t.

  On the train I was showing the little girl how to work the camera. Her name was Lucy. She had a gap-toothed smile and freckles, little fat cheeks, and ringlets, and dark, dark eyes – a happy carefree face, the picture of innocence, a perfect Pears soap little girl. Her mother was dozing with the baby in her arms, the baby’s head resting gently on her breast. Lucy and I sang songs together and played games, and took it in turns to take photographs of the scenery. I took a photograph of her. She took a photograph of me. We whistled with the train’s whistle and knelt together on the seats as the world went rolling by, enjoying the freedom and the speed: the rocks, the stones, the trees, the farms, the sorry-looking Swaledale sheep.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  It was one of those warm September days that seems like a bonus, that makes you believe that you still have another chance and that everything is not lost. We cheered as we reached Settle, laid out like a neat little pocket handkerchief under the pure blue sky. We passed a graveyard and then emerged into the vast Ribble Valley. We hollered our way through the long dark tunnel under Blea Moor and again as we reached the summit at Ais Gill, the vast cliffs opposite like something out of the American Wild West, the blazing heather and the dry-stone walls making everything appear as though it were wrapped and packaged and ready for presentation. Looking back, I wonder if that was perhaps the very last time I was truly happy: enjoying the golden stillness of the English countryside, mind and body relaxed and calm, moving inexorably forward and on and up towards the future and adventure. I had no thought then for London and what happened there. No thought for myself. I was moving on. I was in transit, a pilgrim journeying towards better things. Everything subsequently seems somehow darker, less good, lacking, broken and profane.

  At a certain point, just before Appleby, the railway crosses the River Eden for the first time. I lifted Lucy up a little by the window, so that she could admire the river and the little viaduct with its piers and parapets and arches: twin wonders of nature and of human invention. A southerly wind blew the choking smoke away and we were granted a perfect view of Westmorland, ‘perhaps the most scenic county in England’, according to Morley. And so it is. I gave Lucy the camera and held her tight while she leaned out and took photographs.

  The road swoops along and around from the railway approaching Appleby and in my mind’s eye I can see Miriam in the Lagonda, staring in dismay as we speed away before her. None of us of course had any idea that anything was wrong until things went wrong.

  One moment we were upright, and then the next the carriage tipped and everything changed. I remember there being absolute silence before the screaming began.

  In his short book about the history of the railways and their impact on the people and landscape of England, Morley’s Ringing Grooves of Change (1938), in a chapter entitled ‘Thundering Towards Our Fate’, he writes that ‘In our Steam Age, humans are becoming incapable of recognising the everyday. We value only the extraordinary. Trains themselves, for example, those astonishing creatures of such recent invention, exist now only in our consciousness and in the public imagination when they become untameable, when they become beasts, when they do damage or become derailed … It seems that in our time the railway accident,’ he concludes, ‘matters more to us than the railway itself. The crash, so much an admitted matter of course in railway travel, is becoming the condition of our culture.’

  What follows is perhaps the most difficult and painful recollection from all my time with Morley. I will be as brief but as accurate as I can: the official records are of course available.

  CHAPTER 4

  PANDAEMONIUM

  IT WAS THE MOST VIOLENT COLLISION. There w
as a moment’s shudder and then a kind of cracking before the great spasm of movement and noise began. I fell forward and struck my head on the luggage rack. I was momentarily stunned and knocked unconscious.

  When I came to I found we were all tilted together into a corner of the carriage – me, the mother and the baby. Our coach seemed to have tipped to the right, off the tracks, and become wedged against an embankment. What were once the sturdy walls of the carriage were now buckled and torn like the flimsiest material: the wood was splintered, the cloth of the carriage seats split, everything was broken. I remember I shook my head once, twice, three times: it was difficult to make sense of what had happened, the shock was so great. The first thing I recognised was that the mother and baby were both crying loudly – though thank goodness they appeared to be unharmed – and that the carriage was shuddering all around us, shaking and groaning as if it were wounded.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said.

  The woman continued crying. Her face was streaked with tears.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I repeated.

  Again, she simply sobbed, the baby wailing with her.

  ‘We must remain calm,’ I said, as loudly and authoritatively as I could manage, above the sounds, trying to reassure both them and myself, willing them to be quiet.

  ‘Where’s Lucy?’ she said.

  Where was Lucy?

  I stood up, still rather disorientated and confused.

  ‘I don’t know—’ I began.

  ‘You have to get us out!’ said the woman, between sobs. ‘I have to find Lucy.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. I was still gathering my thoughts, trying to work out what to do.

  ‘GET US OUT!’ yelled the woman, suddenly frantic. ‘I have to find my daughter! You need to do something.’

  I didn’t know what to do.

  ‘You need to do something!’ yelled the woman again. ‘Help us!’

  The carriage continued to rock and sway all around us; clearly, we had to get out.