Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  Beeching became a bogeyman, caricatured, mocked, feared and even lampooned in rhyme. The Guardian published a lament for the lost stations that ran, ‘We shall stop at you no more for Doctor Beeching stops at nothing.’ A popular song went, ‘Oh, Dr Beeching what have you done?/ There once were lots of trains to catch, but soon there will be none/I’ll have to buy a bike, ‘cos I can’t afford a car/Oh, Dr Beeching what a naughty man you are…’ But by far and away the most poignant and lovely musical lament for the lost railways of England was written by the duo Flanders and Swann in 1963, the year that the mad axeman from ICI first began to terrorise the English countryside.

  Flanders and Swann were a prim-ish, proper-ish duo, an owlish pianist and a hearty bearded man in a wheelchair, whose comedy feels a little quaint and easy to mock these days, and indeed they have been, albeit affectionately, by the modern comic duo Armstrong and Miller. Yes, ‘The Slow Train’ is a piece of sheer and unabashed sentiment and utter nostalgia. It is also quite wonderful and will have anyone with a heart dabbing at their eyes within a verse. To a languid melody and rhythm that evokes the gentle rattle of a mid-afternoon carriage down a quiet branch line, the duo sing that no more will they go…

  to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe

  On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road;

  No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat.

  At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street.

  We won’t be meeting again, on the slow train.

  When they get to the bit about ‘No one departs, no one arrives, from Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives’ and the guard’s voice calls faintly, ‘Cockermouth for Buttermere’, even the most cold-hearted economic pragmatist must have been having second thoughts.

  Wishful thinking. They didn’t. The lines were closed, weeds came and choked the tracks and platforms, supermarkets were built across the lines rendering them useless for ever. The only good thing that came out of this nasty, myopic policy was that there are now any number of good walks and cycle paths along the disused lines. On a wet, claggy day when the high fells are out of bounds I can recommend the lovely stroll from Keswick to Threlkeld in the Northern Lakes along the old Penrith to Keswick line. I have to say that it would be even lovelier by slow train, winding above the gorges of the river Greta and curving along the contours of Blencathra and Skiddaw. But at least they haven’t built a Tesco on it.

  On the internet you can find lists of the old stations and learn of the various fates that befell them. Marple in Cheshire is now a cheery pub, Cotherstone in Teesdale is a lovely house. Bassenthwaite Lake station moulders forlornly at the far end of the silent stretch of Cumbrian water. At Barnard Castle and Under Whernside in the Yorkshire Dales, there are ghostly signal boxes that remind you, with a shudder, of the houses at the end of The Blair Witch Project.

  The architectural critic Jonathan Glancey says that after the Beeching closures some of the poetry of the English landscape was lost for ever, and in one case he was nearly exactly right. One of the doctor’s casualties has gone almost for ever. But what remains is an old station sign almost hidden in a leafy bus shelter in a quiet Gloucestershire village and, on a plaque beneath, the text of a poem that speaks of a Middle England that was lost to us long before Beeching came with his ledger and abacus and axe.

  Adlestrop is little more than a cluster of houses, a racing stables and a post office nestling under a little Cotswold hill off the quiet B road that links Chipping Norton and Stow-on-the-Wold. There’s no pub so the drinkers amongst the eighty or so folks who live here must perforce seek out the notorious fleshpots of nearby Oddington. The local newsletter, The Adlestrop Express, tells that the stables have had a frustrating winter and lost a much-loved, rising young horse called Piano Player. Two grand old residents have died in their nineties, and it’s noted in passing that all three of the much-missed Nell’s daughters were married to the sound of the bells in Adlestrop church. On a note of renewal, though, the village welcomes the new couple at Leigh Cottage. Permission has been granted for a new village hall and ‘it’s been decided to arrange a day for the Spring Cleaning of the Church. Many other parishes do this on an annual basis. This has been set for 2.00–4.00pm on Saturday 24 March. It is hoped that it will be fun to get together with the opportunity also for convivial chatter! Please come along armed only with dusters and polish. We will provide everything else. Come for the two hours or just drop in for whatever time you can spare. We will finish up with a nice tea for those who last the course!’

  I know people in the north and the south and the bustling Midlands who would sneer at all this niceness, as they sneer at the very notion of Middle England. I thought it sounded blissful. You just know there is something fundamentally good about Adlestrop. It feels comfortable rather than showily rich, sleepy but not boring. In fact, according to the parish notice board, it’s a social whirl. There’s ‘Yoga For Everyone!’ at Shipton-under-Wychwood. There’s an evening of jazz on Broadwell Hill and over the road at the village hall they’re hosting a racing and general knowledge quiz with wine and cheese. I note with some chagrin that the mobile police station has been here on Main Street – there are only two streets – that very morning. I’d have liked to find out about patterns of local crime. I bet shoot-outs, armed robberies and crack dealing are at a premium. I’m sure there is the odd problem, though, and that local MP Jeffrey Clifton Brown (‘Working for the Cotswolds’) will be pleased to sort them out. With its charming thatched cottages, post office and sylvan setting and its leafy bus shelter with bench and timetables for Toy Lane, Little Compton, Kite Brook and Brock Hill Clump, it is exactly the sort of village where Americans and Japanese think we all live. We should be so lucky.

  That’s not why I first came there though. A clue to what brings me here lies in that fine old Adlestrop sign. It stood formerly on the platform of the old railway station and now has pride of place in the bus stop. Below it is a small brass plaque containing twenty-four lines of poetry. The first time I came to Adlestrop I was having a romantic weekend in a farmhand’s caravan in a field in Evenlode, a village just down the road that makes Adlestrop itself seem like Chicago. The farmhand wasn’t there, I should add. Tearing myself away from drinking champagne and such in front of the black and white telly that worked off a car battery, I noticed on the map that Adlestrop was just down the road. I had to make a pilgrimage. For Adlestrop is known all over the world to those who love getting their head in a book. Not for its Jane Austen connections – she visited the rectory often and is said to have based Mansfield Park here – but for a beautiful and much anthologised short poem that evokes both a specific time and a real sense of timelessness.

  Edward Thomas was killed by a shell blast on the first morning of the First World War Arras offensive in 1917. All of his poems were written during the last three years of his life, leaving us to speculate on what he would have become. For myself, I think he would have become one of the giants of twentieth-century poetry, as what he left us is magnificent and mysterious, an almost whispered attempt to evoke the folk identity of an England that is both sweet and cherished and ancient and dark. ‘Adlestrop’ is his most famous poem and is, as the critic Adam Phillips has remarked, ‘uncannily simple’. Over its four stanzas, in conversational tone, the poet remembers, a little vaguely, his train stopping unexpectedly one afternoon at the station in this tiny Gloucestershire village.

  Yes, I remember Adlestrop –

  The name because one afternoon

  Of heat the express-train drew up there

  Unwontedly. It was late June.

  That’s about it in terms of incident. It makes Waiting for Godot look like Apocalypse Now. But the poem casts a spell that captivates to this day. It survives rote learning in dusty classrooms, it survives exams. It haunts one with its enigmatic brevity and luminous melancholy.

  The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat

  No one left and no one came.

  Note how Flanders and Swann i
n ‘The Slow Train’ echo that line about no one coming and no one leaving. Neat, I think. So the poet is left to his thoughts and to listen to ‘all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ in the misty distance. Listening back to the voice notes I made on my handheld digital recorder that afternoon, I can hear those distant birds singing too. But that echo aside, it occurs to me, as it has to others, that the poem could not be written now. Thomas would find no ruminative silence on his train today, just a hubbub of mobile phone chatter (‘Ask Simon if the estimate from Microsoft came through and tell him that I’m going to be late for the meeting…God knows…Adlestrop, wherever that is’) and the occasional overloud under-informative announcement from the senior conductor.

  Had Edward Thomas ‘detrained’ and strolled into the village he’d have seen very much the same things I note today: rows of pretty houses, the green, the church. But some things have changed. No trains will ever stop at Adlestrop again. Beeching saw to that in 1966. The station is abandoned and overgrown. It was a mile or so outside the village anyway, which confounds some pilgrims. So the poem now takes on another meaning and another aching dimension of loss. It is not just an elegy for the Edwardian innocence that was savaged and lost in the bloody mires of Ypres and the Somme. It’s also, in a perhaps more trivial but sweetly sad way, an echo of the days when sleepy trains connected sleepy villages across a stranger, sleepier, slower England.

  I went to the post office to pick up a souvenir. It used to be run by Dorothy Price, whose father worked at the station in 1914 and who therefore must have been there the day Thomas’s train stopped ‘unwontedly’. She’s gone now but the new lady is brisk and chatty. She tells me that the pilgrims still come and some are disappointed to find the station gone. Actually, as she points out, it’s not gone. ‘It’s a bit sad, though, all overgrown and fenced off. They still come, though, and take pictures. Nice people, generally … well, I suppose they would be.’ She chuckles in recognition of the fact that few devotees of old railways and poetry tend to be thuggish. I buy a strawberry cheesecake ice cream and four sepia postcards of the old station. In one, an awkward and moustachioed young man smiles sadly at the camera. It strikes me that it may have been Dorothy Price’s dad.

  As I leave the post office, I see clouds of steam belching from over the wooded and hedged barrier where I fancy the old line might be and I hear the unmistakeable sounds of movement and industry. For a magical, eerie moment I think that a ghost train is returning to sleeping Adlestrop or that I have stepped through some portal into the past. In fact, it was someone lopping branches with a chainsaw and chucking them onto a bonfire.

  Beeching lopped branches with a chainsaw too, which is why you now go straight through Adlestrop on the London train without a second thought unless you’re of a poetic cast of mind. I’m with Hislop and Glancey in that I think that railways are at the soul of England, Middle or Outer, Merrie or Darkest, and that they have permeated our national psyche; does any other nation produce trainspotters, I wonder? But the extent of this is debatable for some. For instance, the railway historian Jack Simmons states that: ‘The success of the first steam railways evoked little interest from English imaginative writers.’ And it has been claimed that, compared to France and Zola or Russia and Tolstoy, England has never produced a truly great railway novel.

  Perhaps so. But England, Middle England specifically, has produced a great railway poem in ‘Adlestrop’, a great railway ghost story in Dickens’ chilling ‘The Signalman’ and, of course, a great film. Perhaps the greatest British film ever made in fact: a beautiful and melancholy love story that might never have happened if Doctor Beeching had been around fifty years earlier.

  It begins spellbindingly with a train whistle and a whoosh of steam. We are on a darkened railway station in midwinter, lit dramatically and romantically by the lights and fire and steam of an approaching train and by the glow of its carriage windows as it passes at speed. The ticket inspector, Stanley Holloway, crosses the track and enters the refreshment room where a couple are deep in thought and occasional, fragmentary conversation.

  The beginning of Brief Encounter is also its end. The couple are meeting for the last time and she, Celia Johnson, is recounting in voiceover an imaginary conversation she is having with her husband. He isn’t here and the man she is with is not her husband. And that’s pretty much it. Two nice middle-class people, married but not to each other, have an unconsummated love affair after a chance meeting at a railway station. She gets cold feet and he goes off to South Africa.

  What this bald plot summary cannot tell you is that Brief Encounter, written by Noël Coward, directed by David Lean and starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, is a masterpiece. Now this will surprise some. If your idea of a truly great British movie is a Guy Ritchie gangster flick or possibly even The Italian Job (which actually stars the patrician writer of Brief Encounter) then you probably find Brief Encounter a bit twee. It has been parodied often, most affectionately and brilliantly by Victoria Wood, whose heroine begins her tale by stating, ‘I’d gone into Wilverton to change my library book and order a coconut.’ But she gets the mood and look just right and is clearly in love with the movie. Others, though, see it as the worst kind of repressed English melodrama and mock its cut-glass accents and dull milieu. Perhaps the worst insult of all is the ghastly 1974 TV remake featuring Richard Burton and Sophia Loren. It is mesmerisingly bad. Loren stumbles robotically through the most appalling dialogue and Burton exudes the desperate weariness of someone who was once the best Hamlet of his generation but is now looking forward only to the pubs opening.

  Brief Encounter can take all of the above, and still emerge unscathed as a classic. It looks stunning, shot like a film noir by Robert Krasker, Lean’s direction is masterly and the writing is easily the finest thing Coward ever did, a world away from his brittle and patronising worst, and Trevor Howard is great. But the film belongs to two things. First, there is Celia Johnson. She is simply superb, managing to evoke a world of desolation and interior pain with just a look. In one of her very first lines she says, ‘This misery can’t last.’ But you know that it is going to last for the rest of her life. Her expression, luminous and wracked, as she pulls back from a suicidal leap beneath the train, is as astonishing as are her words: ‘I meant to do it, Fred, I really meant to do it. I stood there trembling right on the edge, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t brave enough. I should like to be able to say that it was the thought of you and the children that prevented me but it wasn’t. I had no thoughts at all, only an overwhelming desire not to feel anything ever again. Not to be unhappy any more…’ In a documentary about the film, the comic actor John Sessions puts it perfectly when he says, ‘Only the most cold-hearted, Ray-Ban-wearing, Face reading, post-modern cynic could possibly not be moved by her.’

  In the same documentary, the film’s producer says that every time he watches it, he steels himself, gives himself a tough talking to and still cries. Me too. And I rage against it too. Because she does the wrong thing. She should have left Fred, the stolid and unremarkable hubby and to hell with propriety. In the end this is a film about a very un-Middle-English trait: cowardice, or as critic Jim Shepard has remarked, ‘Decades of forbearance: slow-moving, mile-long freight trains of self-denial … women [giving] up what they most wanted for somebody else’s sake.’

  In early previews, conservative commentators praised the film for its moral tone; exactly what exasperates me about it. Look at the flirtatious station master and the tearoom matriarch, the rude mechanicals of this piece. She has been married before, he lusts after her, and clearly their relationship, even if it does not last, will be joyous and warm and sexy. Now look at our heroes: these complacent, hidebound individuals don’t go off with each other because they are gutless. Real love, real passion transcends and overcomes any boundary. Life is short, regret is long.

  Compare it with Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, another Middle English masterpiece about a wrong turning and wasted, thwarted
love. I am sure McEwan had Brief Encounter somewhere in mind but he’s more forthright in his judgement. He does not conclude, oh well, you probably did the right thing. He says you did the wrong thing and, unlike Brief Encounter, his novel follows the action on, this time through the man’s prosaic and second-rate life.

  So I don’t find the ending of Brief Encounter the happy reconciliation some do. For me, it’s a study in defeat. She isn’t crying with relief, she’s in mourning. But that’s just my opinion. And this is why Brief Encounter is great popular art. Because it entertains and it delights and it provokes and it makes you look into your own soul. I said that the film belongs to two things. The first is Celia Johnson, the second is Carnforth railway station.