Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  I’m sitting at the very table where Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard said their botched, agonising goodbye. I feel I ought to be doing something more reverent than eating a toasted tea cake and jotting down notes about my surroundings but, hey, I like toasted teacakes. My surroundings, I should point out before someone else does, are not those actually used in the film. That was built on a sound stage at Denham Studios. But that set was modelled on this very refreshment room at Carnforth, the station just north of Lancaster where all the movie’s exteriors were shot. It is eerily identical.

  Lean chose Carnforth for various reasons. The war was still on – just – and the station was remote from major cities and considered safe from attack. It was less hampered by blackout restrictions than a London or southern station would have been, and the long ramp from the subway was perfect for some of his set pieces. Even walking along them now brings a palpable tingle. Along the way are a sequence of framed poems by Lynne Alexander, who was the station’s poet in residence in 2004. ‘The Stations of the Clock’ tells the story of Carnforth’s famous clock, ‘iconic’ even, to use that abused phrase with justification here, from its manufacture in 1880 to its role in the film to its restoration along with the station.

  After Beeching’s cuts, the once proud station dwindled to the status of a branch line with the removal of the mainline platform, and then into dereliction in the 1970s. But in the 1990s a team of railway and film enthusiasts led by Carnforth businessman Peter Yates worked to restore the station with support from Railtrack and in 2003, Margaret Barton, the tearoom girl Beryl in Brief Encounter, cut the ribbon on the newly refurbished and handsome station. It’s a great achievement but Peter Yates has said that they don’t intend to rest on their laurels; their next objective is to get it back in use as a stop on London-Glasgow trains on the West Coast mainline.

  If for years Carnforth station’s place in British film history was overlooked, overgrown and under-acknowledged, it’s certainly flaunting it now, and quite rightly too. The famous refreshment rooms now offer themselves for hire with a breezy ‘Come And Have Your Brief Encounter At Carnforth Station’. They’ve done it all rather well: lots of period detail like urns, a bell for attention, adverts for long-lost stouts and such. Glenn Miller plays in the background and there are posters for a forthcoming – and entirely genuine – appearance by a swing band. It’s Saturday afternoon and the place is packed. At a corner table sit a couple I take to be regulars: a loud, cheery man in early middle age with some kind of mild learning difficulty is eating scones – they are hugely popular with all the clientele – with a lady I assume to be his mother, silver-haired and chatty. The staff are attentive to them without being patronising, pleasant without being gushing. It’s a touching scene. At the next table, two men in dark suits sit drinking orange juice, sharing a rock cake, whispering and poring over an old map. They seem to have strayed in here from another great British train film, namely Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, rather than Brief Encounter, and I am intrigued, especially when I notice that their whisperings are in German.

  I would have followed them onto their train, disguised myself as the wine waiter, stolen what was clearly their top-secret map of English gun emplacements/radar installations and ended up being chased along the roof of the train whilst being shot at with a Luger. But I decided to look at the visitors’ book instead. Nearly all have entered into the spirit of things, even if that is the rather exaggerated and inaccurate spirit. ‘Spiffing!!’ says a gentleman from Leeds. ‘Quaint,’ echoes a family from Kent. A darker note creeps in from Susan of Preston: ‘Such a pity about the coffee!’ ‘Exquisite!’ though, says a lady from Bath and, ‘Oh, I have seem to have some grit in my eye!’ writes a lady from the Wirral with a jolly nod to one of the film’s most famous lines and the minor incident which brings the lovers together. That’s a nice touch, I think, before I notice the next comment: ‘As the film says, “We’ll Be Back!”’ Well, yes, except the film you’re referring to isn’t Brief Encounter but the much more modern, much more violent and vastly inferior Terminator starring the distinctly un-Celia-Johnson-ish Arnold Schwarzenegger. With a wince I note that the correspondent comes from my home town.

  My pained reverie is interrupted as the Transpennine Express thunders through bound for Leeds. There were no Transpennines, Silverlinks, Arrivas and such in 1945 but, like today, there was a Great Western and similarly grandly named roll call of privatised train companies. Filming on Brief Encounter took place in the middle of the night, between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., when the local rail services had ended. Every night, though, everything would stop for the midnight passage of the Royal Scot. As Lean recalled: ‘I used to stand on the edge of the platform shaking with excitement, holding Celia’s arm as the thing roared through within six feet of us. Just wonderful.’ In between takes, Celia would huddle by the stationmaster’s roaring fire and keep warm before heading back to the Low Wood Hotel in Ambleside at dawn for a snooze. She hadn’t fancied the trip out of London and had told her husband that she’d got a job that entailed ‘going up north for four weeks’ location at some horrible railway station’ but in the end, according to her letters, she really enjoyed the camaraderie of the production and the station. She played poker and did crossword puzzles and gave sweets and chocolates to the local kids, rare treats in those dark days.

  Celia and Trevor’s agonised goodbye is interrupted by the prattle of the well-meaning but irritating Dolly Messiter. I don’t know if the kid in the replica Newcastle top is well-meaning but his table-top drumming is irritating. But it’s too nice a day to be grouchy and I try to emulate the genial good manners of the staff, whose politeness and pleasantness is complimented on every page of the visitors’ book.

  Outside in the mild midsummer air and the sunlit platform, folks come and go. Some are actually going to places: assignations and appointments in Barrow, Lancaster and Sheffield. They check their watches, peer at timetables and chat on mobile phones. But they are outnumbered by my kindred spirits today, the amblers and the moochers and the tourists, just enjoying a sunny afternoon on the most famous railway platform in England, at least until J.K. Rowling came along.

  Three people make haphazard and halting progress up the platform towards me. There is a tiny, birdlike elderly lady in mauve with cottonwool hair and a kindly, bewildered look, there is a small, haunted-looking man in an anorak and, completing the trio, a huge, luridly made-up woman in a preposterous fur coat who takes every opportunity to berate the other two at terrifying volume. My heart goes out to the cowering pair, who I take to be husband and mum-in-law, especially when the overbearing tyrant at their side demands that husband does up one of her slingbacks. And so he does, kneeling at her feet in the shadow of her enormous bulk, visibly quailing. It is like a Donald McGill postcard of a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. ‘Oh, do hurry up, Arthur, what are you doing down there?’ It is as if an old, bad, 1970s sitcom has come to dreadful life before my eyes. Don’t be another Celia Johnson, Arthur, I want to shout. Don’t stay in this hell out of duty. Leave her. Throw her under the train. Anything. I feel for Arthur especially when, with infinite gentleness, he rises and says to the elderly lady, ‘Hey, Mum, do you want to go and see Noël Coward? He’s through there.’

  He isn’t, of course. But his picture is. Next door to the Refreshment Room is a small visitors’ centre which is, naturally, heavily themed around the film; it plays continuously in a small viewing area with comfy seats and I notice a young couple with backpacks and mousy hair holding hands as they watch Celia wander the rainy streets of Milford, distraught. You can buy the video here and I do, as well as a tea towel, a pamphlet about the station’s history and several postcards, which I think will come in handy for quick jotted correspondence at moments of intense personal trauma and heartbreak. That kind of thing.

  Carnforth’s brush with cinematic immortality is not the only aspect of the station’s life immortalised there. There are exhibits about the so-called Miracle of Hest Bank, an inciden
t in 1965 in which a London-Glasgow express was derailed at high speed in the nearby village of the same name and, incredibly, none of the 119 passengers was killed. (Less fortunate were the twenty-three young Chinese cockle pickers who drowned on the treacherous sandbank nearby in 2004.) Under glass cases are kept prosaic but sweet little reminders of earlier and more luxurious days of steam – ashtrays and whisky glasses from the first-class cars of the Furness, Midland and LNWR Railways – as well as the kind of memorabilia and artefacts from the days of steam that will make some men sweaty palmed with excitement but simply baffle me. Exactly what is a fishplate spanner? It looked quite cute, though, in a small, oily kind of way.

  Another treasurable feature of Middle Englishness is very much in evidence on this mild Saturday in Carnforth, that mainstay of many a rally, museum and open day: the volunteer enthusiast. We are a nation of both, and I like that. These days, when an arid, cultivated negativity is the default mode of the fashionable, people who are interested in things are viewed with disdain. Interested in certain things, anyway. It’s OK to like football, it’s almost obligatory in fact, but not, say, maps or Cluedo or swing bridges. A few years back you may remember that a holidaying party of aviation enthusiasts, or ‘plane spotters’ as the papers dismissively took to referring to them, were arrested in Greece on some ludicrous and trumped-up spying charges. The chatter across every dinner table in NW1 and on laddish phone-ins held that they deserved it anyway: they were sad, they should get a life.

  I don’t see the appeal in spotting trains or planes or vintage traction engines. But then again, I have no interest in cars or ‘dark comedy’ or Chelsea FC. I’m of the opinion that people who like them are in far direr and in more pressing need of a ‘life’ than someone willing to do chokey in an Athens jail for their love of planes. Each to their own, I say, and let’s hear it for the British enthusiast, several of whom – grey-haired men in comfy sweaters all – made my day at Carnforth a lot more pleasant by, for instance, showing me around the large restored booking hall and telling me that people get married here these days and for pointing out that the curving platform was a pretty marvellous feat of geometry and civil engineering. I didn’t ask them about the fishplate spanner, though, and so it remains an enigma, yet to reveal its dark and secret purpose.

  I imagine that the Greek plane spotters probably got short, mirthful shrift from at least one of the presenters of a programme that is the TV flagship of the new Middle England – hugely ironic, given that it would probably hate to be thought of as such. For years, though, Top Gear would have been happy with that cosy designation. Launched in 1977 from Pebble Mill in the heart of Middle England’s most car-friendly city, Birmingham, it was for many years helmed by William Woollard in driving gloves, talking about the Lombard RAC Rally and sumps. It reeked of Simoniz GT Wax and tinned travel sweets. Then some time early in this century, like many other previously straight-laced aspects of British life, it discovered irony. The new studio-based show is essentially a comedy programme with some sports cars in it, in which middle-aged men blow things up and mock each other’s Lamborghinis or heap scorn on other, less testosterone-laden forms of transport, mainly any environmentally friendly new offering and caravans. Top Gear’s three-pronged attack of Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond has turned blokeishness, the hearty culture of the saloon bar, into an art form, and the viewers lap it up. It is astonishingly popular.

  That it’s popular with the 16-to 34-year-old male isn’t surprising. That it regularly attracts 40 per cent of the available female viewers is. Amongst the explanations offered is that it appeals to the kind of woman who doesn’t want the sappy schlocky dramas like Heartbeat on the other side. Or that Mum is just watching along with Dad and Darren. It’s certainly easier to wax sociological on its male appeal. Like FHM, Jack Daniel’s and Insignia body spray, it maybe serves as wish fulfilment for the kind of middle-ranking office furniture salesman who thinks that the fact he once visited a lap-dancing club called Elite in Sevenoaks makes him James Bond. He will never have a reckless, passionate affair with a beautiful woman or beat up a bully or silence a room with his brilliance. But he can gun his company Audi past a labouring caravan with a smirk and may give a half-decent best man’s speech one day and he will take his jokey, blokey cue from what TV critic Andrew Anthony of the Observer called ‘the kind of overemphatic irony and exaggerated indignation that, such is its popularity, threatens to become the blokeish lingua franca of Middle England’.

  Having no interest whatsoever in cars, Top Gear is something of a closed book to me. Yes, I find its Tory populism slightly wearisome. But I may be confusing the show with the kind of person who likes it, such as the vein-in-temple throbbing right-wing blogger of Britain Today who writes, and I quote, ‘In Top Gear, white, middle class, public school educated men with a healthy appetite for the opposite sex get to haemorrhage huge quantities of licence payers’ money on driving exorbitantly expensive cars in increasingly pointless and legally dubious ways [whilst] inarticulate and predominantly working class people gathering round much posher people in a studio and hanging on their every word … fantastic entertainment … When the BBC sticks to giving people what they actually want, which is things like Top Gear, and not things like Muslim women’s fishing, the people are happy.’

  Beyond finding this kind of guff tedious, I’m not really qualified to either praise or criticise the actual show. It is enormously successful and clearly very well made. It’s just that as Morrissey once sang about old Radio One DJs (whom the Top Gear lads are endearingly reminiscent of), ‘It says nothing to me about my life.’

  So I do not know what the thing is about caravans. What can it be about these innocuous, beige boxes driven by middle-aged men that enrages other middle-aged men who drive dull, expensive German saloons? Perhaps it is precisely because they are innocuous and beige? Or perhaps it is because their reasonably sedate passage is preventing Simon in his BMW from a hot assignation with a Ginsters Scotch Egg Bar and the porn channel in a Travelodge near Reading. It is a curious thing, though: two bastions of Middle England maleness, each glaring at the other across the central reservation and thinking each other a bore.

  Why am I not entirely qualified to dissect Top Gear’s worth as a motoring show, as opposed to a piece of light entertainment? Because I don’t drive: a state of alienation from the common weal that some would say makes me about as un-Middle English as one can be. I wish I could claim some principled stand here, some brave and single-minded refusal to join in with the slow asphyxiation of the planet. The truth is less glorious: took driving test at nineteen, failed, not that arsed, lived in a town, plenty of buses, trains and taxis, liked a drink, then got job with the New Musical Express as a rock journalist who, if they are not, should all be prevented by law from having a driving licence.

  For some years, I’ve presented regularly on Radio Two’s Drivetime show. Like all Drivetime shows, it has nothing to do with cars, it’s merely a designation regarding the time of day, borrowed from American radio. It has no more to do with fuel consumption or road tax than the breakfast show concerns itself with muesli or grapefruit or the best way to poach an egg. That, however, hasn’t stopped at least one correspondent from sending me the email equivalent of a green-ink missive in which he rages against me having the gig. ‘Excuse me, but how can a man who DOESN’T DRIVE PRESENT A DRIVETIME SHOW!!!!’ Argument is futile. I’ve long since learned that where their cars are concerned, Englishmen become an illogical child race of angry air-conditioned hermits living on Dairylea Dunkers, service station lattes, Oasis and phone-ins.

  Perhaps I’m biased but I don’t accept that there is romance on the road as there is on the rails. In America, yes, as I’ve said. But in England, the railway is a kind of myth whilst the motorway is a means to an end. Journeying by train expands the experience of both the land and of the others moving in it. Car ownership is a matter of private pride – the Sunday afternoon car wash is a symbol for Middle England �
�� and pure functionality.

  For a certain kind of Middle Englander, the car is a kind of mobile house: private, domestic, full of kids’ toys, books and food, a space jealousy guarded from intruders. This is what Maggie loved so much about the car: its narrow, personally owned domestic privacy as opposed to the unappealing public communality of the train. The car driver is an owner-occupier; the train makes council-estate dwellers of us all.

  And this manifests itself not just in cute stickers and baby shades and Magic Tree air fresheners, but in road rage, that very English curse that turns bank clerks into thugs and thugs into murderers. Unlike Shylock, when you cut him up, it’s you that could end up bleeding, and even the most undemonstrative of fellows is turned to a gesticulating pustule of impotent rage. You are, essentially, a burglar of the road to these men. The car is a castle and you have breached the drawbridge, entered the hermetic unreal bubble that drivers inhabit. As Betjeman puts it:

  A man on his own in a car

  Is revenging himself on his wife;

  He opens the throttle and bubbles with dottle

  And puffs at his pitiful life.

  It’s interesting that England’s most loved car signifiers should all come from long, long ago, the honking, spluttering but ineffably romantic pioneering vehicles of the early twentieth century: the Darracqs and Spykers of the adored movie Genevieve, Mr Toad’s sporty little number in The Wind in the Willows, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  But whatever the car, you could never have a Brief Encounter, however unsatisfying, at Charnock Richard, Newport Pagnell, Hilton Park or any of Britain’s scores of service stations. Like airports and coach stations, no matter how beautifully designed they are, they have no mystery. Or rather, only one, and that is how they can charge six pounds fifty for beans on toast. Terrifyingly expensive, comfortingly faceless, almost Soviet in their statist regimentation, the motorway service station experience unites us all.