I have always had this thing about trains. When I was at junior school, I could often be found after the end of lessons bell had rung, standing well clear of the manual gates at Ifield Halt or perched on the mudhills watching the trains pass. There were olive green liveried electric multiple units with vivid yellow warning panels, occasional class 33 diesels hauling freight to the goods yard at Three Bridges.
Ifield Halt had character in those days. Either side of the approach road to the tracks stood mustard yellow huts. The first hut housed the ticket office; its walls lined with row upon row of pale green full fare and garish pink cheap day return. Tickets to seemingly any destination in the country. The other hut housed George. When a train was due he would waddle out of his hut in his own good time shut the gates to oncoming traffic while the train waited at the home signal then return to his hut. After the train had passed, he’d gradually emerge from his hut once more to open the gates. It was a fascinating ritual to watch – unless you happened to be an impatient car driver.
One day, my father saved up his meagre earnings as a self-employed builder, so that he could take me on a once-in-a-lifetime whistle stop tour of all the major termini in Central London. I think I was ten at the time. I had never ridden a train that far, let alone taken the Underground. I remember my thrills when we spotted the legendary Flying Scotsman standing at King’s Cross, the fabulous Blue Pullman about to depart Paddington. On our return journey, my father asked me if I had enjoyed our day out. I told him it was okay. I have regretted making such an unfeeling, childish comment ever since.
I own a crinkled torn picture of me lying on a blanket in my t-shirt, shorts and wellies, deep in thought during a rare family fishing trip. My father loved coarse fishing as much as he loved to play golf. One of his time-consuming hobbies had to give: he gave up golf for fishing. His favourite fish, I think, was the common bream.
I remember how, at three o’clock on midsummer’s mornings, he’d wake me up with a boiled egg and buttered toast fingers in bed, a ghastly trick that never failed to rouse me from my slumbers. I detested boiled eggs, still do. Then it was off to his beloved River Arun at Stopham Bridge for a one-mile trek through head-high stinging nettles until he found his favoured bend. I didn’t fish, just sat and watched, whatever the weather.
On one occasion it teemed with rain. He sat under his fishing umbrella keeping his blessed gentles dry as I sat miserably outside getting soaked to the skin. On the drive home he would pull over at a public house near Pease Pottage, fetch me a packet of plain crisps with a blue twist of salt hidden inside and a smoked glass bottle of ginger beer, go into the pub and down several pints. My mother always had roast chicken, chicken casserole or a plated chicken pie topped with her best hand-blended short crust pastry waiting for us on the table when we got home.
Two years later, aged forty-nine, he died of coronary thrombosis fishing on the Arun at Hardham. So often, I find, there is a back story behind a premature death. My father laid bricks for a living, a task that involved standing in one place for a considerable length of time, putting pressure on his varicose veins, causing them to swell. He smoked John Player cigarettes. He’d send me to Ifield Parade to buy them for him, along with a copy of The Daily Sketch and a paper bag of broken biscuits from the baker’s shop, before the law changed. Granted, my father was tall, dark and handsome. But he was also overweight and had a large blue bruise on his lower back from where he fell through a skylight at work, having ignored his doctor’s strong advice to have the bruise drained, when he died.
We were a needy family, especially when the weather turned inclement. When he was unable to lay any bricks in the pouring rain. When snow lay all about deep and crisp and even, which it often did on those wintry days. We possessed few if any creature comforts let alone a telephone. It was left to the police to identify my father’s corpse after they had made multiple visits to question my distraught mother who had coincidentally sprained her ankle falling off her dressing table stool when she tried to reach fresh bedsheets on the top shelf of the airing cupboard earlier that terrible, fateful, anxious day.
My mother suffered a catastrophic breakdown. She spent months at a time inside a mental hospital set in beautiful Weald countryside. I had to take a blue liveried electric multiple unit to Faygate Halt then walk miles to visit her. At times she was so heavily sedated, we were unable to hold a conversation. I sat in silence at her bedside scoffing the gift I bought her: Black Magic chocolates, until it was time for me to leave the stench of disinfectant and sour milk, the pleading of disturbed patients, far behind, and walk the sweet chestnut-leafy lanes toward the peaceful sanctuary of the station.
During those stressful years of caring, whenever my mother was hospitalized, I would go trainspotting with my brother, buying our cheap child day return tickets from the kindly man in the first hut. Once we made it as far north as Preston. I had to give my eight-year-old diabetic sibling an insulin injection in a squalid toilet. When we came out we were greeted – by three, highly suspicious, railway police officers. No sooner had we arrived there than it was time for us to catch the next train back. I still have all of our trainspotting books gathering dust on the uppermost shelf of the bookcase in the play room. Every number I spotted is meticulously underlined in black biro. On the back cover of 1979: A Combined Volume Of British Rail Motive Power is a colour photo of a high speed train seen near Twyford with the 14.20 Paddington to Bristol: the picture that inspired my earliest surviving story, Chasing Trains.
I grew up. Girls came along. I never spotted trains again.
*****
From Hearts & Minds by Daniel Furl, my most challenging book ever: HEARTS & MINDS: an emotional journey through storytelling – Kindle edition by FURL, DANIEL. Health, Fitness & Dieting Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
