Christmas Thoughts

I don't know if it is the same for everybody, but Christmas to me is it time of great reflection.

As if the whole of my life flashes before me, and I suppose particularly all of my Christmas Days seem clear side-by-side, remembering where I was and what I was doing.

One of my most vivid memories of Christmas cannot be of Christmas Day itself, but concerns my traveling on Christmas eve from Paddington to the West Country, where I was spending Christmas with my family in Wiltshire.

I have a thing about trains, and have often said that I have done some of my most important thinking on trains. They just have that effect on me.

This particular Christmas I must have been in my late teens or perhaps just 20.

The train was not very full at all, and it was one of those slam-door trains, which were divided into separate compartments, so that you had a compartment of six or eight seats.

It was therefore much more comfortable and cosy than travel on modern trains, in the days when there was much more woodwork and the seats were far more comfortably upholstered.

I don't remember anything particular about the journey, the memory is really I suppose a nostalgic remembrance of a different time.

The days of compartments in trains were quite different to modern travel, and I think as this was close to the time when these kind of trains were being discontinued, this must have been an old first-class carriage, now sadly reduced to standard class travel. And I was the beneficiary of its comfort and sense of occasion.

In those days, you really felt as if you were traveling somewhere, and there would have been a restaurant car somewhere on the train.

I can only remember perhaps once or twice eating a meal on a train, as it was not something I could easily afford as a young man.

But I am glad that I do have that memory of a quality of service and environment, that is so alien to modern train travel in the UK.

Whenever a film uses older trains for some scenes, such as in the opening to Swallows And Amazons, and similarly to The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe in the first Chronicle of Narnia, the sensation is one of magically being transported to another world.

Of course it is a world divorced from the reality of those times, so that of course the children are on the way to their destination somewhere similarly to myself in the West Country (at one point the station name is called that was my destination, Pewsey) they were of course in the process of evacuation from wartime London.

Circumstances far different from my experience in about 1980.

And my first ever published poem was inspired by a train journey, and indeed perhaps reveals something of the rhythmic fact of train travel. Perhaps one of the reasons why it has so stimulated my thoughts towards poetry.

This poem is called The Journey, and the line on which I was travelling is called the Tarka Line. It still exists today, and is so called because the author of Tarka The Otter, Henry Williamson, lived in this area and perhaps wrote his famous book Drawing upon the natural environment in which his character no doubt lived.

It travels between Exeter and Ilfracombe, and is certainly a beautiful journey even in modern times.

The author is known to me in another context, so that when I lived on the Norfolk/Suffolk border I lived in a small town called Bungay that was close to where Sir Henry Rider Haggard once lived, and his daughter, I believe, called Lilias Rider Haggard wrote for the local press and at one stage ghost-wrote the memoirs of her gamekeeper.

She had encouraged her friend Henry Williamson to move from where he farmed in Devon so that he began to farm in Norfolk.

His political views were somewhat dubious, and this was central to his belief that working on the land was essential for a healthy life. He began to write a regular article for the Anglian Times on country matters.

This would have been in the 1920s, and  his friends’ gamekeeper would have been perhaps in his 80s, and therefore had memories of this area extending back to the middle of the 19th century.

They are a fascinating insight into rural life in those times, and of course the Rider-Haggard's were an important local family.

Our neighbor had purchased his house from the Haggard estate on his return from war service in 1945, and his house fronted onto the street which in the middle of the 19th century had been the commercial centre of this thriving market town.

Our street, Bridge Street, is mentioned in one of the volumes ghost written as the memoirs of this country person. Who sadly committed suicide in a house visible from one of our upstairs windows.

The house no longer existed, but someone that we knew lived in a new house built on the site.

The past as they say is all around, and you only have two listen to the stories of those around you to discover some of it.

Our elderly neighbor still had a large pottery urn containing irises that had come with his purchase, of what had once been the local vets combined with slaughterhouse.

Strange to think that those Irises may well have gazed upon the Rider-Haggards, all those years before.


The Journey


Across the bridge our carriage steals
percussion locks the grinding wheels.
my neighbor glances, nothing said
while both of us pursue the thread -

As if the drawing of a sword
was heard by every ear on board.
Bright metal from its scabbard drawn
and then - the braying of the horn.

A trick of light, and tired ears
join end to end a thousand years
of listening to remembered sound
sense deceiving, sinking, drowned

These dirty little diesel trains
are all that cross these old remains
of Devon's ancient forestry
Northward to the Celtic Sea

where underneath the ploughed up fields
lie broken swords and rusting shields
there waiting still with bloody wounds
sleep Saxon knights in earth cocoons.

Across the bridge the carriage steals
awakening, with grinding wheels
on iron rails through blood red earth -
red ochre for our second birth.