The Memory Chalet Page 5

  VII

  The Green Line Bus

  For some years at the end of the Fifties, I went to school on the Green Line bus. The Green Line, publicly owned like all London buses in those days, was a division of London Transport providing long-distance bus connections across London, typically starting out in a country town twenty to thirty miles outside the city and terminating in a comparably distant town on the opposite side of London. The bus I used, the 718, was routed from Windsor in the southwest to Harlow in the northeast, halfway between London and Cambridge.

  The Green Line was distinctive in a number of ways. It was green, of course, not just on the outside but in the livery and finish inside as well. The buses were typically single-decker, in contrast to the conventional London buses of the day, and they had folding electric doors that closed with a swish. This feature also distinguished them from the open-backed double-deckers of central London and gave the Green Line buses a cozy, reassuring, and rather warm feel. Because they covered such long distances for a regular bus line—the typical Green Line route entailed a trip of over three hours end to end—these buses did not stop at most of the standard bus stops but only at occasional interchange points. Despite going no faster than the average London bus, they were thus nevertheless an “express” route and could charge a little more for their services.

  The color and nomenclature of this service was not fortuitous. The Green Line buses invoked and illustrated a long-standing principle of London’s urban planning: their terminuses were strategically located athwart or beyond the “Green Belt” established around London in the early decades of the century. The latter constituted an early exercise in environmental preservation as well as in the provision of open space for public leisure and pleasure. The British capital in those days was thus carefully contained within a belt of open land: variously parks, common land, old-growth forests, undeveloped farmland, or open heath, all of it inherited from earlier royal or municipal or parochial property left in place so as to assure the preservation of the countryside of southeast England, perennially under threat from the unconstrained expansion of the Great Wen.

  Despite the helter-skelter ribbon development of the interwar decades, and the even less appealing public and private housing projects of the 1950s, Greater London had been more or less contained within its belt of greenery; sometimes no more than a few miles deep, but enough to distinguish the city from the country and to preserve the identity and particularity of the towns and villages on its farther side. The Green Line buses thus reflected in their name, their routes, and the distances they covered the largely successful aspirations of a generation of planners.

  I, of course, knew nothing of this. But I think I instinctively grasped the implicit message of these buses and their route managers. We, they seemed to say, are the moving spirit and incarnation of a certain idea of London. We begin in Windsor, as it might be, or Stevenage, or Gravesend, or East Grinstead, and we finish up in Harlow or Guildford or Watford, straddling London as we go (most Green Line routes passed through Victoria Station, Marble Arch, or both). Whereas the red Routemasters scurry back and forth across central London, their passengers leaping on and off at will, we Greenliners box the city, acknowledging its astonishing scale but asserting, in our distinctive routes and endpoints, its necessary limits.

  I sometimes essayed those limits, riding the line from one end to the other just for the sheer pleasure of seeing woods, hills, and fields emerge at each end of my native metropolis. The Green Line “team”—there was a driver and a conductor to every bus—seemed distinctly sympathetic to this ostensibly pointless childhood exercise. They were not paid much more than the drivers and conductors of the red buses—none of the employees of the London Passenger Transport Board could boast much of an income in those days. When I started using their services, the busmen had only just come off a bitter and prolonged strike. But the “mood” of the Green Line men was quite distinct. They had more time to talk to one another and to the passengers. Because their doors closed, the interior was quieter than that of other buses. And large parts of their route were so very attractive, in that settled, comfortable way of the leafy outer suburbs of postwar London, that the bus itself—despite being upholstered in much the same way as all other London buses of the day—somehow felt plusher and more comfortable too. And so the driver and conductor seemed to me at least to take a greater pride in their vehicle and to relax into its routine more than other busmen.

  The conductor, paid a little less than the skilled driver, was usually but not always a younger man (there were hardly any women). His function was ostensibly to keep order and collect fares; but since large tracts of countryside were often covered with relatively few passengers and stops, his task was hardly preoccupying. In practice he kept the driver company. The driver in his turn was part of the bus (his compartment integrated into the interior body) and thus often well known—sometimes by his first name—to passengers on his route. There was no question of the loneliness of the long-distance driver on the Green Line buses. Whether there was a question of class is another matter. Because the Green Lines cost more and picked up passengers from the suburbs as well as across the city, many of their patrons were probably a class or so removed from the typical bus user of those days. Whereas most people who took red buses to work in the 1950s would not have been in a position to commute by car even if they had wished to, a goodly share of the Green Line business in later years was lost to automobile commuters.

  Thus whereas drivers, conductors, and passengers on the inner London buses were often drawn from the same social groups, Green Line commuters were more likely to be middle-class. This probably resulted in the reproduction on the bus of some of the patterns of deference still endemic to British society at large. It also made the buses quieter. However, the rather palpable pride that the Green Line teams took in their bus—they spent more time on it and were less likely to be moved to different services at short notice, in particular the drivers who had to learn long and complicated routes—compensated in some measure for these social hierarchies. The result was that everyone on the bus felt quite pleased with themselves, or seemed to. Even at the age of eleven I remember thinking that the bus smelled reassuring, more like a library or an old bookstore than a means of transport. This otherwise inexplicable association probably drew on the few public places that I associated with calm rather than noise and bustle.

  I continued to use the Green Line buses into the mid-Sixties. By then I was chiefly catching them late at night (the last Green Line in those days usually left its depot around 10 PM), returning from Zionist youth meetings or a tryst with a girlfriend. The Green Line at that time of the evening was usually on time (unlike the red buses it ran to a published schedule); if you were late to the stop, you missed it. In which case I would be doomed to a long and cold wait on a station platform for the rare night train, followed by a cheerless and tiring walk home from some inconveniently sited Southern Railway station. Catching the Green Line thus felt good, a comfort and a security against the chill London night and a promise of safe, warm transport home.

  Today’s Green Line buses are but a shadow of their predecessors. They are owned and run by Arriva, the worst of the private companies now responsible for providing train and bus services to British commuters, at exorbitant prices. With rare exceptions the buses avoid central London, being routed instead between the new reference points of British topography: Heathrow Airport, Legoland, etc. Their color is an accident of history, bearing no relation to their function: indeed, the green livery is now punctuated with pastel and other shades—an unintended reminder that neither the buses nor the service they provide stand for any integrated or common purpose. The conductors are long gone and the drivers, now insulated from the interior but responsible for the collection of fares, have no dealings with their customers beyond the purely commercial. There are no cross-London routes: those buses that enter the city terminate halfway across it before returning whence they
came, as though to remind their users that this is just another bus service from point A to point B and has no aspiration to map or box or contain or in any other way identify and celebrate London’s remarkable scale and diversity, much less its rapidly disappearing belt of protective greenery. Like so much else in Britain today, the Green Line buses merely denote, like a crumbling boundary stone, overgrown and neglected, a past whose purposes and shared experiences are all but lost in Heritage Britain.

  VIII

  Mimetic Desire

  According to the literary theorist René Girard, we come to yearn for and eventually love those who are loved by others. I cannot confirm this from personal experience—I have a history of frustrated longings for objects and women who were palpably unavailable to me but of no particular interest to anyone else. But there is one sphere of my life in which, implausibly, Girard’s theory of mimetic desire could be perfectly adapted to my experience: if by “mimetic” we mean mutuality and symmetry, rather than mimicry and contestation, I can vouch for the credibility of his proposition. I love trains, and they have always loved me back.

  What does it mean to be loved by a train? Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. If this sounds paradoxical, remember Rilke’s admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish. As a child, I always felt uneasy and a little constrained around people, my family in particular. Solitude was bliss, but not easily obtained. Being always felt stressful—wherever I was there was something to do, someone to please, a duty to be completed, a role inadequately fulfilled: something amiss. Becoming, on the other hand, was relief. I was never so happy as when I was going somewhere on my own, and the longer it took to get there, the better. Walking was pleasurable, cycling enjoyable, bus journeys fun. But the train was very heaven.

  I never bothered to explain this to parents or friends, and was thus constrained to feign objectives: places I wanted to visit, people I wanted to see, things I needed to do. Lies, all of it. In those days a child could safely travel on public transport alone from seven years old or so, and I took solitary tube trips around London from a very young age. If I had a goal it was to cover the whole network, from terminus to terminus, an aspiration I came very close to achieving. What did I do when I reached the end of a line, Edgware as it might be, or Ongar? I stepped out, studied the station rather closely, glanced around me, bought a dessicated London Transport sandwich and a Tizer . . . and took the next tube back.

  The technology, architecture, and working practices of a railway system fascinated me from the outset—I can describe even today the peculiarities of the separate London Underground lines and their station layouts, the heritage of different private companies in their early years. But I was never a “trainspotter.” Even when I graduated to solitary travel on the extensive network of British Railways’ Southern Region I never joined the enthusiastic bands of anorak-clad preteenage boys at the end of platforms, assiduously noting down the numbers of the passing trains. This seemed to me the most asinine of static pursuits—the point of a train was to get on it.

  The Southern Region in those days offered rich pickings for the lone traveler. I would park my bike in the luggage wagon at Norbiton Station on the Waterloo line, ride the suburban electric train out into rural Hampshire, descend at some little country halt on the slopes of the Downs, cycle leisurely eastward until I reached the westerly edge of the old London to Brighton Railway, then hop the local into Victoria as far as Clapham Junction. There I had the luxuriant choice of some nineteen platforms—this was, after all, the largest rail junction in the world—and would entertain myself with the choices from which to select my train back home. The whole exercise would last a long summer day; when I got home, tired and contented, my parents would inquire politely as to where I had been and I would dutifully invent some worthy purpose to obviate further discussion. My train trips were private and I wanted to keep them that way.

  In the Fifties, train travel was cheap—especially for twelve-year-old boys. I paid for my pleasures from weekly pocket money and still had pennies left over for snacks. The most expensive trip I ever took got me nearly to Dover—Folkestone Central, actually—from where I could look longingly across at the well-remembered rapides of the French national network. More typically, I would save spare cash for the Movietone News Theatre at Waterloo Station: London’s largest terminus and a cornucopia of engines, timetables, newsstands, announcements, and smells. In later years, I would occasionally miss the last regular train home and sit for hours into the night in Waterloo’s drafty waiting halls, listening to the shunting of diesels and the loading of mail, sustained by a single cup of British Rail cocoa and the romance of solitude. God knows what my parents thought I was doing, adrift in London at 2 AM. If they had known, they might have been even more worried.

  I was a little too young to capture the thrills of the steam age. The British rail network switched all too soon into diesels (but not electric, a strategic mistake for which it is still paying) and although the great long-distance expresses still swept through Clapham Junction in my early school years, pulled by magnificent late-generation steam engines, most of the trains I took were thoroughly “modern.” Nevertheless, thanks to the chronic underinvestment of Britain’s nationalized railways, much of the rolling stock dated from interwar years and some of it was pre-1914 vintage. There were separate closed compartments (including one in each four-car unit set aside for “Ladies”), no toilets, and windows held up by leather straps with holes into which a hook in the door was inserted. The seats, even in second- and third-class, were upholstered in a vaguely tartan fabric that irritated the naked thighs of shorts-clad schoolboys but that was comfortingly warm in the damp, chilly winters of those years.

  That I should have experienced trains as solitude is of course a paradox. They are, in the French phrase, transports en commun: designed from the early-nineteenth-century outset to provide collective travel for persons unable to afford private transportation or, over the years, for the better-heeled who could be attracted to luxurious shared accommodations at a higher price. The railways effectively invented social classes in their modern form, by naming and classifying different levels of comfort, facility, and service: as any early illustration can reveal, trains were for many decades crowded and uncomfortable except for those fortunate enough to travel first-class. But by my time second-class was more than acceptable to the respectable middling sort; and in England such persons keep themselves to themselves. In those blissful days before mobile phones, when it was still unacceptable to play a transistor radio in a public place (and the authority of the train conductor sufficed to repress rebellious spirits), the train was a fine and silent place.

  In later years, as Britain’s rail system fell into decline, train travel at home lost some of its appeal. The privatization of the companies, the commercial exploitation of the stations, and the diminished commitment of the staff all contributed to my disenchantment—and the experience of travel by train in the US was hardly calculated to restore one’s memories or enthusiasms. Meanwhile the publicly owned state railways of continental Europe entered a halcyon era of investment and technical innovation, while largely preserving the distinctive qualities inherited from earlier networks and systems.

  Thus to travel in Switzerland is to understand the ways in which efficiency and tradition can seamlessly blend to social advantage. Paris’s Gare de l’Est or Milano Centrale, no less than Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof and Budapest’s Keleti Pályaudvar, stand as monuments to nineteenth-century town planning and functional architecture: compare the long-term prospects of New York’s inglorious Pennsylvania Station—or virtually any modern airport. At their best—from St. Pancras to Berlin’s remarkable new central station—railway stations are the very incarnation of modern life, which is why they last so long and still perform so very well the tasks for which they were first designed. As I think back on
it—toutes proportions gardées Waterloo did for me what country churches and Baroque cathedrals did for so many poets and artists: it inspired me. And why not? Were not the great glass-and-metal Victorian stations the cathedrals of the age?

  I had long planned to write about trains. I suppose in a way I have already done so, at least in part. If there is something distinctive about my version of contemporary European history in Postwar, it is—I believe—the subliminal emphasis on space: a sense of regions, distances, differences, and contrasts within the limited frame of one small subcontinent. I think I came to that sense of space by staring aimlessly out of train windows and inspecting rather more closely the contrasting sights and sounds of the stations where I alighted. My Europe is measured in train time. The easiest way for me to “think” Austria or Belgium is by meandering around the Westbahnhof or the Gare du Midi and reflecting on the experience, not to mention the distances between. This is certainly not the only way to come to grips with a society and a culture, but it works for me.