Trains

It was often on the sharp clear winter days when living on a hill above a train track felt most surreal to me, the days when the steam would slice through the icy air like the breath of a jogging dragon, days always in the minority in mild moist Devon and all the more special for that. The track was invisible from the house, a line of distinguished oaks forming a central room divider for the valley, so if someone - especially someone from my past in another part of the country - was staying with me for the first time, the whistle, coming apparently out of nowhere, would often be that one final thing that made them collapse into laughter and say something like, “You’re living in a soddin’ fairy tale, mate!” It was the icing on the cake, the cake’s base being made from the medieval jousting arena less than a hundred yards from my back door and the hall just beyond that which Richard II had built in 1384 for his brother-in-law and the river and the 1500 year-old yew tree and occasional sound of flute floating up to my bedroom window from a woman in a smock sitting under a mulberry tree in the Grade I listed gardens. Sometimes the whistle made me chuckle too. My friend Nathan, who had helped to rebuild an old wall nearby, says he often heard the owls call back to the train in the evenings as if under the impression its whistle was the giant owl they must all genuflect before, their all-seeing tawny god. This checked out with what I had recently learned about owls from an owl expert, which was that they were not as well-read and perceptive as their storybook hype leads a person to believe: “all eyes and barely any brain” was the phrase employed, I seem to remember. But you can guarantee those owls did not live with the impostor syndrome that I did, a constant wait for the rectifying of a clerical error and the ensuing letter that would announce, “I’m extremely sorry but there has been a mistake. People of your ilk are not permitted to live here.” Those owls fucking owned that place. I was just a visitor disguised as a tenant.

There are owls where I live now, as well. Four, maybe? And there’s a train track, but it’s one of the ones that people use largely for practical purposes, not a sweet little heritage one. I like being near it, though, and one of the aspects of the recent high winds that I’ve not enjoyed is that when we’re in our garden we can no longer hear the trains moving along the bottom of the valley at night: that smooth comforting sound of strangers being carried home. Right now the nearby lanes are all floods and crumbly branches and fracturing pothole ooze. Several trees have come down in the past week. One fell on the train track on Wednesday when I was on the return leg of a journey to Bristol. At least, that’s what I thought had happened. I was in the front carriage which meant I felt the impact more keenly and the sound it made reminded me of the times when I’d heard a couple of those old oaks near the railway line below my old house go over in the gales. The train dragged to a halt, the conductor announced that we’d “been involved in an incident”, and I prepared myself for a long wait, relieved to still be on a railed vehicle and not upside down in the luggage compartment with a broken collar bone. About thirty minutes later I heard one of the train crew speaking to an elderly lady in the seat behind me who seemed very confused and was expressing worry she wouldn’t make her connection to Redruth, in Cornwall. The lady from the train crew reassured her everything possible would be done to get her to her destination, then said, “Do you want to know what’s happened? Ok. We hit a person.” “Why is she telling the old lady this?” I thought. “It’s upsetting, and it’s a lie. What the train hit was a fallen tree, brought down by the high winds. Everyone in this carriage, and probably in this entire train, knows this.” As the news spread, a couple of people reacted like it was nothing but an inconvenience specifically aimed at them. Passengers who’d been coughing started to cough more violently and frequently and wetly. Mostly people just seemed baffled, emotionally stranded in an oddly blank way that life until now had not prepared them for.

Until I met my partner, who knows endless stuff about trains, I had never considered that one of the reasons that driving one was quite a well-paid job is an acknowledgement of an unavoidable truth: if you do it for long enough, it is highly likely that you are at some point going to see a human body explode in front of your eyes. Suicide is what I’m assuming the case was on Wednesday since that’s what it usually is. Some time while I was otherwise occupied, my mind appears to have decided that the victim was male. I’m not quite sure why. I didn’t see him or any of the parts of him that, via the window, I saw police searching for with high-powered torches. I haven’t spotted any confirmation of his gender in the local news. Perhaps it’s because I’ve heard that when men kill themselves they’re statistically less likely to worry about the impact the act has on other people, especially strangers. Maybe it’s additionally because what I think of when I think of the nearest town to the incident, Cullompton, is a mercifully brief encounter I had not long ago with a man so wholly consumed with rage that it appeared likely he was poised to annihilate himself, if not someone in his immediate orbit. But that’s all from the part of my mind that isn’t still adamant that what we hit was a tree, the part that isn’t still trying to protect myself from thinking about what that - albeit brief - level of pain must feel like, that isn’t still trying to protect myself from imagining what kind of events and emotions bring a human being to such a precipice. I try not to think about the time I walked along the footpath that briefly kisses the railway line and felt the insane power of a train as it rampaged past me and it’s a bit like when, as kids, we used to do cross country runs over a very high bridge near school - a bridge that a classmate of mine later threw himself off to his death - and I sheepishly told the PE teacher I was afraid of running over it and he said, “It’s simple: don’t be such a big nancy, and don’t look down.” The PE teacher was wrong, just as he was wrong to dig and twist his knuckles into the heads of boys who forgot their towels or disappointed him in some other way. It was, and is, definitely not simple.

What I keep remembering, of course, is the noise. It has a shape in my mind which seems born directly of the immense darkness of this time of year: a shape that could never be a tree, because trees never scare me, not properly, not even in the heart of winter when they reveal their spookier more intricate selves. I know it will fade, just as my current heightened awareness of the vast potential scale of emotions experienced by strangers will fade and return to the more moderate awareness that it usually is. But right now there’s not much that can be done about it. It’s not just about going outside in the middle of the night and blanking it out by listening to one of my four owls.

The wind has dropped now, and early this morning I could hear the trains again, just under a mile away, down at the bottom of the valley. The day is crisp and bright but there’s none of that dragon’s breath I used to love to see coming from them and they don’t call seductively to the local wildlife, although some of them - especially the class 43s, built in the 70s and early 80s - sound more satisfying than others. How many have passed along that same bit of track that I was stuck on for all those hours on Wednesday evening, since we started moving again? 80? 100? And how many trains travelling in Britain, since then, as a whole? It’s nowhere near enough, however many it is. On either side of these trains that run through the valley below my house is water: so much water, water where it has no legal right to be. It’s been so wet here that you begin to feel like it’s been there forever, although it hasn’t, and won’t be, until one day it is. The trains float serenely over it. I sometimes imagine dead people coming back from multifarious points in history and witnessing their tranquil progress. It would seem to them like a miracle. More even than it does to me, right now.