Metroland (4 page)

We hunted emotions. Railway termini gave us weepy farewells and coarse recouplings. That was easy. Churches gave us the vivid deceptions of faith – though we had to be careful in our manner of observation. Harley Street doorsteps gave us, we believed, the rabbit fears of men about to die. And the National Gallery, our most frequent haunt, gave us examples of pure aesthetic pleasure – although, to be honest, they weren’t as frequent, as pure, or as subtle as we’d first hoped. Outrageously often, we thought, the scene was one more appropriate to Waterloo or Victoria: people greeted Monet, or Seurat, or Goya as if they had just stepped off a train – ‘Well, what a nice surprise. I knew you’d be here, of course, but it’s a nice surprise all the same. And my, aren’t you looking just as well as ever? Hardly a day older. No really …’

Our reason for constantly visiting the Gallery was straightforward. We agreed – indeed, no sane friend of ours would bother to argue – that Art was the most important thing in life, the constant to which one could be unfailingly devoted and which would never cease to reward; more crucially, it was the stuff whose effect on those exposed to it was ameliorative. It made people not just fitter for friendship and more civilised (we saw the circularity of
that
), but
better
– kinder, wiser, nicer, more peaceful, more active, more sensitive. If it didn’t, what good was it? Why not just go and suck cornets instead?
Ex hypothesi
(as we would have said, or indeed
ex vero
), the moment someone perceives a work of art he is in some way improved. It seemed quite reasonable to expect that the process could be observed.

To be candid, after a few Wednesdays at the Gallery, we felt a bit like those eighteenth-century physicians who combed battlefields and dissected fresh corpses to track down the seat of the soul. Still, some of them believed they’d got results; and there’d been that Swedish doctor who weighed his terminal patients, hospital bed and all, just before and just after death. Twenty-one grammes, apparently, made the vital difference. We didn’t expect any weight changes at the Gallery, but we thought ourselves entitled to something. You must be able to see something. And, at times, you did. But more often you found yourself noting extrinsic reactions, as a weary file of name-gloaters, school-sneerers, frame-freaks, colour-grousers, restoration loons and topographers trooped by. You got to know the quizzical chin-in-hand stance; the manly, combative, hands-on-hips square-up; the eyes-down-on-the-booklet position; the glazed XII-down, XIV-to-go trot. Sometimes, we wondered if we were any the wiser.

Eventually, we were driven reluctantly to testing one another. This we did at Toni’s home, in what we judged to be laboratory conditions. This meant that for pictures, we thumbed in earplugs; while for music, we bound our eyes with a rugger sock. The experimentee would be given five minutes’ exposure to, say, Monet’s ‘Rouen Cathedral’, or the scherzo of Brahms PC2, and then consider his response. He would purse his lips like a wine-bibber and pause reflectively. You had, after all, to axe away all that form-and-content analysis stuff they taught at school. We were after something simpler, truer, deeper, more elemental. So, how did you feel, and what changes would happen if you continued with the prescription?

Toni would always answer with his eyes closed, even after a pic. He would frown until his eyebrows met, wash a quiet ‘Mnnnnnn’ round his mouth for a bit, and then deliver:

‘Skin tension, mainly in legs and arms. Thighs rippling. Exhilaration, yes I think that’s right. Aspiring thorax. Confidence. Not smugness, though. More a sort of firm bonhomie. Up to an amiable épat, at least.’

I’d note all this down in our ledger, on a right-hand page.
The left already contained the source of the inspiration: ‘Glinka, R. & Lud. ov. Reiner/Chi SO/RCA Victrola; 9/12/63.’

It was all part of our drive towards helping the world understand itself.

5 • J’habite Metroland

‘Rootless.’

‘Sans racines.’

‘Sans Racine?’

‘The open road? The spiritual vagabond?’

‘The bundle of ideas wrapped up in a red spotted handkerchief?’

‘L’adieu suprême d’un mouchoir?’

Toni and I prided ourselves on being rootless. We also aspired to a future condition of rootlessness, and saw no contradiction in the two states of mind; or in the fact that we each lived with our parents, who were, for that matter, the freeholders of our respective homes.

Toni far outclassed me in rootlessness. His parents were Polish Jews and, though we didn’t actually know it for certain, we were practically sure that they had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto at the very last minute. This gave Toni the flash foreign name of Barbarowski, two languages, three cultures, and a sense (he assured me) of atavistic wrench: in short, real class. He looked an exile, too: swarthy, bulbous-nosed, thick-lipped, disarmingly short, energetic and hairy; he even had to shave every day.

Despite the handicaps of being English and non-Jewish, I tried to do my bit in a Home Counties sort of way. Our family was small, but there was enough tepidity of feeling to effect a widish diaspora. The Lloyds (well, our Lloyds, my father’s Lloyds at least) came from Basingstoke; my mother’s family
from Lincoln; relatives skulked incommunicado in several counties, lying low at Christmas, turning up with sulky regularity at funerals, and, if pressed, at weddings. Apart from Uncle Arthur, who lived within Sunday-afternoon distance, they were inaccessible; which suited me fine, as I could pretend they were all picturesque rustics, gnarled artisans or homicidal eccentrics. All they had to do was fork out at Christmas, and fork out money, or at least something that was convertible.

Like Toni, I was dark, but several inches taller; some would have called me skinny, but I preferred to think of myself as having the whippy strength of a young sapling. My nose, I hoped, still had a bit of growing left to do; my cheeks were free of moles; occasionally, a squad of acne would make its listless progress across my forehead; my best feature, I believed, was my eyes – deep, saturnine, full of secrets learned and not yet learned (at least, that was how I saw them).

It was a low-key English face, which suited the low-key sense of expatriation common to all who lived in Eastwick. Everyone in this suburb of a couple of thousand people seemed to have come in from elsewhere. They would have been attracted by the solidly built houses, the reliable railway service, and the good gardening soil. I found the cosy, controlled rootlessness of the place reassuring; though I did tend to complain to Toni that I’d prefer something

‘… more elemental. I wish I were, oh, somewhat more sort of bare and forked.’

‘You mean you wish you were somewhat more bare and fugged.’

Well, yes, that too, I suppose; at least I think so.

‘Où habites-tu?’
they would ask year after year, drilling us for French orals; and always I would smirkingly reply,

‘J’habite Metroland.’

It sounded better than Eastwick, stranger than Middlesex; more like a concept in the mind than a place where you shopped. And so, of course, it was. As the Metropolitan Railway had
pushed westward in the 1880s, a thin corridor of land was opened up with no geographical or ideological unity: you lived there because it was an area easy to get out of. The name Metroland – adopted during the First World War both by estate agents and the railway itself – gave the string of rural suburbs a spurious integrity.

In the early 1960s, the Metropolitan Line (by which the purist naturally meant the Watford, Chesham and Amersham branches) still retained some of its original separateness. The rolling-stock, painted a distinctive mid-brown, had remained unchanged for sixty years; some of the bogeys, my Ian Allen spotter’s book informed me, had been running since the early 1890s. The carriages were high and square, with broad wooden running-boards; the compartments were luxuriously wide by modern standards, and the breadth of the seats made one marvel at Edwardian femural development. The backs of the seats were raked at an angle which implied that in the old days the trains had stopped for longer at the stations.

Above the seats were sepia photographs of the line’s beauty spots – Sandy Lodge Golf Course, Pinner Hill, Moor Park, Chorleywood. Most of the original fittings remained: wide, loosely strung luggage racks with coat-hooks curving down from their support struts; broad leather window straps, and broad leather straps to stop the doors from swinging all the way back on their hinges; a chunky, gilded figure on the door, 1 or 3; a brass fingerplate backing the brass door handle; and, engraved on the plate, in a tone of either command or seductive invitation, the slogan ‘Live in Metroland’.

Over the years I studied the rolling stock. From the platform I could tell at a glance a wide from an extra-wide compartment. I knew all the advertisements by heart, and all the varieties of decoration on the barrel-vaulted ceilings. I knew the range of imagination of the people who scraped the
NO SMOKING
transfers on the windows into new mottoes:
NO SNORING
was the most popular piece of knife-work;
NO SNOGING
a baffler for years;
NO SNOWING
the most whimsical. I stowed away in a first-class carriage one dark afternoon, and sat bolt upright in the
soft seat, too frightened to look around me. I even penetrated, by mistake, the special single compartment at the front of each train, which was protected by a green transfer:
LADIES ONLY.
Having only just caught my connection, I fell panting into the silent disapproval of three tweeded ladies; though my fear was cooled less by their silence than by my disappointment that the compartment contained no special appurtenances indicative, however obliquely, of just what it was that made women different.

One afternoon, rolling home as usual on the 4.13 from Baker Street, I had finished my prep and my thoughts, and was staring at the purply-red skeleton map of the line, which occupied the central slot beneath the luggage-rack. I was checking off the stations like rosary-beads when a voice on my right said

‘Verney Junction.’

He was an old sod, I thought; dead bourgeois. The embroidered sun shining out of his slippers was the nearest
he
got to energy and life, I thought. Bet he was
syphilisé
. Pity he wasn’t Belgian. He might be Belgian. What had he said?

‘Verney Junction,’ he repeated. ‘Quainton Road. Winslow Road. Grandborough Road. Waddesdon. Never heard of them,’ he stated, sure that I hadn’t. Old sod. Well, too old to hate really. Commuter’s uniform; umbrella with a gold spoke-ring; brief-case; looking-glass shoes. The brief-case probably contained portable Nazi X-ray equipment.

‘No.’

‘Used to be a great line. Used to have … ambitions. Heard of the Brill Line?’ What was he after? Rape, abduction? Better humour him, otherwise six months and I’d be plump and ball-less in Turkey.

‘No.’

‘Brill Line from Quainton Road. All the Ws. Waddesdon Road. Wescott. Wotton. Wood Siding. Brill. Built by the Duke of Buckingham. Imagine that. Had it built for his own estate, you see. Part of the Metropolitan Line for thirty years now. Do you know, I went on the last train. 1935, ’36, something like
that. Last train from Brill to Verney Junction. Sounds like a film, doesn’t it?’

Not one that I’d go to see. And certainly not if he asked me. He must be a rapist; anyone who spoke to kids on trains obviously was,
ex hypothesis
. But he was a rickety old fugger, and I was on the platform side of the train. Also, I had my umbrella. Better talk him out of it. They sometimes turn nasty if you don’t talk to them.

‘Ever been first class?’ Should I call him Sir?

‘This was a grand line, you know. The Extension Line they used to call it’ (was he getting dirty?) ‘this part out from Baker Street to Verney Junction. There used to be a Pullman car’ (was he getting round to my question?) ‘right up until Hitler’s war started. Two Pullman cars in fact. Imagine – imagine a Pullman car on the Bakerloo Line.’ (He laughed contemptuously, I sycophantically) ‘Two of them. One was called the
Mayflower
. Can you imagine that? Can’t remember what the other one was called.’ (He tapped his thigh with a bunch of fingertips; but this didn’t help. Was he getting dirty again?) ‘No, but the
Mayflower
was one of them. The first Pullman cars in Europe to be hauled by electricity.’

‘No, really? The first in Europe?’ I was almost as interested as I pretended to be.

‘The first in Europe. There’s a lot of history in this line, you know. Heard of John Stuart Mill?’

‘Yes.’ (Of course not)

‘Do you know what his last speech in the House was about?’

I think I must have shown that I didn’t.

‘The House of Commons. His last speech? It was about the Underground. Can you imagine that? The Railway Regulation Bill, 1868. An amendment was moved to the bill making it obligatory for all railways to attach a smoking carriage to their trains. Mill got the bill through. Made a great speech in favour of it. Carried the day.’

Jolly good. It was jolly good, wasn’t it?

‘But
– guess what – there was one railway, just one, that was exempted.
That
was the Metropolitan.’

You would have thought he’d been down there himself voting in eighteen whatever.

‘Why?’

‘Ah. Because of the smoke in the tunnels. It’s always been a bit special, you see.’

Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Only four stations to go anyway. Maybe he was quite interesting.

‘What about those other places? Quinton whatsit.’

‘Quainton Road. They were all out beyond Aylesbury. Waddesdon, Quainton Road, it went, Grandborough, Winslow Road, Verney Junction.’ (If he went on like this, I’d cry) ‘Fifty miles from Verney Junction to Baker Street; what a line. Can you imagine – they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a Channel Tunnel to the Continent. What a line.’