My brother was a railway enthusiast and I caught the bug. It was more or less inevitable. He was 11 years older, and I think he enjoyed showing me things. And there was so much to see and to like.
This would have been about 1950, when you could roam unsupervised around a locomotive shed or stand for an hour at the top of a cutting and be sure to see an engine with a name — a “namer” — hauling an express, as well as more humble stopping trains and freights that waited impatiently blowing off steam in the loop.
Names and numbers could be checked off in the tables of slender little books. Here was a world of endless possibility: nationalised British Railways, then only two or three years old, had inherited thousands of steam locomotives in a fascinating array of classes, most of them limited to their original geographical strongholds so that we knew them only from pictures (‘The Cornish Riviera at speed near Dawlish’) in the Wonder Book of Railways. To hunt even half of them down — to “spot” them — would have been a lifetime’s work.
This contemporary scene was enticing and complex enough, but behind it stood the even more seductive history of the old private railway companies, with their bright liveries, highly polished engines and rival routes across the British landscape. The proud atmosphere of those times had vanished with the first world war and the coming of the car, but by 1950, after a second world war had made that past more distant still, an interest in it began to grow.
The figure who did most to encourage this nostalgia from a railway point of view was a Betjeman-like writer called Cuthbert Hamilton-Ellis, whose book, The Trains We Loved, made an idyll out of Victorian and Edwardian railways.
My brother bought a copy and let me look at the colour plates, which Hamilton-Ellis had painted himself. The Scotch Express at Beattock on midsummer’s eve; two locomotives at rest in Cambridge station in 1900, one bright green and the other deep blue; a jaunty little Irish train puffing through the rain in Connemara: they were vivid and rather childlike pictures, utterly memorable to a child.
All this had gone, but I began to understand that I lived with people who as children had known this world but never thought to notice it — or notice it as much as I wished they’d done. Recalling a trip to see a cousin in 1924, my mother might say, “Her mother had our tea waiting for us when we got off the train and then Kathy and I went to the pictures. I could never stand that Harold Lloyd.” But of the train itself there were no details. “What about the train, Mum? Did the engine have a name? Did you go by the LMS or the LNER? Did you change at Carlisle?” My father should have been better. He was older, so he had spent more of his life in the pre-1914 golden age, and his commonplace book actually contained one or two pictures of glamorous new steam engines that he’d cut out from magazines as a young man. And yet here again there was a dismaying inexactitude. He might say, “Sandy and I took the Pullman and sat opposite a bishop. What did we care? We just sat there and ate our scones.” But there was no answer to the question of which Pullman — the Queen of Scots
My parents, it seemed to me, had been rather negligent in their attention to their surroundings. As the saying goes, familiarity had bred contempt. They hadn’t valued the ordinary enough, unaware that the ordinary could swiftly change.
Of course, this was nonsense. My parents remembered as much of their everyday lives as anyone else in their generation — perhaps more than the average. ‘Mind’, which in Scots means remember, was a favourite word. “D’ye mind that big woman who served in the baker’s?”;“D’ye mind the time we got on the wrong bus at Kirkcaldy?” All kinds of other things too: a Paul Robeson concert, friendships, books. But as very little of this “minding” included railways, I gave it few marks as a child.
That perceived failure may — who knows about these things? — have sharpened my own need to register and enjoy the ordinary, the stuff on my doorstep. I like to think I do.
Too aware of transience
If anything, I am too aware of transience, too troubled by vanishings: the closed pubs, the conductors on the last Routemaster buses, the extinct pipe-smokers. I can feel sad about all of them, and in this I may be typical of a generation that voted mainly for Brexit. To “get our country back”, they said, meaning especially “from immigrants” but also “to the way it was before”.
A significant part of the cultural economy has been built around these feelings, ranging from preserved steam railways to historical TV serials about midwives and country policemen — and we know now, if we didn’t before, that a political movement can draw strength from them too. Importantly, as I realise from my own childhood admiration for the Caledonian Railway’s locomotives in their beautiful livery of light blue, we don’t need to have witnessed the real thing to feel nostalgic for it. It often helps if we haven’t.
A few weeks ago the historian David Kynaston gave a lecture at the British Library titled ‘Uncovering the Unspoken’, in which he looked back at what he felt was a missing element in his outstanding multi-volume social history of post-war Britain.
It was “that whole area of feeling — so often largely unspoken and therefore so often hard for others to retrieve or chart”, which has recently attracted the attention of academics on both sides of the Atlantic. He quoted the American historian Susan J. Matt on the attempt “to recover the history of subjectivity” and the human “intention, motivation, and values that might be invisible if only external behaviours (the traditional subject of history) are traced”. According to Matt, historians are now taking “an emotional turn” in topics as diverse as the changing experience of nostalgia and the history of lust
Has our experience of nostalgia changed? Perhaps it can no longer be associated only with gentleness — a wistful dream of village greens, sponge cake, and steam trailing from the 9.45 to Mow Cop and Scholar Green. Out of this imaginary landscape, or at least from a sense of things having once been better, have come harder emotions such as anger and loss.
In his lecture, Kynaston said that “the emotionally driven and arguably irrational political earthquakes of 2016” had revealed an abundance of uncharted or poorly noticed feeling.
I suggest that lots of this had roots in historic particulars just as particular as my own, but born in an unkinder age.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Ian Jack writes a weekly column for the Guardian and contributes to other sections of the paper.
