Talking Trains with John Betjeman

The older I get, the more I like John Betjeman, especially his prose, and particularly Trains and Buttered Toast, an anthology of his radio talks, mostly from the thirties, forties and early fifties. The subject matter is varied, but his enthusiasms are apparent: Victoriana, seaside towns, great British eccentrics, churches. Despite his campaigns to preserve old buildings, he was never political, but portrayed the small details of everyday life which gave him pleasure – and the things which aroused his ire. His cuddly teddy bear image belies his sharp wit, and he can be quite scathing about things (and people) he doesn’t like.

He hated the word nostalgia, but there seems to be an element of it involved in many of these pieces, for the world he grew up in had changed, and he looked back longingly at the values and lifestyle of that earlier age. Life has altered even more since these short essays were first aired. Take Back to the Railway Carriage, broadcast in March 1940 for the BBC Home Service, in which he sings the praises of our railways. “If you want to see and feel the country, travel by train,” he tells us. According to him:

Roads are determined by boundaries of estates and by villages and other roads; they are shut in by hedges, peppered with new villas, garish with tin signs, noisy with roadhouse ...railways are built regardless of natural boundaries and from the height of an embankment we can see the country undisturbed, as one who walks along an open footpath though a field. Roads bury themselves in the landscape. The railways carve out a landscape of their own. .. Railways were built to look from and look at. They are still pleasures for the eye.

And he adds:

But the greatest gift the railways give to us is the proper management of time. Of course there are expresses which will hurtle you from place to place in no time. But the others – no longer the mania for getting from one town to another volleying along a tarmac road at sixty miles an hour, but a leisurely journey, seeing the country, getting to the place much sooner and much more comfortably in the long run and with the pleasant discipline of having to catch a train at a stated time. And if the train is a bit late, what matter?

Betjeman wrote this long before the closure of branch lines, the destruction of ornate Victorian stations, and the development of high-speed trains. He ddidn’t like the ‘new, smart jazz expresses’ with cocktail bars and stifling heat. No, what he enjoys is ‘an old, bumpy carriage with a single gas light in the ceiling’, posters of holiday destinations on the walls, and a rack for ‘Light Articles Only’. I’m not old enough to remember gas lights, but I do recall the pictures of mountains, hills and seaside towns, the luggage racks made from thick cord netting, windows that pulled down to provide fresh air, and doors with handles rather than electronic buttons.

He throws in comments about railway architecture, passengers and staff, as well as a tribute to Bradshaw, guru of Victorian travellers, who produced railway timetables, maps and information about the towns whre the trains stopped. In addition, there are some lines from Edward Thomas’ wonderful poem, ‘Addlestrop’, where Betjeman writes about the wonderful silence of country stations, which is something you don’t come across these days, with all those pre-recorded messages telling you not to smoke, not to leave luggage lying about, to stand well back from the platform edge, and how many carriages make up each train. Once on the train there is no peace, because there are all kinds of beeps and messages about ‘station stops’ and the name of your train manager. And don’t get me started on the sound of computers being turnrd on and off; other people’s music which can be heard all over the carriage, even though they are wearing head phones; the ringing of mobile phones, and the shouted conversations as people communicate on these devices.

How Betjeman would have hated modern train travel. But he would, I think, have been delighted to know that after many years out of print, a reproduction of an 1863 Bradshaw’s Handbook, a Victorian guide to Britain’s railways, has been issued, largely as a result of Michael Portillo’s TV programmes, ‘Great British Railway Journeys’, of which I am a huge fan. Like Betjeman, Portillo improves with age, and his view of our railways is as quirky as that presented by the poet. Interestingly, Betjeman’s talk was intended for broadcast in November 1939 to mark the centenary of Bradshaw’s first railway guide, but went out later than planned.

Oh dear, I was going to write a much more general post on the entire book, not a look at one essay and my thoughts on trains. And the tenses are all to pot, because it’s been thundering, and has started again, and I’m phobic about storms, and have to keep turning the computer and radio and lights off, so I shall publish it as it is, and maybe tidy up the grammar later. By the way,  I've posted this for the Essay Reading Challenge 2012 hosted by Carrie K, and if you've never read any of Betjeman's prose you've missed a real treat, and this book is a good place to start, so do, please,  give it a try.

Orwell's Effortless Essays

George Orwell

It’s a long time since I’ve read any of George Orwell’s essays, and I’d forgotten just how good they are. They tend to take second place to his novels, but personally I think they are much, much better, and the essay format seems to suit Orwell’s style. He writes about anything that catches his interest: books, authors, the art of writing, making tea, a toad, his ideal pub, his experiences as a policeman in colonial Burma, and politics – especially politics.

He writes with humour and passion, sharing his likes and dislikes, while his observations on human life and the world around him are always thought provoking – and it’s all in lovely crisp prose, with a wonderfully balanced structure and clearly expressed premise. He never put a word wrong, yet he makes it look so effortless.

It’s the small details that are often so telling in his essays. In A Hanging, written in 1931 and set in Burma, he realises the ‘unspeakable wrongness’ of cutting a life short when he sees the condemned man step aside to avoid a puddle.

An old Penguin edition of
one of Orwell's essay
collections

Shooting an Elephant, is also set in Burma, based on a real incident when he was a sub-divisional police officer. An elephant escapes, and rampages through the bazaar,  causing damage, and killing a man. Orwell has no intention of killing the beast, but sends for a rifle to defend himself, and sets off to deal with the situation,  followed by a large crowd of natives. He tells us: “But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have.”

He makes the beast seem very vulnerable, despite its size, and his description is oddly accurate – elephants do have that slow, distracted, benign air possessed by some elderly ladies. Reluctant though he is, Orwell suddenly understands he will have to shoot the animal, even though it is now quiet and ignoring the crowd. “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it,” he says.  “I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.” He realises that the tyranny of the white man has destroyed his own freedom, and adds: “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

Orwell (real name Eric Blair) died in 1950. The world he writes about is long gone, and attitudes prevalent in the days of the British Empire are shockingly incorrect today, but he  was horrified by much of what he saw, and politics was the driving force in his life. He fought against totalitarianism in all forms, and believed in democratic socialism and freedom of intellect.

His politics and his writing were inextricably linked, as he explains in Why I Write, describing four main reasons for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. He tries to ‘fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole’, and says: “I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

A nice cup of tea - though I'm not sure Orwell would approve of it being
'Russian style', without milk.

If you’ve never read any of Orwell’s essays, and you don’t like politics, try reading A Nice Cup of Tea, in which he lists 11 rules for making a perfect cup tea – not an easy task when a weekly ration of 2oz made around 2o drinks.  Then there’s Books v Cigarettes, where he considers the cost of both habits; The Moon Under the Water, where he describes his ideal pub; Bookshop Memories; Boys’ Weeklies, Decline of the English Murder, and a host of others about books and authors.

Thanks to CarrieK who is hosting a reading challenge at http://booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com/reading-challenges-im-hosting/2012-essay-reading-challenge/ I’ve had a wonderful couple of days immersed in Orwell’s essays after a gap of many years.