THE THIN RED LINE
‘Torbay Express’ – from the poetry point of view
NEVER, ever get involved in researching railway or locomotive history. Ever, ever, ever. You will fall into an ethereal world of semi-consciousness, and float in anaesthetic for days without any sense of time, or recollection of who you are, or why you’re here, or whether it was today that you fed the cat, or three days ago.
The knowledge that the LMS adopted the sans-serif style of smokebox numbers in 1936, though for only two years, is of rather limited benefit in the 21st century, but especially so if what you were really looking for, was the number of Stanier Pacifics on the books at Camden when war broke out.
Railway reference books are a minefield of diversions, and at your age, you just can’t afford to lose days from your precious, ever-shortening life by getting lost in them – so just don’t do it!
“Wasn’t Scots Guardsman one of the locomotives involved in the 1948 Locomotive Exchanges?” someone asked a few weeks ago. It was an innocent enough question. I was sure that it wasn’t – but the question sent me scurrying to the groaning, heaving shelves of my ridiculously over full library of railway books, to see what claims to fame, if any, David Smith’s newly reborn Royal Scot might actually have. I could find none. But the ether of curiosity lured me in…
…and suddenly I was online, insatiably combing the net for something the books might have missed. And there it was, in Wikipedia – the revelation that Scots Guardsman, in parallel boiler form, had been the star of the 1936 GPO film Night Mail.
Night Mail! Now, there’s one stonker of a film, especially for its portrayal of social history and ‘the way we were’ before the war, when men called Bert and Harry and Jim still wore cloth caps, tapped carriage wheels with a steel hammer, and sorted heroically half a million letters and parcels every night on the 8.30pm ‘postal’ from Euston to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
Everyone, surely, has seen Night Mail at some time – that crackly, 20-minute black-and-white GPO information film made in 1936 which is carved indelibly into the memory banks by WH Auden’s classic poem of the same name, narrated by a near-monotone voice, though highly effectively and with pace near the end of the film, in the rhythm of the express as it clips the railjoints on its journey north.
Night Mail
This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
bringing the cheque and the postal order,
letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
the shop at the corner and the girl next door;
pulling up Beattock, a steady climb –
the gradient's against her but she's on time.
Past cotton grass and moorland boulder
shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
snorting noisily as she passes
silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches,
sheep-dogs cannot turn her course
– they slumber on with paws across,
in the farm she passes no one wakes
but a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
[Refrain] Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends, towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes, towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces, set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her; in the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs, men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
receipted bills and invitations
to inspect new stock or visit relations,
and applications for situations
and timid lovers' declarations,
and gossip, gossip from all the nations.
News circumstantial, news financial,
letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
letters to Scotland from the South of France,
letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
notes from overseas to the Hebrides
written on paper of every hue
– the pink, the violet, the white and the blue
the chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
the cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
the typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
[Refrain] Thousands are still asleep, dreaming of terrifying monsters, or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's.
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, asleep in granite Aberdeen; they continue their dreams, and shall wake soon and long for letters.
And none will hear the postman's knock without a quickening of the heart, for who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
How brilliant is that? If you log on to You Tube you’ll find the original Night Mail footage in three separate parts, and see how perfectly Auden’s poem ushers ‘the postal’ along in part three. Benjamin Britten, incidentally, wrote the accompanying music. A good job it wasn’t his magnum opus, or he would have been doomed to obscurity.
Of the 400 poems Auden wrote, this is undoubtedly the best known, and for me, the most evocative railway poem of them all, although I say that with a nostalgic undertone, for it was one of the poems which was part of my English Literature curriculum at secondary school.
- End of online sample -
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