Stuart Maconie - BLF & Virgin Trains Commission

S tt uu aa rr tt M M aa cc oo nn ii ee S

A Train Journey from Edinburgh to Birmingham

Stuart Maconie travelled from Edinburgh to Birmingham New Street with Virgin Trains. He spent the time writing and speaking to other passengers about the journey, encouraging them to use the time to write too. This is the result.

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BLF & Virgin Trains Commission

As one of the UK’s foremost travel writers – Stuart has published 9 books about various aspects of the UK, including frequent travel on trains. He knows that train travel affords time and space to think and write. As a frequent traveller between Birmingham and the Lake District, he often uses his trips on Virgin Trains as the only quiet time in his busy schedule where he can reflect and write.

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This comission - from Birmingham Literature Festival and Virgin Trains - was in conjunction with our 20:20 flash fiction competition and the Secret Story event at BLF 2017, where this story was unveiled. Through both Stuart wanted to encourage others to use train travel as time to write.

This is a publication of Writing West Midlands. We support creative writers and creative writing across the region and organise Birmingham Literature Festival.

More information about us can be found at www.writingwestmidlands.org Copyright of all the features in this collection remains with the writers.

Writing West Midlands - Company Registration Number: 6264124.

We are a charity - Registered Charity Number: 1147710.

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A Commission by

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BIRMINGHAM LITERATURE F E S T I V A L in Conjunction with

Virgin Trains

Stuart Maconie with Our Three Competition Winners following their reading at the BLF ‘Secert Story’ event Image - Lee Allen ©

BLF & Virgin Trains Commission

A Train Journey from Edinburgh to Birmingham

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Stuart Maconie

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BLF & Virgin Trains Commission

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In 1936, WH Auden, arguably Britain’s greatest and best known gay communist prune faced versifier of the day, and back then it was a crowded field and a hotly contested title believe me, accepted a commission from the GPO Film Unit to provide, along with Benjamin Britten’s music, the soundtrack to Night Mail, a classic of its kind, describing vividly the journey of the Royal Scot from London to Glasgow. Some 81 years later, I accepted the kind commission of Virgin Trains and the Birmingham Literature Festival to make the journey in the opposite direction. Auden famously began his enduring classic with ‘This Is The Night Mail Crossing The Border/bringing the check and the postal order. Now of course I would have to begin ‘This is the day mail. Dad, what’s a postal order.’

Brief Encounter, Harry Potter, Jenny Agutter, never knowingly overdressed, waving her petticoats at an approaching loco, Thomas the Tank Engine and the Fat Controller, The Titfield Thunderbolt, Sherlock Holmes consulting his Bradshaw, Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings with its arrow shower somewhere becoming rain, trains are stitched into the pop cultural weft of these islands. Waverley station repays the compliment

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by naming itself after a series of novels by Walker Scott who sits immortalised in statue form in a cradle of stone high and thoughtful above Princess Street staring down on the street entertainers, ferociously hip Japanese girls, dour, craggy men from Rebus novel sucking from cans with the plastic sprue still hanging like a holster, all of which comprise the typical Edinburgh street scene.

I took my place on the 14.58 Virgin West Coast Mainline train to Birmingham and arranged myself like an emperor or an invalid with my necessities around me…phone, laptop, headphones, a McEwan’s best, that’s a novel not a can of Tartan I should add, and all the complementary papers. (You’re looking good today Stuart they say, true to their name). Where I’m from, the only pink newspapers were bought from a shouting man on Saturday teatime where the ink was still wet on the Wigan Athletic score. So the FT is largely beyond me. I check my non-existent Rio Tinto Zinc shares and move onto the Times. The Ball’s In Your Court, May Tells EU Leaders, Southgate defends Flat England, Mary Berry Speaks Out; all our national obsessions crowding across the page. Brexit, football, cakes.

Out of Waverley and straight into a tunnel, a half mile of sooty blackness before Before Haymarket, Waverley’s less well known, under-celebrated cousin… the Salieri to its Mozart, the Engels to its Marx, the Dec to its Ant. Soon we pick up what once would have been steam and onwards with a view out of my window over deserted allotments of forlorn asparagus and out across to the Firth Of Forth, just visible through a blue afternoon haze through which it is impossible to see

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BLF & Virgin Trains Commission

whether men are painting it, as they are said to do constantly, starting again as soon as they get to the end. And all along the Autumn announcing itself in a blaze of copper along the track like a torchlit parade in the early gathering dusk. We pass black horses in a flat field, as still as the cut out ones at Wolverhampton, waiting for me a few hours down the line.

The empty, lonely border country starts to open and unfold all around, the city falling away from the shoulders like a lover’s hastily discarded coat. On either side, vast and silent forests and the rolling green like a warped and ancient snooker table, soft baize rumpling to the skyline and a glint of water held like a coin in the folded palm of the hills. Then on the left, a sudden lake where chilly looking row boats bob under a sky of lead.

Tea (with milk) arrives and I admire the poise of the pouring skills as I always do, marveling as I use to marvel as a child at the men who took your money on the whirling fairground waltzers, all inky homemade tattoos and raffish sideburns, both of which are now returned to fashion, and occasionally sported by the onboard crew though not, in this case, Teresa. To the left, big proper glowering hills, their heads in clouds, their haunches running silver with becks and waterfalls and then incongruous, the squat grey lozenge of a grey housing estate where the Sky dishes droop their heads, disconsolate it seems at Scotland’s exit from the world cup last night at the hands of the Slovakians.

The train slows to leap a wide, silky, muscular river, swollen with salmon, the occasional dark figure with creel and waders picked out like a scarecrow against charcoal water and field. Cattle cluster around a bridge and windmill posing

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BLF & Virgin Trains Commission

madly, waiting for some new Constable to come along with easel and brushes and immortalize them. The motorway has joined us now, busy, noisy, insinuating itself alongside, like an investigate reporter jogging along the pavement next to the shifty managing director of rogue financial service company keen to get to his Jag and drive away, to nervously await next weeks edition of Watchdog.

Lockerbie whizzes by. A place whose name, like Aberfan or Hillsborough will always now toll like a bell. The day is now properly dreich as the Scots call it…a bleary wet curtain of soaking clag hanging in the sky like the dirty lace curtains in those houses that you wonder about when you pass them.

Then into England. Teresa returns.

‘You never know which side to sit for the view do you,’ she says, as she slides across the table toward me one of those tiny bags of Pretzels, the crystal meth of snack foods.

At ‘Carlisle the great border town’ where connections are available to Newcastle, Whitehaven, Workington and the Lake District. On the platform at Penrith, a boy in a tracksuit with a bunch of flowers, which I jot down as the title of my first slim voue of difficult modern verse. The hunt is on for new adjectives as the Northern fells roll across the horizon toward me. ‘Blurrybluegreen’ offers someone helpfully on Twitter. At Wigan I get the usual weird pang at passing through your home town. From the platform I can see the chimney of Santus where Uncle Joe’s Mintballs are made and where if you shouted nicely from the sweet-smelling street, they would sometimes lob you a few gratis from the window. Sliding away from me, behind the bridge the Swan And Railway where a teddy boy once threw a pub table through the window. I could

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BLF & Virgin Trains Commission

hop off here and pick up any number of bright and knotty threads in an afternoon‌but, to paraphrase Robert Frost, I have miles to go before I sleep and promise to keep not least to the promotional dept of Virgin trains.

At Warrington Bank Quay there is a murder which I am wrongly framed for and only escape thanks to the help of a beautiful Russian countess who helps me jump from the window into a passing haycart. But alas no. This is not that kind of John Buchan train story. At Warrington Bank Quay there is a chemical plant and a lime green sunset.

After Crewe, the lights come on, the train gets busier, the staff chattier, crisps are shared, soon I feel sure there may even be wine. As we push through darkening Cheshire’s damp, green plains, the landscape flattens and plumpens to a soft plenty of dairy cows and potteries, small fishing lakes as the factory chimneys give way to kilns and we enter the land of Robbie Williams. We pass though Stafford at a reverential crawl to doff our hat but we do not stop and soon we shudder into speed again but by now that rhythm of the train that Auden and Britten loved is as lulling as a lullaby and I dream of black horses and curry houses through Wolverhampton, Sandwell and Dudley until eventually, I am as expertly decanted as Amarone, up and out from the stygian gloom of Platform 5 to the gleaming white retail cathedral that is Grand Central, high church of ApplePay and contactless and Visa Debit, a land that has no rhyme for postal order.

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BLF & Virgin Trains Commission

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A Commission by

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BIRMINGHAM LITERATURE F E S T I V A L in Conjunction with

Virgin Trains