Train Time
The train lay in the station like a sleeping dragon, quietly threatening hisses escaping from time to time from hidden facets of the beast. People scuttled along side it’s sleeping bulk, looking in sudden and inexplicable desperation through the windows for an empty seat. Men in suits walked briskly, trying to disguise their personal race. Old women pulled inexorably on trolleys at a pace they could maintain until the world collapsed. A chattering gaggle of younf women zig-zaged down the platform to their own internal rhythm. One by breathless and thankful one they boarded the train and the doors slammed shut in a staccato beat of finality. The empty station seemed to sigh in the silence, and the train awoke into clanking, grinding life, clawing it’s way out of the vaulted station into the sunlight of early summer.
The bemused search for a seat subsided as people were paired off into arbitrary couples. First smiles were swapped to clear the thick air and reassure that no one was an axe murderer. The train settled into it’s cruising pace, fast enough to make the city a smear of brown on the outside of the windows.
All of a sudden to those people who were used to travel and who had lost the wonder of space and time, the scenery changed from the urban sprawl to the kind of country seen on in Turner. The late sun bathed the world in a golden glow, distances hazed out into white and peaceful obscurity. The fields fairly basked their green flanks in the sunlight, a kind of lazy and contented green lethargy descended on the countryside. It is this land that the songs talk about. This is England, green and pleasant. The fields, the work of thrifty farmers for millennia, have not changed boundaries. They were made when a man grew what he could eat, and served in the time when men were paid to try and grow too much. The quintessential Englishness of a patchwork of fields split by wandering hedges is second only to a well-turned man in a bowler hat with an umbrella swinging jauntily in proof that the world does in fact exist for the benefit of the English. The world that had passed sped by outside the window. To anyone of an imaginative turn of thought the landscape could be populated by the whole history of this sceptred isle. Sadly, the history would be in the form of a variety of armed forces, from the barbarous Celts through ranks of chivalrous knights and into disciplined lines of musketeers. All the ideas would, of course, be false.
As the dragon roared through the valleys of it's birth, diving under hills into the roots of the land, the people on board might look out and see a unicorn prancing through the woods, or a poet walking amidst daffodils, staring at the clouds. They might see, from above their newspaper, grey slate roofs covered in soot, filthy children scurrying across the cobbles, or a dashing dark haired man on a horse rescuing a swooning maiden from the new monsters of the storm. All these ideas would, of course, be false.
As the headlong dash over leagues comes to a slow end, the dragon would hiss once more in dislike of the prospect of emptying it's belly. The iron-arched roofs of a colonial past would be nothing more than cover for the newly freed people. Heads down, they will rush into the new world, forgetting the old as a waste of time. The dragon knew that the time had not been wasted, and quietly settled down to wait until it would see it's brothers again. To the man looking at the train, thinking that the steam echoed the fire of old, it might seem that the metal beast was indeed a creature worthy of a saint. This idea would, of course, be false.
