The Pulse Glass Read online

  Gillian Tindall

  * * *

  THE PULSE GLASS

  And the beat of other hearts

  CONTENTS

  I The Down-Train to Childhood

  II Vanished Doorways

  III Everything Exists

  IV Lost and Found

  V Graven Images

  VI Trees Last Longer than People

  VII Letters to Célestine

  VIII Whole Worlds Were There

  IX The Pulse Glass. And Other Measures of Emotion

  X The Past Destroyed

  XI The London in People’s Minds

  XII A House. And a Map

  XIII Memories Are Made of This

  XIV False History and Favourite Myths

  XV What Will Survive of Us

  XVI An Unforeseen Afterlife

  XVII The Arcades of the Rue de Rivoli

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London’s Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. Her latest book, The Tunnel through Time, traced the history of the Crossrail route, the forthcoming ‘Elizabeth’ line. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fly Away Home

  The Intruder

  Give Them All My Love

  The Fields Beneath: The History of One Village

  The Born Exile: George Gissing

  City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay

  Countries of the Mind: The Meaning of Place to Writers

  Célestine: Voices from a French Village

  The Journey of Martin Nadaud

  The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in Reality and Imagination

  The House by the Thames

  Footprints in Paris

  Three Houses, Many Lives

  The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey

  This book is dedicated to my husband and lifetime companion, Richard Lansdown

  Question put to Prof. Paul M. Cobb of Pennsylvania University:

  ‘What is your favourite archive?’

  Answer: ‘That box you discover in your grandparents’ attic.’

  History Today, June 2017

  Those who knew

  what was going on here

  must make way for

  those who know little.

  And less than little.

  And finally as little as nothing.

  ‘The End and the Beginning’ by Wislawa Szymborska

  (translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

  So the little woolwork picture had gone at last – in its own good time … During its existence it had given pleasure to a number of people, which is mainly what things are for …

  Now the possibility of its ever having an effect of any kind upon any human being again seemed gone …

  A Dog So Small by Philippa Pearce

  But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered … the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls … amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

  À la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust

  CHAPTER I

  The Down-Train to Childhood

  On a Good Friday in April, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I go to sprinkle ashes along the stones, primroses, bluebells and last year’s leaves of an abandoned railway line in Sussex that has become a path for walkers and cyclists.

  Human ashes are flecked pale grey and white, like a large stock of pearl necklaces chopped up and mixed with clean dust. They pour dry and smooth, leaving only the faintest floury residue on the hands. While they are packed tightly into the bag supplied by the crematorium, this concentrated, irreducible residue of an adult human being, these chips of bone, weigh only about six or seven pounds, the weight of a newborn baby.

  When this man, who is now ash, was born, some ten days earlier than the expected date, he weighed just over seven pounds. A very cold morning at the start of a winter just after the end of the Second World War, which was to turn into one of the worst winters of the century. A few years later, when we sang at school near Christmas time ‘ … earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone’, it made me think of that winter, which has now receded so far, out of most living memories, that the carol fits it still more closely:

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow, sn-oow on sn-oow …

  In the bleak mid-winter, lo-oong ag-oo

  Long ago. In the cold house in Sussex near Ashdown Forest – all houses were cold, long ago, unless you were right by the kitchen or sitting-room fire – I am fast asleep in my own room. Then, suddenly, I am awake, and someone is standing by my bed:

  ‘You’ve got a little brother!’

  Great excitement. I am hustled into my dressing gown. As we cross the landing to my mother’s bedroom I encounter a familiar doctor-figure, in black jacket and pin-striped trousers, just leaving. ‘Hello, Mary-Jane!’ he says. He calls all boys John-Thomas and all girls Mary-Jane. It makes life simpler for him, he says.

  My mother is in bed, tucked up, looking quite ordinary, which surprises me rather. Beside her is the long-promised baby, cocooned in a small, woven orange blanket, which I know has been sent by an aunt all the way from Orkney. Such presents were valuable and prized, in 1946.

  That blanket survived time and chance, and the disintegration of our home when I was seventeen and the baby boy not yet nine. When I was a young woman I adopted it as a shawl, and later as a wrap for my own son. A generation further on, it was still with me and served to cocoon my first grandson, but somehow between his infancy and the birth of another one four years later it disappeared, perhaps to some other, unknown baby.

  Most objects, like all people, disappear in the end. Even in a country as relatively peaceful as the British Isles, which has endured neither invasion nor civil war for several hundred years, there are few possessions more than one hundred and fifty years old, and most are far, far more recent.

  Yet already, by the eighteenth century, three hundred years ago, we had in Britain a burgeoning middle class larger than that of any other European country, and replete with possessions. These people, both the well-to-do and the aspirant ‘middling sort’, were, by the days of the Hanoverians, doing quite nicely, thank you. Wills, and still more probate inventories, reveal a mass of sheer stuff, all valued and obsessively itemised. The consumerism that would develop in the wake of the industrial revolution and the unprecedented wealth of the Victorian Empire still lay in the future, but, looking from our side of time, signs of its approach were already apparent. Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), remarked that even quite modest British homes frequently contained objects brought or copied from the other side of the world, thanks to the energies of the East India, Levant and Hudson Bay Companies. This was at a time when the mainly-rural people of other European countries were still fabricating everything for their own use, with the sole exceptions of iron and salt. British families had Delft plates and English imitations of the same, dresses made of Indian cotton and Kashmir shawls. They had copper pots and pewter ones. Peopl
e slightly higher up the social scale had silver forks and spoons. They had cloudy mirrors and decorated tea-caddies and miniature writing desks, and books – for they could mostly read. The most prosperous had engravings and even portraits in oils, and cloaks lined with fur from the Baltic, lockets and brooches and a great deal of closely guarded silk and lace, and necessary thick-felted wool to protect against time and chance …

  Gone. Nearly all of it. The materials consumed stickily with moth-eggs and damp, or passed on to poorer people and thence to still poorer ones, finally becoming rags for cleaning. The furniture, once outmoded, discarded, uncherished, abandoned to servants’ rooms or to the poor, scratched and broken and in the end chopped up for firewood. Here and there a locket survives, a little battered, containing a curl of who-knows-whose hair; or a Bible, worn with use, inscribed with forgotten names; or some silver spoons, thinned with use – generations of soups and jellies and creams. Or, occasionally, a portrait, once an affectionate or proud link with a grandmother or wealthy cousin, now reduced down and down over the generations to a Lady Unknown.

  Some things, though, do not disappear but, rather, change their essence: their very meaning is transformed. I go back, for a little while, to the railway line in Sussex.

  Its modest embankments and cuttings are likely to last through the centuries even as the traces of Roman roads have done, but its sleepers and rails have vanished now as completely as has the little boy whose birth I recall and whose happiest childhood memory was of playing alongside them. These memories were to condition his whole later life, for he became, both in work and in leisure, a railway man. But by the time he was grown-up, the down-train to childhood was no longer running.

  From far off we would hear the whistle of one of the steam-engines that, about ten times a day, would make its way with frequent stops from Three Bridges, or from distant, improbable Victoria, passing not far from our home to its eventual destination at Tunbridge Wells. The little boy, N, would clutch a hand – mine, or that of an attendant adult – in delighted anticipation as we removed ourselves a few feet from the track when the rails began to hum. The engine, when it finally appeared, would at first seem friendly but then grow in size, becoming enormous, a dragon twenty foot high that crashed past with such a din and a fleeting blast of heat that we would cower back in spite of ourselves.

  There was a lane there with a level-crossing, on which we laid the ha’pennies that had been currency for a hundred years or more to see if the train’s passage would squash them out into mock-pennies. On cue, before the train appeared out of the tree-lined cutting, but when a message had pinged down the wires and its puffing could just be heard, a short, stout lady would appear out of the crossing-keeper’s cottage. If the white wooden gates were open to the lane, she would swing them shut against the occasional cart or van, to let the train pass.

  And sometimes, if the train was an ‘up’ one, going the other way to mythic London, and we had timed our excursion right, there would be a farm vehicle already waiting in the lane and a full milk-churn or two standing on a kind of giants’ coffee-table near the track. The train, snorting frustrated smoke, would slow and slow till, as it was creeping past the crossing, the guard on board who was standing at an open door, together with a farm labourer on the ground, would rapidly hoist the churns into the guard’s van. The labourer jumped back, the guard waved to the watching engine-driver or fireman, the driver tooted and the train picked up speed again. This century-old evening exercise of ingenuity, manual strength and timing must then have been in its final years.

  Today, this memory seems as antique as the exploits in E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children of a hundred years ago, or of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles set fifty years before that. Country railways, even the still-living ones, carry a message of nostalgia today, and the dead ones far more so. Remote, derelict stations where empty grates yawn in the darkened waiting rooms, and sheep crop the grassed-over platforms, speak of a lost land of innocence. But then so do the lived-in ones, where geranium pots decorate the sootless walls and the one-time track is burgeoning with potato plants and runner beans. Forgotten is the fact that, close to, the trains could be terrifying and, indeed, lethal: in memory they are reduced to lovable, gentle elephants, to Thomas the Tank Engine, Edward, Gordon and the rest, from the stories of the Reverend W. Awdry.

  Very different was the view of the Iron Road when railways began to spread across the British Isles in the 1840s. This new and extraordinary development, which happened a little earlier in Britain than it did across the wider and more mountainous expanses of the Continent, was perceived, correctly, as a threat to a way of life that had lasted for centuries. Over time, change had always occurred, but it had been gradual and incremental. Narrow packhorse tracks had, through the centuries, broadened into gravel highways, towns had begun to extend beyond their defensive walls. By the eighteenth century ancient market towns, to which the country around had made its way on foot or by cart, were becoming bustling destinations for long-range coaches. New turnpike roads were built, and long-established ale-houses found themselves happily at the centre of a whole network of coach-stops and horse-team changes and the feeding and bedding of travellers.

  But the railways had different priorities and requirements. They cut across old routes, linking one new manufacturing centre with another, ignoring venerable hilltop towns, bypassing historical centres whose traditional wool or linen trades were seen to be in decline. Inns that had, for two or three generations, seen scores of coaches from competing companies in and out of their stable-yards every twenty-four hours, found an odd quietness descending. Some traditional coaching routes, such as the one today followed north-west by the A65 between Yorkshire and Lancashire, by which Charlotte Brontë’s young Jane Eyre is sent alone on the long journey to school at ‘Lowood’ (Cowan Bridge), became so quiet that grass grew over their stones.

  Many people welcomed the railway excitedly, delighted at the opportunities it brought for expanded trade and more, and much cheaper, travel. Coaches had never been cheap, and each one, even with its roof crammed with male travellers, could carry at the most a dozen passengers at a time. A railway train could carry hundreds, and soon did. But those who feared the railways, with their danger, their noise, their dirt and their speed and the way they cut one old field or woodland off from another – who feared that the railways would destroy old patterns of living, thinking and moving about, and in doing so destroy communities – were of course right. Trains bore no relationship to the countryside through which they passed. The alienation of the train traveller from the land or towns through which he was carried was remarked on by a shocked Ruskin, and perceived all too accurately by Dickens in a famous passage in Dombey and Son:

  Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by the park, by the garden, over the canal, across the river, where the sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating, where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking, where the stream is running, where the village clusters, where the great cathedral rises, where the bleak moor lies, and the wild breeze soothes or ruffles it at its inconstant will; away with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, and no trace to leave behind but dust and vapour …

  Away and still away, onward and onward ever; glimpses of cottage-homes, of houses, mansions, rich estates, of husbandry and handicraft, of people, of old roads and paths that look deserted, small and insignificant as they are left behind; and so they do, and what else is there but such glimpses in the track of the indomitable monster, Death!

  The possibility of death that is unmistakably present in the overpowering physical presence of the locomotive becomes also, in the course of this passage (in its entirety far longer than is quoted here), the death implicit in time itself, charging ahead, constantly obliterating and eradicating what has been, carrying us into the unknown.

  It was no personal oddity that led Dickens to set much of his fiction slightly back in time to the
pre-railway era: Thackeray did the same, and so did the Brontë sisters. Evidently, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, that bygone-but-so-recent time was felt to be a dateless setting more suitable for fiction than the immediate, nerve-rackingly evolving present.

  And in addition to the alienation from real place and the social dislocation that was perceived to come as the result of the trains, there was, more prosaically, the blight cast by the sheer construction of stations, coaling bays and shunting yards. In an article published in his magazine All the Year Round in 1860, Dickens wrote:

  I left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in the land, I left it in a stage coach … [when I arrived back by train] I began to look about me; and the first discovery I made was, that the Station had swallowed up the playing field.

  It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of jolting roads: while, beyond the Station, an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried me away was melodiously called Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office, up-street; the locomotive engine that had brought me back was called severely No. 97, and belonged to SER, and was spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.

  It was the initial shocking mainline network that spread in the 1840s which changed provincial life for ever. The next big wave of railway enthusiasm, some twenty years later, brought fewer fundamental changes and was more generally welcomed. The public knew about trains by then – knew they didn’t give you brain-fever, lead to revolution or upset the weather – and had come to think that it might be rather a good idea if their particular village could have its own line linking up with an existing junction. So hamlets that had, till then, huddled inwards around churches and village greens, found themselves endowed with small stations, usually at a little distance across the fields. Footbridges were built over cuttings and low tunnels under embankments, to allow cows to pass from one meadow to the other. Each station was given decorative barge-boarding, a parcels office, coal depot, signal box, stationmaster’s house, running water and often gas lighting too – the new amenities of modern life, which would be potentially available to the village also. ‘Station Roads’ grew between the old cottages and the new installation, and Desirable Residences sprinkled themselves along this carriageway. The social composition of rural Britain changed. Now that the monied classes could ‘run up to town’ so easily, they were more inclined to settle for country living. Ordered goods could be delivered from afar in a way impossible in horse-and-cart days. Gentlemen inclined for a day’s hunting could come down on the early milk-train. A bright country boy could travel daily to the grammar school in the nearest town. Coachmen who had lost their jobs when the old stage-routes disintegrated took to driving short-distance flys instead, the station taxis of the time. Rural England was transformed, but most people were by now quite pleased with the transformation.