The Pulse Glass Read online

  Fifty years or so later, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the gently weathered rural station, often beautified with sunflowers or geraniums grown by the not-overburdened stationmaster, had become a conventional part of life. The world without railways had passed from human memory. In Sussex, husbands in business suits travelled up and down to London daily, convinced that they ‘lived in the country’, that mark of social status, savouring the early tweet of birds as they hurried stationwards in the half-light of dawn, and the short pleasure in the summer months of arriving back twelve hours later with the sun not yet set. Already, decades before the country railways would be closed down in the face of ever-increasing car use, they had developed an aura of gentle tradition, a whiff of nostalgia for a vanished past even before they were officially regarded as obsolete. When their doom was pronounced, around 1960, the shock to the communities they had served was considerable, and the indignation engendered is not extinct today.

  For a while, the dead railway lines became a forerunner of the industrial dereliction and neglect that would blight Britain over the next generation. I recall walking over the Sussex line of my childhood some dozen years after it had been closed. Along the embanked sections one could stride as on a dyke, but in the cuttings the mud left behind by the removal of the track was soft, lush with toadstools and dock leaves, and under the bridges stood great pools of water. Impossible to believe that, not very many years before, trains had run through these lost valleys many times a day. And impossible, too, not to believe that the living railway, which I remembered clearly and had taken for granted, was still there, on some alternative circuit of reality. In one derelict station tall yarrows were growing up through rifts in the cement platform. More disconcertingly still, a few miles further on, the station most familiar to me had vanished utterly, as if a giant had scissored it out of an otherwise complete scene. It took me a moment to realise that in fact the station buildings had been demolished into rubble and used as hardcore to fill in the space between the platforms: a site, no doubt, for some other future building, some other life.

  Not far away from where the station had been, I noticed, and remembered, a handsome thatched-roof farmhouse complete with barns. There, I recalled, I had been taken to buy eggs in the earliest time, before my brother was born or imagined. There were Italian prisoners-of-war employed there then, small, dark, friendly men of whom I was shy. They showed us some pigs, and a family of fluffy goslings, which I did not believe were going to turn into bold, frightening geese.

  By the 1970s, when I took my long walk, with the station and the noise of trains gone, the one-time farmyard had become a smooth lawn with white-painted chairs on it. The eldest son of the old farming couple had become a prosperous local builder. But today, decades later again, I hear that the place is a farm once more, a ‘biodynamic community venture’, employing traditional methods of animal husbandry that the old couple with their prisoners-of-war labourers would recognise. There long before the railway came to bisect its home fields, this once-humble but substantial country dwelling had turned out to be far more lasting.

  The dereliction, too, has all passed now. The one-time railroad has been smoothed and gravelled and re-baptised the ‘Forest Way’. Trees arch over it; bluebells and primroses, and the ox-eye daisies and buttercups that Dickens thought had been driven away by iron and stones, by ashes and hot water, have returned. To receive, one Good Friday, ashes of another kind.

  The level-crossing gates have gone and so has the keeper’s cottage. Up and down the Way, in Easter-holiday peace, come intermittent families with children on bicycles, devotees of safety and green living. They can know nothing of milk-churns or of the little boy in grey flannel shorts who used to stand here in delighted anticipation of the coming train. The railway that was once taken for an archetype of destruction, ‘the indomitable monster, Death’, has by the sheer passing of time become a peaceful site of natural renewal, for which forgetting is a necessary element.

  But not all axed lines are consigned to oblivion, for the railroad of the past can also create its own timeless afterlife. The British, the original builders of railways, are notable for their attachment to them. There are today more preserved and revived stretches of steam-line in the British Isles than anywhere else in the world. On these lines the Railway Age continues in a blessed afterlife, where the brass is always shining, trains are always on time (or if they aren’t, it doesn’t matter), employees are always smiling and there is Mazawattee still for tea in chipped but imperishable enamel. The Forest Way ends in East Grinstead, and there, from the station – a real station, this one, connected to London Victoria – you can today access the line to Horsted Keynes. Once, it was just another obscure Sussex country branch line, then a derelict one. Now it is the world-famous Bluebell Line. Its tree-hung embankments are a haven for birds and other small wildlife such as dormice, since the intermittent noise of the trains scares off larger predators.

  On this odd bank holiday, this Easter time of waiting, as we arrive back at the real station there is a crowd a hundred yards away at the entrance to the Bluebell Line, and a cloud of authentic steam. It turns out to be the Flying Scot of the 1920s paying a regal visit.

  My brother was, as he said himself, ‘an anorak’, an authority on steam-trains around the world. While briskly organising modern-day freight traffic, he permanently regretted steam’s passing. What a pity, I thought, he’s not with us, though he’s probably seen the Flying Scot many times … But, since he was now mysteriously, unexpectedly and for ever absent, I felt happy to have seen a grand old locomotive of the sort he loved that same afternoon.

  Among the things he left behind, unfinished, was an elaborate, beautifully constructed scale layout, complete with miniature houses and stations that he had made himself, stone-chip by stone-chip. It was the model of a railway line in Lowland Scotland that was planned in detail in the 1860s but never actually built, and of which he had acquired the detailed designs.

  Only when he was suddenly dead, and the layout would therefore be abandoned even as the plan for the life-size one was, did a memory of another dream-railway of his come back to me, from very early in his childhood. He was perhaps not yet three, still sleeping in a cot, and when our mother came to lift him out of it one morning he said with delighted anticipation, ‘Let’s go and see the train in the drawing room!’

  She cast doubt on there being any train in the drawing room, but he was insistent, so she carried him downstairs. There was of course no train, and tears of bitter disappointment followed. I wonder now if the superlative miniature dream-train-that-never-was, a celestial version of the ancient Hornby train that was his favourite toy, lodged in a corner of his mind that long-ago morning in infancy and was never displaced.

  CHAPTER II

  Vanished Doorways

  Notoriously, people avoid thinking about the inescapable fact of their own death. They act, and even speak, as if mortality were, with luck and good management, avoidable, or at least endlessly postponable. This unwillingness to confront a basic fact of human existence is probably far more widespread today than it was in past eras, when mortal sickness struck readily and an accident that now would be a passing misfortune could bring a life to an end. Rather, the mental agility of our ancestors seems to have been devoted not to pretending that death was escapable, but to trying to avoid the worst aspects of what lay beyond death, as recounted by the Church.

  I will not venture into the shifting intricacies of Judgement as presented over the centuries. The idea that souls would all be arbitrarily sorted into the saved and the damned clearly presented a moral problem on all but the crudest of assessments. Hence, no doubt, the invention of a third place, Purgatory – in literal terms, a purifying system to prepare sinners for Heaven. The concept seems to have been mooted in the seventh century, and to have been borrowed from older faith systems, but it only acquired official status in the late twelfth. A hundred years later again Saint Thomas Aquinas promot
ed the idea of Purgatory as being located in an actual, physical space on Earth, and Dante followed this vision. But the sense that the Last Judgement, rather than being an ongoing business, was a yet-to-come, once-and-for-all grand occasion that would not take place till the Last Trump sounded created further problems regarding the status of the warehoused souls. How fair was it that the long dead should still be languishing interminably in Purgatory, awaiting their call, if the End of Days was near and the recently dead would only have a short spell there?

  More sophisticated thought in some quarters favoured the idea that the length or shortness of earthly time was irrelevant to the way time might be perceived by a soul on the far side of death, regardless of which of the three realms it found itself in. But this again hardly fitted in with the system, much promoted during the Middle Ages by certain religious communities, whereby Purgatorial time could be shortened if Masses for the dead soul were said or instigated by the living. This inevitably led to a brisk commerce in the sale of what were called ‘Indulgences’, in effect a trade in paid-for prayers, to enable the well-to-do to shorten the Purgatorial sentence for themselves or for other family members. For by that time Purgatory itself seems to have acquired so many of the characteristics of Hell – fire, brimstone, unspeakable torments – as to be indistinguishable from it. Fire had, in any case, always been recognised as an agent of purification, as the medieval Lyke-Wake Dirge testifies:

  From Brig o’Dread when thou may’st pass

  Every nighte and alle.

  To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last

  And Christe receive thy saule.

  Was there, therefore, a distinction to be made between fire and fire? If the dead person had done good works in life, or his family were subscribing to the Church on his behalf –

  The fire sall never make thee shrink;

  And Christe receive thy saule

  – Otherwise it might ‘burn thee to the bare bane …’

  The Reformation in England put paid to all this. The sale of Indulgences by the Catholic Church was a particular target for Protestant condemnation. Indeed you might think, from the story of the Reformation as recounted over many generations in British schoolrooms with a Church of England orientation, that the sale of Indulgences by ‘fat, greedy monks’ was a major cause of the tornado of passionate belief, counter-belief, accusation and counter-accusation that swept the whole of Europe for the best part of two hundred years. But in any case the idea of souls awaiting the Last Judgement never seems to have caught on in the popular imagination, however much certain Christian sects promoted it. The prospect of being kept in suspension after death, even benignly, for hundreds – possibly thousands – of earthly years, waiting to discover your fate, evidently struck people as illogical, and this becomes clear in traditional speech patterns.

  In the imaginations of believers down the centuries, and still today, the known and loved dead are not in Purgatory or any other form of celestial waiting room. They are already ‘Up there’, ‘With God, which is far better’, ‘Asleep in Jesus’, ‘Free from this Vale of Tears’, ‘Gone to a Better Place’ and numerous other circumlocutions. On tombstones from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when worldly calculations seem to have implied a special, Protestant form of Indulgence, inscriptions quite frequently suggest that precisely because the dead party (as well as being an ornament to society) never failed to trust in the Life Everlasting, that Life he or she must certainly have found. No wonder loss of faith assumed a particular horror when it brought with it the corollary that precisely because you had lost it, you would be outcast from the heavenly equivalent of good society. Socio-religious selection may be far less rigorous today, but a walk round any cemetery will still show that the dead are not elsewhere in some unguessable Other World, but have just ‘Gone on Ahead for a little while’: ‘Till we meet again’, ‘Encore un peu de temps je vous reverrai’, ‘Till the shadows fall and we are reunited’, ‘I have just gone into a nearby room’, ‘His wife, who joined him on … [such-and-such a date]’, ‘Together once more’.

  Indeed, it struck me when I was a child, and rather given to reflective wanders round the local cemetery, that much of the standard religion to which most adults then appeared to subscribe seemed to be devoted to promoting a view of the Afterlife as a recognisable, if improved version of life on Earth. When, one day, I asked my grandmother if she thought Heaven was really there (my parents seemed evasive and unenthusiastic on the subject: I was canvassing further opinion), she said: ‘Oh, I do hope so, darling. I should so like to see dear Ethel [her elder sister] again. And George and Guy, too, of course … ’ Her voice trailed off, and I could make a childish guess at where her thoughts had gone. Her redoubtable husband, my grandfather, was still very much alive, but being many years older than her was clearly likely to die first. In all honesty, my grandmother could hardly say, ‘And perhaps Hughie will be there waiting for me, too.’ Hughie’s lifelong atheism, that of a clever young man-about-town of the 1890s, was well known to all, even to me.

  My brother N received, as I did, the then-standard school Christian education: morning assembly with hymns and prayers, Scripture lessons, Confirmation classes. Since, by then, our mother had died by her own hand, such bland fare was hardly likely to impress him. And I do not think that he dared ask anyone, or that anyone dared embark for him, on what happens to suicides after death. They should have. But probably they funked it.

  Only as a middle-aged man, many years later, did he become interested in matters one might characterise as philosophical or spiritual. Christianity did not appeal to him, but he evolved a belief system of his own. He did not like to talk about it much, but it seemed to involve reincarnation, of a rather special kind. Worldwide, the religious beliefs that incorporate reincarnation (Hinduism and Buddhism) are subscribed to by many millions. Certainly the logic of reincarnation seems appealing, and less opaque than the Christian Heaven-or-Hell dichotomy. However, in my brother’s version of it, reincarnation did not apparently work in the standard way, with a life of honest endeavour leading to an upgrade in the next one, or a life devoted to selfishness and unconcern for others resulting to demotion to a beast of burden next time round. It could not work in this morally consequential way because chronology itself, it seemed, was obliterated in my brother’s reincarnatory scheme, in which you might as easily be moved back in time as forward.

  ‘Do you really mean,’ I asked, having digested this, ‘that in your next life you could be a medieval knight, or monk, or … Or a Victorian engine-driver?’

  He smiled. and said, ‘That’s what I’m hoping for!’

  I do not know how much he really meant this and how much it was a daydream, but it was clear that, behind the joke, some fundamental and complex belief was there. Possibly it related to the very ancient concept of serial time (revived in the twentieth century by J.W. Dunne)1 in which key events are repeated and repeated, to good or ill effect, till some cycle is exhausted and a further one can begin.

  But, if I am not careful, I shall find I have pre-empted my whole theme of memory, loss and the arbitrary survival of a few objects. If we consign the whole concept of the past to a many-dimensional timelessness, we lose it in any sense in which it still holds meaning for us. And, in practice, none of us behave as if all time were eternally present. A sense of time moving in one direction is the wavelength on which we live. My brother lived day-to-day on that wavelength as much as anyone else, and more than many: tokens of the past were precious to him. From his days as a young railway employee in distant Scotland and then as a world traveller, he had collected enamel advertisements, station signs, name plates, engine plates to which, over the years, rarity and value accrued. Many were carefully itemised and bestowed in his Will, which was made in haste on his marriage in middle life and then never revisited, so that some of the intended recipients were dead themselves when the moment came or simply lost to sight, another effect of time … In other respects his Will
was sketchy to the point of inadequacy. He had not expected to die with utter suddenness, lying down at the end of the morning in the clothes he had worn for a brisk walk, a few weeks before his seventieth birthday.

  He had not expected, either, to leave, to a further destiny of incompleteness, the scale layout of the never-actually-built railway line between Dumfries and Stranraer. In a specially constructed cabin down his garden he had been busy, with huge care and talent, re-creating a past that had never actually existed but, with a very slight alteration to reality, would have done so. In this, he was in the role of the beggar in J-L. Borges’s story.2 There was an ancient doorway, which survived as long as it was regularly visited by a beggar, but after his death the doorway disappeared …