AND ANOTHER THING
Planes are for convenience, but ships and trains are for delight
PAUL JOHNSON
As I write this, I am about to leave for a flight to Buenos Aires. The older I get, the more travel-hardened I become, the more I loathe this kind of thing. The actual flying is bearable — I am not afraid of death — but I hate airports. They encapsu- late for me all that I most detest about the modern world: its mechanical impersonali- ty, its homogenised overcrowding, its dis- turbed ants'-nest scurrying. International airports are huge: each is a Nowhere City in itself. I once dozed off in one and when I woke I had no idea where I was. Signs, advertisements gave no clue. The people I saw were all nationalities and none. I might have been anywhere in the world. I asked the man sitting next to me, 'Where are we?' 'Singapore,' he said, 'I hope.'
In an airport you are dependent on tech- nologies you do not understand. You do not even see the vehicle which transports you until you are actually in it. There are mysterious delays which are not explained; or, if explanations are given, they are often misleading. Air travel still clings by its tita- nium fmgernails to some of the luxuries of the old Atlantic liners — there are VIP rooms, first-class lounges; unwanted caviar, champagne and lobster are slapped down in front of you. But at the airport your eyes tell you that it is the huddled masses who are now the bulk of travellers, dark little men seeking work with dubious passports and missing visas and dirty little bits of paper they display to impassive immigra- tion officers. Or harassed women in saris or djellabahs, with screaming, bewildered chil- dren. Or families setting off on cheap pack- age tours, wearied by delayed flights and already regretting it.
Airports never shut, their clocks slide inexorably on. There is no daylight. Times of day, months, seasons, mean nothing. Periodically, cleaners mechanically sweep away the detritus. People come and go, endlessly, no one knows whither or for what, and no one cares. If you come back in a week's time, it is the identical scene, with different, equally unknown people. And wherever you go in the world, these big air- ports look the same, smell the same, just as their food tastes the same and their hard, synthetic surfaces feel the same to your touch. To me, Hell is a giant airport, from which no aircraft ever leave; they only land, bringing more unhappy people.
By contrast, sea travel is human. On the QE2, on which I have twice voyaged, they can't quite eliminate the tang of tar, odd smells of paint and wood, resin and smoky fumes. Comforting ropes lie about. Even in harbour, and however big the ship, there is the faint swell of the sea, repeating its rhythms which go back to the beginning of the world. Your cabin is small but it is your own, a little womb you can fill with familiar objects. Waiters, stewardesses soon recog- nise you. You find a little corner of the deck in which you can establish proprietary rights. You can get to love a ship. The port is an ancient thing, which has changed little since Alexandria or Ostia were built in clas- sical times. You wave goodbye to it. It wel- comes you visibly when you dock. You have made friends on board, exchanged address- es. There have been confidences, possibly even kisses. You have not left the world to fly in limbo, but have lived it more intensely on those sustaining billows.
Trains are humanised too. When I was five I started to go with my big sisters to their convent on one, and I loved that train. I was fascinated by the way the engine behaved in the station, emitting, for rea- sons of its own, different kinds and intensi- ties of steam, smoke and vapour, occasional sparks. It was a living thing, with an iron heart, a fiery soul, imperious nostrils. This dragon was the master, the two grimy, cheerful men who tended it merely its ser- vants. The carriages were ancient, with no corridors — first, second or third, and Ladies Only. The doors had big brass han- dles I could barely manipulate. But the dusty seats were home too, with their sepia pictures above: 'A View of Lake Winder- mere', 'The Black Cuillin Hills of Skye', 'Blackpool Promenade and Tower'.
The little railway which transported us from Tunstall, where we lived, to Stoke-on- Trent, where our school was, had its own name, 'the Loop Line'. I was deeply famil- iar with all its tiny stations, and even with my eyes shut I could recognise each, for all had particular sounds and smells, sudden silences, identifiable hisses of steam, a porter's voice I could recognise. Each tun- nel was different and exciting in special ways. I could sense where we were from the changing gradients, the regular moments when the engine gathered speed, or relaxed its iron muscles.
I liked, especially, cold days when the insides of the windows were covered in steam on which I could draw. In those days of the mid-Thirties I rejoiced in the power- ful cast of public characters I could carica- ture. I did Baldwin with his pipe, and Ram- say MacDonald with his wispy moustaches. Hitler had a small moustache too, and a lock of hair which fell over his forehead, and deep, sunken eyes. Mussolini had a huge chin, and bulging eyes and a funny sort of cap with a tassel. Stalin had big black moustaches, black hair without a parting, and a pipe too, bigger than Bald- win's. And I could do Churchill, with his cigar and bow-tie, his little nose and bald- ing head. I loved doing these caricatures, and other passengers loved them too. On a never-to-be-forgotten day, an elderly gen- tleman, with a top hat and a very stiff stand-up collar and, I think, but I may have imagined this, a monocle, was so pleased with my work that he gave me a silver six- pence, untold wealth in those days, which, needless to say, I was not allowed to keep. Another time, getting onto the train at Stoke to return home, I slipped into the gap between platform and carriage, in what seemed to me a bottomless, dark hole. MY sisters had not seen this mishap and, bewil- dered, called out, 'Paul, where are you?' And I answered in a little voice, 'I'm down here.' What a commotion! Porters lifted me out. The station master was summoned to calm everybody down with his imposing presence — I believe he had a top hat too. I was none the worse for this experience, but my sisters used to tell the tale with awe. Well, nothing much happened in those days, at home anyway.
In Somerset, near my house in the Quan- tock hills, there is a revivified steam line: I seldom see it but I hear it often: the thin, ghostly wail of its whistle coming miles across the empty moor, movingly evocative of old days and clattering trains long, long ago. When the whistle stops, I listen hard and sometimes I can just detect the chuff: chuff-chuff of its sturdy tank-engine as it climbs slowly up the Vale of Taunton. Iii my mind's eye I see the happy children leaning out of the train windows, stared at by curious cows as they trundle through the deep meadows. Planes are for convenience, but ships and trains are for delight.
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