ON THE EDGE

 

My Name is Lisa 

 

In his book Round Ireland in Low Gear Eric Newby writes 'In the autumn of 1985, more or less on the spur of the moment, we decided to go back to Ireland . . .'. The idea of making a journey on the spur of the moment is the privilege of the seasoned traveller, and for Newby, who had walked through the Hindu Kush and sailed, with no sailing experience, on a worn out four-masted barque to Australia, a bike ride around Ireland could easily be decided on the moment's spur.

    My humble plan was to travel around England, Scotland and Wales by train, keeping as close to the edge as the network allowed. To remain within sight of the sea wherever possible. It was a plan that I, the inexperienced traveller, could never have arrived at with Newby's impressive spontaneity. I had been thinking about it for some time, and the more I thought about it the more absurd the idea seemed to become. Because, of course, without high ground, a good telescope and a clear day, the idea of keeping within sight of the sea would define the enterprise as the mission of a fool. 

    Later, when I began to think more seriously about it, and the whim became a plan, I could see that probably it would be the mission of a fool, all the more so because this fool does not particularly enjoy travelling. But I have never wanted to do what is easy. You have to do, or attempt to do, what you can't do — it's the only way to fulfilment. So, as the whim became a plan, I tried to think logically. I thought about maps. Maps, I thought, would be a good start. The Thomas Cook rail map of Britain and Ireland is very good and is printed in jolly colours, but, in covering the whole of Britain, it is necessarily low on detail. The answer was obvious: the internet.

    So, early in 2008 I looked at the National Rail Enquiries web-site to find out where I could buy some detailed maps of the whole of the UK rail network. Now, it has to be understood that as well as being an inexperienced traveller, I am equally not very good at navigating my way around the internet, but I gave it a go. It went like this: 

    On the NRE web-site I was invited to click on 'Train Companies and Maps'. A promising start, I thought. But unfortunately the maps, even on my quite large screen, were unreadable, although on one of them I was able to decipher, with my magnifying glass, the sentence 'For full details within this box [around London] see other side of sheet.' The idea of peering at a computer screen with a large magnifying glass seemed to me to be a nice combination of technologies and the information I gained was encouraging, for it was clear that somewhere this map must exist as a tangible as well as a virtual document.

    And then I met Lisa. . .  

    Lisa appeared under the 'Contact Us' heading. 'Just "Ask Lisa", our new virtual assistant' said the caption. She looked rather nervous and rather inexperienced as well as new, but I clicked on her anyway and she suddenly came to life — well, a sort of life. Lisa stood (or stands — perhaps she's still there now, who knows) with her back to a couple of inter-city trains and a throng of passengers. Lisa had short blonde hair and dark eyes. I suppose she was in her twenties and she wore a dark jacket with an open-necked white blouse. Probably she could have done with some help from a make-up artist for her spell before the camera but I don't hold this against her — perhaps the budget didn't stretch to these cimematic niceties. Lisa was fidgeting nervously. She pursed her lips, tilted her head to the left in what was an almost teasing gesture and offered a gentle smile. Then she brushed some pigeon poo from her shoulder. In doing this she revealed a gold ear-ring that dangled tantalisingly. Another smile and she looked down to her feet and then back to the camera. At one point she appeared to be about to take off her jacket but thought better of it.

    Another caption: 'Lisa says: "Welcome to National Rail Enquiries. My name is Lisa. How can I help you?"' and I began my virtual dialogue, typing the not unreasonable question:

    'Where can I obtain printed maps of the entire network?'

    'Lisa says: "You can find the National Rail network maps on the page I am loading for you now."'

    This was the map I had just found and could not read. Already I was beginning to be irritated by Lisa's answers being prefixed with 'Lisa says' as if NRE had assumed that I had forgotten that it was she with whom I was communicating (or trying to).

    'Where can I obtain maps of the entire network which are printed on paper in type which is big enough for the average-sighted person to read?'

    'Lisa says: "You're talking very quietly. Please speak up a bit."'

    I repeated my question but in capital letters.

    'Lisa says: "I think you are looking for railway maps. Please ask your question more simply"'

    'Paper maps.'

    'You asked "Paper maps". Lisa says: "I think you are looking for maps. Have a look at the maps that I'm loading for you."'

    I knew before I saw it that this would be the map I had twice rejected and I was right.

    'I have. They are not what I want. They are unreadable.'

    'Lisa says: "You're talking very quietly. Please speak up a bit."'

    I felt let down and was left wondering what sort of brainless executive thinks up this sort of junk and, even more extraordinary, what other sort of brainless executive decides to put it in to practice? I suppose in not fulfilling her promises Lisa had something in common with her colleagues (who wear more make-up) on other web-sites and I watched as she brushed one last pigeon poo from her shoulder and I clicked her away.

    Let down I may have been but fired up I was. These are just the difficulties I need to fuel my determination and I decided to try to speak to someone on the telephone at Network Rail, feeling certain that I would be invited to join some automated system of electronic voices offering me multiple choices, none of which would be the one I needed. Astonishingly, possible uniquely, I got the voice of a human being. It was female, but I don't think it was Lisa. I explained my needs, gave her my post code and telephone number and she said she would look into it. She'd see what she could do. I felt encouraged as I imagined her ploughing through wooden plan chests of maps until she found just the one for me. . .

    Days passed and nothing happened as I suppose I knew all along that nothing would, and I turned my thoughts to ideas less tangible, less practical, than maps. I thought, perhaps, that I should try to clarify the reasons for this proposed journey. Why should someone who is psychologically about as sedentary as a lump of granite in the middle of Dartmoor want to attempt this? 

    To say, as the legendary mountaineer said, 'Because it's there', is not good enough — neither for the mountaineer, nor for me. I may be psychologically sedentary but I have come to know trains over the past ten years or so, travelling as I do, from my home in Sussex to Venice and back. I have come to realise that the train journey, even the quite short one, provides me with fruitful inspiration for drawing — and drawing is what I do. It is the medium through which I function and, for me, it is not limited only to making pencil marks on pieces of paper. For me it's all drawing: etching, working with brushes and coloured paints, writing — even an idea, an intangible idea is a drawing. It's a drawing no-one else can see. It's mine.

    I am not a hearty traveller, not a communicative traveller. I am not the raconteur at the bar with scotch and soda. In the restaurant car on the night train to Venice I am the one at the end with the espresso and brioche. I am the constant observer. The collector of ideas and information. The one with the memories rekindled by the unique movement and endless image replacement of the train.¹

    The night train from Paris to Venice. It seems such a romantic journey. And so it is, so it can be. Where else could you share an illicit cigarette out of sight of the steward with a lovely ballet dancer from Toronto? Actually, of course, the answer is 'anywhere' but because it was there, on that train, somewhere in the dark Swiss night, it was for me the only possibility. But do this journey, or any journey, too often and it becomes a shuttle and it's always a journey with a purpose — a journey from A to B. So what, I thought, if I made a journey in a big and rather twisted circle from A to A; a journey with no purpose at all? The more I thought about this, the more intrigued I became by the idea that the pointlessness of the campaign would be its whole point. By doing something that doesn't lead anywhere, by doing something merely for the doing of it, I could perhaps produce something worthwhile in the way of pictures and words. A contradiction, of course, to the idea of pointlessness. But, time would tell. 

    Trains are the bondage of memories and memories are bound by trains. I was about fifteen, I suppose, when, every day on my way home from school, the heavy wooden crossing gates, white, with their great red circular and tinny disc in the centre would rattle closed to allow through the four-fifteen Southern service to Swansea, a city then still throbbing with the beautiful filth of steel and coal. I think the locomotive would have been a Merchant Navy class and it had streamlined sides which concealed the cylindricality of its boiler and gave it the appearance of a partly-opened can of Spam. Sides which carried on them some of the industrial grime of Swansea. Dirty green it was and it must have weighed about a hundred tons. It was all steam and thunder and sulphurous perfume and every day I wanted to be on that train. Not only to escape tomorrow's mathematics or, even more terrifying, tomorrow's P.E. in the hideous sweat-smelling gym, but because, even then, I had learned the words, the seductive words of Edna St. Vincent Millay:

 

    My heart is warm with the friends I make,

        And better friends I'll not be knowing,

    Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,

        No matter where it's going.

 

But I was never brave, wayward or sensible enough to take proper notice of the Harp-Weaver.² And, besides, there was Susan at the gates. Each day Susan would be waiting at the gates too, but over the road and on the far pavement. Susan to whom I was afraid to talk. Susan with whom I was in love. I think now that it was her, even for those Mary Quant days, improbably short skirt with which I was in love but I was too young then to distinguish between love and longing. Nevertheless the Spam can streamlining and the high hemline brought even higher by the wake of the passing train will remain always with me and since those distant afternoons I have always been attracted both to trains and to tarts.

    Even for someone who is not attracted to trains, a pointless journey such as mine could not really be made by any other means. Friends have said that the answer is to do the job in a camper van. In such a van, they say, one can be much closer to the coast. But they have missed the point which is that it is precisely the knowledge of deprivation that creates the interest. It's like collecting; if you are collecting, for instance, a series of books, it is those editions which you haven't yet acquired which are more important than those you have in your collection. 

   The camper van would give too much freedom. I need the restrictive discipline that the network of steel rails condemns me to. The open brief is an impossibility. It is as if someone were to say to me 'Make me a drawing' while the stranger who appears and says 'If you please — draw me a sheep' has a far better chance of getting a result, even if the final drawing is of a box with three holes in it.³ Then there is the obvious fact that you can't make drawings, whether constructed from lines or from words, while driving a van. I can't anyway. Lastly the railway has a habit of going past the backs of things: the abandoned warehouse with its broken windows, the back gardens with the red and yellow plastic toys. I like the backs of things. They seem to tell you more.

    There was, at the outset, a fundamental decision to make. A journey based on a big and twisted circle has to be made in either a clockwise or an anti-clockwise direction. However, there was never much doubt as to which direction I would take. It would have to be anti-. I don't know why. It is certainly nothing to do with 'against the clock' which sounds too much like a race but, starting as I would from Chichester (where I waited all those years ago for the train I never caught) I would be at the bottom and more or less central. Six o'clock. Travelling in an anti-clockwise direction would mean that I'd leave London early in the campaign and I feel somehow that the knowledge that the capital is behind me as I travel sits easier with me than the knowledge of its expectation.

    Originally I had intended to include Eire and Northern Ireland in the journey, crossing the Irish Sea from Liverpool to Dublin and making another ragged circle. But it didn't take long with the Thomas Cook map to realise that it would be a very ragged circle indeed. The east coast would be easy but the Atlantic side is virtually rail-less, at least in a north-south direction. I suppose this was one of the reasons Eric Newby decided to go round Ireland on a bike. So, England, Scotland and Wales it had to be. It's probably enough anyway, I told myself. 

 

1. See The Red Handkerchief / Il fazzoletto rosso, 2007. 

2. Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem 'Travel' (1923), was not actually included in her collection The Harp-Weaver of a year later but I always think of her as the Harp-Weaver. 

3. Antoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince, 1945.