Notes From a Small Island (23 page)

customer. I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savoured the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.

If I learned just one thing in Blaenau that day it was that no Blatter how hard you try you cannot make a cup of coffee and a cheese omelette last four hours. 1 ate as slowly as I could and Ordered a second cup of coffee, but after nearly an hour of delicate eating and sipping, it became obvious that I was either going to have to leave or pay rent, so I reluctantly gathered up my things. At the till, I explained my plight to the kindly couple who ran the place and they both made those sympathetic oh-dear noises that kindly people make when confronted with someone else's crisis.

'He might go to the slate mine,' suggested the woman to the man.

'Yes, he might go to the slate mine,' agreed the man and turned to me. 'You might go to the slate mine,' he said as if thinking I might somehow have missed the foregoing exchange.

'Oh, and what's that exactly?' I said, trying not to sound too doubtful.

'The old mine. They do guided tours.'

'It's very interesting,' said his wife.

'Yes, it's very interesting,' said the man. 'Mind, it's a fair hike,' he added.

'And it may not be open on a Sunday,' said his wife. 'Out of season,' she explained.

'Of course, you could always take a cab up there if you don't fancy the walk in this weather,' said the man.

I looked at him. A cab? Did he say 'a cab'! This seemed too miraculous to be taken in. 'You have a cab service in Blaenau?'

'Oh, yes,' said the man as if this were one of Blaenau's more celebrated features. 'Would you like me to order one to take you to the mine?'

'Well,' I sought for words; I didn't want to sound ungrateful when these people had been so kind, but on the other hand I found the prospect of an afternoon touring a slate mine in damp clothes about as appealing as a visit to the proctologist. 'Do you think the cab would take me to Porthmadog?' I wasn't sure how far it was, and I dared not hope.

'Of course,' said the man. So he called a cab for me and the next thing I knew I was departing to a volley of good wishes from theproprietors and stepping into a cab, feeling like a shipwreck victim being winched to unexpected safety. I cannot tell you with what joy I beheld the sight of Blaenau disappearing into the distance behind me.

The cab driver was a friendly young man and on the twenty-minute ride to Porthmadog he filled me in on much important economic and sociological data with regard to the Dwyfor peninsula. The most striking news was that the peninsula was dry on Sundays. You couldn't get an alcoholic drink to save your life between Porthmadog and Aberdaron. I didn't know such pockets of rectitude still existed in Britain, but I was so glad to be getting out of Blaenau that I didn't care.

Porthmadog, squatting beside the sea under a merciless downpour, looked a grey and forgettable place, full of wet pebbledash and dark stone. Despite the rain, I examined the meagre stock of local hotels with some care -1 felt entitled to a spell of comfort and luxury after my night in a cheerless Llandudno guesthouse - and I chose an inn called the Royal Sportsman. My room was adequate and clean, if not exactly outstanding, and suited my purposes. I made a cup of coffee and, while the kettle boiled, changed into dry clothes, then sat on the edge of the bed with a coffee and a Rich Tea biscuit, and watched a soap opera on television called Pobol Y Cwm, which I enjoyed very much. I had no idea what was going on, of course, but I can say with some confidence that it had better acting, and certainly better production values, than any programme ever made in, say, Sweden or Norway - or Australia come to that. At least the walls didn't wobble when someone shut a door. It was an odd experience watching people who existed in a recognizably British milieu - they drank tea and wore Marks & Spencer's cardigans - but talked in Martian. Occasionally, I was interested to note, they dropped in English words - 'hi ya', 'right then', 'OK' -presumably because a Welsh equivalent didn't exist, and in one memorable encounter a character said something like 'Wlch ylch aargh ybsy cwm dirty weekend, look you,' which I just loved. How sweetly endearing of the Welsh not to have their own term for an illicit bonk between Friday and Monday.

By the time I finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains were unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage,

Britain would be it. In any case, cars aquaplaned daringly through these temporary lakes and threw sheets of water over nearby houses and shops. Mindful of my experience with puddles in Westori, and aware that this was a place where there truly was nothing to do on a Sunday, I proceeded up the High Street in a state of some caution.

I nosed around the tourist information centre, where I picked up a leaflet that informed me that Porthmadog was built in the early nineteenth century as a port for Blaenau slate by one Alexander Maddocks and that by late in the century a thousand ships a year were entering the port to carry off 116,000 tones of Welsh stone. Today the quayside is, inevitably, a renovated zone for yuppies, with cobbles and smart flats. I had a polite look at it, then followed a back lane through a harbourside neighbourhood of small boatyards and other marine businesses, and up one side of a residential hill and down the other until I found myself in the tranquil hamlet of Borth-y-Gest, a pretty village of brick villas on a horseshoe bay with gorgeous views across Traeth Bach to Harlech Point and Tremadoc Bay beyond. Borth-y-Gest had an engaging old-fashioned feel about it. In the middle of the village, overlooking the bay, was a sub-post office with a blue awning announcing on the dangling part 'SWEETS' and 'ICES' and near by was an establishment called the Sea View Cafe. This place might have been lifted whole from Adventures on the Island. I was charmed at once.

I followed a grassy path out above the sea towards a headland. Even under low cloud, the views across the Glaslyn estuary and Snowdon range beyond were quite majestic. The wind was gusting and down below the sea battered the rocks in an impressively tempestuous way, but the rain at least held off and the air was sweet and fresh in that way you only get when you are beside the sea. The light was failing and I was afraid of ending up joining the waves on the rocks far below, so I headed back into town. When I got there, I discovered that the few businesses that had been open were now shut. Only one small beacon of half-light loomed from the enclosing darkness. I went up to see what it was and was interested to find that it was the southern terminus and operational HQ for the famous Blaenau Ffestiniog Railway.

Interested to see the nerve centre of this organization which had caused me so much distress and discomfort earlier, I went in. Though it was well after five, the station bookshop was still open and liberally sprinkled with silent browsers, so I went in and had anose around. It was an extraordinary place, with shelf after shelf of books, all with titles like Railways of the Winion Valley and Maivddach Estuary and The Complete Encyclopaedia of Signal Boxes. There was a multi-volume series of books called Trains in Trouble, each consisting of page after page of photographs of derailments, crashes and other catastrophes - a sort of train-spotter's equivalent of a snuff movie, I suppose. For those seeking more animated thrills, there were scores of videos. I took down one at random, called The Hunslet and Hundreds Steam Rally 1993, which bore a bold label promising '50 Minutes of Steam Action!' Under that there was a sticker that said: 'Warning: Contains explicit footage of a Sturrock 0-6-0 Heavy Class coupling with a GWR Hopper.' Actually, I just made that last part up, but I did notice, with a kind of profound shock, that all the people around me were browsing with precisely the same sort of self-absorbed, quiet breathing concentration that you would find in a porno shop and I suddenly wondered if there was an extra dimension to this train-spotting lark that had never occurred to me.

According to a plaque on the wall in the ticket hall, the Blaenau Ffestiniog Railway was formed in 1832 and is the oldest still running in the world. I also learned from the plaque that the railway society has 6,000 members, a figure that staggers me from every possible direction. Though the last train of the day had finished its run some time ago, there was still a man in the ticket booth, so I went over and interrogated him quietly about the lack of coordination between the train and bus services in Blaenau. I don't know why, because I was charm itself, but he got distinctly huffy, as if I were being critical of his wife, and said in a petulant tone: 'If Gwynned Transport want people to catch the midday train from Blaenau, then they should have the buses set off earlier.'

'But equally,' I persisted, 'you could have the train leave a few minutes later.'

He looked at me as if I were being outrageously presumptuous, and said: 'But why should we?'

And there, you see, you have everything that is wrong with these train enthusiast types. They are irrational, argumentative, dangerously fussy and often, as here, have an irritating little Michael Fish moustache that makes you want to stick out two forked fingers and pop them in the eyes. Moreover, thanks to my journalistic sleuthing in the bookshop, I think we can safely say that there is a prima facie case to presume that they perform unnatural acts with steam

videos. For their own good, and for the good of society, they .should be taken away and interned behind barbed wire.

I thought about making a citizen's arrest there and then - 'I detain you in the name of Her Majesty the Queen for the offence of being irritatingly intractable about timetables, and also for having an annoying and inadequate little moustache' - but I was feeling generous and let him go with a hard look and an implied warning that it would be a cold day in hell before I ventured anywhere near his railway again. I think he got the message.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   TWENTY-ONE

IN THE MORNING, I WALKED TO PORTHMADOG STATION - NOT THE

Blaenau Ffestiniog let's-play-at-trains one, but the real British Rail one. The station was closed, but there were several people on the platform, all studiously avoiding each other's gaze and standing, I do believe, on the same spot on which they stood every morning. I am pretty certain of this because as I was standing there -minding my own business, a man in a suit arrived and looked at first surprised and then cross to find me occupying what was evidently his square metre of platform. He took a position a few feet away and regarded me with an expression not a million miles from hate. How easy it is sometimes, I thought, to make enemies in Britain. All you have to do is stand in the wrong spot or turn your car round in their driveway - this guy had NO TURNING written all over him -or inadvertently take their seat on a train, and they will quietly hate you to the grave.

Eventually a two-carriage Sprinter train came in and we all shuffled aboard. They really are the most comfortless, utilitarian, deeply unlovely trains, with their hard-edged seats, their mystifyingly simultaneous hot and cold draughts, their harsh lighting and, above all, their noxious colour scheme with all those orange stripes and hopelessly jaunty chevrons. Why would anyone think that train passengers would like to be surrounded by a lot of orange, particularly first thing in the morning? I longed for one of those old-style trains that you found when I first came to Britain, the ones that had no corridors but consisted of just a series of self-contained compartments, each a little world unto itself. There was always a

frisson of excitement as you opened the carriage door because you never knew what you would find on the other side. There was something pleasingly intimate and random about sitting in such close proximity with total strangers. I remember once I was on one of these trains when one of the other passengers, a shy-looking young man in a trench coat, was abruptly and lavishly sick on the floor - it was during a flu epidemic - and then had the gall to stumble from the train at the next station, leaving three of us to ride on into the evening in silence, with pinched faces and tucked-in toes and behaving, in that most extraordinary British way, as if nothing had happened. On second thoughts perhaps it is just as well that we don't have those trains any more. But I'm still not happy with the orange chevrons.

We followed a coastal route past broad estuaries and craggy hills beside the grey, flat expanse of Cardigan Bay. The towns along the way all had names that sounded like a cat bringing up a hairball: Llywyngwril, Morfa Mawddach, Llandecwyn, Dyffryn Ardudwy. At Penrhyndeudraeth the train filled with children of all ages, all in school uniforms. I expected shouting and smoking and things to be flying about, but they were impeccably behaved, every last one of them. They all departed at Harlech and the interior suddenly felt empty and quiet - quiet enough that I could hear the couple behind me conversing in Welsh, which pleased me. At Barmouth we crossed another broad estuary, on a rickety-looking wooden causeway. I had read somewhere that this causeway had been closed for some years and that Barmouth had until recently been the end of the line. It seemed a kind of miracle that BR had invested the money to repair the causeway and keep the line open, but I bet that if I were to come back in ten years, this trundling, half-forgotten line to Porthmadog will be in the hands of enthusiasts like those of the Blaenau Ffestiniog Railway and that some twit with a fussy little moustache will be telling me that I can't make a connection at Shrewsbury because it doesn't suit the society's timetable.

So I was pleased, three hours and 105 miles after setting off, to make a connection at Shrewsbury while the chance was still there. My intention was to turn north and resume my stately progress towards John O'Groats, but as I was making my way through the station, I heard a platform announcement for a train to Ludlow, and impulsively I boarded it. For years I had heard that Ludlow was a delightful spot, and it suddenly occurred to me that this might be my last chance to see it. Thus it was that I found myself, some twenty minutes later, alighting on to a lonely platform at Ludlow and making my way up a long hill into the town.

Ludlow was indeed a charming and agreeable place on a hilltop high above the River Teme. It appeared to have everything you could want in a community - bookshops, a cinema, some appealing-looking tearooms and bakeries, a couple of 'family butchers' (I always want to go in and say, 'How much to do mine?'), an old-fashioned Woolworth's and the usual assortment of chemists, pubs, haberdashers and the like, all neatly arrayed and respectful of their surroundings. The Ludlow Civic Society had thoughtfully put plaques up on many of the buildings announcing who had once lived there. One such hung on the wall of the Angel, an old coaching inn on Broad Street now sadly - and I hoped only temporarily - boarded up. According to the plaque, the famous Aurora coach once covered the hundred or so miles to London in just over twenty-seven hours, which just shows you how much we've progressed. Now British Rail could probably do it in half the time.

Near by I chanced upon the headquarters of an organization called the Ludlow and District Cats Protection League, which intrigued me. Whatever, I wondered, did the people of Ludlow do to their cats that required the setting up of a special protective agency? Perhaps I'm coming at this from the wrong angle, but short of setting cats alight and actually throwing them at me, I can't think of what you would have to do to drive me to set up a charity to defend their interests. There is almost nothing, apart perhaps from a touching faith in the reliability of weather forecasts and the universal fondness for jokes involving the word 'bottom', that makes me feel more like an outsider in Britain than the nation's attitude to animals. Did you know that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was formed sixty years after the founding of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and as an offshoot of it? Did you know that in 1994 Britain voted for a European Union directive requiring statutory rest periods for transported animals, but against statutory rest periods for factory workers?

But even against this curious background, it seemed extraordinary to me that there could be a whole, clearly well-funded office dedicated just to the safety and well-being of Ludlow and District cats. I was no less intrigued by the curiously specific limits of the society's self-imposed remit - the idea that they were interested only in the safety and well-being of Ludlow and District cats.

What would happen, I wondered, if the members of the league found you teasing a cat just outside the district boundaries? Would they shrug resignedly and say, 'Out of our jurisdiction'? Who can say? Certainly not I, because when I approached the office with a view to making enquiries, I found that it was shut, its members evidently - and I wish you to read nothing into this - out to lunch.

Which is where I decided to be. I went across the road to a pleasant little salad bar restaurant called the Olive Branch, where I quickly made myself into a pariah by taking a table for four. The place was practically empty when I arrived and as I was struggling with a rucksack and a tippy tray, I took the first empty table. But immediately I sat down people poured in from all quarters and for the rest of my brief lunch period I could feel eyes burrowing into me from people who turned from the till to find me occupying a space obviously not designed for a solitary diner and that they would have to take their trays to the unpopular More Seating Upstairs section, evidently a disagreeable option. As I sat there, trying to eat quickly and be obscure, a man from two tables away came and asked me in a pointed tone if I was using one of the chairs, and took it without awaiting my reply. I finished my food and slunk from the place in shame.

I returned to the station and bought a ticket for the next train to Shrewsbury and Manchester Piccadilly. Because of a points failure somewhere along the line, the train was forty minutes late arriving. It was packed and the passengers were testy. I found a seat by disturbing a tableful of people who gave up their space grudgingly and glared at me with disdain - more enemies! What a day I was having! - and sat crammed into a tiny space in my overcoat in an overheated carriage with my rucksack on my lap. I had vague hopes of getting to Blackpool, but I couldn't move a muscle and couldn't get at my rail timetable to see where I needed to change trains, so I just sat and trusted that I could catch an onward train at Manchester.

British Rail was having a bad day. We crept a mile or so out of the station, and then sat for a long time for no evident reason. Eventually, a voice announced that because of faults further up the line this train would terminate at Stockport, which elicited a general groan. Finally, after about twenty minutes, the train falter-ingly started forward and limped across the green countryside. At each station the voice apologized for the delay and announced anew that the train would terminate at Stockport. When at last wereached Stockport, ninety minutes late, I expected everyone to get off, but no-one moved, so neither did I. Only one passenger, a Japanese fellow, dutifully disembarked, then watched in dismay as the train proceeded on, without explanation and without him, to Manchester.

At Manchester I discovered that I needed a train to Preston, so I had a look at a television screen, but these only gave the final destination and not the stations in between. So I went off and joined a queue of travellers asking a BR guard for directions to various places. It was unfortunate for him that there were no stations in Britain called Fuck Off because that was clearly what he wanted to tell people. He told me to go to platform 13, so I set off for it, but the platforms ended at 11. So I went back to the guy and informed him that I couldn't find a platform 13. It turned out that platform 13 was up some secret stairs and over a footbridge. It appeared to be the platform for missing trains. There was a whole crowd of travellers standing there looking lost and doleful, like the people in that Monty Python milkman sketch. Eventually we were sent back to platform 3. The train, when it arrived, was of course a two-carriage Sprinter. The usual 700 people squeezed onto it.

Thus it was, fourteen hours after setting off from Porthmadog that morning, that I arrived tired, dishevelled, hungry and full of woe, in Blackpool, a place that I didn't particularly want to be in anyway.