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Tag Archives: Stations

I could hear every word you said!

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Peter Cooper in The Contexts of Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Arachne Press, Ilkley Playhouse, Stations, Trains

image I went riding on the Write Track alongside my co-driver, Louise Swingler, and wonderful fire-woman (and expert slide-clicker and general ideas-stoker) Mavis
on the fringe at the Ilkley Lit Festival last night (Tuesday 15 Oct). And after a few shunts and diversions we  built up enough steam to arrive safely at our destination.

We arrived for work carrying guitars, Station Master hats and coats, a top hat, books, and lots of nerves to a busy Wildman Studio at the Ilkley Playhouse and were escorted to our dressing room (well of course!)

image

Once on stage (that’s luvvie talk) we performed our odd mixture of songs, brief sketches from ‘Brief Encounters’

image WP_001751and strange ones from ‘Strangers on a Train’, as well as rousing readings from train-related incidents by Richard Yates, Kate Atkinson, Paul Theroux, Angela Carter and Arundhati Roy, before entering the tunnel of our own tales from the ‘Stations’ anthology.

stations

https://www.arachnepress.com

We finished by asking the audience for their own favourite train stories or episodes – and were re-railed along the lines of: The Railway Children, Ghost Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Slum Dog Millionaire, The Night Train, Train to Pakistan, and Thomas the Tank Engine – to name but a few.

(Feel free to add your own!)

It was lovely to get such engagement  – and many positive responses to our performance too, including:

 “I could hear every word you said!”

(There’s Yorkshire praise for you!)

SAM_3530

People hovered on the platform for some while afterwards, chatting, sharing more train anecdotes and even buying a book or two at the station bookshop.

Or was it the free cake from the buffet that kept them there?

http://www.exquisitehandmadecakes.co.uk/

Chocolate vinilla

Related articles
  • On the Write Track (petercooperstellingtales.com)
  • Ilkley Literature Festival (likescameraactionblog.wordpress.com)

Walking Under Water

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by Peter Cooper in The Contexts of Writing

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Tags

Brunel Museum, Dickens, Inspector Bucket, Rotherhithe Tunnel, Stations

image

It would be nice to say I’ve been walking on water but enjoyable as the Stations book launch has been I (nor we) didn’t quite do that (well nearly)! No, but the Stations Book Express has certainly been steaming through the London Overground at a great pace and to be honest I’ve barely been holding on, Cherry Potts (editor at http://arachnepress.com/) stokes the engine so!  stationsBut I have done my bit to get up a head of steam at Clapham, at Shoreditch (http://shoreditchradio.co.uk/) and at Rotherhithe, shovelling extracts from my story Inspector Bucket Takes the Train with all the energy I could muster. Now, though,  I must climb out of the carriage and catch the train back to the frozen north.

brunelmuseumBut what a delight  the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe was: the readings, of course, with the lovely Stations authors, and the quaint (and unexpected) Turkish cafe with its charming hostess, and then the plunge into the shaft of the Rotherhithe tunnel itself, the entrance to what was once seen as the eighth wonder of the world (at least according to the museum guide, Robert Hulse). And we were amongst the first visitors the place had had for over 140 years! (To the air shaft I mean, not the museum!)

Of course all we can see right now is the doomy shaft itself, its echoing walls covered with the soot of thousands of steam train journeys, some in solid flakes like black crustaceans, its drab concrete floor (stopping us from tumbling onto the railway lines underneath us), huge bolted pipes and the outline of the wooden staircase that would have once led the Victorian visitor down to what essentially became an underwater shopping mall.  in 1843 the idea of walking under the water, with who knows how many tonnes of the Thames only a few feet above the ceiling, must have been, as our guide pointed out, “like walking on the moon”.

Thamestunnelshaft

The Brunels, father and son, were the first to successfully tunnel underneath a navigable river and developed the technique for all river and, I presume, channel tunneling that followed – and that we take so much for granted as we nip under the water on the Eurostar. Robert Hulse, the museum guide, pointed out, with almost ghoulish delight, that we were standing on the spot where six men died as the tunnel flooded and the men drowned in river sewage. One man who did survive was Marc Brunel’s son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. (How the history of engineering might have turned on that event. No Leviathan, Great Western Railway or Clifton Suspension Bridge then!)220px-IKBrunelChains

‘But what has all this to do with the contexts of writing?’ I hear myself ask. Well, Charles Dickens must surely have passed through the same shaft that I stood in for one thing!  In ‘Household Words‘, one of the many periodicals that Dickens founded and edited, the writer (perhaps Dickens himself) describes his sense of awe when:

“crossing the Thames by means of The Rotherhithe Tunnel… gasping for a breath of vital air… (feeling) a cold shudder run through (him)  as (he)  heard the drip of oozing water.”

Dickens, like Brunel the younger, was born in Portsmouth and admired the work of his  contemporary, citing the “great works of Brunel, Babbage and Stephenson” (again in ‘Household Words’) and telling us that “Mr Brunel is not a man whom we can afford to lose.” (We nearly did!)  It is perhaps Dickens too who describes Brunel’s Leviathan as “the floating marvel of the age”.

The tunnel was originally designed as a commercial proposition to create revenue by offering a route across the congested Thames for cargo traffic – but after the tunnel was dug there was no money left to build the shafts with the spiral ramps that horses and carts would use to ascend and descend. Instead the tunnels became a tourist attraction, a place where you walked under the water to the shops located in each of the cross-tunnel arches (as seen in the picture at the head of this blog) to buy and to be entertained.  Apparently on the opening day 50,000 people walked through paying a penny each and bought souvenirs from the shops in the arches to show how brave they were for shopping under water. Soon, however, it became a favoured haunt for prostitutes, and visitors found they could buy rather more than a souvenir.

As it happens, I have Polly Meakin, a character from my novel ‘Inspector Bucket and the Beast’ visiting Rotherhithe (though not, unfortunately, the tunnel.) book lauch(Available from dahliapublishing.co.uk, Amazon, via this provider, & Waterstones.com)

Bucket thinks that she may have been an accomplice of the Beast in his attempts to entrap young girls, but she insists she didn’t know who or what the Beast was and only helped him because she was desperate.

“The Bobbies shifted us on from Hyde Park as soon as they saw us. It’s always, ‘Move on! Move on!’, they said, but they never tells you where to move on to, does they? We went to Rotherhithe in the end, to try to get some factory work, soap boiling or candle making or some such. No hands wanted, we was told.”

If I had known about the Rotherhithe shaft and tunnel then (and of course I should have done!) I would certainly have used it in my novel, if not for Polly Meakin than perhaps the Beast himself. In another scene from the book I show Inspector Bucket searching the secret areas of a so-called Gentlemen’s club where prostitution and all manner of nefarious activities are going on. Perhaps I might have had the Beast frequenting the alcoves of the Rotherhithe tunnel as well as this ‘Hell Club’.

 “There were alcoves, and in each one a lascivious act was framed.  In front of this series of alcoves the voyeurs promenaded, sometimes pausing to view their favourite scene. No one accorded us attention as we passed along; nobody seemed to mind us nor be ashamed to be seen. Indeed, it was as if they were out for their Sunday stroll! Some of the voyeurs were serious in demeanour, as if they were connoisseurs of some fine art or sculpture, pointing out some special feature of the action displayed for them or commenting, without lewdness, on some item of physique. Some were laughing. Some sights were almost pretty. But most were cruel.”

Although there are plans afoot to reopen the shaft itself as a major entertainment attraction (there are already concerts and other entertainments held there) for the moment the only glimpse we can get of the tunnel is at the weekend when the tunnel’s lights are on, and if you alight at Wapping you can look back and see the lit panoply of what was once one of the marvels of the age.

Inspector Bucket Takes the Train

13 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by Peter Cooper in The Contexts of Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Dickens, Inspector Bucket, Staplehurst disaster, Stations, Trains

With Arachne Press due to publish its Stations Anthology (arachnepress.com/books/stations) wherein dear old Inspector Bucket has another outing in my story Inspector Bucket Takes the Train (dealing with devious thieves on the Highbury and Islington line) it’s time to blog about trains and their place in Dickens’ writing!

So what did Dickens think about the train?

Despite the fact that the railway age had started in 1830 (when he was already 18) it might seem that Dickens, like my version of his character Inspector Bucket in Inspector Bucket Takes the Train and Inspector Bucket and the Beast, had no time for the train. Perhaps he too might have

“preferred to see the streets and the alleys and courts of London as he rode along – not just the backside of factories.”

In the popular imagination Dickens is probably mostly associated with the coaching age, the era of the horse and carriage and of coaching Inns. And with good reason.

Dickens’ first novel, ‘Pickwick Papers'(1836/7), is, of course, about the very business of ‘coaching’, describing the Pickwick Club’s adventures as its members journey through Regency England, just prior to the railway age. Though serious themes are dealt with and though some encounters with coaches and coachmen are sometimes angry ones, the associations linked with the idea of coaching are invariably to do with being “hearty” and “easy” , and of rolling “swiftly past fields and orchards”. Despite some of the novel’s darker elements its tone might be summed up in this description:

“The coach was waiting, the horses were fresh, the roads were good and the driver was willing.”

Similarly, In 1840, when Dickens began ‘The Old curiosity Shop’, although both London Bridge and Euston Railway Station had been open for nearly four years, Dickens was still enveloped in nostalgia for the old coaching days:

             “What a soothing, luxurious, drowsy way of travelling (it is) to lie inside that slowly-moving mountain, listening to the tinkling of the horses’ bells…”

The sleepy lyricism of this contrasts with an early description of a railway engine from ‘Pickwick Papers’ (1836), treating the train as an object of comic ridicule:

“a nasty, wheezin’, creakin’, gaspin’, puffin’, bustin’ monster, alvays out o’ breath, like a unpleasant beetle … alvays a pourin’ out red-hot coals at night, and black smoke in the day…”

Curiously, apart from this reference, the train seems to play little or no part in any of Dickens’ first five novels. In ‘Martin Chuzlewhit’ (1843), the sixth,it appears at last, (though in an American incarnation) transformed from something whimsically comical into something much more agonised, with an

“… engine (that) yells as if it were lashed and tortured …and (that) writhed in agony.”

Clearly some of Dickens’ later novels though written in the railway age are set before it – whether it be the horrors of the French Revolution, as seen in ‘A Tale of Two Cities'(1859) or in the nostalgia of Great Expectations, begun in 1860 but clearly about a world mostly stuck between 1812 and 1830. But those novels that are set in a contemporary world see the train as something destructive or presaging  something hopeless or catastrophic.

In Dombey and Son (1846-8), for instance, the building of the railway is described as “an earthquake” which “rent the neighbourhood to its centre.” It is compared to “the track of the remorseless monster, Death!” But it is also seen as an an agent of avenging justice when the novel’s villain James Carker is run over by a train and “mutilated” so that his split blood has to be “soaked up by a train of ashes”. In ‘Our Mutual Friend'(1864/5) a train “shot across the river, bursting over the quiet surface like a bomb shell.” Here we have the continued metaphor of the railway age as despoiler of the natural world but Dickens also seems to imagine the railway as a metaphor for a despoiled society – as in ‘Bleak House’ ((1852/3) where, because of the railway, “everything looks chaotic and abandoned in full hopelessness“. In ‘Hard Times'(1854) the metaphor is extended to despoiled or diseased human beings, where the arrival of a train gives rise to “the seizure of the station with a fit of trembling, gradually deepening to a complaint of the heart…”

Although Dickens’ final (unfinished) novel, ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood'(1870), is written at a time when most of the major Victorian railway stations were already built and the railway age was in full bloom, Dickens chooses to return to the nostalgia of his almost railway-less youth in Rochester, where, significantly, the railway station in imaginary Cloisterham is “unfinished and undeveloped”. In fact, we are told, “… the trains don’t think Cloisterham worth stopping at.” Actually, Dickens had bought his childhood dream house in Gad’s Hill, Highham, Rochester, (the model for Cloisterham) in 1857, using it as his country retreat and dying there in 1870. It is inconceivable that the endlessly moving, the endlessly travelling, Dickens would ever have lived in Higham at all if there hadn’t been a railway station with a good connection to London, what ever he may have felt about the railway in other ways. Indeed, in her biography of Dickens (Charles Dickens – A life), Clare Tomalin speculates that on the very day he died Dickens may have taken the train (and cab) from Higham Station (a mile from his house in Gad’s place) to Peckham in South London where he regularly paid the housekeeping for his lover Nelly Ternan.

It was Nelly Ternan, too, who was with Dickens on the day of the Staplehurst train disaster, the 9th of June 1865, when the train to Charing Cross hit a bridge and fell into the river below. Ten people died and fifty were injured. Dickens almost lost the manuscript of his last completed novel, ‘Our Mutual Friend’. Dickens famously went to help his fellow passengers with, according to Clare Tomlinson, “his brandy flask and his comforting and practical presence.” But he made sure that his lover, despite injuries to her arm and neck was, according to Tomalin again, “discreetly and hastily removed from the scene before anyone could become aware that (she) had been travelling with Dickens.” Clearly Dickens was, unsurprisingly, “shaken” by this experience and we are told, in a remembrance of him by one of his sons, that “.. sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt…he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands.”

Although there is much in both his life and work advocating the railway for its economic and practical advantages, as well as demonstrating the  pleasure to be found in train travel itself (as in his journalistic piece ‘Flight, 1851), in his novels and some of his shorter fiction (such as ‘Mugby Junction’  and ‘The Signalman’, both 1866) the railway remains an issue of anxiety and an image of foreboding darkness.

The final irony is that Dickens died on the fifth anniversary of the Staplehurst disaster and that his final, funereal journey from Higham to London and Westminster Abbey was, of course, via Charing Cross Railway Station – by train.

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