Sometime in 2005
On a train to Brighton from Victoria, I don’t know if this was even 2005 as the entry is undated. It was not long before the old slam-door trains were replaced. Whenever I was travelling at night I would stand for the journey, in the vestibule between the carriages, I would open the window because you could. Not just a small window, the full window in the door slid down. An opening large enough for an adult to climb out of. Often the lightbulb in the corridor went out, leaving that piece of corridor completely dark, your eyes adjusted and the nighttime landscape came alive. It was after a journey like this I wrote the following.
London – judders – feels like it’s barely on the rails and about to shake off its panels and parts.
PRESS AND PULL DOWN TO OPEN; My hair flying wildly as I give away my secret self, aeroplanes in a queue over London – slicing through cloud, sending cones of light out on the mist in front of them.
Orion rising, the air chill and clear, the red beacons on the black spiders’s web lattice of the Crystal Palace transmitter tower.
A beautiful night in London. Then an onrush, a push, a galloping roaring clattering careen between and under the Downs.
Flaring arcs of electric light, hurting my eyes and making the branches of trees appear, for a second, like giant dendritres pure white against the dark. The clustered, crowding rooftops. Aeroplanes at high altitude flicker as they move through the darkness.
We pass, crashing at breakneck speed, through Gatwick. I’ve got the window down. Damp smells, rushing air, Victorian brick work lines the navvy built tunnels where the smell changes and the chill becomes an emotion.
These trains are manky and soon they’ll be gone for boxes of air- conditioned restraint where you can’t open the windows. Woodsmoke. Another train smashes past on the up-line and there is such a sudden concussion of air I’m amazed the shockwave doesn’t derail us.
A fingernail clipping moon hangs over Haywards Heath. Cigarette smoke and then a young guy with a silly swagger and stinking of booze steals my spot by the window. He gets bored after five minutes and goes away. By Wivelsfield the smell of woodsmoke on the night air was almost like a solid object.
The passing of something so life-affirming is sad. A solo and perfectly dressed woman gets off at Burgess Hill and clop clops along the platform, the night air blankets the sound of her shoes.
The sharp ’ding-ding’ of conductor to driver has a colour of cold steel. We skim across more rooftops, this time of Hassocks.
Through the winter dark, and onto home, a warm bed waiting.
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