Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

We were traveling in a deep railway gully, veering away from Clapham Junction, and from the train I got a glimpse of a cinema I had gone to until it became a bingo hall, the church that was turned into a day-care center, and beyond the common the Alfarthing Primary School, where my kids, all pale faces and skinny legs, were taught to sing by Mrs. Quarmby. These were streets I knew well: one where my bike was stolen, another where my car was broken into; greengrocers and butcher shops where I'd shopped; the chippie, the florist, the Chinese grocer; the newsagent, an Indian from Mwanza who liked speaking Swahili with me because he missed the shores of Lake Victoria; the Fishmonger's Arms—known as the Fish—an Irish pub where refugees from Ulster swore obscenely at the TV whenever they saw Prince Charles on it, and laughed like morons the day Lord Mountbatten was blown up by the IRA, and where, every evening, I drank a pint of Guinness and read the Evening Standard; this very place.

From scenes like these I had made my London life. In those days I prayed for rain, because it kept me indoors—writing weather. So much of what I saw today was familiar and yet not the same—the usual formula for a dream. I looked closer. The trees were bare under the gray tattered clouds, and most of the buildings were unchanged, but London was younger, more prosperous. This district that had been semi-derelict when I moved here—empty houses, squatters, a few aging holdouts—had become gentrified. The Chinese grocer's was now a wine shop, and one of the pubs a bistro, and the fish-and-chip shop was a sushi bar.

But the wonderful thing was that I was whisked through south London with such efficiency, I was spared the deeper pain of looking closely at the past. I was snaking through tunnels and across viaducts and railway cuttings, looking left and right at the landscapes of my personal history and, happily, moving on, to other places that held no ambiguous memories. Don't dwell on it,

the English say with their hatred of complaint. Mustn't grumble. Stop brooding. It may never happen.

I loved the speed of this train and the knowledge that it wasn't stopping anywhere but just making a beeline to the coast, past Penge, Beckenham, Bromley—the edge of the London map and the old grumpy-looking bungalows I associated with novels of the outer suburbs, the fiction of twitching curtains, low spirits, and anxious families, especially Kipps

and Mr. Beluncle, by the Bromleyites H. G. Wells and V. S. Pritchett, who escaped and lived to write about it.

In the satisfying shelf of English literature concerned with what we see from trains, the poems with the lines "O fat white woman whom nobody loves" and "Yes, I remember Adlestrop" stand out, and so do the trains that run up and down the pages of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. But the description that best captures the English railway experience for me is Ford Madox Ford's in his evocation of the city, his first successful book, The Soul of London,

published a hundred years ago. Looking out the train window, Ford speaks of how the relative silence of sitting on a train and looking into the busy muted world outside invites melancholy. "One is behind glass as if one were gazing into the hush of a museum; one hears no street cries, no children's calls." And his keenest observation, which was to hold true for me from London to Tokyo: "One sees, too, so many little bits of uncompleted life."

He noted a bus near a church, a ragged child, a blue policeman. I saw a man on a bike, a woman alighting from a bus, schoolchildren kicking a ball, a young mother pushing a pram. And, as this was a panorama of London back gardens, a man digging, a woman hanging laundry, a workman—or was he a burglar?—setting a ladder against a window. And "the constant succession of much smaller happenings that one sees, and that one never sees completed, gives to looking out of train win dows a touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction. It is akin to the sentiment ingrained in humanity of liking a story to have an end."

"Little bits of uncompleted life"—what the traveler habitually sees—inspire pathos and poetry, as well as the maddening sense of being an outsider, jumping to conclusions and generalizing, inventing or recreating places from vagrant glimpses.

It was only twenty minutes from soot-crusted Waterloo to its opposite, the open farmland of Kent, many of the fields already raked by a harrow, plowed and awaiting planting in this first week of March.

"Will you be having wine with your lunch?"

A woman in a blue uniform brought me a bottle of Les Jamelles Chardonnay Vin de Pays d'Oc 2004, praised on the menu for its "subtle vanilla from the oak and a buttery finish."