When I was sixteen I left school and spent two years commuting to a College of Further Education to study A levels. The college was in Tonbridge, a town in Kent, England. To get there I had to catch two buses to get to Staplehurst Station to catch a train to Tonbridge. That was my first experience of commuting by train; a step out into the wider world and I was all eyes and ears.
In those days, the old British Rail trains had door handles that could be opened from the outside - the outside only, in fact, and they were not locked. So it was possible for an agile commuter to deftly open a door and hop on just as the train was pulling off. When the train arrived at a station, to get off you would have to push down the window, stick your arm out and open the door from the outside, then hop off the train. Some would do that before the train had come to a halt just for the hell of it. One of the sounds that I associate with those days is the sound of slamming train doors. The commuters would slam them shut as they got on, or if not them, then the guard would walk along the outside of the train slamming the doors in succession.
Ah, the good old days!
This morning I was going through my old stuff and came across two notebooks that I kept in those days, and I spent a cheerful few minutes going through them. The first entry I came across was also my favourite, a malicious short story about one of the London-bound city types who my teenage-self so despised; especially the corpulent ones. My skinny-self utterly despised the corpulent ones.
And so I offer it to you, as it was punctuated and written, spelling mistakes and all. (I was not an attentive or careful speller of words. That sort of thing was for dullards.)
The notebook in which I wrote the story lost its cover long ago.
Fat Man at the Station
Fat Man parks his car in a vacant space between two other vehicles. His car is similar to every other in the car park in that it is totaly [sic], but not quite, different to each of them, just as each is totaly [sic], but not quite different to every other.
Fat Man struggles to extricate himself from his car. He can only half open the door, since the car next to his is too close.
Grubby, the train pulls in a minute early.
Fat Man is out of his car, wedged between the two, executive case in one hand, door in the other.
Slamming the door shut, Fat Man tries to hurry to the train. His wind-tossled head jerks backwards. He drops his case and totters, trying to keep his balance.
Shirt now untucked, he opens the car door and removes his tie.
With tie askew and boasting a shining band of grime, he picks up his now dented case, hurriedly closes it, leaving once neat documents half exposed around the edges for the drizzle to spatter.
Fat Man slides out of the space between the two cars, giving each a nicely polished band along the wing, and himself a dirty front and rear.
From my new position inside the train, now beginning to pull off I see Fat Man rush through the platform gate, briefcase under arm, tie over arm. He grasps at a door but has to let go.
The train speeds up. As Fat Man passes my compartment, I give him a cheerful wave.
Out of My Brain On The 5:15
That was the same year that the film Quadrophenia came out. Although I was never "out of my brain on the train" - at least, not going up to Tonbridge in the morning - and didn't travel first class as Jimmy Cooper did, it is "5:15" that always springs to mind when I recall the "good old days" of British Rail!
Cheers!