One of my favourite Christmas memories is of a very different sort of Christmas that was spent far away from home . . .
We were called ‘Bogiewallahs’ – travellers in a converted Indian railway carriage or ‘Bogie’.
This Bogie was organized by Butterfields Railway Tours, run by a dauntless Yorkshireman called Ashley Butterfield. Over the Christmas of 1979, Ashley was to have time off. I worked as an assistant to a deputy leader for a five-week tour, living in ‘the Bogie’, as it was fondly known. By arrangement with Indian Railways the Bogie was coupled to trains following a route round India and had room for about thirty passengers.
The only thing that distinguished it from all the other umber-coloured railway carriages was a small poster on the side. One common feature of life lived on the railway was going along to the loos and returning to find that the engines in the yard – many still steam in those days – had been shunting (again). You had to search, dodging across the shunting-yard tracks, to find out where the Bogie had got to this time!
Every aspect of life was an adventure. We cooked in a tiny kitchen in the middle of the carriage, on four fire buckets set into a clay surround on the floor. As well as the business of lighting the coals in the buckets (sometimes hanging out of the door of a moving train to get a breeze to them), the huge cooking pans had no handles but were lifted by a lip at the edge. Shifting these about on a moving train was dangerous, to say the least – but is what cooks have been doing on Indian trains for years, just as all food was prepared while squatting on the floor.
We spent Christmas Day in Cochin in Kerala. Cochin is a port, a place of spice warehouses, famous for its beautiful fishing nets hanging like graceful moths from bamboos all along the sea-front. Lunchtime was for rest, plenty of chat and jokes and curry. We celebrated with the passengers at a restaurant in the town. But on Christmas night we were scheduled to move on north, travelling overnight.
It was a very hot evening and all of us were warmed inwardly by a good spicy meal. The food schedule for the tour had to be followed, however: supper was to be pea and ham soup. Obediently we filled the fire buckets from the coal bunker in the kitchen and set to on the soup. As we cooked, the train eased into motion and we were soon thrumming along through the suburbs. What with the heat outside and the fires inside, the cutlery in the kitchen ‘was soon too hot to touch! Sweed poured off us. The passengers peeped in sympathetically.
‘We don’t really need soup,’ they said. ‘We had such a good lunch.’
‘Too late!’ we said with moist cheeriness.
At last the unnecessary meal was over and done with, and with the carriage doors open, most of us relaxed, chatting, on the floor. We breathed in the soft night air as our engine pulled us onwards into Boxing Day and to a new destination. No presents, no tree or streamers – but it was a wonderful Christmas.