OUR lack of interest in kinsfolk and acquaintance in London was more than balanced by our enthusiasm for our relations in Cornwall.
Mother’s family was not only numerous and well-to-do, but intelligent and jolly. Hardly a year passed but some of us paid them a visit, and occasionally it was all of us. Among, then, the bits of luck in my childhood must be included this plunge from London to the depth of the country.
To us children an important element in this piece of luck was the journey of three hundred miles that it involved. Our parents must have thought otherwise. Had they not been peculiarly care-free by disposition they would never have embarked on the adventure of taking five children all that way in a train of the ’seventies. Coaching days were doubtless bad, but there were inns on the way.
We used to go to bed earlier the day before, not so much to please mother as to bring tomorrow a bit sooner. We got up long before it was necessary, impeding all the sandwich-making and hard-boiling of eggs that was going on. But eat a good breakfast we could not, being ‘journey-proud’, as our old cook used to express our excited state. Meanwhile the luggage was being assembled in the hall, having its last touches of cording and labels. For weeks I had been packing in my bedroom, and once I presented five large cardboard boxes, wobbly with various belongings. My father ran upstairs to inspect them, and solemnly looking at them said, ‘Now, Molly, which of these is really the most important?’ Charmed by his businesslike manner and by the word ‘important’, I gladly pointed to one, and consented to leave the others behind.
The next crisis was the fetching of a cab. At 7 o’clock in the morning there was no certainty of getting one quickly, and we kept rushing to the window until someone shouted, ‘Here it comes.’ If you saw that cab today your anxiety would be as to whether it could possibly stay the course to Paddington. The few ‘growlers’ still to be seen in the London streets are royal coaches compared with those of the ’seventies. They were like the omnibuses, with the same dingy blue velvet, only much dirtier, and as they were used for taking people to hospitals my father used to call them ‘damned fever-boxes’. To us children, no Cinderella’s fairy-carriage could have been handsomer than the cab actually at the door. If we were all going my father and the elder boys had to follow in a second cab. Luggage was piled on the top, and we were packed in among rugs, umbrellas, and hand-bags. At last the cabby climbed up to his seat and whipped up the horse. It took an hour or more to jog along from Canonbury to Paddington, but we did reach the enchanted spot at last.
The train was scheduled to start at 9 a.m. and to arrive at Camborne at 9 p.m. This was before the days of the Flying Dutchman, not to mention the Cornishman and the Riviera Express. Even when the Flying Dutchman was begun it had no third class, and was too expensive for the whole family. Luncheon-baskets had not been invented, neither was it possible to reserve seats. In order, therefore, to travel all together in one compartment we had to arrive more than half an hour before the train was to start. There was then the suspense of waiting for it to come in, and my fear that we might not be on the right platform or that the Great Western had forgotten all about it. My father meanwhile was taking the tickets and having the luggage labelled. Never did he hasten his steps or hurry, no matter what the emergency, so that there was the additional fear that he would miss the train. When at last we were all safely in a carriage, he would saunter off to buy a paper, and other people were coming in.
In time everything was settled and we were gliding out, ‘with our faces towards Cornwall’, as mother used to say. Very little of the view from the windows escaped us, and I was privileged to ‘kneel up’ and report the latest news to the company. No sooner had we fairly left London behind, were gathering speed, and had sated ourselves with fields and hedges for a while, than we began to survey our fellow passengers and make friends with them. In the old broad-gauge carriages there were usually six a side, and much courtesy was needed for a long run when there was no escape from one another. Our parents took care to found a family tradition of being good travellers, which was understood to mean that we must not be a nuisance to other people, by crowding the window, talking loudly, moving about, eating before the appointed time (and perhaps being ill)…and the evil-doings of children who began to eat sweets before Reading were pointed out.
Where we came out strong in the carriage company at large was in our superior familiarity with the route. We knew all the points of interest to be looked out for. ‘We are going to Cornwall.’ ‘We always go there,’ ‘We’ll show you when it comes.’ By such delicate expressions of superiority we managed to conceal our contempt for the poor creatures who ‘were only going to Bristol’, or some degraded person who had to ‘change at Didcot’. What we most liked was a grown-up, preferably a man, who was a complete stranger to the line. A kindly clergyman would listen with apparent fervour to our informative talk about Brunei and the viaducts, or be shown the ‘very place that Turner took for his “Rain, Steam and Speed”’. We knew the exact point to get a view of Windsor Castle, and showed it as if it were our own.
Reading, the first stop, was great fun for those on the near side. What more cheering than to see distracted people looking for seats when we were definitely full up? If we had a vacant seat at any stop Charles would suggest that I should be pushed forward, for any one on seeing me, he maintained, would try farther on. Or he would ejaculate, as any one was about to come in, ‘No one would think that Barnholt was recovering from measles!’ We talk of the confusion of a modern station, but it is orderly peace compared to the rushing about and shouting of those days. The wonder is that we ever moved on again. And yet we didn’t dare to leave the carriage, because at any moment the guard might decide that he had had enough.
Didcot had one definite pleasure. We knew that little boys would be going up and down the platform singing out, ‘Banbury cakes! Banbury cakes!’ And mother would crane out and buy some, just to encourage the crew.
Next came Swindon—name of sweet assurance. How often mother used to say, ‘They can’t leave Swindon under ten minutes, no matter how late we are.’ Considering our early breakfast, or lack of it, the refreshment-room at Swindon was a land of Canaan, and the hot soup all round is still a joyful memory. So hot it was that Dym launched a theory that it was hoped some would be left to serve up for the next train. Those ever-memorable ten minutes were no doubt entirely for the gain of the restaurant and entirely to the detriment of the Great Western, but they were sheer life-savers to long-distance travellers. In later years the railway had to compensate the restaurant for doing away with those ten minutes, to the tune of £50,000. Perhaps a little remorseful, the restaurant proprietors presented a silver model engine to Swindon, to commemorate the transaction, and the little model is known to the railwaymen as ‘the £50,000 engine’.
Thus refreshed we were all agog for our next excitement—the Box Tunnel. The railway cuttings grew higher and higher, and at last we rushed with a piercing whistle into the total darkness of ‘the longest tunnel in the world’. The oil lamps, and later the gas lamps, were let down from above with much labour only at dusk. There was no thought of lighting up for a tunnel. Old ladies may have been afraid of robbery and murder, but it was a great feature of the day’s entertainment to us. By a prearranged plan the boys and I rose stealthily and felt our way into one another’s places. When the train emerged into the light the elders sustained a turn, or handsomely pretended that they did.
The charm of Bristol was its appearance of being a half-way house. Not that it was so by any means, but it was the elbow-joint in the journey. The muddle and rush were greater even than at Reading, and we were often kept there for some twenty minutes. Yet we dared not leave the carriage for more than a mere leg-stretch just outside the door. I sucked much pleasure from hanging out at the off-side window, to watch the man tapping the wheels and applying the yellow stuff from his box. Thus I understood what my father meant by calling London butter ‘train-oil’.
Some of our company usually left the train at Bristol, so that we had the carriage more or less to ourselves, and could move about more freely. This was specially desirable because there was soon to come a magic moment when a glimpse of the sea was possible, just for the short time when Bridgwater Bay was visible on our right. Then we bowled along the warm sleepy countryside of Somerset, with no excitements beyond fields and cows and tiny villages, mile after mile. This was the strategic point that mother chose for unveiling dinner. A bulging basket had long been eyed as it sat in the rack. Restaurant cars are boons, and luncheon-baskets have their merry surprises, but for food as a species of rapture nothing compares with sandwiches, eggs, pasties, and turnovers, doled out one by one from napkins, when the supply is severely limited. Oranges in summer were unknown then, as well as all the foreign apples and other fruit to be had in London today. We had to slake our thirst with acid-drops and a tiny ration of lemonade. If by any chance a fellow passenger remained we always managed to do some little barter of biscuits or sweets, because strange food is even more pleasant than one’s own.
We used to hail Exeter as being ‘almost there’, for it was in Devon, actually the next county to Cornwall, and definitely ‘west’. A quiet dignity pervaded its saintly stations, but we could never stay long because of course we were late. A train in those days was never ‘on time’. After Exeter we were all keyed up for the greatest treat of the journey. I have travelled in many show places of Europe and America, but have never been along a piece of line to equal the run from Exeter to Teignmouth. We children were not stirred as mother was by the beauties of the estuary and the opposite shore. What we looked out for were the waders carrying on some mysterious hunt in the water, and two pleasure-boats, shaped like some kind of water-fowl, and called the Swan and Cygnet. I never dreamt but what they were real birds.
Then, with a magnificent gesture, the Great Western swept us to the sea-side, indeed almost into the sea. Mother remembered a day when the waves had washed into the carriage. The bare possibility of such a thing made this part of the run something of an adventure, and we almost hoped it would happen again.
The sun was always shining at Dawlish, and there was the sea all spread out in dazzling blue. And as if the train knew how to enhance the effect, it would roll in and out of short tunnels in the ‘rouge’, or red sandstone of Devon. Each time it emerged the sea looked bluer and the rocks more fantastic in shape. However beautiful the inland scenery might be, it seemed dull after this, and after Teignmouth we usually fell asleep. I remember being laid out at length with my head on mother’s lap, and the rest being a blank till the glad sound of ‘Here’s Plymouth’ woke me.
By now it was late afternoon, and you would suppose that here at last would be some chance of tea and a wash in comfort. Ah no! The London train didn’t care about Cornwall, there were no through carriages arranged for long-distance people, and we had to change into a local affair, with hard wooden seats, and patronized by a succession of market people with large bundles. By the time we had found this train, seen the luggage shifted, carried along our small parcels, and settled into our seats, there was no time to do more than buy a bag of buns. They had not thought then of allowing people to carry cups of tea into the carriage with them.
In all this confusion I had time to notice that we were coming out of Millbay the same way that we had gone in. It was a sort of terminus, apparently, and very mysterious, because I was assured that we were not going back to London. I asked my father what became of the engine that had brought us from London. How did it get out so as to pull the train away again? He explained very carefully how it was lowered into an underground passage, run along under the train, and then hauled up again at the other end. This seemed to me no more peculiar than most things.
Shipping on the Hamoaze amused us mightily enough until we reached the climax of our journey—the Albert Bridge. We were leaving ‘England’ behind and were in the enchanted land of Cornwall at last. We greeted the tiny whitewashed cottages of the ‘natives’ with far greater fervour than we had shown over Windsor Castle. We vied with one another in trying to remember the order in which the stations came. We stopped at all of them. And when I say stopped I mean stopped. There was none of the hurry of Reading or Bristol. We leant out to catch the accents of the porter, proclaiming his piece in the soft west-country drawl. We watched all the greetings and partings and waving of hands of the travellers…. Then would descend that peculiar silence of a country station that signifies that everyone is settled, and the guard feels that it is safe to let the train start again.
If a sun-bonneted market woman got in with us mother could never resist talking to her, and answering the invariable Cornish question ‘Wheer be ’ee goin’?’ Then would follow the astonished ‘From Lunnon, are ’ee? Aw, my deer!’
And now it was growing dusk, and the familiar tin-mine buildings were silhouetted against the sky, and generally darkness had descended before we ran into Camborne more than an hour late. We had become indescribably dirty and tired and hungry. But our reception atoned for all. Countless uncles and aunts and cousins were crowding the platform, and as we got out every one was exclaiming ‘Here they are!’ We children were the heroes and the spoilt darlings of the hour. We were bundled into waiting carriages and driven to a royal spread. On one such occasion I remember my cousin Edgar running all the mile and a half by the side of the carriage in the dark, giving us a whoop of joy when a gate into a lane had to be opened for us to pass.