Travel, Trains and Teeny-Tiny (Uni) Towns

Travel, Trains and Teeny-Tiny Towns

A Rather Long Post About How A Book Made Me Realise I Love Trains, Visiting Small Towns And Referencing The Thirteenth King Who Can Time Travel. 

Settle in for this one. Make yourself comfortable. Set the scene - with a girl dressed for winter on your average East Coast Train, crappy biro in her hand and a little notebook full of incomplete anagram circles. 

The last few weeks I feel like I started to explore this lovely land I call home. I've been hopping on and off trains: to St Andrews, Glasgow, Durham - and realised how much I enjoy it. Similarly, I've also begun to noticed that those teeny-tiny towns (or itty-bitty-city in the case of Durham) have a delicious appeal. A fortnight past, I stepped off at Leuchars having meandered down the coast from Edinburgh, thrilled to visit Charlie and his incredibly wee kittens. Yesterday, I jumped out of the carriage onto the platform and gazed down the lush verdant hill across to Durham's Cathedral before, with a grin and the sun on my face, ambling into town. Both Saturdays were glorious. Bursting sunshine winked down from the sky with a bright, cold eye and the buzz of being somewhere new made me shiver with delight. There I stood, in the role of stranger, ready to see someone else's haunts and havens. 

As I mentioned, Charlie met me at the bus stop when I popped up to St Andrews but when I went to Durham it was to see my sister settled into her new room in Hatfield College's Rectory, so in this latter case I was meeting my family. Now, both of these places are home to world-renowned universities, hugely successful and prestigious colleges for some of the best and brightest students. Both are also ancient - buildings in both areas range from the medieval to Norman, histories going back even further. In terms of universities, St Andrews is much older, but that hardly detracts from how we should view Durham. Town and university merge in their respective centres and the both have that slightly odd feeling of locals vs students. 

But now, having been at Carolina for a year, I don't look at either place with the scorn or derision that used to curl my lips at the mention of small university campuses. Muttering judgementally, I'd make comments like 'they're just like school', or 'they're too bubble-like and insular' or 'they're full of the same people' - I imagined everyone decked out in Jack Wills and signing off (as one girl actually did on my sister's facebook) "#Durham #YAH". Well, I think I can safely say that I am an idiot and am very glad that UNC has opened my eyes. Squirrel.

It meant that whilst wandering in my happy daze alongside the nattering Mr Wild, I could laugh at myself, face to the bitter sea breeze and love that in that place and that time I seemed part of one of the most beautiful places in Britain. It meant that looking round Durham yesterday, twisting and turning through its higgledy-piggledy streets, I had to fight the urge to break off from my rag-tag family and go explore all the curious nooks and crannies. Yes, I think I'd be restless in any town as small as these two and I think I'd be mad if I had spent four years at either one straight after Haileybury. But I can see why my sister fell in love with the Cathedral and Castle. And I think there's a certain appeal in the small everyone-knowing-everyone atmosphere. Driving into her college today, we were clapped and cheered through the gates and the excitement of starting university somewhere like that was infectious. And you know... those 'Sylvia Plath cliffs' beneath crumbling stones that Alice described to me years ago... they're rather wonderful too... and I can't deny that living by the sea has enormous charm.

There's a couple more things to mention. 

Returning home from Durham, my pen finds itself in my hand. I finally finished a book I've been dipping in and out of over the last couple of weeks. It's an Ian McEwan novella - although it reads a lot like a collection of short stories (and there's something about them that makes me read it in the voice of that time-travelling master of the universe) - and it's called The Daydreamer. Vivid, fantastic and written with such insight to the way the dreaming, wondering, wonderful mind works, I sat for the remainder of the journey in a nostalgic, whimsical stupor, watching the dull green fields fly by beneath curling wisps of cloud and rain. 

In the aftermath of McEwan's words, I'm remembering things. The final chapter, 'The Grown Up', whisks me back to days down in Dorset when The Houseboat Gang raced the tide in,  building our castles higher and higher and moats deeper and deeper into dark wet sand, mornings spent splattering down the beach from Bounty to Sea Shanty and evenings wriggling sandy feet into sleeping bags. We would spring down the shoreline, nimble, weightless, flying through the dunes, making up games that would make any writer envious of all their miraculous storylines. There's a paragraph when he writes about how: 

'the sun sank... and the families gathered in one of the gardens for a barbecue. After they had eaten, the grownups would be far too content with their drinks and endless stories to set about putting the children to bed, and this was when The Beach Gang would drift away into the smooth calm of dusk, back to all their favourite daytime places. Except now there was the mystery of darkness and strange shadows, and the cooling sand beneath their feet, and the delicious feeling as they ran about in their games that they were playing on borrowed time. It was way past bedtime, and the children knew that sooner or later the grown-ups would stir themselves out of conversations and the names would ring out in the night air -' 

(McEwan, Daydreamer, 128-9)

As I read it I was back on Bramblebush Bay, barely aware of the echoing chink of the chain ferry down the beach, covered in white and black sand with Vicky, George, Rollo, Tom, Rosie and everyone else. It was our names on the end of the sentence. Every story has that wonderful allure, that assessment that's so perfect and evocative. Things like the 'Useful-Things Draw' (aka. the family-man-draw) that's inevitably full of junk like the tops of bottles, too short string and plain old peculiar 'stuff'. Or the contrast between a cat's morning and ours. 

The Houseboat Gang
Ludo, Rollo, George, Tom, Georgie, Rosie, Vicky and Me

At about this point, I realise I have a good couple hours left on the train and my face is twisted in a nonsensical smile that I'm sure made the boy sitting opposite me a little nervous. I also realise, watching the world disappear along the track, that I really enjoy travelling by train. That sentence could be followed by one that takes you back to the beginning of this post, back to Durham and the girl curled up on a train. What I failed to mention is the bubbling enthusiasm and sense of adventure that I've begun to identify in the last couple journeys. Standing on the platform, the time ticking down and the train about to approach - there's something in the anticipation. With a train, its rattle promises adventure. There's a hint of new places, new faces, new things to discover and explore and of course there's a little bit of risk too. Will you actually find your way to the right end of the line? Will the train take you where you want? Have you hopped on the right one? Who will you sit with? Who will you meet? You can meet anyone on a train and there's that feeling of infinite possibility... the same feeling I often have when crossing the Meadows, knowing you could bump into brilliance.

 So that's the last thing I really wanted to mention - how brilliant I've realised trains are. That's it. I won't write anymore. 

Je serai poète et toi poésie, 
SCRIBBLER

Birth of a Blog

So I went to Dorset, down to the 'lonely sea and the sky' that I spent all my summers growing up. It was just me and dad, on the worst driving day I think you can have without there being a typhoon, heading through the quarries and the heathland of the New Forest towards Poole Harbour and the houseboat. We'd donned our longest wellington boots and layer upon layer of tatty clothes and then finally wrapped ourselves up in oversized Cuba Sails jackets that rustled around us in the steady wind.


I didn't want to go to Dorset, I was quite sullen on the way down (although I cheered up with a Simply British cocktail - ahhhhh Hendricks) and was relieved when, much to both our surprise, we saw shadows waving at us from Sea Snail.


That sentence probably makes very little sense to someone who doesn't know what the houseboats are... Well you see: over the ferry in Bramble Bay (that's where we - the houseboaters - all like to stay) there were seven houseboats all in a line, stretching from White Wings to Caroline. Now there are six because Dawn broke apart and the owners tried to replace her with a river boat but that was an epic fail as soon as the weather turned bad. So now there are six houseboats all in a line, stretching from White Wings to Sea Shanty. We're all lined up along the beach, four floating and two fixed (Kleco and Sea Shanty) and we're all slightly different. Our boat, Bounty, was originally a Life Boat, launched in the 1890s and savign 57 lives in her time. When she was 'retired' she was bought by a family who turned her into her new form - the houseboat. She's lovely, an old wooden girl with a smiling red stripe around her middle and a white 'box' on the top. My parents bought her and did her up nearly 25 years ago now when they saw that she was off the water and in a sorry state.


I think I have a photo somewhere. Let's see.... Well if I find one I'll stick it up asap. I know I have some down stairs that I can add. AH HA!! Actually I just stalked my brother's facebook and found this!!

This is Bounty, lovely thing that she is. Unfortunately I couldn't find a colour one because EVERYTHING he took seems to be in black and white or sepia. But you get the picture.


Anyway, so that is where this begins. In the cool grey seas of Poole Harbour. Now to introduce some key characters. The waving shadows from Sea Snail were Terry Fisher, travel writer and an original houseboater from when my dad and his family used to holiday down there as kids, and her two trickster sons George and Timmy. The two boys, with their skinny knees and and sandy feet are both cheeky wee things - the eldest George is a keen sailor with that amazing gumption that seems to be so crucial to naturals like him and my sister Vicky, they lack fear and I bet he goes down a ski slope with that same fearlessness. His little brother, Timmy, likes to simply paddle - and by that I mean he likes to sit on the full-sized surfboard and use a spade to push himself through the chilly waves. A little further down the beach lies White Wings, on our arrival occupied by Jonathon and Maria. They have three children now: Sophia, David and Simon. Simon's two and very sweet with blond hair and blue eyes and so pale like his dad where as the other two are more like Maria with sandy skin and honey hair. Jono, like Terry, was one of the original houseboaters and he and dad were always very close as young sailors on the big blue wet thing. And my god the stories the three of them have behind them.


I wonder if there are any photos of the three of them.


This blog, strange as it, starts with them. There's no electricity down there, just wind generators on the roof to power the meagre lighting that we figured was a tad safer than the original gas lamps (wooden boat... gas... hmmm?) and there's no running water, just a hand pump that can be used to pull water up from the plastic jugs underneath the sink. So how does a distinctly electronic dot-com thing come from them?


Well that means I have to introduce myself. You can call me Scribbler, I've been coming to Dorset since I was months old and I was part of a second generation of houseboaters between my dad and his friends and Timmy/George/Sophia etc. I grew up with AAMilne and the Swallows and Amazons. My favourite poem, as quoted above is by John Masefield, and my favourite book when I was growing up was Kidnapped (quickly followed by the Wolves of Willowby Chase but that doesn't quite fit with my point). By the time I was eight I had decided I wanted to be a writer and started my first novel. When I was 11 (?) I was published in a book of poetry and at secondary school I was published a number of times in the school magazine before I took over as the Editor. There are two things, therefore, that permeated my childhood, the Dorset sea and writing. The two are almost inextricably linked.


Of course, both are much extended now. I've sailed with my family across the Channel, through the Med, in the Atlantic around the Caribbean and even up in Scotland. I've written a great many stories and poems and books, all of which need much editing and TLC (truthful, like-it-is criticism). And I've tried and failed, numerous times, to keep a blog. I keep a diary almost religiously and yet typing up words on here has always been a struggle.


THAT IS NOW ABOUT TO CHANGE.


In August I'm going to the USofA to the University of North Carolina for a year. I'll still be studying philosophy and english literature like I do back in the Jekyll and Hyde City but I'm going to be over there in the plus degrees and sunshine. It was Terry's idea, when she discovered this little fact about my future plans, that spurred me on to therefore start a blog and do it properly. It'll be like travel writing I suppose, but mixed in with a lot of those typical musings of a literature student that have always been part of the way that I write. I also suspect that I'll put plot ideas and queries and creative moments etc up as I go. Furthermore, I plan on making this something that different people might take different things from, after all I'm sure many of those who might read this won't want to hear about how I'm totally obsessed with Joyce's Ulysses and the letter O and others might only really want to read about the places I go or the things that I experience out in the States rather than stuff about the people I meet or the ideas that I have. So I'm going to have each blog post (if it's of any length) start with a blurb and a list of headings so you can sort of skip to the bit that you're interested in. I'm also going to start making a list of places that I want to go to in America, things I want to do and people I want to see. Feel free to send suggestions about those things if you like.


Congratulations if you managed to read all of this. I know it's been quite long and waffly. Let the games begin!


Je serai poète et toi poésie,
SCRIBBLER