Perhaps the most lyrical of all English train journeys in prose fiction is this one, undertaken by Phillip Maddison in the early summer of 1914.
Phillip is the author substitute for Henry Williamson in his huge semi-autobiographical saga, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Five volumes of the novel sequence are devoted to the First World War. How Dear is Life, in which this train journey appears, is the fourth volume and covers the transition from peace to war. It was published in 1954.
The novel opens with Phillip starting his working life as a clerk in the same insurance office as his father. He joins the territorials and, when the war begins, volunteers for overseas service on the assumption that the territorials will be used as support behind the lines. However, after heavy casualties, they are needed in the front line and Phillip finds himself thrown into the chaos of combat at the first battle of Ypres.
Phillip’s journey to North Devon for a holiday with his aunt is the first time he has left London, and he is keen to see as much as he can from the train. He stands at an open window all the way “without one moment that was not full of interest”. At Weybridge, he looks out for the Brooklands motor racing circuit. To his disappointment there are no cars actually racing.
This is the stopping train and as it goes on, past Salisbury towards Exeter, Phillip displays his keen interest in the appearance of the people on the station platforms, the way they are dressed, and so on. We realise that for a teenager of 1914, this is the equivalent of going abroad for the first time. Of course, the reader knows what Phillip does not, that he is shortly to go abroad, courtesy of His Majesty the King.
After Exeter, “a city as remote as the sun”, the train goes on towards Barnstaple, and Phillip notices the river, first on one side of the track, then the other. This is the river Taw, a reminder that we are in the countryside with which Williamson will always be associated, thanks to Tarka the Otter.
The weather has been sunny all the way, and “after Exeter the fields of red-gold wheat seemed to have been saturated with the everlasting blaze of the sun”.
After the eight-hour journey from London, Phillip changes trains at Barnstaple. He transfers to the narrow-gauge Lynton and Barnstaple line, which closed in 1935 and is described here in great detail by Williamson, at something like its peak. Phillip notices that the Lynton engine “had a big polished dome like an immense fireman’s helmet rising out of the middle of the tank”.
He is excited to see buzzards, but when he asks a travelling farmer about them, he can’t understand what the farmer says.
A local vicar invites Phillip to sit with him in the observation car at the back of the three-coach train, and we are treated to a description of the country alongside the line.
Particularly striking is the Chelfham viaduct, higher than the arches Phillip has seen on the line into London Bridge station. The vicar explains that it is white because it is built of local materials. Phillip notices that as the train ambles on, the vicar is taking what looks like dust out of his pocket and throwing it on to the embankment. He realises that they are seeds; and explains that he has done the same thing himself at home.
Phillip relishes the journey: “The longer it took the better. To ride in such a train was an adventure which he would like to go on forever.”
At Chelfham station, “no one got out, no-one got in”. This is a deliberate reference to that most loved of rural railway poems, Adlestrop. It is Williamson’s tribute to its author, Edward Thomas, himself killed on the Western Front. Appropriately enough, I wrote this piece on Armistice weekend 2018. I myself marked the centenary by reading Williamson’s novels.
Eventually, Phillip is the last passenger left on the train, alone in his reverie: “It was a dream country, floating on sunshine, the world lying far below. Were some of the shaggy men with dogs, drovers of cattle, descendants of the Doones?”
After nearly two hours Phillip arrives at Lynton to be met by his aunt. Phillip will return to this area later in the sequence, just as Williamson himself did in real life. It stands as a symbol of lost innocence and peace.
The Exeter to Barnstaple route remains open, now known, appropriately enough, as the Tarka Line. The Chelfham viaduct is still there today, although at the moment no trains pass over it. That could change though. About a mile of the Lynton and Barnstaple line is open as a heritage railway, and there are plans to re-open it along its full distance on more or less the original route. For now, if one wants to take the little train from Barnstaple, across beautiful Exmoor, it will have to be in the imagination, with some help from Henry Williamson.
The Good Reader 