Lines to Remember

The railway crossing the river at Bradford-on-Avon, with the fourteenth-century Tithe Barn in the middle distance.

For travellers to London by rail from Bath and Bristol, the most straightforward route is the Great Western main line of course: 125mph to Paddington, with no hesitation or deviation, engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel with straightforwardness uppermost in his mind.  Three times a day, however, a train arrives from the capital ‘round the back’ via Salisbury and Warminster, and three times a day there is a return journey to Waterloo.

	arr	dep
Bristol Temple Meads		1249
Keynsham	1255	1256
Oldfield Park	1302	1303
Bath Spa	1305	1307
Bradford-on-Avon	1318	1319
Trowbridge	1327	1328
Westbury	1334	1339
Warminster	1346	1346
Salisbury  (attached to the 1215 from Exeter St. Davids)	1416	1421
Andover	1437	1438
Basingstoke	1455	1457
Woking	1515	1517
Clapham Junction	1536	1537
London Waterloo	1549

The timings of the 1249 from Bristol are perfect for an unhurried afternoon run, as I found last week, joining at Bath.  It was the third day of spring’s first serious uprising against this iron Lenten winter we have been having.  All the trees were bare still, but the sun had spring’s confidence and even spring’s warmth.  Easter holidays had brought children to playgrounds and teenagers to river-banks — though nobody else seemed to need to go anywhere far, as the train was almost empty as it wound up the Avon valley.  From Bradford-on-Avon we ran with assiduous avoidance of alacrity to Trowbridge, and in the platform at the next station, Westbury, we were momentarily facing away from London, in the right direction for Penzance.  Then between there and Warminster lies the village of Dilton Marsh, and we ran non-stop through the Dilton Marsh Halt of John Betjeman’s poem.  When I re-read it on arriving home, this poem struck me anew, because I realise it shows with particular clarity the opposition between two voices that run throughout Betjeman’s poetry.  They are set against each other in this poem, and one of them is a clear victor.

On one hand there is the familiar ironic, comic and parodying voice, the ‘Come-friendly-bombs-and-fall-on-Slough’ schoolboy irreverence that reads as if scribbled in a margin, which Betjeman achieves by singing of mundane modernity in Romantic, Wordsworthian diction, and sending up both.  So, in answer to the question, “Was it worth keeping the Halt open…?” mused on with deliberate bathos ‘as we looked at the sky’, comes the carefully ironic response:

“…Yes, we said, for in summer the anglers use it,
Two and sometimes three
Will bring their catches of rods and poles and perches
To Westbury, home for tea.”

A crucial transport interchange, then!  And later, unmistakeable Betjeman:

O housewife safe in the comprehensive churning
Of the Warminster launderette!
O husband down at the depot with car in car-park!
The Halt is waiting yet.

Ha, ha, ha!  We chuckle at the incongruity of the high register and the supposedly banal subjects.  Or we smile wryly at the witty caricature of modern life.  Good old Betjeman, what a laugh!  But there, in the last line of that stanza, does the parody not fade abruptly?  Just where we might expect a punchline, the Wordsworth mimic vanishes.  No joke is cracked.   ‘The Halt is waiting yet’: the first impression is simply that this sentence is not ironic and that it does not say much, but, read again, in its very plainness there is something mysterious.

And then, proving beyond doubt that this straight face has not been pulled for the sake of rhyme or metre, there follows the extraordinary last verse, casting aside the schoolboy smirk once and for all:

And when all the horrible roads are finally done for,
And there’s no more petrol left in the world to burn,

Here to the Halt from Salisbury and from Bristol
Steam trains will return.

This is the other voice, plangent, disarming and perhaps the truer Betjeman, which appears with particular force in this poem and for which, I contend, the mischief is a front and in fact a defence mechanism.  And I can see why Betjeman needed such a defence mechanism.  The strength of his sentiment might be met with bewilderment even today, but in the 1960s, when the car was the future and anything even faintly Victorian was fair game for gleeful destruction, how much more greatly the laughs would have dwarfed those generated by the Lyrical Ballads spoofery.

Yet the outburst of this last stanza, in its audacious earnestness, shows how visceral nostalgia can be.  Nostalgia is not always an enjoyably fuzzy emotion, a melancholy to wallow in, and it cannot always be held back.  Hopeless it may be, but perhaps it must sometimes cry aloud in defiance of slick progressivists and ‘bespectacled grins’ (did not Philip Larkin too have two voices, one a foil for the other?).