Light against Shadow

It is an awe-striking thing to see our self-assured, hyper-ingenious civilisation brought so completely to a standstill.  An old peril has returned to stalk the world, and has swept over us with breathtaking speed.  Maybe January’s floods distracted me, but it was not really until the Coronavirus reached Lombardy that I started paying it close attention — and this was on the advice of a friend with whom I had been hoping to make my first visit to Italy in April, and who, having lived through the SARS epidemic in Singapore in 2003, had some idea of the approaching danger.  His early alertness has been completely vindicated.  (On the other hand, the pandemic really has erupted with extraordinary speed, and I don’t think that we need blame ourselves if we were taken by surprise.)  All in all, it was not until perhaps two and a half weeks ago that the scale of the crisis dawned on me, and I realised that it was only a matter of time before it engulfed us in Britain too.

Since then, an uneasy stillness has grown gradually heavier and heavier over our lives.  Even a fortnight ago, central London was perceptibly emptying out, which means I suppose that it was merely very busy rather than, as under normal conditions, pandemonium.  Road traffic subsided noticeably: one evening, on my way back home from the station, peals of church bells came to me in a street where I have never before heard them over the noise, and a blackbird’s song sounded with startling clarity from a branch high above me in the dusk.  Long before the streets fell silent, though, the atmosphere had changed: all was sober, muted, as if we were all marking some joyless anti-Christmas.  Before we were sent home from work a week ago last Tuesday, the air in the office was ionised with anxiety, and however hard we tried, we could hardly talk of anything but the virus.  We knew the wave was coming, and we were waiting for it to break over us.  Now it is upon us, and suddenly, I think still to our disbelief, we are all stuck.  Nothing can happen; nothing can move.  We find ourselves (in the Clerk of Oxford’s words) in the ‘longest Lent of our lives’.

Now the skies are empty of aeroplanes, and the torrents of traffic that usually come stampeding down my road have abated, most strikingly at night.  The new hush is slightly disconcerting, but to one who finds London’s noise immensely wearing, not unwelcome at all.  Being cut off from work, the pub, the rest of the country and from church is still taking some getting used to, though, and what an odd sight it was to see the Prime Minister leaning over his desk on Monday (23rd) to grab our lapels and tell us all to keep to our houses.  His instructions on how to wash our hands a few weeks ago was a strange enough sight… the only other public leader I can think of with such a strong opinion on this subject was Pontius Pilate.

The coronavirus had set me thinking about light and shadow even before I heard the words of last Sunday’s second reading ringing around the walls of Fisher House, the Catholic chaplaincy of the University of Cambridge, over the Internet and out through speakers into our living room.  "Be like children of light," read Fr. Chase, Lent-robed in pixellated purple, and the words of St. Paul as fiery as ever. "Try to discover what the Lord wants of you, having nothing to do with the futile works of darkness but exposing them by contrast… Anything exposed to the light will be illuminated, and anything illuminated turns into light".  Without a doubt, a new darkness has entered the world, but what happens when it meets the light is, as ever, far from straightforward: it is a mystery, one that we in our day are not the first to notice.  Already we can see that its effect is not simply to cast a shadow over things, but to embolden the light where it shines, or to show where it is thrown at different angles, in rays we would never normally see.  What the shadow brings is causing us great suffering: the unexpected and hastened deaths, the pain of the stricken, the fear of the vulnerable (and ours on their behalf), the anxiety of doctors and nurses before the unknown, the ruin of businesses and commerce, the evaporation of holidays and weddings and grand projects, and the load added to the existing troubles of so many (for example, are there people in Worcestershire, Shropshire, Yorkshire and the valleys of South Wales now confined to homes still damaged by flood?).  The shadow is real enough, and may be as grave a menace as we fear.  But it does not go unanswered.

I can see many silver linings being fanned into brilliance.  One is that we have just had an opportunity to prove to ourselves how much we value human life, and I think we have acquitted ourselves pretty well.  Are we prepared to bring the economy to a grinding halt in order to save life, even fragile life?  Yes, we are.  This is worth knowing, it seems to me.

Secondly, we are building new solidarity.  The virus is everybody’s common foe, so our common purpose is to defeat it: we are all on the same side.  What is more, it is a silly little cell with knobbly bits which has no feelings.  There is no other side to the argument; we have no need to consider its point of view: it must be vanquished.  So there is a strange relief with which we can throw ourselves wholeheartedly into that one uniting purpose, even if the noblest pinnacle of our sacrifice is to sit in a chair at home.  In tight corners we find out moral choices sharpened and starkened.  They are not always made easier, but sometimes the right course of action at least becomes clearer, and I think that is happening here.  Once or twice in the past week a rare feeling has caught me, one which I remember once shivering surprisingly down my spine when I came across a photograph of a gigantic, catastrophic pall of smoke over London after a Blitz bombing raid: the East End burning.  Even at a remove of seventy-five years, a cold intoxicating thrill swept over me, the beautiful clarity of war that an enemy brings about by placing himself wholly in the wrong, and us, together, gloriously, in the right.  This can be, of course, a highly dangerous feeling, and one which can be transmuted in seconds into fire-blooded vengefulness.  But as long as we limit our vengeance to the virus, maybe this new just war will do us good, and unify us, straighten our priorities, and remind us of our common humanity.  So it is that, paradoxically, even in this grave situation, there is a sense in which I feel more at home in Britain now than I usually do.

The East End of London in flames, 7th September, 1940. 
From www.ghmartinez.blogspot.com.

But we are forging new and valuable bonds in quieter ways as well.  The Internet is being used with tremendous energy and imagination in order to help the vulnerable and overcome our collective isolation.  (I would include the Church in this, which I think has responded commendably to this crisis, as I rather suspected it would).  There have been the email circulars that various firms have sent to ‘customers and colleagues’ alike, so that civilians like me overhear their thanks to their staff.  (The cynical might scoff, but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume that the message is sincere.)  A colleague at work told me that in the hour and a half she had spent queuing in Morrison’s the previous Sunday (15th March), she spoke to more of her neighbours than in all the fifteen years she has lived in that part of London.  And then there was the extraordinary occurrence in my street on Thursday evening: the audible and visible observance of a national round of applause in support of the National Health Service.  Normally, this sort of thing simply doesn’t happen on our road, in which, one way and another, neighbourhood sentiment is on the patchy side.  Jubilees, Royal Weddings and Remembrancetide had all passed by unmarked, but now applause rang out from the front gardens and windows of neighbours who do not really know each other that well, but had found a common cause.  It helped that we were all bound to be at home anyway, and of course there was no traffic to compete with, but it was still a moving and heartening occasion.  For the first time I have ever seen, there was a general exchange of ‘Good night’ across the street.

I think a time of enforced monasticism will do us no harm, either, and maybe we will all emerge from this strange time a little wiser than before.  There are those of us whose lives only a world-wide pandemic could slow down!  Perhaps we will find new aspects of life to notice.  For instance, we might observe the strange paradox that, even as this virus reminds us of our physical, incarnated nature — that we really are one body — those of us not actually struck down by it are experiencing it as a malevolent spiritual force, invisible and silent.  The material and the spiritual are not so easily distinguished as we think.

In passing, I think I will note some other miscellaneous aspects of this crisis that have struck me.  For instance, that China has sent doctors to Italy and medical testing kits to Spain.  Also, that it is interesting how many prominent people have gone down with the illness: politicians, public figures, and even the Prince of Wales.  And is this the moment at which the phrase ‘to stay home’ (American, surely?) will supplant the British ‘to stay at home’ in our speech on this side of the Atlantic?  Finally, one more reason to hope: it has occurred to me that the pandemic will spark ambitions in scores of youngsters to become pathologists or doctors.  So, although a time of fear and uncertainty like this ‘has the capacity to bring out both the best and the worst of our human nature’, as our Archbishop John Wilson has said, I think we can have every hope that this darkness too will be ‘exposed by contrast’ with the light, and driven away.

I hope and pray that all readers, and those dear to them, are safe and well and as cheerful as we can be in these times.

In the original version of this article I stated mistakenly that the words of St. Paul, ‘Be like children of light…’, the Second Reading for Sunday 22nd March, had been read by Fr. Mark Langham; actually they were read by Fr. Chase Pepper, who was con-celebrating.

Farewell to a Quirk

The 0927 to Horsham draws into Ockley station, 14 May 2018.

The new timetable that descended on most of the railways of south-eastern England in late May has, alas, been in the headlines more or less ever since, not really because of any fault in the plan itself, but mainly because one of the largest railway companies involved arrived at D-day without having trained enough drivers for the new regime.  So no sooner had the bright new age dawned than it disintegrated impressively into a cascade of chaos which has only gradually been stemmed.

Of course any railway timetable, which must count among man’s most audacious attempts to impose order on this universe of turmoil, can always be scuppered by the slightest hitch.  Even at the theoretical stage, the task of designing one is tremendously complicated, especially in Britain, whose network is still among the densest in the world.  The idea of imposing upon the tangle of lines and chords and junctions a pattern of regular and reasonably frequent movement, in which no train ever conflicts with another, is enough to turn a grown man weak at the knees.  For, notwithstanding the brilliance and solidity of Victorian engineering and workmanship, a tangle really is what they are.  Our railways were never built to a central coherent plan, but by a multiplicity of companies all after slices of a multiplicity of pies, and willing to create any number of awkward layouts to that end. 

And then there is the catalogue of practical difficulties that reality itself will let loose upon the timetable the moment it is implemented.  On the one hand is the formidable traffic to be handled: in volumes far higher than a hundred and fifty years ago, covering greater distances, and with different flows and peaks.  And on the other hand are, in no particular order, damage to the permanent way, damage to rolling stock, signal failures, track circuit failures, floods, subsidence, frozen points in winter, buckled rails in summer, debris on the line, vandals on the line, leaves on the line and the wrong kind of snow (for all that the press scoffs at these last two, they are both genuine problems), lorries bashing bridges, guards left on platforms, missing drivers…  And what chaos these cannot cause may be provided in abundance, as it turns out, by the directors’ board of the railway company itself.

So the timetable planners are noble souls, going forth to solve a giant puzzle to which the Victorians, who set it, never guaranteed an answer.  The railway map spreads out like a chess-board and the trains like pieces, with their differing routes and differing calling patterns.  All-stations stoppers, outer suburban semi-fasts and inter-city expresses must all move harmoniously and regularly.  Thus a timetable becomes a daring sustained utterance of ideal order against all the forces of chaos ranged against it.  It is both a meticulous work of arithmetic and a courageous act of faith.  Dare I even call the planners poets?  After all, as the character Syme explains in this passage I have seen quoted from G. K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday (a novel which I must get round to reading):

Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Baghdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.  No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride.  Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories.  Give me Bradshaw, I say!

The nearest equivalent to Bradshaw’s famous volume is now a 41-megabyte download from the Network Rail website, though limited editions of the print version are still published.  Some might expect such a tome to be resoundingly dull.  But I wonder whether a majority of passengers would be with Chesterton: the idea that ‘chaos is dull’ must resonate with many who have endured long waits and dwindling hopes these past few months.  Even in ordinary circumstances, any working regular timetable often masks a great deal of complexity.  Perhaps we should marvel not at the scale of disruption that sometimes occurs, but that any timetable should ever have reasonable success.  For instance, to a passenger it might seem the natural order of things that trains from a given station should depart in a given direction at the same number of minutes past each hour throughout the day — 0812, 0912, 1012 and so on — according to a ‘clock-face’ timetable.  But this is more difficult to achieve than it might seem.  Enough time must be left at each terminus to turn around to recover from any delays, for instance.  Also, the circumstances behind the scenes are not the same throughout the day: everything must be in the right place in the morning, and be left in the right place at night, and the preparations to be made on the eve of Sunday are different from those for the eve of Monday.  The timetable also has to shoulder the burden of rush-hour, in its two opposite directions, at each end of the day.  So no wonder the order is not quite universal.

Yet once the timetablers have suppressed most of the chaos, I find I am quite fond of any quirks that are left, providing I am not actually caught out by them.  The old timetable had quite a few variations that were interesting to those of us to whom, I suppose, these things are interesting.  Some were adjustments made to cope with rush-hour traffic; others were stop-gaps to ease miscalculations in the timetable itself.  Still others were Parliamentary trains, one of the token services run perhaps once a day or once a week to prove to the satisfaction of the law, but of very few passengers, that a line or station is still open for business, and thereby to avoid the palaver of applying to close it (There are enough of these to justify the compilation of this list of Passenger Services over Unusual Lines; see also my write-up of an adventure to Shippea Hill, the station that is hardly a station by a hill that is hardly a hill).  Other quirks seemed to exist for reasons no longer discernible, lost in the mists of time, for traditions last long on the railways.  The new regime’s planners, though, have striven to simplify things, adjusting irregularities and ironing out the oddities of the old order, and their achievement is impressive.  But some of the old timings will not pass unmourned; at least, not by those of us who mourn these things.

One quirk that we have lost involved the line that runs southwards from Dorking in Surrey to Horsham in West Sussex, an odd stretch of railway, because, although it was built as a double-track main line (and retains a line speed of 75mph), it is rather a backwater.  Perhaps it is because it does not aim squarely at a terminus as it nears London, but appears to dissolve into the various intertwining strands and loops in the suburbs.  These are now too congested with local traffic to accommodate many non-stop trains, and there are no facilities left for fast trains to overtake slow.  The map below shows how the route becomes ensnared in the confusion of South London.  Gone are the days when coastal expresses ran this way to and from London: the fastest trains from Horsham to Victoria now use the route to the east via Gatwick and East Croydon.  Holmwood, Ockley and Warnham, the three euphonically-named intermediate stations on the stretch between Horsham and Dorking, have only an hourly service in each direction, and all trains stop at all stations.  My complaint is not of dullness, as we have established! — rather, the disappointment lies in the failure to exploit railway infrastructure to the full.  What is a main line for, if you do not send trains down it at top speed?


A tangle really is what they are.  (Click to enlarge; the Dorking-Horsham line is in the lower left-hand corner)

Yet under the old timetable the line was allowed, once a weekday, to reclaim its former glory.  For the unassuming 0756 from London Victoria, having extricated itself from the tangle of South London lines and trundled unhurriedly through outer suburbia in accordance with its designation as secondary passenger service 2E12, was transformed, on its arrival at Dorking just before nine, into the Horsham Flyer, the Wealdman, the Sussexpress, unique in being timetabled to run fast from Dorking to Horsham, non-stop through Holmwood, Ockley and Warnham.  It was not quite clear for whose benefit this dash was made, away from London in the morning peak and rather on the late side for rush hour anyway.  Most likely not for the passengers’: it may well have been for operational ease, to avoid the need for guards who were still needed to oversee stops on this line, or perhaps simply to reach Horsham in time to form an ordinary stopping service back.

Still, it was there to be travelled on by any passengers who wanted it.  It also produced a fluke in the ticketing system.  For those approaching from the north and wanting Ockley or Warnham stations at that time in the morning, it was quicker to take this train to Horsham, be carried straight past the desired station, and then double back with the returning London service, than to wait for the next direct ‘down’ train — and, just this once per day, an easement made this doubling-back perfectly valid on ordinary tickets to these stations.  What more remained for me to do, then, than to concoct some pressing need to arrive at Ockley station at 9.20 in the morning, before the arrival of the direct train seven minutes later, and thus give myself an excuse to try it out?

For months after I discovered it, this drifted around pleasantly in my thoughts as a nice idea to do some day, along with the knowledge that Leith Hill, the highest point in south-east England, stands nearby.  But the advent of an all-standardising, quirk-free new timetable, under which I found this oddity was to be abolished, concentrated my mind.  Yes, definite action was suddenly necessary: there was now a deadline before which a walk from Ockley station to Holmwood station via Leith Hill was absolutely required to take place.  And might 9.27 a.m. not be a little on the late side to set off on this walk?  Indeed, would not a slightly earlier time, such as 9.20, be more or less perfect?

So on the fourteenth of May, in the last week of the old timetable, I too had cause to extricate myself from South London so that I could number myself among the last beneficiaries of the the Unmitigated England Express.  It was a still-golden morning flooded with still-welcome sunshine, long before drought was to drain England of all her colour.  All down the line the train had been emptying, and there were only a handful of us left aboard as we drew unostentatiously out of Dorking, round the corner and into Betchworth tunnel.  Through the darkness we accelerated, bursting out into unsuburbanised Surrey, past trees aflash with fresh May foliage, past stiff haughty pines, past the working farms and all that space in the fields beyond.  And continued to accelerate, leaving behind us the chalk cliffs of the North Downs, and bringing the shadowier evergreen of the Greensand Ridge, with its culmination in the summit of Leith Hill, into view on the right.  Straight through Holmwood, the ride becoming a bit rough, and gaining speed until at least Ockley, after which a stretch of jointed track lay in wait with its ambush of nostalgia.  (To run over jointed track at 75mph is to recall old England to life).  Warnham, warm in the sun, with one lone gentleman on the platform, was gone as soon as it was glimpsed.  The distance to Horsham, 13 miles and 30 chains, was covered in just over fifteen minutes — an average speed of about 53mph.  Not bad, it must be said, for suburban stock designed to pootle around South London all day.

At Horsham I stepped nonchalantly onto the platform and then just as nonchalantly boarded again, and presently the train set off back towards London again, possibly with its own air of nonchalance.  No high speeds but business as usual between there and Ockley, where I alighted.  I noted not without smugness that I had indeed arrived a crucial three minutes earlier than the next down train, and therefore that the detour via Horsham and the Unmitigated England Express had been entirely and unquestionably worth the effort.  The nearby A24 made its presence felt, but I lingered for a while to admire the handsome station building, before then setting off on my walk.

The time I had gained by doubling back via Horsham was immediately wasted faffing around in a half-field-half-scrapyard beside the dual carriageway where nature had been allowed or possibly encouraged to obfuscate the footpath.  So it was the long way round that I came to Capel village (here, as so often with British railways, the station is not named after the nearest significant settlement), and rested in the parish church.

St John the Baptist’s Church, Capel, Surrey.

Setting off westwards from the village I found myself in that sort of England which, not unlike a railway timetable, impossibly survives and even thrives in spite of all that threatens it.  The atmosphere was encroached upon but not shattered by the intrusions of the A24 and A29, nor by the procession of aeroplanes in the bright south descending towards Gatwick.  I met someone only once (a man building a roof in the blazing sun) and lost my way only twice (a GPS reader would have saved me a lot of trouble and spoilt all the fun) in the five or six miles before I reached Leith Hill Place, where stands the childhood home of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Leith Hill Place

Leith Hill itself is understandably well-known and even on a weekday there were plenty of people at the top.  From its summit on a clear day London can be seen to the north, and the sea glimpsed through Shoreham Gap in the south.  The enjoyable story of the tower at the top is that it was built (or had built!) in 1765 by Richard Hull, an earlier resident of Leith Hill Place, in order to bring the hill, whose natural summit is 965 feet high, to an elevation of a thousand feet.  The tower is looked after by only the fourth keeper since the mid-nineteenth-century, who sells elderflower lemonade from a hatch in the ground floor of the tower.  There are other refreshments for sale as well, but it is the elderflower lemonade I remember.

Leith Hill Place from just below the summit of Leith Hill.  The Weald and South Downs in the distance.

Then down from the summit via Coldharbour village (whose apparently incongruous name probably comes from the French col d’arbour, a wooded hill), back to Holmwood for the London train, and home.  It was almost as if the main point of the exercise had not been to justify the exploitation of an obscure piece of railway operation for the sake of curiosity.

This is something else that railways do.  Their rules and patterns and occasional oddities add spice to the whole idea of planning a jaunt like this, and turn the whole country into a kind of puzzle or board game, though not always in a frivolous way.  Roads have no timetables, so they have no timetable quirks.  I am sure my trip was more enjoyable for all that meticulously-planned messing about in trains.

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