Chester to London - Misremembered

My view of the train station is determined by horizontal lines that stretch from one side of the window to the other: roofs, platforms, strips of paint, railway track. Vertical lines intersect semi-regularly between the horizontal: drainpipes, brick pillars, metal posts. Seen only in these terms it appears as an excel spreadsheet with some of the cells tampered with. The station scrolls left as the train pulls out.

The man across from me is writing notes on what looks like the manuscript to a book.

Beginning slowly the train passes through Chester, westwards: below a bridge, past the blue lid of the water tower peaking out above the brambles, past allotments, allotments, and past allotments, each flitting by faster. The trackside thorn bushes blur to grey streaks.

Everything is grey and muted. The sky is overcast. The sun behind the clouds is approaching setting. The colour is drained from everything, save the bold greens of some of the fields that pass by.

The train moves through, ditching between hills that duck and climb. The rise and fall of the trackside mound forms frames that present each landscape.

Contents framed:

1. Green field containing flock of sheep, dispersed; brown fields; hedgerows and trees bare of leaves; grassy hills.

2. Muddy field containing three trees aligned in diminutive order, left to right; grassy field; wooded patches; wooded hills.

3. Narrow boats in large square mooring; field containing two caravans; wooded patches; hill with castle perched on top.

The trackside mounds flatten, and the perspective opens out. The castle remains visible in the distance.

I remember seeing this castle on this journey before. I would have told you it's Beeston castle, but on this same train once I remember a couple discussing that it wasn’t Beeston. I took some notes of the journey, though not of that part of the their conversation:

The couple sat across from me are arguing. Something to do with her parents, something to do with a wedding, and something about 'just being very different people.' He goes to put his arm around her, she shirks, then they argue for a while longer and he mentions something to do with Shakespeare.

The tension begins to diffuse when they begin discussing the food for the wedding. 

"Monkfish, prawns or fois gras." 

The dust on the window and the monochrome of the clouded twilight make the images I see through the train window feel as if they are filtered, overexposed and of poor resolution. The blacks of the shadows are grey. The whites are flat. The landscape thins. Light thickens.

A great square silhouette of a castle stands on a grey horizon, its crenulations rubbled across the top like a sandcastle that’s been too quickly unbucketed.

I finish writing notes on the castle and look out of the window for a moment. We pass a mobile home-cum-shop with ‘Beeston Maintenance’ written on its front. I reconsider my previous line of thought.

Across the table the man annotates the text I had assumed to be a manuscript. On the paper I can see a diagram of a bone. ‘University of Liverpool’ is stamped along the edge of the text. Not the notes to the next Midnight’s Children then.

A pile of old black rubber tires mounds up against the side of a barn house we pass.

Huge muddy puddles have gathered in a field, its earth recently turned—the trees and sky the puddles reflect are in sepia.

We will shortly be arriving at—Crewe—our final station.

I get up to pack my things into my bag.

* * * * *

 

I’ve been aboard the train from Crewe to London for about ten minutes without knowing what to write. I write what I see.

The railway track that runs parallel to this one is clearly defined. The mound beside it, and everything else, is blurred.

The hills are painted with the grey film that distance will apply to a landscape. They look like watercolours on a grey canvas of sky.

Distance can equate to time in the same way. As things move further into the past this same grey film daubs itself on our memories. Attempting to focus on individual details—trees, rocks, faces—we begin to fill in the blanks ourselves. A line in the cliff-face is a tree perhaps. A resting figure becomes a rock. That smile is no longer entirely her own.

We enter a tunnel and the windows flatten to black. Another train thunders past, squares of light flashing for an instant, then in another beat we leave the tunnel.

We pass a power plant. Its form is massive, reaching from the bottom to the top of the window frame that determines my view, huge curved concrete columns.

We pass a field of solar panels lined like plate mail. I think of Andreas Gursky’s photograph of the photovoltaic farm. I think of his photographs taken from moving vehicles, Utah and Tokyo.

“Gursky has described the relationship between construction, documentation and authenticity in his work as similar to the way that we might recall a landscape glimpsed from a moving vehicle: ‘You look out of the window and get an impression, but when you write it down it will be what you imagine,’ he explains.”

I first wrote this piece from my notes a little over three months ago. When I published the piece the server crashed and I was left with fragments of my train ride. I would glance at my notes and these fragments and attempt to write the journey again, and each time a new journey would begin to take form.

Looking at the journey now I notice a number of elements I did not on first writing it.

·      The power plant mentioned a few lines above is likely the same power plant I see at the East Midlands Parkway station in ‘Hull to London - Returning’.

·      My brother and I discussed the castle. There is one near Beeston which is known for hosting weddings and other events. I dimly recall the couple on the train discussing this. This recollection could be a total fabrication.

·      The subject of this piece was always intended to be the inconsistency of memory. This subject has intensified each time I consider the piece. Each time I find it more difficult to translate this to the reader.

Please consider the image below. The blurs in the photograph are not the result of a faulty camera. They are constructed. Each perceived fault is fashioned in order to convey a message. The faults in this piece are not intentional. However, I believe that in their inspection they carry messages none-the-less.

I glance out of the train window. And the landscape passes by.