THE HERITAGE TRAIN

An elderly man relives past experiences aboard a heritage train

This was something Jonas Smyth had been looking forward to since forever. He was going for what he guessed would be an all-too short trip on a heritage railway.

The carriages were the sort he’d travelled on as a boy with his parents and sister, the kind with corridors that opened on compartments for about eight people and with posters to seaside resorts to gaze at with an excited pair of eyes because that was exactly where he was going. To the seaside. For his once in a year holiday on golden sands. When, he seemed to recall, it never rained and ice-creams were sold on every corner and nobody mentioned bad teeth when you ate your candy floss.

Where the air was filled with the appetising aroma of frying fish and chips.

Where everything had been practically perfect, especially the ride on a steam train to get there.

Now he was what the grandkids called “well-old” and he was having a treat all on hos own. He was going for a dozen or so miles on a heritage railway in a carriage he remembered and pulled by a steam engine that still filled his heart with wonder when he thought about it.

Those days had been great, but there had been one journey he’d always wanted to forget. And that one journey was seared on his memory as if it had happened only yesterday. Yesterday and sixty-five years ago. The journey that had stolen his sister from him.

Jonas looked out of the window. The train had still to leave the station and men and women, foolish enough to be bordering on missing it, were still half-running towards the open doors.

The engine whistled, and then, at the back of the train, the guard whistled as a sort of plaintive echo, doors were slammed, the last dribs and drabs of passengers found their seats.

And then the door to his compartment opened and a family edged silently in, bringing with them a strange old-fashioned sweet fragrance. A boy, a girl, a father, a mother. Possibly. Sometimes, these days, families weren’t what they’d once been and there was no certainty that there hadn’t been falling out and swapping and changing after the children were born, and different fathers or mothers or both appearing on the scene. Family life wasn’t what it used to be. Which, he supposed, was sometimes a good thing. But this little group looked family enough.

And they did look sort of familiar. Like he might have seen them before. Somewhere.

They sat in their seats, the man and his son sitting opposite the woman and her daughter. Was the man the girl’s father or the woman the boy’s mother? Or had there been some interweaving of two discrete groups?

“We’re off, dad!” said the boy.

That sorted one part of the puzzle, then.

And there was something eerily familiar about the whole little scene. Man, boy, we’re off, dad…

The engine gave a mighty series of thumps as the train moved forwards. He remembered the thumps from the past, when he’d been no older than the boy sitting next to the man who was certainly his father because he was dad.

“It’s scary, mummy,” whispered the girl.

It might have been his own sister saying that, back in the old times when they’d been going for their annual holiday to the seaside. He was sure it might have been. He was sure he remembered it’s scary, mummy, from a long time ago as the holiday train had eased into movement. And she’d had every right to be scared, hadn’t she? Poor Jane...

“Your brother’s not scared,” said the mother, smiling at her daughter.

So that solved the problem. They were a family. Somehow it was comforting to know that. The girl had a brother and he wasn’t scared.

Of course he wasn’t! He was a boy, a creature that scorned fear, a creature who was never scared of anything or anyone, except Mr Johnson at school and his cane.

I was a boy once, he thought, a boy just like that one. Why, I even wore the same sort of clothes … those shorts do look a bit old fashioned come to think of it. And the girl’s dress, it’s pretty like a lot of modern clothes aren’t. My sister Jane wore dresses like that…

“Jonas is never scared of anything,” sniffed the girl.

What a coincidence! His name was Jonas, and so was that small boy’s! How old might he be? Eight or nine, enjoying the same sort of ride as he’d enjoyed all those years ago, in the post-war years when it had been a financial struggle but his parents had managed it. And it’s not as if Jonas has ever been a particularly common name…

“It’s because I’m a boy, Jane,” said the lad seriously.

Jonas and Jane! Now that was more than a coincidence, surely? I’d better ask them…

“Excuse me,” he said as the train gained speed, “I couldn’t help overhearing … are those your names, Jonas and Jane?”

He might not have said anything or made a sound! The boy sat next to the man and gazed at the picture on the wall above the head of his mother opposite. The man smiled at him and ruffled his already tousled hair. The woman open a bag and took out a bag of potato crisps.

“Anyone want a crisp?” she asked.

“Put the salt in first,” suggested the man.

“Of course I will, Tony,” smiled the woman, “we want them to taste good, don’t we?”

Inside the bag of crisps she found a little screwed up bag, a blue bag, one like bags of crisps used to have, a bag of salt. And Jonas had known she would find it there because he remembered, long years ago, going on holiday in a train not unlike this one.

It had been a horrible journey.

It had been the train ride he’d never forgotten. The one that was forever in his head, that still replayed itself in nightmares. And he had plenty of those, still. All these years later.

“No!” he shouted, “No, no, no!”

“Can I have the first crisp?” asked Jane.

“No, No, No!” His voice was hoarse, but nobody took a blind bit of notice of him. It was as if he wasn’t there. It was as if they couldn’t hear him.

“If Jonas doesn’t mind,” said the mother.

“Go on, greedy guts, you have it,” grinned the boy.

And with a crunchy crispy crack the girl bit into the crisp.

“Spit it out!” he shouted, “For Christ’s sake spit it out!”

“Can you hear something?” asked the mother, “a sort of whisper?”

“I thought I could,” replied the father, “a sort of cry, but from miles and miles away.

“It’s horrible, this crisp,” said Jane. “And I heard it too, sort of warning.”

And she spat the crisp out. Because it tasted all wrong. Because she’d heard a whisper in the air.

Like all those years ago she hadn’t…

“Go on, eat the whole lot!” grinned the boy. Grinned Jonas. He remembered it. With dreadful guilt as she had, to tease him and deny him because that’s what brothers and sisters did to each other.

“Yuk!” declared the girl, “there’s something wrong with them. They don’t taste like crisps at all.”

“I’ll take them back to the shop, then,” muttered the mother, “to that new self-service shop. I knew no good would come from self-service in shops. Anything could happen. Bad people could even tamper with food.

“Why, someone might even die!”

Like Jane had, sixty-five years ago, thought Jonas.

The train clattered and clicked on, it rattled over points, it felt better than any train had ever felt before.

But when he looked up, to thank the family for hearing him, maybe, or wish them well, they were no longer there. The seats were bare.

The only clue that they’d ever been there was a half-chewed crisp on the floor and an odd old-fashioned smell he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

© Peter Rogerson 27.11.17