A Book of Railway Journeys Read online

  “You should not be in possession of such a book,” said Mischa, severely. “Such a book is a confidential publication.”

  ERIC NEWBY,

  The Big Red Train Ride

  7. Some assorted drunks

  I went to my own compartment to drink my vodka and saw in my solitary activity something of the Russians’ sense of desolation. In fact they did nothing else but drink. They drank all the time and they drank everything—cognac that tasted like hair tonic, sour watery beer, the red wine that was indistinguishable from cough syrup, the nine-dollar bottles of champagne, and the smooth vodka. Every day it was something new: first the vodka ran out, then the beer, then the cognac, and after Irkutsk one saw loutish men who had pooled their money for champagne, passing the bottle like bums in a doorway. Between drinking they slept, and I grew to recognize the confirmed alcoholics from the way they were dressed—they wore fur hats and fur leggings because their circulation was so poor; their hands and lips were always blue. Most of the arguments and all the fights I saw were the result of drunkenness. There was generally a fist fight in Hard Class after lunch, and Vassily provoked quarrels at every meal. If the man he quarrelled with happened to be sober, the man would call for the complaints’ book and scribble angrily in it.

  “Tovarich!” the customer would shout, requesting the complaints’ book. I only heard the word used in sarcasm.

  There was a nasty fight at Zima. Two boys—one in an army uniform—snarled at a conductor on the platform. The conductor was a rough-looking man dressed in black. He did not react immediately, but when the boys boarded he ran up the stairs behind them and leaped on them from behind, punching them both. A crowd gathered to watch. One of the boys yelled, “I’m a soldier! I’m a soldier!” and the men in the crowd muttered, “A fine soldier he is.” The conductor went on beating them up in the vestibule of the Hard-Class car. The interesting thing was not that the boys were drunk and the conductor sober, but that all three were drunk.

  PAUL THEROUX,

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  8. The Red Army with its trousers down

  The car opposite our own on the other train was occupied by soldiers, and from our compartment we had an unprecedented view of its lavatory accommodation through its window which, unlike the lavatory windows on any other Russian train I had ever seen, or on any other train anywhere else in the world I had ever seen, was made of clear glass.

  Both trains left a little late and in the course of the next few minutes we were treated to the extraordinary spectacle of a succession of Russian soldiers each one of whom, on entering the lavatory, stood astride the pan and, as if he was performing a drill movement, lowered his trousers, in doing so revealing one of the most closely guarded military secrets of the Soviet Union—that its soldiers, like those of kilted, Highland regiments in the British Army, are not issued with underpants. If this is a calumny and they are issued with underpants, then they had forgotten to put them on.

  ERIC NEWBY,

  The Big Red Train Ride

  9. A storm in Siberia

  We were emerging from the permafrost now and the Rossiya was running through birch forests full of little lakes, on some of which men were fishing from rowing boats, and when the train stopped you could hear hundreds of birds chattering away. Then, while we breakfasted off more of the omul, of which we were beginning to tire, the country began to open out. In the fields the wheat was already 18 inches high, which showed that we were really out of the permafrost zone, and there were lush meadows full of buttercups and bog cotton, and grassy banks covered with yellow lilies and lupins. Even the forest was changing. The everlasting larches and birches were thinning out and being replaced by oaks. Around one o’clock we crossed a big river, the Zeya, a tributary of the Amur (as were all the rivers we were crossing now). There were gold mines on its upper waters and in the ranges away to the north of the line. By now we were ravenous and we all trooped off to the restaurant car to find that it had been miraculously replenished with food, although the drink situation was the same; and there, with the temperature up to 86°F, we ate fish soup and minced steak, washed down with lemonade. All the time now the big, brilliantly painted containers from Japan and the United States were rushing past on their flat cars on their way to Europe. All that day the Rossiya travelled eastwards under a cloudless sky. Then, towards evening, away to the north, an enormous swirling cloud as black as night appeared over what was a practically limitless horizon and came racing towards the railway. In order to get a better view of this phenomenon I rushed to the back of the train and looked out of the window of the last car. By now it was nearing the line and not more than 100 feet above it. An apocalyptical wind began to blow, bending the trees and tearing the leaves from them, and forked lightning began to shoot earthwards from it while at the same time the sun continued to shine, bathing the whole landscape in a ghastly, yellowish light. Then, when the cloud was over the Rossiya, it released a deluge of rain, which was accompanied by prolonged and deafening peals of thunder. It was at this moment, just as we reached the 8020th kilometre mark from Moscow, that Rossiya No. 1 roared past in the opposite direction, inward bound from Vladivostok, streaming water and illuminated by the lightning which was now continuous, a magnificent sight. I shared this grandstand view of a Siberian storm with a very drunk Russian who was armed with a half-full bottle of vodka, and he was so overcome by the spectacle that in the course of those few minutes he finished it off. Soon this great cloud was gone beyond the Amur where it would presumably give the Chinese the same treatment as it had given us, once more leaving the sky overhead clear and blue as if nothing had happened.

  ERIC NEWBY,

  The Big Red Train Ride

  10. The Vostok

  The eastern terminus of the Rossiya is Vladivostock, which is now a restricted city. So at Khabarovsk, some 500 miles from Vladivostock (and 5,400 from Moscow), passengers for Japan and Hong-Kong disembark and enter another train called the Vostok.

  The Vostok was made up of a half-dozen green passenger cars, drawn by an electric engine, and from the outside looked no different to any normal Russian passenger train. On the inside it was fantastic, a train-that-never-was, something that might have been designed by Beaton for Garbo, using for money the three-year box office take from My Fair Lady: the perfect train, kept forever behind the wall in Plato’s Cave, of which only distorted shadows are seen in the outer world, all shining mahogany, brass and scintillating glass.

  Each of the two-berth compartments was loaded with mahogany, some of it gilded. The mahogany armchair was covered in red plush (and so was the brass door chain) and the coved roof was also banded with mahogany. The finely chased door furniture was solid brass, and the screws in the brass door hinges had been aligned by some artisan so that each of the cuts in the heads of the screws was parallel with the ones below it and next to it. The mahogany table had a brass rim around it; there were brass rails around the luggage compartment overhead to stop the cabin trunks crashing between one’s ears, the ashtrays were solid brass, and the cut-glass ceiling light had a brass finial on it.

  On the floor there was a thick red and green Turkey carpet. On the beds of snow-white pillows had been arranged in a manner that suggested that this work had been performed by a parlourmaid who had majored in household management around 1903. The sheets were freshly ironed and so were the white voile curtains which were also supported on a brass rail.

  In the bathroom, with which the compartment was connected by way of a mahogany door, there was a full-length looking glass, a stainless steel washbasin as big as a font, furnished with nickel-plated taps (the sort that stay on once you have turned them on), and the stainless steel lavatory basin had a polished mahogany seat. The shower head was attached to a flexible tube. The towels were thick and sumptuous and the heavy water carafe held two litres. Illumination in the bathroom was provided by a frosted glass window which gave on to the corridor. On the outside this window was embellished with an art-nouv
eau motif, also in solid brass, and in the corridor this motif was echoed in the decoration of the ceiling lights. The corridor, in which golden curtains oscillated with the movement of the train (which, admittedly was far more bumpy than that of the Rossiya), was provided with a number of tip-up seats, also upholstered in red plush, for those who had grown weary while on the way to and from the restaurant car, and the carpet was the same as those in the compartments.

  And everything worked. If this was not enough, our particular car was equipped with the most beautiful conductress I had seen on the Russian or any other railway system. She was reputed to be of Czech origin. Perhaps the whole thing came from Czechoslovakia, for it was newly built, and she with it. If it was built in Russia, where had the Russians found the artisans to build it? From the same source that produced the men and women who refurbished the Summer Palace at Tsarskoye Selo?

  ERIC NEWBY,

  The Big Red Train Ride

  TO A LOCOMOTIVE IN WINTER

  Thee for my recitative,

  Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,

  Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,

  Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,

  Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,

  Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,

  Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,

  Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,

  The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,

  Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,

  Thy train of care behind, obedient, merrily following,

  Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;

  Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent,

  For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,

  With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,

  By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,

  By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.

  Fierce-throated beauty!

  Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night,

  Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all,

  Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,

  (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)

  Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,

  Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,

  To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

  WALT WHITMAN

  The ordeal of Gladys Aylward, missionary

  Expedition “Gladys Aylward” assembled on the platform at Liverpool Street Station on Saturday, 18th October, 1930. It must be numbered amongst the most ill-equipped expeditions ever to leave the shores of England, possessing in currency exactly ninepence in coin and one two-pound Cook’s travellers’ cheque. The cheque was sewn carefully into an old corset, which also contained her Bible, fountain pen, tickets and her passport. She kissed her mother, father, and sister good-bye, and settled herself into the corner seat of her third-class compartment. The whistle blew, the train hissed and puffed; she waved through the window until her family were out of sight. She dried her eyes, sat back and spread out on the seat beside her the old fur coat which a friend had given her and which her mother had cut up and made into a rug. Her two suitcases were on the rack. One contained her clothes, the other an odd assortment of tins of corned beef, fish and baked beans, biscuits, soda cakes, meat cubes, coffee essence, tea and hard-boiled eggs. She also had a saucepan, a kettle and a spirit stove. The kettle and the saucepan were tied to the handle of the suitcase with a piece of string.

  Soon they were out of the city, past the suburbs. In the country she pressed her face against the cold, misted window and whispered, “God bless you, England.” She did not know—she would not have wished to know—that it would be twenty long years before she saw that landscape again.

  She disembarked at The Hague, tipped the porter who carried her bags the ninepence in coppers and secured a corner seat. From Holland the train rattled across Germany, Poland and into the great steppes of Russia. She sat “facing the engine,” cocooned in her fur rug and watched the Continent slide past. In Russia she was shocked by what she saw: the crowds of apathetic people waiting on the bare, cheerless stations, surrounded by their bundles; women working in gangs; poverty and peasantry on a scale she had never imagined.

  Ten days after leaving England the train crossed into Siberia, and she was at once enchanted by the grandeur of the scenery: the towering mountains, the great belts of dark pines, the endlessly stretching snow, the bright sunshine and the immense loneliness. At one halt a man came into her compartment who could speak a little English, and through him the other people, who had long ago tired of trying to ask her questions in sign language, now began to satiate their curiosity. He was a kindly man, and he conveyed to Gladys that the conductor of the train who had examined her tickets wished to tell her that no trains were running to Harbin, and that she would probably be held up at the Siberian-Manchurian border. If this were true—and she concentrated on trying hard not to believe it—then her chances were remote of proceeding onwards through Harbin to Dairen, and so by steamer to Tientsin.

  To increase her fears, at each station halt more and more soldiers crowded on to the train. Two officers shared her compartment now, and although they could not talk to her except by gesticulation, they were quite pleasant. At Chita the train emptied of all civilians, except Gladys. The conductor came along and with fantastic signs tried to entice her out on to the platform. Gladys, however, now firmly rooted in the compartment, was having none of it; she believed that every mile forward was a mile towards China. She stayed put.

  The train filled up with soldiers and rumbled onwards. A few hours later in the darkness it halted again at a tiny station and the soldiers got out, formed up on the platform and marched off up the line into the darkness. The train lights went out. She took a short walk up the corridor and satisfied herself that she was the only person left aboard. Then, borne on the thin, freezing wind, came a noise which, even although she had never heard it before, she recognised immediately. The sound of gun-fire! Rumbling, ominous, terrifying! She poked her head out of the carriage window and saw the distant flashes light the sky. She scrambled her belongings together, wandered along the platform and, in a small hut by the track, found four men clustered round a stove: the engine-driver, stoker, the station-master and the conductor who had unsuccessfully urged her to get off the train at Chita. They made her a cup of strong coffee and with a running commentary amplified by gymnastic gesticulations reiterated the fact that she had, indeed, reached the end of the line. Beyond was the battlefield. The train, they said, would remain at this halt for days, perhaps weeks, until such time as it was needed, then it would take wounded back to hospitals behind the line. They pointed down the track the way they had come. “Go back,” they said.

  The line wound drearily through snow-covered pines. It ducked through dark tunnels; it was hemmed in by high mountains; the snow in between the sleepers was thick and soft; icicles hung from the pine-cones. But to walk back to Chita, they said, was her only hope.

  She set off. Not many miles from the Manchurian border, the Siberian wind gusting the powdered snow around her heels, a suitcase in either hand, one still decorated ludicrously with kettle and saucepan, fur rug over her shoulders, she crunched off into the night. God obviously did not mean her to be eaten by the wolves, for there were plenty about.

  Four hours later, when the cold and exhaustion became too much for her, she sat down on the icy rail, lit her spirit stove and boiled some water for her coffee essence. She ate two soda cakes, and felt mise
rable. She decided she must sleep, at least for an hour or two. She arranged her suitcases into a windbreak, scooped up snow to fill the cracks, wrapped herself firmly into her old fur rug and lay down. Drowsily, she listened to the noise of far-off howling, and with childlike innocence said to herself, “Now I wonder who let all those big dogs out at this time of night? Noisy lot!” Not until a couple of years later in China did she realise that she had heard a hunting wolf-pack.

  A pale dawn was lighting the mountains when she woke up, stiff but refreshed. She made herself more coffee, ate another soda cake, gathered up her luggage and set off again along the interminable railway track. Late that night, staggering along, almost unconscious with cold and weariness, she saw the lights of Chita gleaming far down the track. It gave her new strength. She struggled onwards, lifted herself wearily on to the platform, dropped her suitcases into a heap and draped herself on top of them.

  ALAN BURGESS,

  The Small Woman

  Travelling to Samarkand

  1. Lord Curzon

  Installed in a broad-gauge railway carriage, Curzon settled down to enjoy the three days of effortless travel that were to transport him from Uzun Ada to Samarkand. Around him were stowed his bedding and his portable rubber bath, his tinned meat and chocolate, his notebooks and his flea powder. His journalistic conscience was disturbed by the difficulty of gathering facts and figures about the rolling stock—“it is, indeed, as hard to extract accurate statistics or calculations from a Russian as to squeeze juice from a peachstone.” Nor was there much else to engage his attention as for more than twenty-four hours the train rolled slowly through Kara Kum, the desert of black sand.

  On the afternoon of the second day, the train halted at Geok Tepe, where, seven years before, General Skobeleff’s army had stormed the fortress in one of the most bloody encounters of the Russian drive into Central Asia. As at Tel-el-Kebir in 1883, Curzon paced the battlefield, reconstructed the action, gloomily noted the debris of war and a carpet of bleached bones. Then on through fertile country to Askabad, the capital of Transcaspia and seat of the Russian Governor-General. Here Curzon’s suspicions were aroused by the construction of a broad road leading to the Persian frontier. “Already,” he wrote, “the north of Persia and Khorasan are pretty well at Russian mercy from a military point of view.”