On the train last week, heading west through the belatedly sun-kissed meadows
of southern England, I experienced what can only be called an Adlestrop
Moment. It was picture-postcard perfect. Just as in Edward Thomas’s
celebrated little poem, the express drew up “unwontedly” at an unscheduled
stop (or “station stop”, as train staff now insist on saying) on an
afternoon of heat. Just as at Adlestrop, the orderly and enclosed world of
the train, and of expected routine, was ruptured.
I’m not sure that many passengers suddenly became aware, as Thomas’s traveller
did, of “willow-herb and grass, and meadowsweet and haycocks dry” all
around, let alone “all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire” merrily
twittering as far as the ear could hear. Especially as we were in Somerset
at the time. But many of us did spill on to the platform, happy on this
golden afternoon to stretch our legs and enjoy the toasty breeze.
As it turned out, we had bags of time. The train had been halted because an
elderly lady had been taken ill on board. The conductor had called ahead for
assistance. Even so, the ambulance took half an hour to arrive at the little
station. I was in no special hurry, but I imagine that the delay caused
serious inconvenience to others.
Yet as I walked up and down that platform, I noticed two strange things. The
first was that strangers were actually starting to strike up conversations.
We were all travellers who had been thrown together “randomly”, as they say
on Facebook. A quirk of fortune – or rather, someone else’s misfortune – had
trapped us in this half-hour of shared stasis. And because “normality” had
broken down, it seemed, so had reticence. People started telling each other
where they were heading, who would be waiting for them, and why their
journeys mattered.
I was momentarily reminded not of Adlestrop but another classic of English
literature – Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. And I also experienced
a sharp pang of regret: that the frenetic pace and increasingly bland
impersonality of modern life is normally so discouraging of chance
conversations between strangers. We are impoverished by that, I think.
But the second thing I noticed was even odder. Nobody seemed angry about the
delay, once they realised that another passenger was in real distress. Quite
the reverse. Up and down the train there was a frisson of concern about the
welfare of the old lady and her agitated hubby. Those with medical training
rushed to help. So did those without. Who would have thought that a single
trainload of passengers would carry so many pots of pills and potions?
Which set me thinking. Clearly everyone, or nearly everyone, has the capacity
not just to empathise with someone else’s troubles but to demonstrate that
empathy by acts of generosity and self-sacrifice. But what’s equally clear
is that, in normal everyday life, we tend to keep this empathy locked up
behind a mask of polite indifference. Donne might have observed that no man
is an island. But for most of the time, tragically, we act as if we are
isolated entities.
Unlocking the compassion seems to require a jolt to our complacent routines.
That can come in many ways. I experienced it, on a tiny scale, on my halted
train. During the Blitz my parents experienced it at a much deeper level –
quite literally, huddled in Tube stations hundreds of feet below cratered
London.
But why can’t compassion happen all the time? Why does it take a tsunami or a
famine to trigger the West’s concern for the Third World, when billions of
people out there need help all the time? One answer, I guess, is that we are
complex beings in whom altruistic instincts and selfish ones jostle
constantly for supremacy. Even in religious communities, it seems, where the
raison d’être is supposed to be a boundless love for others,
believers can be (and frequently are) bitchy, fractious and ungenerous to
each other.
That’s a pity, because mankind is at its finest when at its most selfless.
When I reflect on the darkest moments of my life, my predominant memories
are of the magnificent gestures of help and comfort I received from others –
not just family and friends, but complete strangers. I recall, for instance,
how I struggled to hobble on crutches across a busy road, after one of the
numerous motorbike accidents that enlivened my younger days, and was
horrified to see a bunch of thuggish-looking teenage punks heading straight
for me. I honestly expected them to kick my sticks away and fall about
laughing as I fell helpless to the ground. Instead, they strode purposefully
to the middle of the road, stopped the cars (I imagine that drivers were too
petrified by their appearance to emit so much as a protesting peep) and then
helped me to wobble across.
William Blake reminded us that cruelty has a human heart – and it does. One
sad but inevitable thing about being a newspaper journalist is that one
spends most of one’s life observing the results of mankind acting callously,
thoughtlessly or selfishly.
But the converse of Blake’s observation is also true – that heart-warmingly
good deeds often spring out of the most unpromising situations and the most
unlikely people. Like Edward Thomas, I will never forget my “Adlestrop”. It
reminded me that Blanche Dubois got it right in A Streetcar Named Desire
(though possibly for the wrong reasons). In a crisis, one can always depend
on the kindness of strangers.
Monsters and marvels (maybe)
A giant boa constrictor slithering through the airing cupboards of South
Wales. A great white shark spotted in Cornish waters. Hitler’s record
collection mysteriously found. Lord Lucan alive and well and living in New
Zealand. A terrifying plague of moths relentlessly munching through our
woollies.
Or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter, does it? This is the silly season!
Journalists and readers enter into a tacit conspiracy of suspended
disbelief. We need to fill white space. You need to be lightly entertained
as you sit with your toes buried in sand and your pasty precariously perched
on the arm of your deckchair. Who gives a tinker’s cuss if the great white
shark turns out to have been photographed slightly farther away from
Cornwall than we were first told (ie, off South Africa)? Or if Hitler’s
records turn out to have been conjured from the same magic trunk as his
diaries? In August it all adds to the gaiety of a recumbent nation.
But why do we call this the silly season? None of those stories is any dafter
than the piffle from Westminster that fills newspapers for the other 11
months.
My favourite silly-season story? It was the item about the girl, drifting out
to sea on an inflatable banana, being rescued by a man on an inflatable
peach. “Unfortunately,” a coastguard said, “this sort of thing is all too
common.”
Got it covered
One reason why there may be no proper stories right now is that most of
Britain’s journalists seem to be where I am – at the Edinburgh Festival. How
many hacks does it take to cover a cultural beanfeast? Well, nearly a
thousand are accredited by the Fringe alone. Good grief, the entire First
World War was covered by fewer reporters. I’m not saying that there are
skivers in our ranks. Perish the thought. But I wish I owned shares in
Scottish pubs.
