Metroland Read Online Free Page B

picturesque rustics, gnarled artisans or homicidal eccentrics. All they had to do was fork out at Christmas, and fork out money, or at least something that was convertible.
    Like Toni, I was dark, but several inches taller; some would have called me skinny, but I preferred to think of myself as having the whippy strength of a young sapling. My nose, I hoped, still had a bit of growing left to do; my cheeks were free of moles; occasionally, a squad of acne would make its listless progress across my forehead; my best feature, I believed, was my eyes – deep, saturnine, full of secrets learned and not yet learned (at least, that was how I saw them).
    It was a low-key English face, which suited the low-key sense of expatriation common to all who lived in Eastwick. Everyone in this suburb of a couple of thousand people seemed to have come in from elsewhere. They would have been attracted by the solidly built houses, the reliable railway service, and the good gardening soil. I found the cosy, controlled rootlessness of the place reassuring; though I did tend to complain to Toni that I’d prefer something
    ‘… more elemental. I wish I were, oh, somewhat more sort of bare and forked.’
    ‘You mean you wish you were somewhat more bare and fugged.’
    Well, yes, that too, I suppose; at least I think so.
    ‘Où habites-tu?’ they would ask year after year, drilling us for French orals; and always I would smirkingly reply,
    ‘J’habite Metroland.’
    It sounded better than Eastwick, stranger than Middlesex; more like a concept in the mind than a place where you shopped. And so, of course, it was. As the Metropolitan Railway hadpushed westward in the 1880s, a thin corridor of land was opened up with no geographical or ideological unity: you lived there because it was an area easy to get out of. The name Metroland – adopted during the First World War both by estate agents and the railway itself – gave the string of rural suburbs a spurious integrity.
    In the early 1960s, the Metropolitan Line (by which the purist naturally meant the Watford, Chesham and Amersham branches) still retained some of its original separateness. The rolling-stock, painted a distinctive mid-brown, had remained unchanged for sixty years; some of the bogeys, my Ian Allen spotter’s book informed me, had been running since the early 1890s. The carriages were high and square, with broad wooden running-boards; the compartments were luxuriously wide by modern standards, and the breadth of the seats made one marvel at Edwardian femural development. The backs of the seats were raked at an angle which implied that in the old days the trains had stopped for longer at the stations.
    Above the seats were sepia photographs of the line’s beauty spots – Sandy Lodge Golf Course, Pinner Hill, Moor Park, Chorleywood. Most of the original fittings remained: wide, loosely strung luggage racks with coat-hooks curving down from their support struts; broad leather window straps, and broad leather straps to stop the doors from swinging all the way back on their hinges; a chunky, gilded figure on the door, 1 or 3; a brass fingerplate backing the brass door handle; and, engraved on the plate, in a tone of either command or seductive invitation, the slogan ‘Live in Metroland’.
    Over the years I studied the rolling stock. From the platform I could tell at a glance a wide from an extra-wide compartment. I knew all the advertisements by heart, and all the varieties of decoration on the barrel-vaulted ceilings. I knew the range of imagination of the people who scraped the NO SMOKING transfers on the windows into new mottoes: NO SNORING was the most popular piece of knife-work; NO SNOGING a baffler for years; NO SNOWING the most whimsical. I stowed away in a first-class carriage one dark afternoon, and sat bolt upright in thesoft seat, too frightened to look around me. I even penetrated, by mistake, the special single compartment at the front of each train, which was