Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads - University of Hull

Newcastle, York, Edinburgh and, no doubt, Hull. I’d tack myself onto
a queue with a combination of deep reluctance and deep resignation
that I supposed made me a truly British citizen. My trips in those
days were driven by my pursuit of novelistic material, ‘seeing the
world’ as I thought of it. Later on, I was a bright, over-aged PhD
student at Goldsmith’s, eager to give careful little papers on Dickens
and Premonition, or Dickens and Alcohol, in cities I knew He
had visited.
The last Flying Scotsman had left a decade before I was born, but
there was still a certain atmosphere about the station, a lingering
moodiness of steam. I walked carefully among the shades and
shadows. Underfoot, the brown-grey, semi-shiny stone resembled
skin, strangely dimpled in places, patched here and darned there. A
rich smell of old waiting-rooms drifted over me, of damp, soft
wooden floors, impregnated with dirt. I tasted smoke. And then I
saw Him, at the end of the platform, a darting human genie made
of fire and mist, surrounded by a fiery-misty crowd of fellow-actors,
including pretty teenaged Ellen and her sly mama, their mass of bags
in the care of fiery-misty, cap-doffing porters. He shouted orders
and jokes, he hurried everyone along, he blew kisses to Catherine,
the donkey-wife he was already leaving behind.
My elation died as the Pendolino nosed in. The Pendolino is a
moulded-plastic Disneyland, nursery-school, health-and-safety
train, a pretend airplane-train, a train that can’t sing, even when it
manages to reach forty miles per hour, a train whose wheels never
go der-der-der-dum over the rails, a train which, when it stops
precariously in the middle of a viaduct, has no furious steam to gush
forth, not even any batteries to re-charge with a reassuring, patienthorse
whinny: a train gloss-coated and uneventful as a banker’s
conscience. And here it was, trying to look important.
I queued briefly to get into the Quiet Coach. The backs of the seats
had great orange ears sticking out, like some cartoon elephant’s. I
hadn’t made a reservation. Apparently, no-one had. The little
information-screens overhead were innocent of information. I sat
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