On the Slow Train by Michael Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

stand telling passengers to insert a coin for a luggage trolley is rusting and empty, the trolleys probably having been tipped into the ocean long ago.
    But now it’s time to M IND THE DOORS , and the train heads down the half-mile length of the pier as purposefully as it must have accelerated out of East Finchley for Charing Cross, past the rusting remains of the diesel tramway, with its own separate tracks, which functioned until 1969. In fact rust and genteel decline have defined the entire transport history of the island, which has always been a kind of anachronism, operating with the equipment of at least the previous generation. In the nineteenth century there were three different companies, with names like the Freshwater, Yarmouth and Newport Railway, running a ragbag of ancient locomotives over single-track branch lines which mostly seemed to go to nowhere. Between the wars the railways still captured the flavour of the 1890s, when Queen Victoria was in residence at her favourite home, Osborne House, near Cowes. And from the 1950s until the end of steam in 1966 the railway was a perfectly preserved museum of the pre-grouping world before 1923, despite the modern liveries. Little tank engines pottered round single-track secondary routes tugging wooden-panelled non-corridor coaches. And now the Tube trains, which made their first outing when Neville Chamberlain was prime minister, are the biggest anachronism of them all.
    There are many who say that the Isle of Wight never recovered from the death of Queen Victoria, when the smart set – who built their holiday homes to be close to Her Majesty and possibly get invited round for a fairy cake and some iced tea with Tennyson and Dickens – packed up and went home. But it has had moments of modernity since then. Parked on the sand next to Ryde Esplanade station is the Hovertravel hovercraft, waiting for its next flight to Southsea. As every schoolboy reader of the
Eagle
knows, this was a Great British Invention of the 1950s developed in the Isle of Wight by Saunders-Roe at Cowes. But sadly, like many other Great British Inventions, including flying boats, also built by Saunders-Roe but in the 1930s, hovercraft are no longer so futuristic. Passenger services have fallen out of favour and the Ryde–Southsea service is the last remaining in Britain. ‘Typical,’ people say. The Isle of Wight can’t resist clinging on to its past.
    Even the station name Esplanade – the only one in Britain – is redolent of Ryde’s Victorian heyday (there was once a Promenade station in Morecambe, but this closed in 1994). Esplanades, by definition, are not modern things, and reek of an idealised past – sandcastles, buckets and spades, the Punch and Judy man and donkey rides. Holidays and nostalgia are always a heady mix, and recollections of childhood summers in south coast holiday resorts are often so frozen in time as to exclude the modern reality of poverty, decline and unemployment which blights so many of them. Even so, Ryde appears rather perky and vibrant this morning, with the little shops of Union Street looking much as they might have done in the days when Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx might have strolled past during their stays on the island. In the Royal Esplanade Hotel on the seafront, Josef, the waiter who serves me morning coffee, is in jovial mood telling me about the ‘motor scooter festival’ that took place the previous day – the world’s biggest. Back in the 1960s the Vespa crowd used to go to Margate for a punch-up; now middle-aged and more respectable, they come to Ryde for tea and cakes. ‘Such nice people,’ Josef tells me. ‘No trouble. No trouble at all.’ A toot on the whistle as the next train south arrives at Esplanade station over the road. It’s all perfectly in period. In its post-war heyday our Tube train would almost certainly have carried passengers to Leicester Square to watch