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Westport leave as I could not pay for the tickets. We had the choice of taking a hotel room and waiting till the next day, till the next train (for the afternoon train would be too late for us to make our bus connection)—or in some way boarding the Westport train without tickets; this “some way” was found: we traveled on credit. The stationmaster in Dublin, touched by the spectacle of three tired children, two dejected women, and a helpless father (escaped only two minutes earlier from the swastika truck!), worked out that the night in the hotel would cost as much as the whole train journey to Westport: he wrote down my name, the number of persons traveling on credit , shook my hand reassuringly, and signaled to the train to leave.
    So on this strange island we managed to enjoy the only kind of credit which we had never been given and never tried to obtain, the credit of a railway company.
    But unfortunately there was no breakfast on credit in the dining car; the attempt to obtain it failed: the bank notes, in spite of the crisp new paper, did not convince the headwaiter. With a sigh we changed the last pound, had the Thermos flask filled with tea and ordered a package of sandwiches. The conductors were left with the stern duty of writing strange names down in their notebooks. It happened once, twice, three times, and the alarming question arose for us: shall we have to pay these unique debts once, twice, or three times?
    The new conductor, who joined the train at Athlone, had red hair and was eager and young; when I confessed to him that we had no tickets, a ray of recognition crossed his face.Clearly he had been told about us, clearly our names and our credit together with the number of persons traveling on credit had been telegraphed through from station to station.
    For four hours after Athlone, the train, now a local one, wound its way through smaller and smaller stations farther and farther to the west. The highlights of its stops were the towns between Athlone (9,000 inhabitants) and the coast: Roscommon and Claremorris, with as many inhabitants as there are people living in three city apartment blocks; Castlebar, capital of County Mayo, with four thousand; and Westport with three thousand inhabitants; on one stretch, corresponding roughly to the distance between Cologne and Frankfurt, the population dwindles consistently, then comes the great water and beyond that New York with three times as many inhabitants as the whole Republic of Ireland, with more Irish than there are living in the three counties beyond Athlone.
    The stations are small, the station buildings light green, the fences around them snow-white, and on the platform there usually stands a solitary boy who has taken one of his mother’s trays and hung it around his neck with a leather strap: three bars of chocolate, two apples, a few rolls of peppermints, chewing gum and a comic; we wanted to entrust our last silver shilling to one of these lads, but the choice was difficult. The women were in favor of apples and peppermint; the children, of chewing gum and the comic. We compromised and bought the comic and a bar of chocolate. The comic had the promising title of Batman , and the cover showed a man in a dark mask climbing up the outsides of houses.
    The smiling boy stood there all alone on the little station in the bog. The gorse was in bloom, the fuchsia hedges were already budding; wild green hills, mounds of peat; yes, Ireland is green, very green, but its green is not only the green of meadows, it is the green of moss—certainly here, beyond Roscommon, toward County Mayo—and moss is the plant of resignation, of forsakenness. The country is forsaken, it is being slowly butsteadily depopulated, and we—none of us had ever seen this strip of Ireland, or the house we had rented “somewhere in the west”—we felt a little apprehensive: in vain the women looked left and right of the train for potato fields, vegetable plots, for the fresh,