Metroland Read Online Free PDF

a bit special, you see.’
    Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Only four stations to go anyway. Maybe he was quite interesting.
    ‘What about those other places? Quinton whatsit.’
    ‘Quainton Road. They were all out beyond Aylesbury. Waddesdon, Quainton Road, it went, Grandborough, Winslow Road, Verney Junction.’ (If he went on like this, I’d cry) ‘Fifty miles from Verney Junction to Baker Street; what a line. Can you imagine – they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a Channel Tunnel to the Continent. What a line.’
    He paused. An empty school playground flitted by; a metal merry-go-round draped with washing; the flash of a windscreen.
    ‘They never built the Outer Circle either.’
    He was an elegiac old fugger, that was for sure. He told me about workmen’s fares, and electrification, and Lord’s Station, which was closed when war broke out. About someone called Sir Edward Watkin, who had some plans or other; some ambitious old turd, no doubt, who couldn’t tell Tissot from Titian.
    ‘It wasn’t just ambition, you see. There was confidence as well. Confidence in ambition … Nowadays …’ He spotted the reflex glaze-over which my face always gave when I heard that last word. ‘Don’t sneer at the Victorians, my lad,’ he said sharply. Suddenly he sounded as if he was turning nasty again; maybe he was a rapist; maybe he realised how I’d outwitted him. ‘Look at the things they did instead.’
    What, me, sneer at the Victorians? I didn’t have enough sneer-room left. By the time I’d finished sneering at dummos, prefects, masters, parents, my brother and sister, ThirdDivision (North) football, Molière, God, the bourgeoisie and normal people, I didn’t have any strength left for more than a twisted pout at history. I looked at the old fugger and had a go at an expression of moral outrage; but it wasn’t one my face was much good at.
    ‘You see, it wasn’t just the people who built the railway and ran it. It was everyone else as well. You probably aren’t interested,’ (Christ, he did go on, didn’t he?) ‘but when the first through train from Baker Street to Farringdon Street arrived, the passengers cleaned out the restaurant buffet at Farringdon Street in ten minutes flat,’ (maybe they were hungry because they were scared) ‘ten minutes flat. Like a plague of locusts.’ He was almost talking to himself now, but I thought it wise to slot in another question, just to be on the safe side.
    ‘Is that when they called it Metroland?’ I asked, not really sure when I was talking about, but taking care not to sneer.
    ‘Metroland? That nonsense.’ He turned his attention to me again. ‘That was the beginning of the end. No, that was much later, some time during the war before Hitler’s. That was all to please the estate agents. Make it sound cosy. Cosy homes for cosy heroes. Twenty-five minutes from Baker Street and a pension at the end of the line,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Made it what it is now, a bourgeois dormitory.’
    It was as if someone had dropped a bag of cutlery inside my head. Hey. Christ. You can’t say that. It’s not allowed. Look at yourself. I can call you bourgeois; well, I think I can anyway. You can’t call yourself it. It’s just not … on. I mean, it’s against all the known rules. It’s like a master admitting he knows his own nickname. It … well, I suppose it can only be answered by a non-conventional response.
    ‘Aren’t you a bourgeois, then?’ I inventoried to myself his clothes, voice, briefcase.
    ‘Ha. Of course I am,’ he said lightly, almost gently. His tone reassured me; but his words remained a puzzle.

6 • Scorched Earth
    Toni and I worked hard at deconditioning. After a thoughtful session of Bruckner (‘Lowering of pulse; vague tugging inside chest; occas.