By the water, under the water

We took my mother out for a day in the Isle of Purbeck. The plan was to pick her up and drive down to the park-and-ride just north of Corfe Castle, and then take the train down to Swanage. I had done the drive several time a few years ago, and knew how long it should take me. We picked her up at half past nine.

By ten o'clock it was obvious that I wasn't going to get there for the first train with the comfortable ten minutes in hand to allow her to walk slowly round from the car-park to the station. First it was oncoming traffic through Stalbridge, a village suffering from the current principle of "we don't approve of building bypasses to avoid heavy traffic having to squeeze through the narrow eighteenth century streets, so we'll put in traffic calming measures instead." Then it was a pair of delivery lorries struggling to do 40mph, and then it was a crawl at less than 20mph behind a mini-JCB.

With great relief I turned off the road to Poole and sped along the back roads towards Wareham Forest. I managed to make up a few minutes along the straight stretches. With three minutes to spare I swung into the car-park, and asked the volunteer if they would hold the train for us. He said they would be happy to do so, and Mother with Little Petal set off with the folding wheelchair while I dashed to park the car.

I caught them up as they neared the platform. "You get straight on, I'll get tickets," I yelled, and dashed to the ticket office. I was behind two people, but they finished in short order and I stuck my piece of plastic under the glass and asked for three adult returns. From the platform I heard an "I'll take that, thank you very much." It was the volunteer guard as he took the collapsible wheelchair that mother had hired for the day. His tone was very much that of the physics teacher who has discovered that Debberson-Smythe and Bindersham Junior have just assembled a working replica of the first atomic bomb on the back bench.

I sat back triumphantly in the carriage seat as the last door slammed and the whistle blew. We accelerated briskly towards Corfe, and through the window we could see the tallest part of the ruined castle encased in scaffolding and blue sheeting. They are making the crumbling parts safe. I sometimes wish that they would use the lottery money to rebuild Corfe Castle, and maybe Tintern Abbey, in the same way that the volunteer force rebuilt the Swanage railway after it was closed and left to dereliction back in the Beeching era.

We crossed the viaduct where twenty years ago I had walked along the earth and stones, devoid of sleepers and rails, and suddenly thought "someone's dropped their bracelet", and then almost immediately "that isn't a bracelet." It was a very small adder, perhaps only ten inches long, but it hissed and curled back into the strike position as I nervously crouched down and tried to get the camera to focus close in. I must have been too nervous, because the pictures were blurred. Years ago, as I walked along to the playing fields in Biddenden with my next-youngest brother, a speckled shape had wriggled smoothly out from the grass across the stones almost at our feet. I stopped my brother from reaching out for it; although I was only just old enough to go to school I knew inside me that this wasn't something you picked up and played with.

Corfe Station had been changed since we last came through it, perhaps four years ago. It now has a footbridge, so the second platform is open, and our train halted there. We moved out again, and Mother suddenly exclaimed "Look at the yearlings!" The carriage suddenly filled with excited German voices as everyone else watched the small herd speed alongside the train like shaven Bison. I'm sure I heard a lady describe the solitary brown calf as an 'Almond Cow', if my rusty German was correct. I realised that the two large coaches I had dashed between back at the park and ride must have been full of them.

Mother turned to Little Petal and told her that I first traveled on a steam train when I was three weeks old, and it was the only time I stopped crying. In fact, a few weeks later, worried about my constant crying, she took me to the doctor. "Hmm," he said, as only doctors can, "let's see, shall we?" He pulled his pipe out of his mouth and stuck it in mine, and I went suck-suck-suck so rapidly that the tobacco glowed red and crackled. "Oh dear, you're a bit of a poor cow, aren't you?" he said to Mother. "Try giving him bottled milk."

It worked. That story, by the way, is as related to Little Petal by Mother when they first met. She had never told it to me, and I had no recollection of ever smoking a pipe at so young an age. Funnily enough, though, my earliest distinct memory is of a steam engine. I was sat on my Father's lap, behind the steering-wheel of his car, and up above us loomed an arched bridge, across which a dirty grey engine rolled from left to right, steam drifting across the brickwork. From talking to Mother, we know that she was in hospital ready to give birth to her second child, because the scene I described was of Three Bridges, where they were living for a short while before moving back out to the countryside, and she insisted that she would never have allowed Dad to have me on his lap if she had been in the car with him.

Out of all my loves and hobbies, railways have been the most enduring. I have dabbled with hang-gliders, sailed small yachts around the coast and across the Channel, restored old sports cars to dash around circuits and chase through the lanes in night-rallies, and moved on from all of those. But railways, (and once again, bicycles), have persisted in capturing my imagination. As I grew up, the railways were already dying. We moved twice to places where the local line had just closed, and I became used to seeing rusty derelict rails in the hop-fields of Kent and Sussex on our car journeys to Hastings. I joined a model railway club in my teens. They were very keen on exact-scale modeling, replicating every tiny detail. So I took along my first effort, a short stretch of tree-lined straight rusty track crossing a road, with a single siding, a cornfield made from a piece of doormat, and hop-fields modeled from straws and painted cotton threads. "But where are the trains?" I was asked. "The line is closed," I told them, "It's the crossing at junction road halt on the Kent and East Sussex." They accused me of mickey-taking, and for a while I grew out of railway-modeling.

We reached Swanage, and I went to respectfully ask the guard if I could please have my mother's wheelchair back, and we wouldn't misbehave with it again. As we moved down the street towards the sea I suddenly realised I had left the parcel in the car that I meant to post. It was an ebay sale. "I've got mine in my bag," said Little Petal smugly. What a shame she couldn't have also put mine in her bag too.

We reached the coffee shop that Mother had remembered from an earlier visit. It had a curved front that therefore faced both away from and towards the sea. We picked a table from which we could see Ballards Down and the distant shape of the cliffs of Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight, and started elevenses. I had ordered a tomato and cheese and red-onion pannini, with the smug satisfaction of someone who that morning had discovered he weighed eleven stone and ten pounds. As I bit into it, Mother asked me if I had ever been to the Singleton Museum. I shook my head. So she started to tell us how, back in the late sixties and early seventies, when the craze was to dam up rivers and flood valleys to make reservoirs, (and I froze in shock, thinking "How could she know that I blogged on this very subject less than six hours ago, completely unplanned?"), back then, a man heard that an old house was going to be flooded, and determined to save it. So he bought it, had it dismantled completely, and stored it on his land. A few months later, someone rang him up, saying "I've got another house for you", and so began a collecting obsession that makes my jumble look quite normal. Finally, a wealthy landowner, having learned what this man was trying to do, offered him the use of some land at a peppercorn rent to re-erect this collection of houses. Immediately, I knew I wanted to see it. It reminded me of Ikuta Park in Japan, where in a similar way they had moved old examples of historic housing away from the bulldozers and concrete-lorries and preserved them for all to see. We made plans for our next outing.

We strolled along towards the pier, she walking for a while because she was determined she would stand on her feet, and then riding in the wheelchair as she saw how far away it actually was. She had never seen the new pier, and as we neared it I pointed out the rusty rails set into the paving slabs where in Victorian times there had been a horse-drawn tramway to carry goods to and from the old pier. As we started along the new wooden decking an idea was forming in my mind. I began to photograph the area.

We came to the point where the trippers were clambering onto a small boat that ran from Swanage out into the bay towards the Isle of Wight, and watched it pull away from the pier. I had to convince Little Petal that the distant land she could see was St Catherines Point, and not France or Beachy Head. Her geography is limited to "born in these streets, you're a Geordie, born anywhere south of this line, you;re a southerner." As they sat and ate the Swiss chocolate bars I had bought from a souvenir shop that also had cheap socks on sale, I photographed more and more of the pier, thinking what a lovely model it would make if it also had a small railway running along it to carry the lazier tourists to and from the end.

Something caught my eye,a table for the convenience of the fishermen on the pier, complete with a measuring stick a yard long, with the inches marked off, to settle all those disputes of exactly how long the fish was. And mounted to the back of the same table, I found a piece of grey plastic drainpipe two feet long, arranged vertically, with a second piece of curved pipe on the top. There were two signs on it. The first said it was for disposing of old fishing line, and the second said that you must not put your hand inside it. Is there some small section of each council called the Standard Idiot Department, whose job it is to ensure that everything has a sign on it to try and stop the incorrigibly-stupid from harming themselves? And were they fighting a hopeless battle, doomed to failure because anyone stupid enough to need a sign telling them that doing something was hazardous was probably too stupid to understand the sign in the first place? I managed to persuade Little Petal to put her arm into the curved portion of the pipe so I could take a photograph. She even mimed shock and surprise; oh, the power of the lens. If I'd thought to buy more chocolate I could probably have persuaded them both to "get 'em out and jiggle them around a bit."

But it was lunchtime, and Mother remembered a restaurant she had been to once before, so we went back to the Mowlem Centre and found a lift to help her get up to the first floor, where we could sit in Victorian-style decor and look out over Swanage Bay. I told them how much I liked the roman blinds, and was asked "what roman blinds?" "Well, those," I replied, pointing to what I would describe as regularly-bunched floral pelmets. "They're swags," I was told in stereo, with a derisive undertone. I marked it mentally as a word to remember.

I agonised over the menu, firstly spotting smoked trout salad, then thinking I had found the dressed crab salad my heart desired but realising as I read further that it was a sandwich, until I turned the page and saw that the seafood platter contained not only crab and prawns with rose-marie sauce, but smoked salmon. I knew that I couldn't have a starter as well as a main course and retain my new sub-twelve stone weight, so I made the most of my platter and finished off the onion and peppers that mother and Little Petal both declined to taste.

Outside, although the sky was covered with steel-grey clouds, I saw that beyond Ballards Down the sun was lighting up some of the taller columns with a strange silver glow, and wandered over to the window to try and get a photo through the glass. A woman glanced at me curiously as I tried several angles. "It's these wonderful swags," I told her, "I must have a shot of them." "Are you an interior designer?" she asked, showing some interest. I paused, and said "No, I'm actually a jobbing gardener." She asked, still interested, what sort of things I was good at. I thought quickly about what I had been doing these past few weeks. "Cutting and clearing, uncovering, re-arranging, oh, and tying things up decoratively." She asked if I had a card, and I had to say I was word-of-mouth only. I feel a whole new avenue of opportunity is opening up in front of me.

We made our way back to the station to find a train had fortuitously arrived, which then carried us back up the line to Corfe, where I turfed them off onto the platform, complete with wheelchair, and continued on to the the park and ride. I sprinted to the car, fetched the forgotten parcel, sprinted back, and managed to get on the same train as the engine finished coupling up the the seaward end. The same lady who had clipped our tickets on the way up was now behind the buffet counter. I caught her eye, and asked if it was alright if I rode back to Corfe on my earlier ticket. Yes, of course it was. I hung out of the window with the camera set to video mode and recorded the short trip under the narrow-gauge bridge and around the curve through the short cutting into Corfe station. Mother and Little Petal were still sitting on the seat, and didn't recognise me as I passed them, just another face behind a camera.

I took both parcels to the little post-office in Corfe, and went back to the station. We walked along to the museum for another look round. I have a photograph from there taken several years ago, where Little Petal stands on a platform weighing machine, and stares at the pointer on the dial with a mixture of disbelief and anger, as though a voice has just said 'Get OFF me!" Mother was obviously tiring now, and when the diesel railcar pulled into the platform, she looked relieved when we suggested we could hop on it and get back to the car quickly.

We were just early enough to miss the Wareham rush-hour traffic, but got caught behind a large taut-liner lorry going along the back road through Wareham forest. We crept along at 30 mph as it struggled around some of the tighter bends, and I was glad to see it keep heading along towards Poole as I turned off to Spetisbury. Once again, we crawled along behind tractors, and cars that didn't know quite where they were going, and lorries that did know but weren't going to get there in a hurry. I could see in the mirror that Mother was asleep in the back, so at least she wasn't suffering the same frustration that I was. There are still some wonderful places to go and see, but it is proving to be harder to drive to them and back at what I call a sensible speed. I would like to be able to do the 50mph average that my 2002 copy of Autoroute Express says I should be able to do, but a quick calculation shows that an average of 40mph on any roads other than motorways is something to hope for, not something to expect.

Mother is now seeing each place as though it may be for the last time. I too am looking at everything with a slightly different viewpoint, because I am wondering if we are going to be able to enjoy the use of cars and the roads as much as we have been doing so. Fuel price is only part of the problem; my main concern is that there is now so much more traffic around that getting to anywhere not on a dual-carriageway or motorway is taking significantly longer than I would have expected. Most of the places that I want to see are, while not exactly off the beaten track, certainly not beside the high-speed roads. I would like to take her out to the Singleton museum, which I would have said was a two-hour journey each way from where I live. Allowing for a degradation in average speed, the journey is now probably more like two hours and twenty minutes each way, and I have to allow for a stop each hour so that she cn stretch out her legs and relieve the pain of sitting for too long and the traveling time has extended to nearly six hours. That doesn't leave much time for actually doing anything at the destination, does it? I have an idea that our world is going to shrink quite rapidly soon.

But above all, I am still marveling at the coincidence of reading something in the morning which triggered memories from my youth, and Mother then raising almost that very topic completely unprompted over coffee a few hours later. As Charles Fort said, "it steam-engines when it becomes steam-engine time." And he never even went to Swanage.

By the water, under the water, (Into the blue again)