She accompanied us to the station. Even by September 1914 the train-services had begun to be disrupted (though there were extra trains to important places like Odessa) and tickets were becoming hard to acquire. Nonetheless Shura spirited us through all the formalities, through all the early-morning crowds of uniformed police and soldiers and sailors - a sea of multi-coloured cloth and gold braid - through the sweetmeat sellers, the drinks-vendors, the sellers of charts and lurid magazines or newspapers. How Russia was full of men, women and children with trays around their necks in those days. In his knowledge of the station, its peculiar customs and denizens, Shura was at least able to comfort my mother. ‘I suppose if you must go into the world, it is better to go with a worldly guide,’ she said, when he had vanished for a moment to engage some pinch-faced maiden in furious conversation before returning with a swagger and a handful of long-stemmed cigarettes, one of which he offered to me. I refused, of course. My mother told Shura of the dangers of smoking and warned him how upset his Uncle Semya would be if he learned that the ‘little scholar’ had been corrupted. Shura took all this with a kind of pitying tolerance for both of us and then announced that the train was in and that we should board it.
My mother came with us. She followed us along the gangway of our coach, distracting me from my admiration of its wonders: its galley, its stove. This was one of the finest expresses of the South Western Railway. She was a real beauty of a locomotive (probably a 4-6-4, though I cannot now recall the exact type) whose livery of dark green, gold and cream was matched in all the coaches. It was a very long train, comprised entirely of first- and second-class carriages. There was no third-class accommodation on this Kiev-Odessa Express, which could normally do the journey in under fourteen hours. Even the steam from the loco seemed whiter and cleaner and more impressive than the steam from other trains. In some of the further platforms I saw troop-transports with heavy artillery on flat-cars and these, together with the large number of armed servicemen in the station itself, were a clear reminder that we were a nation at war. Once again I felt the old urge to don a uniform. I remarked to Shura that he must be looking forward to the moment when he was called to the service of his country. His only response was to puff on his papyrussa cigarette and offer me another of his winks. My mother burst into tears at the thought of my joining the army and she was comforted by the easy-going Shura in that same spirit of tolerant contempt. Through some trick he found us both places in a compartment and let me bid farewell to my mother while he kept the seats for us.
The collar of my new coat was damp with her tears before the guard told her kindly that she must leave. Shura shouted that she should fear nothing, that if the driver lost his way Shura would be able to put him on the right track. This raised a laugh from the other occupants of the carriage and drew a last snuffle or two from my mother, who kissed me and went to stand on the platform, dabbing at her eyes and producing, every so often, a kind of agitated grin. I took my seat. Shura and I stood out from most of the other passengers in that we were younger and did not wear uniform. Most of the people in our carriage were soldiers, sailors and nurses, all of whom were smiling at us with that peculiar complacency those who wear uniform often reserve for those who do not.
This was to be the first long train journey I recall with proper clarity (there are hazy impressions of our journey from Tsaritsyn to Kiev). It was to span the whole day, from eight-thirty in the morning until late into the night, but I should have been glad if it had gone on forever. The train was taking me to a new world of romance comprised partly of Hope’s Ruritania, partly of Pushkin’s poetry, and of Green’s book The Cap of Invisibility, with its tales of exotic ports and flawless sapphire seas. I was prepared to sit in my place the whole way, but Shura had me up almost as soon as the train left the station, and my mother’s limp and glistening handkerchief, behind. He wanted to show me the first-class carriages. So we made a tour of the train, playing the innocent whenever an official asked us what we were about, telling him that we had lost our carriage.
I was astonished at the luxury of the first-class, at the deep-green plush, the polished brass and oak. Shura told me that he had travelled first-class more than once, but I did not believe him. He knew, he said, how to act like a gentleman: ‘It will be my job some day.’
I could not imagine what business he planned for himself. What could elevate him permanently to this world of plush and glitter? I did not, however, disapprove of his ambition. Those wonderful carriages looked like the abode of angels and smelled like a well-groomed beast. And the people who inhabited them were demigods. I loved them. I longed to share their life, to be accepted by them.
I was to retain my enjoyment of luxurious travel no matter how frequently I came to experience it. It raised me from the deepest gloom to the highest imaginable sense of well-being. Some years would pass before I was to familiarise myself thoroughly with that most delicious form of transport. It has now all but disappeared from the world. Today it is replaced by the utilitarianism of plastic and nylon; the bleak, characterless, ‘efficient’ State-operated railways and airlines. And not only the trains have steamed their way into oblivion. The great ships, the monarchs of the Cunard and P&O Lines, have gone completely. What do we have instead? Car-ferries. No wonder all the transport-systems are losing money. What human being really wishes to travel in something resembling a less-than-clean hospital ward? As one who has used every form of modern transport, from the great pre-war liners to the sadly-missed and much-maligned Zeppelin passenger ships, I can honestly say that democratisation has worked entirely against everyone’s interest, including the public’s. Save for a few pathetic cruise-vessels, there is nothing left of the flying boats and luxury steamers which so frequently confirmed the maxim that to travel was better than to arrive.
When I speak nostalgically in the pub about the C-class Imperial Airways planes, I am laughed at openly. Those ignorant poly-hybrids occupying their featureless housing estates resent anyone who remembers days when ‘civilisation’ was something more than a word for labour-exchanges and municipal art galleries. Romance has vanished from their lives. They could not recognise it now if they were handed it on a plate (as they are handed everything else). They mock the past. They ape only its most tawdry and ‘glamorous’ aspects. For them Sensation has become everything. They cultivate cynicism as their mothers and fathers cultivated ‘sophistication’. They are quite as ludicrous as those shop-girls and sad clerks who filled the dance-halls of the twenties and thirties and were despised by genuine high society. They share another thing: they have no respect for their elders. They have no imagination. Yet they flock to see films like Murder on the Orient Express. Do they believe that the likes of them would have been allowed to set even a grubby boot on the footplate of such trains? In my day ‘skinheads’ and ‘teddy boys’ knew their place. In the gutter! They have the transport they deserve: hidden in the lower depths, noisy and dirty and claustrophobic, fit only for H. G. Wells’s bestial Morlocks.
If I did not exactly feel like an Eloi by the time we returned to our seats I certainly felt like a prince. The sense of comfort and security was everywhere in the train. And it was obvious that many of our fellow-passengers shared this mood. Every place in the compartment was, of course, taken. There were uniformed people filling the corridors. It was almost impossible to see past them to the mellow wheatlands of the Ukrainian steppe, now churned with chaff and scattered with sheaves and haystacks, for the harvest had been gathered. The sky had that wonderful pale-gold and silver-blue quality which comes at about nine o’clock in the morning, promising a warm autumn day. The two Catholic nursing nuns, one in her twenties and the other apparently not yet reached maturity, asked if the window could be opened and we all agreed that it would be good to have some fresh air. I offered to open it for them, but failed to understand the sash-cord method. To my great embarrassment Shura had to help me. The wind blew the smell of the countryside, sweet and rich, into my face, and my spirits rose again. As well as the nuns, who had the window seats, we shared space with two youngish naval lieutenants; a Cossack captain in grey shapka and kaftan, with bullet pouches and a wide belt, into which was stuck a dagger and from which hung a typical Cossack sword; a gentleman in a dark homburg hat and coat, with an astrakhan collar; and a Greek priest who spoke little Russian but who smiled at us a great deal, as if in blessing. The Cossack captain sat next to Shura and more or less opposite me. He had a clean-shaven jaw but a huge, curling grey moustache with waxed ends. He sat with his sabre between his knees, his back stiff and unsupported by the seat behind him, as if he rode an invisible horse. He had that manner Cossacks often have, of his horse never being very far away, and I imagined (though in all likelihood I was wrong) that a box at the end of the train bore a chestnut stallion.