Hooton offered the world not only a mildly ridiculous name, but the dumpiest British Rail station I ever hope to sneeze in. The shacklike platform waitingrooms were dripping wet, which didn't matter a great deal as I was soaked already. With six others, I waited a small eternity for a train to Chester, where I changed to another for Llandudno.
The Llandudno train was gratifyingly empty, so I took a seat at a table for four, and contented myself with the thought that I would soon be in a nice hotel or guesthouse where I could have a hot bath followed by a generously apportioned dinner. I spent a little time watching the scenery, then pulled out my copy of Kingdom by the Sea to see if Paul Theroux had said anything about the vicinity that I might steal or modify to my own purposes. As always, I was amazed to find that as he rattled along these very tracks he was immersed in a lively conversation with his fellow passengers. How does he do it? Quite apart from the consideration that my carriage was nearly empty, I don't know how you strike up conversations with strangers in Britain. In America, of course, it's easy. You just offer a hand and say, 'My name's Bryson. How much money did you make last year?' and the conversation never looks back from there.
But in England or in this instance Wales it's so hard, or atleast it is for me. I've never had a train conversation that wasn't disastrous or at least regretted. I either blurt the wrong thing ('Excuse me, I can't help notice the exceptional size of your nose') or it turns out that the person whose companionship I've encouraged has a serious mental disorder that manifests itself in murmurings and prolonged helpless weeping, or is a sales rep for the HozeBlo Stucco Company who mistakes your polite interest for keenness and promises to drop by for an estimate the next time he's in the Dales, or who wants to tell you all about his surgery for rectal cancer and then makes you guess where he keeps his colostomy bag ('Give up? Look, it's here under my arm. Go on, have a squeeze') or is a recruiter for the Mormons or any of ten thousand other things I would sooner be spared. Over a long period of time it gradually dawned on me that the sort of person who will talk to you on a train is almost by definition the sort of person you don't want to talk to on a train, so these days I mostly keep to myself and rely for conversational entertainment on books by more loquacious types like Jan Morris and Paul Theroux.
So there is a certain neat irony that as I was sitting there minding my own business some guy in a rustling anorak came by, spied the book, and cried, 'Aha, that Thoreau chap!' I looked up to find him taking a perch on a seat opposite me. He looked to be in his early sixties, with a shock of white hair and festive, lushly overgrown eyebrows that rose in pinnacles, like the tips of whipped meringue. They looked as if somebody had been lifting him up by grabbing hold of them. 'Doesn't know his trains, you know,' he said.
'Sorry?' I answered warily.
'Thoreau.' He nodded at my book. 'Doesn't know his trains at all. Or if he does he keeps it to himself.' He laughed heartily at this and enjoyed it so much that he said it again and then sat with his hands on his knees and smiling as if trying to remember the last time he and I had had this much fun together.
I gave an economical nod of acknowledgement for his quip and returned my attention to my book in a gesture that I hoped he would correctly interpret as an. invitation to fuck off. Instead, he reached across and pulled the book down with a crooked finger an action I find deeply annoying at the best of times. 'Do you know that book of his Great Railway what'sit? All across Asia. You know the one?'
I nodded.
'Do you know that in that book he goes from Lahore to Islamabad on the Delhi Express and never once mentions the make of engine.'
I could see that I was expected to comment, so I said, 'Oh?'
'Never mentioned it. Can you imagine that? What use is a railway book if you don't talk about the engines.'
'You like trains then?' I said and immediately wished I hadn't.
The next thing I knew the book was on my lap and I was listening to the world's most boring man. I didn't actually much listen to what he said. I found myself riveted by his soaring eyebrows and by the discovery that he had an equally rich crop of nose hairs. He seemed to have bathed them in MiracleGro. He wasn't just a trainspotter, but a traintalker, a far more dangerous condition.
. 'Now this train,' he was saying, 'is a MetroCammel selfsealed unit built at the Swindon works, at a guess I'd say between July 1986 and August, or at the very latest September, of '88. At first I thought it couldn't be a Swindon 8688 because of the crossstitching on the seatbacks, but then I noticed the dimpled rivets on the side panels, and I thought to myself, I thought, What we have here, Cyril my old son, is a hybrid. There aren't many certainties in this world but MetroCammel dimpled rivets never lie. So where's your home?'
It took me a moment to realize that I had been asked a question. 'Uh, Skipton,' I said, only half lying.
'You'll have Crosse & Blackwell crosscambers up there,' he said or something similarly meaningless to me. 'Now me, I live in UptononSevern'
'The Severn bore,' I said reflexively, but he missed my meaning.
'That's right. Runs right past the house.' He looked at me with a hint of annoyance, as if I were trying to distract him from his principal thesis. 'Now down there we have Z46 Zanussi spin cycles with Abbott & Costello horizontal thrusters. You can always tell a Z46 because they go patooshpatoosh over seamed points rather than katoinkkatoink. It's a dead giveaway every time. I bet you didn't know that.'
I ended up feeling sorry for him. His wife had died two years before suicide, I would guess and he had devoted himself since then to travelling the rail lines of Britain, counting rivets, noting breastplate numbers, and doing whatever else it is these poor people do to pass the time until God takes them away to a merciful death. I had recently read a newspaper article in which it wasreported that a speaker at the British Psychological Society had described trainspotting as a form of autism called Asperger's syndrome.
He got off at Prestatyn something to do with a Faggots & Gravy twelveton blender tender that was rumoured to be coming through in the morning and I waved to him from the window as the train pulled out, then luxuriated in the sudden peace. I listened to the
train rushing over the tracks it sounded to me like it was saying Asperger's syndrome Asperger's syndrome and passed the last forty minutes to Llandudno idly counting rivets.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FROM THE TRAIN, NORTH WALES LOOKED LIKE HOLIDAY HELL ENDLESS ranks of prisoncamp caravan parks standing in fields in the middle of a lonely, windbeaten nowhere, on the wrong side of the railway line and a merciless dual carriageway, with views over a boundless estuary of moist sand dotted with treacherouslooking sinkholes and, far off, a distant smear of sea. It seemed an odd type of holiday option to me, the idea of sleeping in a tin box in a lonesome field miles from anywhere in a climate like Britain's and emerging each morning with hundreds of other people from identical tin boxes, crossing the rail line and dual carriageway and hiking over a desert of sinkholes in order to dip your toes in a distant sea full of Liverpool turds. I can't put my finger on what exactly, but something about it didn't appeal to me.