The rail journey from Yorkshire down to Cambridge was always a special one. It took most of the morning, first the short run from Halifax to Leeds, then dragging suitcase and bags over to the main line platforms and the Intercity service to Peterborough.
At Peterborough there was another intensive cardiovascular session, sweating and straining to get a few hundredweight of belongings up stairs and over the bridge to the local train for Cambridge. That trip carried me from Halifax and Brighouse, wrapped in the gloom of their own Mordor, to Rohan in the south. As the dark satanic mills fell further and further away my mood would lift and the black clouds would be drift back into the dark alleys of my mind.
I am (I hope) no longer quite the naive child I was when I first made that journey - dreaming of hallowed corridors, the ground where Newton and Marlowe had strolled and pondered and carved their names on history. Now, with the benefit of hindsight I am far more cynical, but the embers of that vision and that last leg of the journey, from Peterborough across the Fens to Cambridge, are not yet wholly cold and dead. They still glow faintly, now and then.
I would always sit by the window, so as to see the countryside pass by, and to know that I was really going somewhere. Facing forwards and watching the tapestry of fields and hedges, the winding lanes and loitering trees as the world and the future rolled towards me under the clattering wheels of the "Local service calling at March, Ely, Cambridge." Those names are still magical, they echo with the promise of life and the future.
I always left Halifax as early in the morning as possible, partly because I couldn't stand to be there any longer than I had to, but perhaps mostly because then I would cross the Fens in the fresh sharp light of the morning. I remember sitting in the carriage, as the train hummed and the guard walked along the platform closing doors,
BANG
BANG
BANG
BANG
BANG
and the engine would start to race The train would jerk forwards, wheels and joints squealing and rattling in protest, first at a slow walking pace then faster and faster up to a modest canter as it made its way out of the town. We would slowly escape from the gaze of morose factories and smug semi-detached family dwellings, and work up to a steady, comfortable, run.
Chuggatachug-chuggatachug-chuggatachug the carriage swaying a trifle violently from side to side, so if you rested your head on the window it would bounce painfully off the glass every few seconds. Steadily we would forge on through the rising swell of the countryside towards the bustle of King's Parade and the quietly reverberating tranquillity of New Court.
The sun would pour in through the window, burning the side of my face and making me take off pullover and jacket. Flecks of dust would wallow and drift in the pyramid of glowing sunlight, the tall heat in the carriage a startling contrast to the biting chill of the morning air outside, and the silver frost just beginning to submit to the morning sun.
As we rolled on I would start to notice the mist. A low silver-white blanket, gilded with sunlight, fed by the evaporating dew, luxuriating in the still clear air, faint tendrils, phantoms reaching up towards the ascending sun. Where there was no mist the harsh, glistening frost and dew would sear my eyes. Like a sea of pearl and diamond, a living thing, so complex, constantly changing, transient, melting away to nothingness even as it was born.
This was that moment between reaching out for a thing, and actually touching it. That frozen instant just before your fingers actually feel the prize and find it heavier, less elegant, less perfect, than it had promised to be. It was that short space of time when the future flawless.
Camelot in the spring.
As the mists cowered and finally died in the face of the towering morning, they would carry with them the last demons, not comfortable here.
Even on the wettest, darkest days -- I loved Cambridge. I would throw on a jacket and walk down Kings Parade, through Kings College, along the river, anywhere. For hours.
The pattering raindrops were calming, soothing, the sounds of the city were blunted slightly amongst the constant sound of falling droplets. The low grey cloud reminded me how I used to read under the blankets when I was little. Safe. Back in Yorkshire I would sit in the front room and think of death. Think of the glowering moors and the dark morose greens and lost, gnarled trees. I would see the blackened, corrupted stonework and doomed figures. The Brontes standing alone in the fields, watching the grass and the trees whipped and beaten by the wind and the rain.
I thought of them dreaming and writing of lives seared by passion, while they scribbled in their notebooks, and died. One by one. Their bodies rotting in the stagnant void of reality.
They lived in Haworth -- a magnet for tourists now, thousands of them crawling all over the place. Wearing out the tired old cobbles.
They say that once a position at Cambridge was a sentence of death. Damp, surrounded by rancid marshland, and a ghastly halitosis of pestilence and evil vapours. A good way to dispose of troublesome intellectuals.
Times change.
