MAISE & METFORD: The Train (A Novella, Part 1)

This is part one of my novella-in-progress, Maise & Metford, which follows a young girl's coming of age in the British convalescent homes of the 1950s.

The Train

Before boarding the train at Victoria Station, I wasn’t told where I was going. My mum and dad opted for other topics of conversation during meals—which neighbour boy had gotten the cane at Tim’s junior school, the new advert that Dad’s business had put out, and for me, how quickly the 11-plus exam was approaching. No one seemed to remember that I’d been absent from school for over four weeks now, and that—depending on the length of my “early holiday,” as Dad called it—I’d likely not be around in two months to take the 11-plus exam. The grunge of bedrest still clung to me at the kitchen table like a bad odor, glazing my eyes and plastering cowlicks in my hair. Sitting beside Mum, Dad and Tim in their daily wear, I felt hot and muggy-headed in my cotton pyjamas, as if I were sleepwalking and conscious from a great distance away.

On the morning of my departure, Mum had knelt down in front of me and pulled out her handkerchief.

“Take care not to breathe too much smog, Lorna dear,” she said, covering my mouth with the handkerchief and tying it in a knot behind my head. Though her voice was bright, as polished as our front-room silver, she directed it more to the handkerchief than to me. “There’s no worse place for you right now than London.”

I couldn’t remember the last time Mum had knelt in front of me that way. Tim and I had both been bathing and dressing ourselves for years. We were grown enough now for her to give us our good-bye kisses standing up. Even when we came in with bloodied knees from playing outside, she’d sit us on the kitchen table for inspection, slipping an arm around our waist and whisking us onto the tabletop with a brisk there, there. But today was different. Today, her wrists brushed my ears as she knotted the handkerchief. I stared straight down into her part, which I’d never really seen before, not from that angle, her hair gelled into home-perm waves as slick and neat as wax beneath her hairnet. She bowed her head the way she would in church on Sundays.

“There, nice and tight,” she said, straightening up, and didn’t look at me again until we’d reached the coach outside.

Neither Mum nor Dad had ridden with me to the railway station. They entrusted me to the care of a tight-lipped woman in a brown smock, who sat with me in the backseat of the coach. Her apron smelled of starch and bore a cross stitched between her breasts. She spoke to me twice on the whole trip: once to say watch your step as I dismounted the coach, and again to say here’s your queue as I boarded the train. She seemed like a woman who thought little of words, trimming them like fat from a meat cutting. In the coach, I’d wanted to ask her where we were headed, but I thought it best in the end just to gaze quietly out the window instead.

The train carriage was full of boys and girls around my age. They tramped past me in search of empty seats, their footsteps pattering up and down the corridor. Brown-clad nurses like the one I’d ridden with in the coach herded everyone into queues, and occasionally, the elegant spectre of a nun in white drifted from one compartment to another, trailing a respectful silence in its wake. Outside of my primary school classrooms, I’d never seen so many children all in one place. As they slipped out of the nurses’ queues and scattered about the corridor, they reminded me of the children in Peter Pan, running from their nannies in Kensington Gardens on their way to becoming Lost Boys.

I stood in the midst of it all with my back pressed to the carriage door. My head felt as foggy as the London smog that I wasn’t supposed to breathe. For the last month, I’d seen little beyond the four walls of my bedroom. I’d spent more time with the boys and girls on the Children’s Hour than with any of my friends from school or the neighbourhood. To be surrounded by other children now—shoving, shuffling, sneezing, shrieking, making a mess of themselves and others—was surreal, almost dreamlike. I stood no more than two feet from some of them, and yet I was also miles away, still at home in Ruislip, lying in bed with my 11-plus practice papers and wondering what my classmates were learning in school.

Edging away from the bustle, I stole into a nearby compartment and slid the door shut. As the commotion in the corridor grew muffled and distant, I breathed a sigh of relief through Mum’s handkerchief.

Inside, an old nun snoozed beside the window. She looked so snug in her white tunic that I thought of cotton sheets, her coif like a pillowcase upended on her head. This was the carriage’s smoking compartment—which I knew from the huff of stale smoke that escaped the bench cushions as I took my seat—so I guessed that it would be the last one filled. I for one didn’t mind the smell. Dad smoked Capstans, and during his business dinners, I could barely see the front-room ceiling for the smoke. I also didn’t mind the old nun, who was snoring lightly through her nose with her chin tucked into her lace collar. I imagined that her skin might feel like crumpled rose petals, and that she’d have a happy laugh and happy eyes.

As I waited for the train to pull out of the station, I caught a glimpse of myself in the window. Wearing Mum’s handkerchief, I looked like a bandit from one of the Saturday-morning serials that Tim and I watched every week at the cinema. I screwed my eyebrows together and tried to look mean, make-believing that I was hijacking the train instead of riding it to God-knows-where. I would sneak into the driver’s cabin, wearing my most menacing expression, and order the rail guard to reroute the train to Ruislip—or else he’d regret it.

I wasn’t, after all, an anxious little girl dressed in the lemon-curd yellow of her Sunday best. I was only pretending to be.

At this thought, the barest trace of a smile flickered at the corners of my mouth. I had the urge to elbow Tim then, to let him in on my playacting, but inside the compartment there was only me and the old sleeping nun. So I let the smile drop and drummed my heels against the bench’s backboard, blushing that I’d grinned to a room full of nobody.

Just then, in the corridor, a young girl shrieked for her mum.

Though the compartment door was shut, I heard her as plainly as if she were sitting beside me on the bench. Mum-mah, she screamed, high and clear as a tea kettle left screeching on the stove. My arms prickled with gooseflesh. It was the sort of cry that follows nightmares, made while you’re still partly trapped in that place where there is nothing but you and the dark. It rang down the corridor and crossed through walls like a wraith, soaring above the register of fear and into that of hysterics, trailing on and on as though it would never end. I wished someone would belt her up. I’d do it, I thought, if no one else would. I didn’t know how long I could stand that horrible fevered screaming, to which something inside of me seemed to cry out in response.

After it ended, a hush fell over the entire carriage. Not even the nurses made a sound. All I could hear was the nun’s light snoring, the clinking of couplings outside the carriage, and the in-and-out whoosh of my own breathing. I wondered then if all of us were here for the same reason: if this girl, too, had carried home a sheet of slick, black film that pronounced her life suddenly in danger.

The train’s whistle sounded. Steam hissed from its axles and fogged the windows. The old nun’s head bobbed as the carriage rocked, crawling forward with the clack-clack of its wheels over the railway tracks.

I’d wanted to mark the exact moment of my departure, to brace myself for when the journey really began, but as I looked out the window, I noticed that there was nothing to see but steam. The station was already gone.

Part two on its way in a week!
Meg