"The Incredible Mile" by Harold Elvin

In 1968 Mr Elvin decided to travel from St Pancras to Euston, mostly by rail, via Newcastle, Bergen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow, Irkutsk, Nakhoda (near Vladivostok), Ulan Bator, Taskkent, Samarkand, Sochi, Odessa, Istanbul and Paris. This is a travelogue about his experiences, mostly aboard the trans-Siberian express.

He has a fascinating way of writing with many more sentence fragments than usual. For example, "I went with a driver so mad for speed and so uninterested in pot-holes, chickens, sheep, barriers like road repairs, that my only excuse for remaining alive is that I must be a cat." (C 76) This misses out an 'and' in the list which makes it sound more clipped and urgent. This can be quite poetic (and occasionally irritating).

More urgency is added by the device of using 93 chapters (on average each chapter is less than three pages long).

On the other hand, I wanted more. Much of what he writes about are his experiences with the people aboard the train and in the towns he gets to. I wanted more, much more, about the places he visited. This book is a taster to an incredible journey but I wanted the main course ... and spuds.

There are some wonderful moments:

• "Instead of signals, at hundreds of points down the line, were the frailest little women with sad little flags." (C 16)
• "We finished the last of the toilet paper at Omsk. After that it was each man for himself." (C 16)
• "All seemed convinced that the communist countries were a bastion of goodness surrounded by a sinister war-mongering ferment of degradation against which a constant alert was needed." (C 36)
• The Tsatangs of NW Mongolia herd white reindeer and build tents just like the Lapps
• "Most countries have come in from the out-of-doors, got snug in houses and created an art which is part of the snugness. Chopin is drawing-room matter, not steppe and desert matter." (C 49)

There are some brilliant descriptions:

• "The man so thin he'd have to try twice to make a shadow" (C 3)
• "We were a blood cell running down an artery, our train down our railway track was the one live contact all these lands had with the outer world." (C 5)
• "The festers that men create by beauty spots." (C 17)
• "A croaky voice as if a frog with a cold lodged in her throat." (C 26)
• "For the irreligious ... these churches were living theatres at their richest." (C 35)
• "Our waitress has an early-Bardot walk. She was seventeen. Where her top lip joined her lower lip were two wells the breadth of sixpences out of which smiles radiated in ever-increasing circles across her face lighting up anyone's spirit who happened to be noticing. Her smiles' timetable was two per minute. Any suitor must have only one ambition: to keep that time-table up to scratch." (C 39)
• "A man, looking as if he had been poured into his clothes and someone had forgotten to say 'when'" (C 86)

There are some great sayings:

• "All girls are good, so where do the horrible wives come from?" (C 7)
• "In the city the man is master. In the country the land is master." (C 12)
• "It is a law that what an individual or a public asserts for itself can usually be taken as the opposite. Whoever heard of a generous man saying he was generous, or a brave man acclaiming his bravery: yet the mean and the coward do nothing else." (C 27)
• "Anything faster than walking is an insult to the territory you pass over." (C 41)
• "How can a man with a full stomach pass judgement on a hungry thief?" (C 69)
• "Like trying to smuggle day in past a rooster." (C 86)
• "As worn out an an old woodpecker in a petrified forest." (C 86)

A fascinating journey at a fascinating moment in Cold War history; while the author is in Siberia the Russians tanks entered Czechoslovakia.

December 2019; 255 pages

Other books on travel, exploration and explorers, which are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

My parents were members of the Readers Union Book Club. They must have had a great person to choose the books. This is one of the many I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog. Here is a list:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"St Pancras Station" by Simon Bradley

This book is a mixture of histories: a brief biography of St George Gilbert Scott, the architect behind the St Pancras Hotel and the Albert Memorial; an architectural history of the St Pancras hotel and "train shed"; a history of the railways; and a description of the development and decline of the hotel and its subsequent regeneration (unfortunately the book was published before the opening of the new concourse; or course the hotel is not yet reopened).

It was surprisingly interesting. I learned about the revival of Victorian Gothic architecture with its homage to the late medieval. I found out that the reason that the St Pancras platforms are on the first floor is because the line approaching them had to either go under or over the Regents Canal and over was cheaper. I discovered that the iron pillars that support the platforms were spaced a certain number of beer barrels apart so that the undercroft could be used as a beer warehouse to bring Burton Ales to London and the South (freight from the Midlands being a principal source of revenue for the new Midland Railway). I was informed that the reason for the stations along the Euston Road (Paddington, Euston, King's Cross and St Pancras) was the early legislation that prevented the rampant railways companies from intruding further into London. I also became aware that the railways were a great catalyst for social change, promoting milk drinking in cities, national brands, out of town printing (Clay's in Bungay could undercut London printers and still distribute through the trains), Melton Mowbray pork pies and Chivers jam (Mr Chivers owned a fruit farm in Histon near Cambridge and converted his surplus fruit into preserves which he then distributed via the brand new railway system).

The single arch train shed of St Pancras, at the time the world's largest single span structure, was conceived so that more platforms could be fitted beneath. Previous constructions such as King's Cross's had pointed roofs (KX has a pair) but this means that you need supports and that can get in the way of platforms. Furthermore a twin roof idea such as KX means extensive extra guttering to carry away water. Form follows function. I really got interested in station design and I much pay more attention to the built environment. I even started to appreciate the massively over-ornate architecture that is Victorian Gothic.

Fascinating stuff!

May 2009, 174 pages