5 SEPTEMBER 1931, Page 10

The Old Trams

By J. 13. MORTON.

THERE is a well-loved town in Ireland to which I return whenever I may ; but always with an anxiety which appears ridiculous to me afterwards. For a very long time now I have been told, on every visit, that the trams are to be scrapped, since a motor-'bus company can 'do their work more speedily and more satisfactorily. But every time I return the trams are still rocking and jangling on their way ; a little older, to be sure, and with more of the paint scraped off, but still performing their task. Those who use them seem to me to be infected with a deep melancholy. They huddle into the corners, and clutch their tickets apprehensively, as though they had been discovered doing something disgraceful. And to my ear the bell grows less shrill, and to my eye the speed diminishes day by day. It looks as though one day the trams will come to a shudder- ing standstill in the course of 'their last journey, and remain in the middle of the 'road, crumbling away until there will be nothing left but a few heaps of scrap-iron and the rusted skeletons of the compartments that once carried crowds to and fro.

The people of the place hail each new announcement of the abolition of the tram-service with shouts of delight.

On more than one occasion already the news has been celebrated with festivities, and bands have played rollicking airs, and revellers have drunk to the destruction of the dirty old anachronisms. But it has always turned out that the alarm was a false one. The next day the familiar screeching sound would wake the inhabitants, and through their windows they would see the cumbersome vehicles rattling along as before, dingy in the sunshine, deplorably sordid in the rain.

Tales are told of them. Young children regard them with awe, and think of them as the oldest things in the world, surviving, like their grandfathers and grand- mothers, and falling gradually into decrepitude before their eyes. They dream of the strange people of other days who must have ridden in these trams when they were new ; people in unfamiliar clothes who belonged to what they think of as history. The wits say that the tram lines were laid down by the Milesians, but that their origin is still covered by the haze of myth and antiquity. Once a motor 'bus, tearing along from a place out in the country, broke down towards the end of the journey, and stood halted by the side of the lines while, one after another, the trams went and returned, and the laughing drivers and conductors put their tongues out at the motor 'bus which would not budge.

Recently it was announced that the end had really come. As one of the people said, the trams were like a prima donna, for ever making a last appearance. But this time there was no doubt about it. Everybody was con- fident, and went about with a lighter step and a brighter eye. A banquet was given, speeches were made, toasts were drunk. The bandsmen put on their uniforms again and marched about, playing martial music. A stranger arriving in the town might have thought that the relief of some beleaguered city was being celebrated, or an anniversary remembered, or the commemoration of a famous battle being made. Youths went about the streets with their hats on the wrong way round. Ribald songs were roared. There were torchlight processions far into the night, and ironical epitaphs were chalked up on the vast shed where the trams reposed in darkness. Stray drivers or conductors of motor 'buses were given drinks, handed cigarettes, flattered and slapped on the back. And then, when morning began to appear in the sky, there broke upon the befuddled brains of those returning home a sound that stiffened them up, and sobered them like a jet of cold water received full in the face. It was a familiar clanking and rattling coming down the road. They strained their eyes in the half-light, as though expecting to see ghosts walking, and there, fantastic in the mist of morning, lurched and swayed the first tram of the day. Incredulously, little groups of belated revellers gathered by the roadside, and each man read despair in the face of his neighbour. The trams were still running.

It was once suggested that a rich American might be persuaded to buy the trams, and to take them back to America, with his armour and his period furniture, and all the other relics of a bygone age. A very sentimental American was chosen ; one who gave out that he was of Irish descent, and had returned to find the old cabin from which his grandmother had emigrated long ago. This man was known to be buying wildly, and had even made an offer for an old ruin of a castle, which he proposed to remove stpne by stone, and to re-erect in his own country. , A prominent citizen was selected for the job of approaching the American and getting him interested in the trams. But he did his work badly. In fact, he stopped the American in the street and asked him if he had ever thought of buying trams to take home with him. This direct attack failed, and another prominent citizen, with a reputation for tact, took over the task. He turned out to be so tactful that after a week in bars and hotels he had only got as far as telling the American that the curse of the town was a lot of rotten old mouldy trams that were no good to anybody, and wouldn't he be a queer fellow that would be paying good money for the like of them old tin cans. The American agreed entirely with him, and there the matter ended.

I am possibly the only living person, with the exception of the drivers and conductors, who would be sorry to see the trams scrapped, and who rejoices in the legend of their immortality. Nor is this wholly from any vague sentimentality—though that plays its part. My chief reason for liking the trams is that they go slowly, and so enable the passenger to look about him, and to notice things and people in the streets. I am as fond of boasting that I have gone slowly through a place as other people are of boasting that they went through it too quickly to see it. And if I am left as the sole occupant of the last of the old trains, it may be that the wheel of fashion having come full circle, I shall be in the forefront of the old craze for dawdling and digesting an experience. My record of one mile in so many hours may be announced with all the fuss that now accompanies everybody else's record of so many miles a minute. If the trams can hold out a bit longer, they may win in the end. They may be the bridge by which I shall be suffered to cross from the old world to whatever follows this brief era of insanity.

But I fear not. Their doom is plain for all to see. I read death in their progressive dilapidation, in the blistered and scratched paint, in the wheezing noises they make when they come to a small ascent in the road or a sharp corner, and in the look they give the old driver when he asks them for a special effort. Nobody troubles any more to give them a gay coat of paint in the spring weather, or to repair the damaged fittings, or to re-upholster the shabby seats.

If there is a heaven for trams I do not doubt that one day these old and worn trains will be transfigured, and will run, gleaming and glowing with their first youth, upon insubstantial lines, along streets paved with gold. And more than one native of the place I love so well will come down at morning through the awakening courts of Paradise to sit once more on the new springy cushions and to hear the bell ring clear and strong as it did before we were born.