Firm friends
Jeremy Clarke rr he moment the announcer stated that the 9.05 to Newquay was leaving from platform four, virtually the entire crowd on the concourse at Paddington station arose like a Zulu impi and ran towards it. Platoons of young totty, hampered by pink and lilac suitcases as heavy as themselves, screamed with excitement and frustration as they were left standing by the swarms of young lads who raced along the platform to secure seats.
I was standing, fortunately, beside the entrance to platform four, and was in the vanguard of the pell-mell race for the second-class carriages at the front of the train. Spotting a vacant seat in the carriage on the far side of the buffet car, I jumped aboard and dived into it. Within two minutes seats, aisle and vestibules at both ends of the carriage were rammed with young Newquaybound revellers, all of them breaking out the lager and the alcopops and shouting. The din was tremendous. Community singing could be heard in the next carriage. We were having a party for the next four hours whether we liked it or not.
At two table seats immediately in front of us, a group of eight lads set about getting as drunk as possible while burping as loudly as possible. Across the aisle from them were two middle-aged American men, one of whom was facing me. In spite of the language and the whiperack burps, these lads weren't unfriendly — or even particularly anti-social given the circumstances — but the American eyed them with uncertainty across the aisle.
He had a kindly face. It seemed to me he wanted to let them know that he was a friendly guy, that he too came from a macho culture, and that he understood that guys must be guys — particularly Anglo-Saxon guys. But these English working-class guys were something else. They worried him They seemed so cretinous he couldn't be entirely sure whether a gambit of simple friendliness and good humour would be graciously received. With these guys a misunderstanding was possible. Perhaps even a punch up the throat.
Buuuuuurp! His expression of sunny amiability clouded over with doubt and he averted his eyes. But his friendliness — and perhaps a modest interest in social anthropology — overcame these fears and finally he said, 'So. Are you fellows on holiday?' The response was a fruity belch; another, louder one; a proffered can of Foster's; and an increasingly heated, inconclusive debate among the lads about whether they were on holiday or not.
The bloke next to me was a stockbroker. Raising his voice above the mounting din, he told me that he lived and worked in Singapore and came home once a year for a week-long family holiday in Cornwall. He'd just stepped off the plane. It was easy to keep abreast of the news from Britain in Singapore, though, he said. He'd been saddened, for instance, by the recent flooding in Sheffield and Hull. But on the other hand he was pleased to hear how increased investment in the country's railways had improved them no end. He said this without irony and with a sideways flinch of his head because someone was leaning on it.
The aisles and vestibules were so crammed with standees that movement up and down the train was impossible. We never saw the ticket collector. The train announcements came from the buffet steward, informing us either that he'd run out of beer and had telephoned ahead for more, or that he was very pleased to announce that another shipment of beer had arrived as promised. The bar was replenished three times, I think, and since the only passengers with access to the buffet bar were those travelling in it, and perhaps a few of us in the adjoining carriage, I think we should be congratulated.
After Taunton a shriller note could be detected in the general commotion; a lessrefined version, perhaps, of what Evelyn Waugh once described as `the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass'. Hardly anyone was seated now. All were standing, dancing, canoodling, snogging, on the seats and tables and in the aisles. And smoking openly. A chap in a striped dressing-gown stood on a seat and smoked his cigarette in an exhibitionist manner as if blowing extravagant smoky kisses to us all. After Taunton, the 9.05 to Newquay was Liberty Hall on bogies.
Even we sober folk, the kindly American included, perked up and joined in after Taunton by mentally flicking V signs at the passing countryside and passing out the cigarettes. If poor Charles Kennedy had only got up earlier last Friday, and caught the 9.05 instead of the 11.05, he could have smoked with impunity instead of furtively puffing his smoke out of a window like a naughty schoolboy. Partied too, if he'd fancied it. Pity.
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