The East Anglian line
David Taylor
Travelling out of Liverpool Street your first impression is that London goes on for ever. It is not until the train reaches Romford, 15 minutes out, that one is truly conscious of there being countryside on either side of the track, though even this ef- fect is reduced by an awareness of the fire- fly lights (it is dusk or near dusk) of Dagenham and Upminster away in the distance. This feeling — that you have never quite got out of surburbia — persists as least as far as Chelmsford. It is worth noting that East London and the adjoining parts of Essex, seen from out of a carriage window, have not changed in 20 years. Bethnal, for instance, is still a jumble of blackened arches, asphalt car-parks and the backs of grimy houses, through whose win- dows you can, without undue labour, pick out people cleaning their teeth. The old Bryant and May factory (I have never seen a factory that conveys more adequately the image of sweated labour) remains, as do the old corrugated tin roofs that went out some time before the last war. Ageing racist graf- fiti — 'Stop the Asian Invasion' — seem to be touched up every six months or so. No one has ever got round to removing them.
Forest Gate, Manor Park and the other District Line stations date, presumably, from a time when the London suburbs real- ly were suburbs precisely defined, that is, town and countryside not too unpleasantly juxtaposed. Nowadays this sort of nomenclature seems the purest whimsy. Near Maryland there is a wasteland of in- numerable criss-crossing railway tracks and line after line of rusting rolling stock. Bales of timber are piled up sideways on to the track and written-off cars heaped up so fan- tastically that the effect is like that of mountains of papier-m'aché. Only the Plessey works — where the chromium has had less time to rust — strike an in- congruous note.
The realisation that there is open country at the end of all this steals upon one only gradually. In contrast to Romford, where blocks of fir trees and smart little factories go bras dessous, a place like Shenfield is almost defiantly rural: white-painted houses poking out from behind the trees and ploughed fields edging right up to the track. lngatestone seems positively sleepy, an overworked adjective when applied to an English country town but for all that remarkably exact in this case.
It takes a journey by train to impress upon you the enormity of what has happen- ed to East Anglia in the last 20 years. Not that the view from the carriage has altered all that drastically. There are still the same square-tower churches, the same tiny lanes trailing off to God-knows-where, the same files of scrubby trees leading down from the track and getting progressively smaller as they go. But the texture of the countryside is changing. Great scallops of earth have been scooped out of the ground, leaving hollows which curve protectively over the detritus of unfinished motorways. In the past one had a vague idea that the fields, all perfectly proportioned, went on for ever, like the squares in a patchwork quilt. Now the houses are creeping out from behind the hills. It is quite usual to see a thread of newly-built bungalows bisecting what was once, presumably, an unbroken stretch of arable land. This is the effect of the London overspill on the Home Counties. One grows used to picking out the factory chimneys set against the skyline.
It would be impossible to tell where Essex becomes Suffolk, which it does just beyond Manningtree, were it not for the fact that the train crosses the Stow. (One of the `Great idea of yours, holding up the bank in the Barbican. Now how do we get out?' delights of this journey is that you cross rivers, the Chelmer, the Colne, the Waveney, at regular intervals.) There are no great geographical dissimilarities. In fact, parts of south-east Essex remind you distinctly of the area around Southwold. The eastern counties have often been damn- ed for their want of variety — the usual ad- jectives are 'flat', `low-lying' (I once heard a critic refer to the Bath Hills as ‘puny') Orwell, when describing the fictitious town of `Knype Hill' in A Clergyman's Daughter (to be identified, one imagines, with Bury St Edmunds), wrote of 'the low, barely un- dulating East Anglian landscape, in tolerably dull in summer, but redeemed in winter by the recurring pattern of the elms, naked and fan-shaped against the leaden skies'. This is rather harsh. Until well after Ipswich the train runs through what are, comparatively speaking, valleys — you can demonstrate this with the aid of a contour map — with ploughed fields rising sedately up to ridges topped by banks of fir trees. It In-
disputably only in Norfolk that the land is n- disputably flat.
After Ipswich — outwardly a sprawl of playing fields with the Ipswich Town F.C. floodlights beyond — the line veers north- west through Suffolk market towns, Stowmarket, Claydon and Needham Market. In the half-light there is something quite impressive about the fields receding under the sombre sky — about the colour of faded blue gingham, a landscape of wire fencing and stunted larches and here and there, if you are near the Ouse or the Waveney and there has been rain recently' pools of water. One gets a feeling, and it Is a. feeling prompted now only by parts 01 Essex, that the essential features of the landscape, the layout of the fields, the wedges of woodland along the horizon, have hardly changed in a thousand years.
Into Norfolk the vista alters just ',creel"' tibly. There are more livestock in the fields, more of the curious round church-towers. Moreover, you realise why it is still possible to refer to this part of the eastern counties as 'remote'. From the border through tcl, Norwich one travels through interrupted countryside. Near Diss (and this is a verY casual thing) I saw a horse lying dead in a field. There are bead-chains of paddocks full of makeshift jumping apparatus; 3, child is competing in a solitary, imagine" gymkhana. I was reminded of a poem by Edwin Brock, The River and The Train:
By my left eye the landscape is at slack tide; trees and barns barely flowing in a thick swell.
Soon it will turn carrying us south on a regular course.
And indeed there is something sluggish about these quiet, sopping (it has been ,a rainy spring) fields. Drawing into Norwiet: one is rather glad that East Anglia is still relatively inaccessible, that the people wh° `would go to Norfolk if only there were something to do there' rarely make the ef- fort, fort, and that the brickwork of Norwich station retains, for the most part, its original colouring.
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