There and Back Again

Back in the dark ages, when I was a senior school student, one of my O Level English Literature texts was Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings. I still remember lines from many of the poems, but the one that has stayed with me the most is The Whitsun Weddings itself, and in particular its description of the towns and countryside that the poet-traveller passes through on his journey from Hull to London Kings Cross. 

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense

Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence

The river’s level drifting breadth began,

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept

For miles inland,

A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.

Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and

Canals with floatings of industrial froth;

A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

And rose: and now and then a smell of grass

Displace the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth

Until the next town, new and nondescript,

Approached with acres of dismantled cars…….

I don’t often travel on trains, but when I do it is usually partly on the line that follows the later part of Larkin’s own journey – from the station of my small Hertfordshire market town, into London’s Kings Cross. 

As the train rattles through largely arable farmland, and creaks by the backs of towns and the ends of suburban gardens, I’m often reminded of Larkin’s words.

So earlier this summer, I took my trusty point and shoot on one of these train journeys, and snapped away through the windows as we travelled from rural Hertfordshire to London. The resultant grainy and blurry images are my tribute to a poem that has stayed with me for almost 40 years. 

Helen