THE IRON LADY

Day six saw us drive to Slingsby in North Yorkshire. I had already lost most of my sense of time, meandering about the country with a caravan strapped to my back. I didn’t know what I was doing, or trying to achieve. I had no goals, no targets, no objectives, none of the business palaver that supposedly gives one a sense of purpose whilst at work. I was drifting on a flood-tide of minutiae – an attractive door-knocker here, an unusual ventilation cover there, an unorthodox lamp-post somewhere else. My friends and former colleagues had started to fade from my memory, like old sepia photographs. This is what caravanning is like – the days blow into each other like ink spreading on a blot-sheet, and time simply ceases to have any relevance at all. It’s like living under the influence of an opiate. It’s soothing, but it surely cannot last. I’d quite like to live in Slingsby and umpire its cricket matches. I’d like to live in one of the limestone cottages with a picturesque garden and virginia creeper climbing up the walls. I’d like to sketch the church and buy a used Volvo S40 from the garage in the middle of the High Street. I’d like to join a committee and do something useful about the old railway track. It really is a most attractive place to live – picturesque, quiet, sweet-smelling – a million miles away from confrontation. We visited Pickering, the end of the line for the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. Ex-LNER A4 ‘streak’ ‘Sir Nigel Gresley’, carrying its BR number of 60007, hauled the 16:00 up train from Grosmont. I stood beside this magnificent lady as she released copious amounts of steam from her safety valves, and ejected huge volumes of grey exhaust smoke into the clouded sky. I half-expected a jobsworth from the Council to come up with a clipboard and complain about transgression of the Clean Air Act, or Health and Safety at Work legislation, or some such, to diminish the magic moment for me. Fortunately, no-one did. Instead, an old man explained the mechanics of the Stephenson link motion to his lady colleague, who understood about every sixth word. Everywhere, people of all ages, from babes-in-arms to those in the autumn of their lives, gaped with awe at this magnificent and remarkable machine. One man, about the same age as me, carrying a camera with a lens as long as a yard-brush handle, who could clearly remember the dog days of steam locomotion in the 1960s, wiped a tear from his eye before focusing his camera on the sleek lines of the Iron Lady. Behind him, nailed to a fence, were reminders of more gracious times – enamel advertisements for Joe’s Mint Balls, Colman’s Mustard, Virol Pick-Me-Up, Weetabix Breakfast Cereal and Brooke Bond Dividend Tea, even Bristol Tipped Cigarettes. I went away with a deep sense of gratitude that I had been able to witness the scene and thus recall the days of my youth, when I, and a gaggle of my reprobate train-spotting chums, would see this very same locomotive lurch and lumber over the world-famous diamond crossing and steam portentously into Newcastle Central station. The memory, and the excitement, were real, and vivid.