A few miles south of Oxford stands my favorite railway station in the world. It is called Culham, though it is not very near the village of that name. It lies on one of those mysterious weather boundaries, perhaps something to do with the course of the nearby River Thames. I was once standing there on a cold, dry winter’s afternoon when a train from the south came in, entirely covered with fresh snow as if it had arrived from Siberia. I seldom if ever get off there, and the trains are few. But sometimes I make a point of visiting it, just to cheer myself up.
If you can manage to reach it, you will find that the actual station building is no longer in use, and has been given over to some private purpose. If I were rich, I would buy it and turn it into a small study, with a desk in the bay formed by the glorious stone-mullioned window that looks over the tracks. I can think of few happier ways to spend the remaining winter afternoons of my life, than pretending to work in such a place, with a fire burning in the grate, a kettle whispering on the hob and the whole place trembling as great goods trains rumble through every few minutes. Perhaps I should also install a cat. But at least, thanks to the vigilance of some noble preservationist, it is “listed,” a British system which means it cannot be torn down and replaced by the modern railways’ idea of what a small country station should be like. This would mean an unhelpful computerized ticket machine, often out of order, a leaky shelter built apparently to funnel the prevailing wind onto the passengers, and some chain-link fence, decorated with entangled litter. Oh, for the romance of travel. As Mao Tse-tung did not quite say, “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a dismal dump.”
Why do I like it so much? Partly, it is its clever design, apparently deeply old-fashioned but also astoundingly modern. It is of mellowed red brick and stone, well-suited to its style, which also involves a steeply-pointed roof with tall mock-Tudor chimneys. There must surely once have been a waiting room with an open fire and a station cat. It might be the lodge of some recusant Roman Catholic’s sixteenth-century country house. Indeed it is faintly reminiscent of one of the oddest buildings in England, also close to a railway line. This is Sir Thomas Tresham’s Triangular Lodge at Rushton in Northamptonshire, past which I have been whirled many times by express trains to Sheffield. You can see it from the train just long enough to exclaim, “What on Earth is that!” before it is gone, but never for long enough to appreciate it properly. I still yearn to visit it one day. No doubt it will be locked when I finally get there. Tresham’s sixteenth-century building (he was indeed a very brave and defiant recusant) is a monument to the Holy Trinity, full of wittily coded messages. Somehow it manages to be hexagonal inside, and triangular outside. And, as with Culham Station, the eye instantly sees how clever it is long before the mind can work out why. It is interesting that the two buildings seem to emerge from the same civilization, yet Tresham’s Lodge was built in 1597, while the station was built in 1844, as the brutal industrial age accelerated. It seems to be the last survivor of a standard design approved by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great engineer and chief of the Great Western Railway. The others have all gone. It ought to be workaday, but it is not. To transform it from lodge into station, the architect has placed a severe rectangular flat canopy all round the steep little gabled building, which makes it look as if the old is piercing the new.
But when it was built, the arrival of the iron road was the opposite. The new was piercing the old. My particular fascination for wayside stations is that the ultra-modern world, of mechanical power, speed and distance, touched an ancient world of gamekeepers, duckponds, bells, middens, and hayricks. For a few seconds, perhaps a dozen times a day, the deepest recesses of rural England were accessible to the entire busy outside world, and all its ideas and dangers. This allowed the two parts of civilization to co-exist. The old did not strangle or oppose the new. The new did not wreck the old. I can still remember the perfect peace of such a small station, just after the train had bustled out of it. For a short and frantic time there had been the wheeze and the bark of the locomotive, the cries of the guard, the wham of doors, the tinny clatter of milk-churns, and the station-master’s whistle. Then nothing but a wisp of steam and that unforgettable smell that such trains left behind them.
No wonder so many storytellers and film-makers set so many crucial scenes on railway platforms. They are, or used to be, the nearest thing we had to frontiers. And then there’s the even greater feeling of peace and security brought about when an express flies through the country station, hissing fiercely, as it goes from one giant city to another but leaves the country to get on with its own life. Uninterrupted tranquility is nothing like as satisfying and soothing as the interrupted sort. But when a village is invaded by a modern highway, there will never be any peace again. Even if it is routed away from the houses, there will always be the dreary scour and sigh of the traffic on the main road, blown on the wind, night and day.
I have other reasons to like Culham station. There, in the days when it no doubt had a staff of five, including a man to collect your thick pasteboard ticket, my grandfather, magnificently mustached, must have alighted many times on his way to the Christian training college where he learned to be a teacher, having worked and studied his way out of the grim Portsmouth back streets where he grew up. I always think of this fierce, nonconformist young man, whom I only knew in his great old age, when I pass that way. The college building is still there, but it has another purpose now.
An old colleague once used Culham to travel to what must have been the most landlocked Naval base in the country. Such establishments are given names as if they are ships—this was H.M.S. Hornbill. The habit of pretending they are actual seagoing vessels led to them being known rather poetically, and satirically, as “Stone Frigates.” H.M.S. Hornbill was in fact an airfield for the Royal Naval Air Service, though you would not know this from the official British Ordnance Survey maps of the time, which didn’t bother to mark it, presumably in case this tipped off the Russians. Did this fool the K.G.B., I wonder? Any casual traveler could surely see the hangars and runways as he trundled by on the Oxford train. How we westerners in Moscow used to laugh at dishonest Soviet maps of the city and its surroundings, crammed as they were with anti-ballistic missile launchers. The only accurate map of the Soviet capital was produced by the C.I.A. Its most striking feature was its amazingly detailed depiction of movie theaters, presumably because their many entrances and darkened auditoriums were ideal for clandestine meetings. Yet our own charts seem to have been at least as deceptive as the Kremlin’s. Later, Culham became the site of an elaborate attempt to create nuclear fusion energy, the modern equivalent of making moonbeams out of cucumbers. It is time for another visit.
