Man Overboard by Monica Dickens Page A

peaceful corner of countryside invaded by the mechanical dragons of the London and South-western Railway. The family did not seem to notice the trains now, for they seldom looked up; but it must have taken their ancestors a long time to get used to them. Ben could imagine that first owner, with mutton-chops and tweed knickerbockers, waging a furious war when the railway was first mooted: writing letters to
The Times
, signed “Indignant Landowner”, bullying his M.P. about opposing the Railway Bill, stumping among the workmen who were laying the lines, prodding at things with an ash stick and threatening to shoot anyone who put a foot on his land.
    When the first trains began to go by, and the children in their big hats and cumbersome clothes ran out into the garden to shoutand scream at the novelty of this marvellous chugging monster which snorted clouds of steam and sent the rooks cawing round the sky, the father would watch dourly from an upstairs window, shaking his fist and saying it would not last. He kept a gun in the bedroom in case of thieves, and his faded wife, worn out with child-bearing, lived in terror that he might take a pot-shot at the late train when it woke him in the night.
    The railway was there to stay, and gradually the family grew used to it. For a few months perhaps the children stood by the fence like the little smock-and-knickerbocker group in
The Railway Children
, and waved to the trains, but as the novelty wore off they went back to their old games, and the father stopped writing letters and did not wake any more in the night.
    Perhaps they talked occasionally of moving, but they loved the house and so they stayed. They assimilated the trains as a part of life, and each succeeding generation assimilated them too, and only hated the railway when another maid left because of soot on the laundry, or yet another foolish dog lost its life on the rails.
    The mother of this present generation kept horses in a stable behind the house, and there was a horse trailer under an open shed. That implied a certain amount of money, although nothing else about the family spoke of wealth. Perhaps her husband was always complaining that she spent too much on the horses, but she had a little money of her own and did not see why she should not spend it how she liked. Ben sometimes saw her in the yard, doing things with buckets and pitchforks.
    When the children were young—the two girls younger than Ben, the boy about his own age—there had been ponies. Now that they were grown-up, Ben did not see them on a horse. Perhaps the mother’s enthusiasm had discouraged them. He had once seen the elder girl ambling down the road, slopping long-backed in the saddle, as if she had learned nothing from her mother.
    The girl got her long back from her father. He was a lean and stringy type, seen sometimes in overalls, hammering and sawing around the house. It was probably he who had pulled down the ivy, but inefficiently, so that it started to grow again immediately. He had dug a pond once in the front lawn. It had never held water.
    The other sister was small and lively, but the son was as tall as his father. Ben had watched him grow from a gangling youth into a presentable man, who for years now had been seen onlyoccasionally at week-ends, once getting out of a car with two small children and a plump girl who must be his wife.
    Quite an ordinary family, but fascinating to Ben because he only knew them in his mind. Perhaps they disliked each other and were each discontented in their separate ways, but he preferred to believe in them as he saw them. They represented something which he had never had, even when Marion was pregnant with Amy and had come as near as she ever could to domestic serenity.
    As the train passed the familiar landmarks, Ben leaned forward so that he should not miss anything that was going on about the house. There was a new horse in the field. It threw up its head and ran as the train approached. The