Waving to a Train
New Statesman, 16th
March 1984
Nostalgia is traditionally green on TV. There’s so much of it about it’s a wonder the green doesn’t wear out before the other colours, to turn to mud from all the tears that are shed over it, mine included. For instance, I already feel nostalgia for M.J. Read’s play ‘Waving to a Train’ (BBC2) in which someone goes back to the scene of a childhood picnic in the Fifties when he was nine.
We see the old fifties bus trundling into the
countryside, the little family descending, walking, then the modern version of
the bus, with the narrator on board, following them. He never catches up with
the family and overhauls them, as he might in a modern play or ‘Hamlet’, but he
is there on the poppies hillside, overhearing with the weepy hindsight of
adulthood the struggles of his widowed mother to meet his and his sister’s
demands, so innocent and yet so brutal in their effects. The sister wants to go
to a Milk Bar and wear lipstick. The boy wants to go to boarding school. The
mother is the classic soppy-stern model of the period, trying to be all things
to her disintegrating brood. “I’m not having you walking the streets like a
harlot,” she says. “Oh Christ, let them go, let them go,” cries the man, but she
cannot hear him. “It was all such fun when I was married,” she mourns, as the
boy waves and the train passes.
Now we are aboard the train, watching and waving
with the man to the little trio in sun hats and sandals waving from a sunlit
hillside. The train enters the tunnel (of time) and we are looking back at a
little splash of green as it receded again into the past. Why am I such a
sucker for this kind of thing?
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