Lost Language of Trains by Ian C. Smith

 

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Lost Language of Trains

An early scene from My Beautiful Laundrette.  South London, where my father grew up.  Daniel Day-Lewis, a gay bovver boy, no way of knowing he would one day be the U.S. President, still young then, as was I.  Trains rattle along the line below a young Pakistani Englishman whose mother suicided by jumping onto it, where he pegs laundry that will fleck with soot, take forever to dry, as it does in rain-streaked districts of stained bricks.

I became familiar with laundrettes in Thatcherite London, and constant trains, their echoes wails of suffering as if from ancient bones buried beneath the lines in that centuries-old city of conflict.  Like a pardoned convict’s return, mine took years from when my parents whisked me to the other end of the Earth, if that verb applies to a crude six-week voyage by ex-troopship after we seemed to leave as hurriedly as the squatters scrambling out the window in another early scene.

One woeful Wednesday, sent home from school because the King died, I skipped home joyous at this unexpected half-holiday only to disturb my mother, a chilblained war-damaged woman, hands fixed in washing-up water, staring at something nobody else saw, face damp with sorrow.  Soon we were off to the Australian jungle, I thought.  Well, school was savage, which suited me, London days disappearing dreamlike.

Back Down Under where laundry dries quicker than yesterday dies, a squatter myself wherever I lived, years worn to the bone now, the evening train comes on down the line, earworming me, a train in an Elvis song, lights semaphoring my walls, hauling me back to when everybody seemed on the dole, another line from that film, when I needed little more sustenance than the energy, the wan thrill of returning emigres you could call underground love, memory and landscape alike in attrition. 

© Ian C. Smith

Ian C. Smith

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, North of Oxford, Rundelania, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

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