Patrick Leigh Fermor travel writer, 1915 - 2011

Something which steam-railway-lovers of a certain kind, might see as an oddity -- touching and affecting to them in their aforesaid capacity, in a way in which the author of the book wherein it occurs, would probably never in a million years have envisaged on the part of any potential reader.

The book is "A Time To Keep Silence" by the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915 -- 2011). The author -- though not a religious believer as such -- had a fondness for spending time as a guest in monasteries, finding the experience valuable for psychological de-cluttering vis-a-vis twentieth-century metropolitan life "at the sharp end". The book -- published 1957 -- recounts and reflects on various such monastic sojourns of the author's. He tells of his first discovery of this therapeutic expedient; at a time when, rat-race-beset, he sought "somewhere quiet and cheap to stay while I continued to work on a book that I was writing." Fermor -- who although he writes, in my opinion, exquisitely; often found the writing a slow / difficult / frustrating process -- was in autumn 1948, en route from Paris to a Benedictine abbey in Normandy.

He writes: "I had spent an abominable night in Rouen in a small hotel near the station where a procession of nightmares had been punctuated by the noise of trains arriving and leaving with a crashing and whistling and an escape of steam and smoke which, after a week's noctambulation in Paris, turned my night into a period of acute and apparently interminable agony".

It is perhaps salutary for such as us, to reflect that a busy steam-worked railway had -- for people not captivated by it for its own sake -- a number of downsides: largely -- smell (that of coal smoke, not delightful for everyone), dirt, and noise. Over an approximate century-and-a-half, the last of these especially must have inflicted on very many folk worldwide, prolonged wretchedness comparable to Fermor's as described by him. Nonetheless: one man's interminable ordeal is another's too-brief night of bliss -- a railway-and-steam enthusiast might well have revelled in such a night in that Rouen hotel seventy-four years ago.

Reading that short passage by the author, brought home to me that a steam-y experience of this kind -- be it hellish, heavenly, or anything in between -- is as at 2022 or '23 effectively not to be had anywhere on Earth: not as an ordinary, quotidian, "this is how matters always are" thing. (Somewhat-disturbed nights in rail-adjacent accommodation may not be totally, no more -- but one sees it as generally reckoned that diesel traction does its stuff more quietly than steam ditto; and electric, quieter still.)

I've been a -- characteristically, delighted -- recipient of this experience a number of times in my life -- including, in France. My most recent -- and final -- incidence of it was one of which I have told elsewhere in these Pages: in Chengde, China, in 1996 -- hotel near the station, room (which we deliberately went for) overlooking the goods yard; in which throughout the night much shunting and attendant whistling, with class JS 2-8-2 chiefly officiating, took place. Said thing undergone, is one which now, a billionaire rail-and-steam enthusiast could not have -- it has vanished from the planet. Such a billionaire might commission for a night or two, on one or another "preservation" scene, a simulation -- but per my feelings about all such matters, that would be utterly phony and thus totally unsatisfying.

Supposing that Patrick Leigh Fermor now continued to be among the living -- a spry 107-year-old, still "all there" mentally, and still up to modest travels (including monastery stuff) and writing brilliantly about them; were I to contact him expressing envy for his miserable night in Rouen three-quarters-of-a-century ago, and explaining my reasons for feeling thus -- I'd rather expect his rejoinder to be, "Sir, I suggest that you seek psychiatric help."