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THE TRAIN AND I - A TRAIN OF THOUGHT

My experience with trains goes back a long way. My secondary grammar school was a fifteen minute train ride away from the town where I lived then. I travelled back and forth for nine years, the train wasn't just a means of transportation, it was part of my life.

My classmates who got in one station before me were always in the second carriage, last compartment. They used to prepare our homework to the extent that they found out where the problems were, and when I got in we would tackle them together. I remember one day when we had a Latin test in the first lesson and there was no light in the whole train, it was winter and pitch dark. We were all panicky, and when the conductor came with a torch round his neck to control the tickets we begged him to stay with us and shine his light on the pages of our books, which he did! The man be praised forever.

I used to write so well with my schoolbag on my knees that no teacher could ever find out that my homework had been done only minutes before reaching school. You can do a lot in 15 minutes if you're well organized! The morning rides were always quiet, everyone scribbling away, composing, copying, reading or memorizing. I mostly copied maths and swapped my German homework for it. The rides back were a bit livelier, the girls were chatting and giggling, the boys using the carriages as gyms swinging from the luggage racks or doing other workout exercises on the wooden (!) benches to release the strain after a hard day at school.

We didn't come late to school only because we occasionally missed the train, but also because cows loved to wander between the rails every now and then, no hooting made them leave the track. We had to follow them up to the next station where they were shooed away by the railway people.

Once I strolled with some friends through the goods station, and two friendly men on a steam (!) locomotive invited us to have a short ride with them. I was about 12 years old then and so deeply impressed that I wrote an article about the adventure, sent it to a kids' mag and got a book for it as a prize.

When I was 18 years old, I had bad marks in English and had to go to England for a language course. I decided on a school in Cambridge and went there by train, alone, so as not to have someone with whom I could speak German. I managed well, found the right train in Dover, the right train in London, but then...The conductor said "Change at Ely", and for the life of me I didn't know

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