in recognition of his work promoting the railway industry in general and the Settle–Carlisle line in particular the big four railway companies – the old LNER, and the GWR, the LMS and SR – awarded Morley in 1939 a fat little golden locket, inscribed with his name, on a chain. He needed only present the locket to a ticket inspector on board a train to be granted free first-class travel the length and breadth of the country. Morley cared almost nothing for awards and baubles: one bathroom at St George’s was rather eccentrically papered with moulding black and white certificates and citations that might more usually have been proudly framed and displayed, and a crusty old armoire in a guest bedroom served as storage space for his various medals, statuettes and gifts ‘in recognition of’, many of them featuring depictions of pens and quills carved in marble, onyx, or, in one case – after our trip to Durham – made out of coal. Morley referred habitually to such awards and honours as ‘chaff’ and, occasionally, as his ‘pointless paper empire’.* But the Big Four locket travelled with him everywhere until the day he died.
According to Morley in 72 Miles the Ribblehead viaduct was one of the modern wonders of the world, and the route of the Settle–Carlisle line ‘a journey into the heart of England and Englishness’. (He also made this claim, it should perhaps be conceded, about the west Norfolk coastal route, the GWR journey down to Devon, the Esk Valley line, and the all-electric Southern Belle route from Victoria to Brighton.) Describing the Settle–Carlisle line he rose to sweeping rhetorical heights:
There is perhaps not even in Switzerland, nor in India, nor indeed in our own green and pleasant land, a more magnificent journey than that through the great valley of the Ribble, and on round the broad shoulder of the mighty Whernside at Blea Moor, on through the valleys of the Dee and Garsdale, up and over the watershed to the summit at Aisgill, and then through the justly named Eden Valley towards Carlisle. If the good Lord Himself had been a railway engineer during the glory years of the mid- to late nineteenth century, he could not have plotted a finer route.
‘The Settle–Carlisle line is not a journey by rail,’ he famously concludes 72 Miles. ‘It is the journey of a soul.’ There was perhaps a slight tendency in all his work for Morley to wax unnecessarily lyrical but in his great paean to the Settle–Carlisle line his prose found its proper subject. The book combined perfectly his poetic instincts with his obsessive practical concerns. He was an expert on every aspect of the line, from the ‘long, tall’ Douglas fir and Baltic pine sleepers, to the ‘doughty’ granite chipping ballast, the ‘proud’ stations, the tunnels, the viaducts and the signals. And of course, alas, he became an expert on its tragedies.
I can imagine the journey that Miriam and Morley enjoyed on the way to Westmorland, the same journey as all our journeys: Morley seated in the back of the Lagonda, among his books and writing requisites, Hermes typewriter wedged into position on the portable desk, sharp pencils at his elbow and paper conveniently to hand, pouring endlessly forth like some magic fountain. His voluminous notes on the journey – including a ton or more of notebooks and index cards and papers for the putative book on the Great North Road, never published – are housed now, along with all his other manuscripts, in Norwich. There, in his favourite county, the ‘still centre’, the reader might recreate that journey from London to the Lakes, from the Whittington Stone at Highgate Hill, ‘memorial to Britain’s most benevolent citizen’, through the beauty of Welwyn village, home to Edward Young, author of Night Thoughts, and, according to Morley, echoing Dr Johnson, ‘perhaps England’s most defected genius’, and on and up past the famous Folly Gateway at North Mimms, stopping off for refreshments at the Roebuck at Broadwater, past the Caxton Gibbet, and on and on past Retford, Bawtry and Doncaster. Morley has often been described – and dismissed – as a mere antiquarian, a provincialist, a dull draftsman, a ‘topophiliac’, in the words of one particularly patronising critic in the Listener, devoted to places rather than to people, but he was also interested in the everyday lives of men and women, and in the chronological as well as the chorological: indeed, a part of his research for the Great North Road book includes dozens of typed pages on the history of the St Leger race, held annually since 1776, when it was won by a brown-bay filly sired by the mighty Sampson; the notes, like Morley, go on and on, and range wide and deep, a complete portrait of people in a landscape, a Brueghel in words. He was, in all his books, and certainly during my time with him compiling The County Guides, a celebrant of all that was living – though in reality our business was often with death.
My guess – though I can’t confirm it – is that it was probably Miriam who spotted the train in the distance. She wouldn’t have wanted us to beat her to Appleby. I can imagine her tossing back her head and stamping her elegant foot hard on the pedal. We must get there before him. Thank goodness she didn’t.
On the train I was showing the little girl how to work the camera. Her name was Lucy. She had a gap-toothed smile and freckles, little fat cheeks, and ringlets, and dark, dark eyes – a happy carefree face, the picture of innocence, a perfect Pears soap little girl. Her mother was dozing with the baby in her arms, the baby’s head resting gently on her breast. Lucy and I sang songs together and played games, and took it in turns to take photographs of the scenery. I took a photograph of her. She took a photograph of me. We whistled with the train’s whistle and knelt together on the seats as the world went rolling by, enjoying the freedom and the speed: the rocks, the stones, the trees, the farms, the sorry-looking Swaledale sheep.
Click.
Click.
Click.
It was one of those warm September days that seems like a bonus, that makes you believe that you still have another chance and that everything is not lost. We cheered as we reached Settle, laid out like a neat little pocket handkerchief under the pure blue sky. We passed a graveyard and then emerged into the vast Ribble Valley. We hollered our way through the long dark tunnel under Blea Moor and again as we reached the summit at Ais Gill, the vast cliffs opposite like something out of the American Wild West, the blazing heather and the dry-stone walls making everything appear as though it were wrapped and packaged and ready for presentation. Looking back, I wonder if that was perhaps the very last time I was truly happy: enjoying the golden stillness of the English countryside, mind and body relaxed and calm, moving inexorably forward and on and up towards the future and adventure. I had no thought then for London and what happened there. No thought for myself. I was moving on. I was in transit, a pilgrim journeying towards better things. Everything subsequently seems somehow darker, less good, lacking, broken and profane.
At a certain point, just before Appleby, the railway crosses the River Eden for the first time. I lifted Lucy up a little by the window, so that she could admire the river and the little viaduct with its piers and parapets and arches: twin wonders of nature and of human invention. A southerly wind blew the choking smoke away and we were granted a perfect view of Westmorland, ‘perhaps the most scenic county in England’, according to Morley. And so it is. I gave Lucy the camera and held her tight while she leaned out and took photographs.
The road swoops along and around from the railway approaching Appleby and in my mind’s eye I can see Miriam in the Lagonda, staring in dismay as we speed away before her. None of us of course had any idea that anything was wrong until things went wrong.
One moment we were upright, and then the next the carriage tipped and everything changed. I remember there being absolute silence before the screaming began.
In his short book about the history of the railways and their impact on the people and landscape of England, Morley’s Ringing Grooves of Change (1938), in a chapter entitled ‘Thundering Towards Our Fate’, he writes that ‘In our Steam Age, humans are becoming incapable of recognising the everyday. We value only the extraordinary. Trains themselves, for example, those astonishing creatures of such recent invention, exist now only in our consciousness and in the public imagination when they become untameable, when they become beasts, when they do damage or become
