Where the Eurostar eases out of the Channel tunnel into Kent, at Ashford, there is a vast parking lot of trains, named for English and French writers and composers. While I was musing on the prospects of an engine called Debussy, a woman nearby was coolly dictating a series of numbers to her husband. This was the first of a wash of indications that I was in England. Here were trainspotters. Behind me, a man with a trans-European voice was talking to his mobile phone. ‘Where can I get any rabbits? No rabbits!
You don’t know where …?’ It wasn’t clear whether the rabbits were intended as pets, circus props, or for the table, but somehow he had the numbers of at least four suppliers. All of them let him down.
We passed oast houses and hop fields. The countryside was as parched as an Australian summer paddock. (In England it was a summer of records: the first time that the temperature exceeded 100oF; Sussex’s first county championship after 164 years as a cricket club; Labor’s first by-election loss in 15 years.) I was musing about Dickens, who was born in Kent, in the naval port of Chatham, when the train went by the Staplehurst Station. Here, in June 1865, Dickens was returning to England with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, when the train was derailed at a bridge. Several people were killed. Many were injured. Dickens gave as much assistance as he could, but was nervously debilitated by the accident. Five years later, he died on its anniversary.
No back way into a city by train is ever attractive, but the squalors of Brixton have intensified in the four years since last I had this view. From there, via Waterloo, to Twickenham was a leap across a class divide, into a busy and prosperous village by the Thames. Behind the block of flats where I was to stay was a large garden. Squirrels ran about in it. Apples ripened and fell. The planes from Heathrow passed close overhead every minute. Once a fox disdainfully strolled across the lawn. In the street, chestnuts cannonaded off the roofs of parked cars, although the drought had left them too small to make good conkers. We were at home long enough to see High Chaparral beat the desperately unlucky Falbrav (which should have won on protest) in the Irish Champion Stakes at Leopardstown. Instead of the Cox