CHAPTER TWO
TRAINS
Rail Haiku
Light showers leave pools.
Laughing ducks paddle past us.
How I love the spring!
Sunshine bakes the rails.
Stuck! Seat heaters still heating.
How I love summer!
A single leaf falls
and we pause to admire it.
How I love autumn!
These snowflakes look wrong
and they frighten my iron horse.
How I love winter!
– Caspar Addyman
Ψ
Some people hate travelling by train. They see it as an unreliable, uncomfortable, and slow way to get from A to B.
They are not without reason. Train companies do a lot to encourage this view; they continue to use forty year old trains that break down in the platform at station A, they leave rubbish aboard from the previous journey from station B to station A, once under way they go out of service at some station C which you had never heard of but at which you will spend the next hour waiting on the platform while they find a coach to take you the rest of the way, the coach will be unheated and the driver will have been specially instructed to drive slowly, taking the scenic route to try to make everyone feel better. Or, if by some happy accident it appears that your train may arrive on time, it will stop mysteriously for an impassive red light, just four hundred yards outside station B until the requisite two-thirds majority of passengers are crimson with fury.
Of course, there is absolutely nothing a traveller can do except console himself with exorbitantly overpriced cans of Tennent’s Extra or start meticulously plotting the kidnap and torture of the fat controllers who run the railways. Those rich and doughy men who come on television to lie about ‘every effort being made’ and ‘continual programmes of improvement’. Before being driven away in their chauffeured Jaguars to supervise the swimming pool installation people involved in the very real continual programmes of improvements to their country homes, paid for out of the fat productivity bonuses they made every effort to award themselves. And that portion of the travelling public that lets itself get madder and madder.
Having just picked his way through previous passengers detritus, David Gardner was in this category before he had even left station A (which in his case was London.) He had been down to the capital on business and had already today suffered one travelling incarceration at the hands of this rail company on his much delayed journey down. Then a day of hostile jostling in the energy-sapping metropolis had kept his anger and resentment alive and now he faced the prospect of returning slowly home on an antiquated train that had not been cleaned since the age of steam. He took the empty crisp packets off his chair, saw that there was no way to fit them in the minuscule inter-seat bin and so reluctantly threw them under his seat. He flopped down fuming.
There are other passengers who are more sanguine; they view each journey as an adventure, each setback and breakdown as an added amount of excitement and the long unexplained waits as an opportunity to bond with their fellow travellers. They love the uncertainty of an hour outside Stevenage with no information on the tannoy (sometimes because it is broken, but mostly because the crew have not got a clue either.) If these happy-go-lucky types are forced to get off the train at some place they have never heard of, they let the other two hundred passengers attempt huddle into the two replacement buses with seats for fifty, while they happily spend three pounds on a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit at the improbably named Ye Merrie Wayfarer station café. Then they attempt to engage in conversation the bored teenager who has just served their tea half in the cup, half in the saucer. Quizzing the resentful and monosyllabic teen, ever keen to find out all about the local area. At least this is better than having them sat next you on the train, their gleeful bonhomie throwing your own seething rage into sharp contrast and making everything ten times worse.
But as the perpetual optimists would be the first to point out, whenever these two types of traveller meet, it is always ‘interesting’. Hazel Cole was one of this band of merry wayfarers and she had just sat down next to David.
“Wasn’t that lucky? I was running late and I needn’t have hurried anyway because they had cancelled my train,” she offered.
“Me too but I was here on time,” he threw back.
“There is probably a very good reason why they are having problems.”
“If there is they are not sharing it with us, there have been no announcements whatsoever.” David said with an unfriendly finality that he hoped would end this annoying conversation. There was indeed a silence from the grey haired old lady next to him as she started rummaging in her huge handbag. But that was not the last of her conversational gambits by any means.
“Need a light?” Hazel asked.
If this had been any other carriage on the train, such a mark would have met with righteous indignation and any other opening gambit with feigned deafness. In the smoking carriage the rules are different. One is allowed to smoke (obviously) and by some other unwritten rule, one is allowed to talk. Which is to say that, for whatever reason, people in smoking carriages are more chatty (and coughy and wheezy.) And although David was in absolutely no mood to be civil to anyone, something about the convivial atmosphere of smoke filled rooms and his need to let off some steam got his chin wagging. That and the fact that Hazel Cole was an utterly unthreatening looking old lady who happened to be able to get a conversation out the corpse at a Trappist funeral.
“I shouldn’t have come by train, I knew it would break down. It only makes me mad, bloody useless.”
“Ulcers?”
“Yes, as it happens.”
“Ah, so you are an executive monkey”
“What?”
“Do you have ulcers?”
“Yes”
“Well there you are then!”
“I don’t see how that makes me a monkey.”
“In 1958, a man called Brady performed a very infamous experiment, where he had two groups of monkeys, Workers and Executives They lived in adjoining cages and every so often they would get an electric shock. The executives had a button in their cage to make it stop. That stopped it for the workers too. Both groups got exactly same number of shocks but it was the hectic executives that developed ulcers.”
“You are saying I work too hard.”
“Not quite. A man called Weiss performed another more subtle version of the experiment on rats. He divided them into several groups. Some getting inescapable shocks, some not, some could control their destiny and others were there as a ‘control’. Their job was to do absolutely nothing and get no shocks and report how they felt at the end. These lucky rats probably thought they had died and gone to rat heaven. But chances are someone used these ones for some cortical dissection experiment where they see how well the rats function without large lumps of their brains. At which point they really would have died and gone to rat heaven. You wouldn’t believe how many rats it takes to tell something that is kind of obvious with hindsight. In this case, they learnt that a combination of unpredictable stress and the illusion that you could do anything about them that had the worst effect.”
“Like travelling by train?” David concluded, at last realising why this sweet if hectoring little old lady was telling such a gruesome story.
“Yes, And?”
“And so go by car?” he said, proving that he had not completely grasped her point just yet.
“That is along the right lines but that is not what I was thinking,” she offered encouragingly, “What happens if you hit a traffic jam?”
“True! True! Well maybe I am screwed whatever I do?” David ended uncertainly, worrying if he should say ‘screw’ in front of this woman, who was clearly a schoolteacher, headmistress or something.
“Yes, maybe. But what you got right was that the way to deal with things you cannot control is to change your behaviour. There is nothing you can do about the state of the trains.”
“Well, not much” David interrupted, his head filled with images of him kidnapping and torturing the rail executives responsible for this mess.
“So you have to change how you view of the problem. You change your behaviour in this situation.”
“You are telling me I should not get mad? I can’t help that! They do this every God-Damned time I travel.” David snapped, starting to get mad again and not even caring if this headmistress slapped his wrists. In fact, maybe he would quite like it if she did. She was not so old as he had first thought; she had grey hair but it was still shiny and full-bodied and she had a lively face with bright hazel eyes, a clear complexion and what wrinkles she had, were more likes lines from smiling. She paused, watching him as his anger dissipated somewhat.
“But yes, if it is always like this I should be used to it by now.”
Once David had let his guard down the rest was easy. Between London and Stevenage, Hazel had shown him that his real unhappiness came from his feeling that he was not in control of his own time. The demands of his job and his family made him feel that he had no choice about anything he did and so when things went slightly wrong and in ways beyond his control, like today with trains, it was too much. He snapped, he stressed and, as he now saw, he wasted even more energy railing against something implacable. Trying to rush in situations where it simply was not possible.
Now that he saw it in this light, he saw the same pattern in other low points in his life. Supplier delays that set his contracts behind schedule, clients who changed their minds, drivers who were moments too slow to pull off at traffic lights. He even realised he was furious about the rain delays at Wimbledon. He was unsure if he would quite follow this headmistress’s advice about taking each delay as a little holiday for himself, but he conceded that his own fury was not helping him. It was amazing how, now that she had pointed it out, it was all so simple. He wondered why he never stopped to question what he was doing before. He supposed he had been in too much of a rush. But now thanks to Hazel, he was starting to realise that his life was not in fact a sequence of cruel tricks and it was mostly only his treating it as such which had made it such a trial. Taking a step back to include himself in the picture, he saw quite how much he contributed to his own unhappiness and in turn saw the opportunity to improve his own state of mind. As he thought some more, he got a little dizzy. It was simple to lay out in objective terms but as he switched from examining a situation to examining his reaction to it, he felt like his mind was getting tangled. It was like trying to see the back of you own head when standing between two parallel mirrors. It ought to be easy but every time you look round to one side, your own reflection gets in the way.
“You know, this has been a revelation to me. I had never thought about my life in these terms before. You know what you should do you should write a book about all this stuff.”
“I have. It is being published this week.”
Ψ
When Dr. Cole held the first copy of her book in her hands she allowed herself to feel proud. Throughout her career she had been published many times but only ever in academic journals and tomes. When she retired two years previously she had decided to write something more accessible.
She shuddered at the thought that is would be mistaken for a self-help book. She shuddered more that this is exactly what it was. It did not help her that she had lost the battle with the publisher and against her every wish they had called it ‘Help Yourself ’.
It attempted to demythologise the whole genre. To remove the cult of the personality from personality profiling. She did not want people to do what she told them because she had all the answers (which she did not) or because she had three degrees and two doctorates (which she did) nor because she was a self made millionaire with perfect teeth (which she wasn’t - she wore dentures and had a clinical psychologist’s pension). She wanted people to stop expecting to be given simple answers, to realize that the world is actually an extremely complicated place and that no expert could possibly know them better than they knew themselves. She hoped her readers would realise this and thank her when she told them that her book did not have the answers either and she was not going to solve their problems. That was the main problem with her book: it ultimately removed its own foundations. She hoped that she would succeed in being supportive enough that it would convince people that they could indeed support themselves but not so forthright that they dismiss her advice as an exercise in circular argument.
Though of course all these problems would only be problems if anyone actually buys the book.
~
And buy it they do, in their thousands. A goodly legion of others are more literal minded and steal it. Though she does not know this yet because it has not happened in her subjective time-line. I can tell you because we are floating above this book and you could have guessed anyway that a character would not appear here unless there was not some point to their existence from the point of view of plot development. Obviously this nice old woman is a counterpoint to that strange young man you met in the last chapter. Heck, it probably even tells you this on the fly-cover. (If it does, I lost my battle with my publisher.) So it is not as if I am giving away any surprises. If on the other hand, I told you that at the climax of the book he pushes her off a tall building then that would spoil things, so I will not do that. I cannot really tell you much about the man who pops up from time to time slightly unbalanced and confused by things. It would only confuse and unbalance you. However, do pay close attention to the duck in chapter five.
A note to the reader:
You are still with me this far in, for that I thank you. Especially now that I am trying your patience with these little asides. I am afraid there will be more interludes in the pages that follow. I did try to avoid it but in the end I was not clever enough to write it in such a way that everything flowed happily along from one phrase to the next. Therefore, all too often I shall interrupt myself and break my stride with trivia and digression that I have been too stupid to work into the body of the text. When you encounter a discontinuity such as this, I beg your indulgence and your pity. I hope that you will forgive my failings as an author and acknowledge that while he may not be the sharpest pencil in the case, at least your author is trying his feeble best. I hope also that you are able to follow the thread that I keep laying aside.
Ψ
If she was honest with herself, Hazel welcomed the opportunity to get out of the house. Since she retired two years previously she had nothing to do. One day she was visiting lecturer at two local universities and a clinical consultant in the mental health sector. Now she was talking to her plants and going half crazy. Writing a book about how to stay sane had been her way of staying sane.
Writing it had been hard. At first she had been too highbrow. She was oblivious to her own academic jargon. It seemed obvious to refer to hypotheses, experimental paradigms, neurotransmitter modulation, cognitive dissociation, existential self-actualisation and social constructivism. Fine for textbooks and journals but it would have been utterly discombobulating for the audience it was intended for. It needed a more popular tone.
She started again. This time she dictated it, imagining she was talking to someone like the man on the Great North Eastern Railway. She was all chatting to her fellow passengers and her book needed a more chatty tone. So she had imagined she was explaining her subject to him, or someone like him. Random imaginary train passengers seemed like the ideal test population. But this still didn’t quite work.
A journey by train tends to be slow and seems to set the mind on train tracks too. Like David on her journey to York, doctor Cole’s imaginary audience threw up a lot of objections to her helpful advice. Which she answered, at length. Her second draft had been far too long-winded. She needed another imaginary reader.
It would not have got through to the man on the proverbial Clapham Omnibus. Nor any other hassled commuter hurrying to work. He would not have time to listen as she attempted to patiently expostulate a complex but accessible story of how the world around us makes our minds out of the material of our brains. Before she even got beyond even a simple introduction, the man on the Clapham Omnibus would have leapt off the back of the still moving omnibus as it slowed somewhere along a busy high street, heading to work in a job he hates muttering about how one always gets the seat next to nutters on buses.
True enough, buses and nutters go together like horse and carriage. But there aren’t nearly as many certified crazies amongst them as we think. It is just that types of normal than we are used to. Although, with the end of comprehensive mental health care, there are plenty of card-carrying service users out on the streets. And they do seem to share the impulse to hop on and off the buses whenever they can, entertaining the rest of us.
Her third draft was her last. Again, she had dictated it. Her breakthrough had come when she had visualised as her audience an archetypal television weatherman (or weatherwoman or weatherperson or whatever they were calling them these days).
She had never met one but had a clear image in her head. An amiable, slightly camp individual, a little too keen on clouds and knitwear, or at least able to fake enthusiasm for cumuli nimbi and hand-worsted merino for professional reasons.
Her everyweatherman, her man for all seasons was imagined as an intelligent person who could handle the ideas of interacting cycles of cause and effect, who understood that a certain level of unpredictability was inescapable but who needed the technical explanations in warm, reassuring sound bites.
He would be curious about the world around him but with only limited time and attention to give her because he needed to keep his eye on the sky, excited about a building storm. Fortunately, at its heart, Hazel’s message was short and simple: You are the best person to help yourself.
As she saw it, everyone was a psychologist of sorts and an expert on their own condition. Even her most troubled patients knew themselves better then she ever would. Sadly that familiarity breeds contempt. The tricky bit was always persuading people that they could help themselves.
Weathermen were optimistic by temperament, it is an essential talent if you are to keep doing a job where every day your duty was to disappoint the British Public with the same depressing message; that they live on a wet and windy island in the North Atlantic that only gets two weeks of summer and one day of snow. That their island’s weather is about as dull and depressing as you will get, absent of all extremes of summer heart and winter cold, no hurricane wind nor monsoon deluge, every day just another wet miserable Tuesday afternoon.
The message in a book about the human brain was essentially the same. Although great extremes of genius and retardation occurred, mostly we were average. Although we were capable on occasion of rare acts of compassion or aggression, mostly we were more temperate. Although we may be visited by extremes of sadness or joy, mostly we were slightly miserable.
The forecast in her book was not one of outright depression but it could be a disappointing one for someone who presumed to find the islands of their minds located in the Caribbean of existence. Likewise anyone hoping that a mere book might provide easy solutions was as out of their mind as someone who hoped to tow Britain south in a pedaloe. Help Yourself was a dose of reality and anyone who had understood it would probably come away with more questions than they started with.
So when Hazel rewrote her book for the third and final time, the long winding yarns of version two were trimmed down to size and her potentially depressing message was delivered in the cheery tones of Michael Fish or John Kettley.