On the Train

ON THE TRAIN

This poem centres on the Ladbroke Grove train crash that happened near Paddington on 5 October 1999.

Clarke begins, in the title of the poem, with one of the most irritating statements of the modern age, the person on a train telling someone on the other end of the phone that this is the case. In the early days of the mobile telephone this was an ostentatious way of letting others know that the user was in possession of said telephone. Clarke is well aware of this but alerts us to the fact that we need to modify our intolerance in the light of such, disasters as the Paddington rail crash.

The opening of the poem initially presents the persona travelling “through England” (line 1) in terms that make her appear like a baby being carefully looked after by a vigilant parent. The speaker is “Cradled” (line 1) and this is the first word of the poem.  The train is then described as “rocking, rocking the rails” in a rhythm redolent of a lullaby. The speaker is lulled by the motion with which anyone who has travelled by train will be familiar. She is also lost in her own world by listening to a  personal stereo, “my head-phones on” (line 2). That safety is precarious and not to be taken for granted is subtly suggested in the change of tone effected through Clarke’s description in line 3: “the black box of my Walkman” makes the scene authentic and immediately recognisable through a well known brand name but it also suggests a coffin and, perhaps, the black box recorder that survives disasters, even if people do not. The mood of anxiety is reinforced as “Hot tea trembles in its plastic cup” (line 4). We are familiar with seeing the effect Clarke describes here but she injects life into the image by carefully choosing the word “tremble” in this context. The verb personifies the drink as a fearful individual.  The use of the present tense makes the situation immediate and personal, particularly as the speaker addresses her partner at the close of the first stanza: “I’m thinking of you waking in our bed / thinking of me on the train. Too soon to phone.” (lines5-6) The presentation of intimate thoughts shared between people is a prelude to a contemplation upon the universal significance of all human relationships and the fact that they can be destroyed by disasters such as the Ladbroke Grove crash.

The second stanza takes the reader through “suburbs” and “commuter towns” (line 7) and the everyday sights of the leave takings involved in “cars unloading children at school gates” (line 8) as she listens to the radio. We are told, though that it is “silenced in dark parkways down the line” (line 8). A foreboding atmosphere is sustained through such apparently innocuous details as “locks click” (line 10) and:

 …trains slide out of stations in the dawn
dreaming their way towards the blazing done-ship

(lines 11-12)

There is a sense of the irrevocable about what is happening and the fact that the trains are described as if dreaming of a Viking funeral ship is a sinister personification and a terribly prescient vision in the context of what is to become a gruesome immolation of many people. The Viking funeral was a heroic celebration, often of those who had died in battle, but the train crash will be a modern day reduction of that to accidental, pointless death.

Clarke continues in stanza three with the everyday detail with which all mobile telephone users are familiar:

The Vodaphone you are calling
may have been switched off.
Please call later.

(lines 13-15)

However, she quickly modulates to contemplation upon the desperation of those who will try again and again to contact those lost in the “rubble” of the crash. The repetition of “calling later” in lines 15 and 16 clearly presents the way people will keep ringing  while they have any hope at all. The destruction of hope is brilliantly handled by Clarke through the repeated image of rubble. First the phones of the dead “ring in the rubble” (line 17) and then in “the rubble of suburban kitchens”. Homes have been metaphorically reduced to rubble as telephone calls from the authorities come in to tell them that someone has died in the accident.

The final stanza returns to the relationship between the speaker and her partner. She cannot get through on the phone. Despite knowing that she will “be home safe” (line 21) she feels an urgent need to speak to the person she loves, “talk to me, please” The simple act of telling someone that one is safe by saying, “Darling, I’m on the train” is not something about which to be intolerant. We all need to know that we are loved and that we love. This oft-used line is surely a code for that. Clarke’s sentiment, “Today I’m tolerant / of mobiles (lines 22-3) is surely one that will chime with every reader when they recall, as Clarke does so well in this poem, the horror of disasters such as the one forming the subject of her poem.