Frailty on the rails
Travel at the edge of possibility
The last few days have been a delicate dance of transport, a tenuous trace across the contours of Europe. A trip in which we were all too conscious of the fragility of life, of plans and of our trajectories through the world.
My mother is 83, and no longer robust and steady on her feet. So much so that she’s adopted a walking frame on wheels that has both a small motor and a seat. She leans on it to walk and when she needs a rest sits in it and rolls it along. I was sceptical at first but I’ve found that it has helped on our journeys and can (just about) be folded and lifted into the boot of the car.
We had a plan concocted with my brother and sister to get her to the north of England for a weekend, to an event marking the life of one of her oldest friends and to see her granddaughter (and her granddaughter’s new cat). It was a plan of many parts in which my brother would drive her from her corner of Germany to the north of France where his mother in law lives. And I would make my way from my valley in the eastern end of the Pyrenees to Lille to stay with another friend. We’d meet at the Eurostar terminal in Lille the next morning where my brother would hand over my mother and the responsibility for the next stage of the journey. My job was the next leg, to London. And from London to Sheffield and my sister.
It meant that the day was fully a travel day, an early start day, a watchful eye day and a day of patience. But a day in which between us - me, my brother and my sister - we got my mum to Sheffield.
I woke up early in Roubaix, had a pleasant sunlit morning walk to the metro and then a countdown of metro stops through the Lille suburbs. The Eurostar terminal in Lille is a relatively small operation, where it was impossible to miss my tall brother next to the increasingly hunched form of my mother pacing the station concourse. Check-in was the first test of our plans and I worried that the rolling chariot was too cumbersome for the scanners. I negotiated for it to be rolled through and searched manually. What was more difficult was ensuring my mum didn’t take anyone out with her walking stick, which she insisted on carrying across the seat of the roller, both ends poking out and ready to catch the unwary and slightly bleary, queuing in the early morning light.
Boarding the train, however, was relatively problem free and actually the journey went well, sitting next to each other and catching up. Even getting off the tall train went smoothly, mum clinging to the hand rail and easing herself down the train steps onto the platform as helping hands reached out to her, keen to steady and assist.
With more than an hour before our onward journey to Sheffield, we stopped to rest in the cafe of the St Pancras Hotel. It’s a hidden gem and oasis of calm, created out of the original station ticket office tucked behind the glorious Victorian Gothic facade of St Pancras station hotel. Light floods down from the high glass roof onto a room of small tables, compact sofas and upholstered chairs. The price of a pot of tea, whilst not inconsiderable, buys time to gaze at the perfectly restored patterned ironwork, the red bricks and the contrasting stone details, the walls inset with columns and arched windows. A space that made a punctuation point, a respite and treat before setting off again.
The onward trip to Sheffield was a little more breathless at the outset - as the train platform was only called about five minutes before departure. We trailed after the kind and cheery station staff person who commandeered our luggage to get us in to the accessible travel area. Once aboard, Mum sat in the wheelchair space and I sat at a table nearby, reading. Two hours went pretty quickly and we were in Sheffield by lunchtime.
Which is where the fun began - or at least the beginning of the list of things Mum had to do in the UK in the short amount of time available.
First up was Santander bank - a decent uphill drag from the station, for which I was grateful that she had her roller to variously trot behind, lean on, and sit in along the way.
The banking experience may have gone more quickly without her insistence on a quick life history recap, but then again, as their devices that failed and needed rebooting three times, this may not have been the case. The queue that built up behind us melted as the staff at the other counters opened and picked up their pace to accommodate the diversion. We proceeded onwards to Boots the chemists, where none of the displays were harmed in the bulk purchase of vitamins and ibuprofen (although more by luck than judgement).
Heading back to catch the bus (having managed to swerve Tesco) it turned out that Sheffield centre was being taped off by police due to a car crash. All the buses were being diverted. Working out step-free access to the street where we (might possibly be able to) catch a bus was tricky. The uncertainty was magnified by our lack of mobility, and I started to panic when mum seemed set on haring off in the wrong direction. I was just reaching the end of my tether explaining where I thought we ought to be heading when my sister, Sophie, called to find out how we were getting on. We were lucky that she had the will and the time to pick us up in the car. So we sat tight until she was as close as she could get to the cordon and trotted the couple of blocks to meet her. After this, the day descended into relief, cups of tea, and take out pizza with a crafty helping of chocolate to finish it off.
Saturday woke up too early - the late spring light has already lengthened both the mornings and the evenings in the north of England and it was flooding into the house overlooking the city by 5am. But that meant more time to prepare for our trip Stretford Public Hall. Squeezed into Sophie’s car - all three generations and the electric roller - we took the hilly route out over the Peak District, passing names of places that figure in our family history. Chapel en le Frith, Sparrowpit and Dove Holes. We have origins scattered across the north, woven in with the Industrial Revolution, converging from Westmorland in the north and the Peak District in the south to shuttle between the great industrial cities of Bradford and Manchester. As we strung together fragments of family stories for Hanna, the hills gave way to the sprawl of Manchester and the satnav found us our way to Stretford Public Hall.
The commemoration of Hilary turned out to be somewhere between the sweetest, most poignant, coffee morning and a whimsical avant garde performance. A short welcome by her daughter, memories and poems read by people she’d inspired, rounded off with a piece of music played on a set of handbells she’d rescued from oblivion and had restored. All served with coffee and huge slabs of cake.
Time passed quickly, but we had one last part of the day, so we headed back to Sheffield, in time for tea with Mum’s cousin Penny, herself driving from Bingley, on the edge of North Yorkshire. Their grandfather had been a wheelwright as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Penny’s father and my Mum’s mother (both born over a hundred years ago) had been brought up in small cottage houses at Thackley End. These were home for a generation or more of Hodgsons and the centre of orbit for my grandmother and her siblings. They were the source of tales of chickens, vegetables, and the pig club during the war, that fascinated me as a child. Where we popped in on the unmarried great uncles, petted Toffee the dog and met our second cousins.
When Penny set back home (whilst it was just still light enough for her to get back to familiar roads before dark) we were all socialised out.
The end of the adventure would be to get mum back onto the Eurostar to be collected by my brother and conveyed back home. Like a package on consignment, she noted. It involved another early start for the 0822 from Sheffield to London, leaving plenty of time to get to the platform using lifts rather than my usual dash up and down stairs. Being early was getting to be a thing, and with plenty of time in hand, we lined up with the accessible carriage indicators. We found that boarding had become easier with practice.
Everything was on track.
Until a train announcement that we would be held at Kettering. A train had hit a person down the line and all services would be stopped whilst the emergency services were in attendance. Our tenuous plans were cast into sharp relief by the shortness and fragility of life.
People milled on the platform trying to find alternative routes on cars and buses. Keen to get us to the Eurostar on time, we were called a taxi by the sympathetic (and excellent) train crew but it didn’t show up. So eventually, when the line was cleared - noone wants to hear the words ‘the forensics have finished’ really but the trains were restarted - we climbed aboard a southbound service. Despite building more than an additional hour into our schedule we were arrived at St Pancras long after the gates closed, so we headed to the passenger assistance desk of Eurostar.
There’s been a kindness and preparedness to help the straggly and struggling that has been lovely. The man at the help desk had also been affected by the same cancellation on his way to work. He found mum the last seat on the next train (an upgrade and unfortunately he couldn’t upgrade us for free) and then walked her through the security himself.
I went and stared at the trains for a while, my eyes searching for her bowed figure shunting the roller.
Partly wondering whether I’d be able to see her get on and partly just taking in the splendid arched roof of St Pancras station. It was only when I sat down to have a celebratory cup of tea that I realised that my chargers and cables had disappeared off onto Eurostar premier with her.
Life is short. Even though my mum can trace out stories from the 1940s, could reminisce about my great grandmother in Kettering three quarters of a century ago whilst we sat waiting in the modern station ticket office, the scenes still seem just a breath away. The years that change us mean that every phase of our lives is bounded, different. We are fragile, are plans are fragile and every step is uncertain. It’s a privilege to grow old, yet a lifetime can seem like a blink of an eye.
Sometimes we’re arrogant and think we can control everything. We take our privilege for granted. Or maybe it’s just me that’s guilty of this. Watching for my mum through the glass barriers at the end of the Eurostar platform, straining my eyes for her bowed figure and for the gallant man that wheeled her case, it was clear it’s the tiny connections that help us from one step to the next, that make us greater than our individual strengths and lift us over the barriers of our individual weaknesses. Our privilege is in the grace of others, our tenuous plans become reality in their hands.
