I hate shopping. My
perfect shopping trip, when I have finally been persuaded that I can no longer
do without a certain new article of clothing, because I “look so tatty I don’t
want to be seen out with you anymore,” is a surgical strike on a major
outfitter of no more than ten minutes, followed by half an hour roaming around
a bookshop, then lunch out, an hour in a museum or art gallery, then home.
That immediately gets
the painful bit out of the way, after which, it falls neatly into the “now it’s
just a day out” category. My cunning plan sometimes falls foul of my wife’s
ability for lateral thinking. In practice, this means that she may have stated
that her aim is to make only one or two purchases herself, but when actually surrounded
by all that stuff, she goes off at a tangent and identifies all sorts of
household items which were definitely not on the list she showed me - the proof
I had required to see before our departure, that we were embarking on a trip of
limited duration.
Even worse than the city
or town centre shopping expeditions are the out of town retail outlets, where
there is nowhere nice to eat lunch and I also find that I have landed in a
cultural desert. The latest example we drove into is called Victoria Retail
Park and it is in Netherfield, on the
edge of Nottingham . I just wished I was
somewhere else, or maybe, in this instance, the location was actually OK, but
it is just that time has changed it.
While my wife checks
out that her latest bit of communications gadgetry is available, I sit on a
bench and look after the shopping bag. I close my eyes and whisk myself back some
fifty years. Of course, I’ve been here once before. Colwick was one of the very
few Eastern Region sheds that I ever reached. The ex-Great Northern Railway motive
power depot was on the flood plain of the River Trent and on the outskirts of
the city. I comforted myself with that notion, smelling the sulphurous smoke,
listening to the clanking from the worn bearings and connecting rods on the
ancient, overworked freight engines that were moving around in the extensive
yards, where I was now sitting.
I have hazy
recollections of ex-LNER locomotives in large numbers, but there were no namers
amongst them. That would have upset me at the time, I thought. These were just black
and grubby. Many of them were
different, however, and lots of them had handrails attached to the boiler
cladding, another unusual feature for us LMR folk. I decided that B1s were not
as easy on the eye as Black Fives and although the Robinson 2-8-0s were
impressive, they looked like a very old design when compared to the Stanier
2-8-0s that we were used to. They certainly all had rarity value, though. I
must have copped virtually everything I saw and it would have been a good haul.
I was suddenly jolted
back into the present. Quite a well-spoken voice enquired, “Have I got to smack
your leg in front of all these people?” Choosing to interpret this firstly as a
rhetorical question, and then realising that it was probably more likely that
it was being directed at the infant who just happened to be adjacent to me at
that moment, I thought it best to maintain my silence. My principles took
another hit instead. I could at least have tried to take a bit of the heat out
of the situation with a merry, well-timed quip.
I still feel the guilt
from the two occasions that I can remember when I smacked my own children,
having not just lost patience, but all reason and self-control in the flicker
of an eye and as a result of total exasperation and probably over next to
nothing, in the overall scheme of things. I remember turning around again from
my driving seat seconds later to see the red, raised, finger-shaped marks on
the thigh of my slight, delicate and dumbfounded daughter, sitting strapped into
the back seat of the car, sandwiched between her, no doubt, equally guilty
brother and sister, too shocked even to cry, as a result of my uncharacteristic
lapse. The sickening wave of remorse hit me as though I had been jettisoned down
a chute into boiling water. It stays with me to this day. I still keep
apologising to her for it.
I had completely lost
it at the time, but this parent in
the here and now was actually making a calculated, premeditated decision as to
a violent intervention and had very publicly brought passers-by into the
equation for a bit of added humiliation. It sounded very much like official
parental policy, in this case. At least, I could have claimed to have had the intention of not hitting my children. More
enlightened attitudes to corporal punishment for young children have apparently
not reached parts of Nottinghamshire yet.
Instead, I made every
effort to return to my hazy memories of Colwick shed. I’ve been around Colwick
shed, I’m sure I have. Why can’t I remember the circumstances and even,
roughly, the date? I know it is underlined in my combined volume, as is Toton.
It was the only time we ever came anywhere near to Nottingham in the days of
steam.
Before any more
threats of violence were directed at any other very small people nearby, I
persuaded my wife to call it a day. As soon as I got home, I checked. There it
is underlined in red in my summer 1962 abc; 40E Colwick, along with 18A Toton.
Now, I know I’ve had a wander around Toton during the diesel era - on an open
day, I think - so it could just be that I added that one later on, but that
would still not explain Colwick. It gets worse. I can’t find any mention of
Colwick in my train spotting notebooks [1962-1968]. I’ve gone though them all pretty
carefully. I need further assistance.
I contacted the man [then
a senior pupil] who ran the railway club at our school and asked him if he took
us to Colwick between when I started spotting in 1960 and 1962, years for which
I have no written record, choosing instead to recklessly dispose of them, once
I’d transferred the information into my combined volume. He got straight back
to me. No, we never went there on an organised visit from school.
It is just possible
that my train spotting records are incomplete and that one or two trips are
missing. In a couple of instances and for reasons unknown, I had also definitely
torn out a couple of pages from my notebook. I fancy that on one or two other occasions
I did not bother with notes at all, but took a loco-shed book with me in a
plastic wallet and lazily recorded straight into that, possibly via scraps of
paper, especially, I suppose, if we were going around a busy shed. I would then
have done my “neat” version in my combined volume when I got home. That particular
arrangement had gone out of the window, the day I left the loco-shed book on my
seat when leaving a train in Chester
Colwick closed to
steam in 1966, so it must surely have been before then. Did I ever go long
distance spotting by myself or with anyone other than my mates? I had joined
the Warwickshire Railway Society for one year only. I liked the look of the shed
tours they offered and on Sunday 12th July 1964, three of us from
home had taken part in a mighty bash with them of some Welsh Marches and South Wales sheds. We had made our own way from Liverpool
to Birmingham Worcester
What else did I get
for my subscription in a whole year if it wasn’t a trip to Colwick MPD? I
contacted my main former train spotting accomplices. “40E Colwick,” I said,
“When did we go there? Help me, please,” but nobody could come up with an
answer.
I’m thinking now that
we might have dropped in at Colwick and Toton on our way back from Grantham
youth hostel, where we definitely stayed for the night of the 10th of
April 1969, after the end of steam and a year before 40E, by then re-coded 16B
and a diesel depot, was finally closed. I’m not even sure about that. All I can
say is that I would never have invented either numbers recorded, or sheds
visited. It looks like it will remain a mystery. I actually decided not to list
any details of trips we made between the end of steam and 1970 as my protest at
steam’s demise - my one-man campaign, which, as you might have noticed, fell on
deaf ears and was completely overlooked by the authorities.
So, was I really sitting
in the retail park and imagining it all? Perhaps my trip to Colwick had just been
wishful thinking. If so, it wasn’t difficult with a little imagination. I could have been there, but maybe I just
wasn’t. After all, I knew what some of the engines that lived there looked like
from other trips to Gorton, Retford, Doncaster and Darlington .
In fact, all that
remains of Colwick shed today is the LMR club in the building that was formerly
the staff canteen. Next time you are “encouraged” to go shopping in the big
supermarket or the retail park there, try and grab a quiet moment and reminisce
about what it was like there half a century ago. It’s easy, apparently. I can
only hope that you are brought back down to earth gently. I believe we are all
a bit vulnerable when we are emerging from a hypnotic trance. I hope there is
no big bully there to spoil the moment.
[This article first
appeared in the Railway Antiques Gazette. Thanks are due to the editor, Tim
Petchey]
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