The Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway ~ Brief Excursion

Journal

Volume 3

I

Saturday, warm inside, cool outside and taking a step back in time, the hint of Spring on this late March morning.

How good to be writing the journal rather than the Dispatches or Ukraine Dispatches. A brief respite, then back to current events. Sometimes, I need to step back in order to regain perspective.

Last week I reached 69 and, in my mind's ear, could hear Dad laughing … "That's it Ken. You're now in your seventieth year!" along with his giggle. It mattered not whose birthday, there was always a chorus, "Dad (or Des) stop it. I've only got to this one. Stop adding!"

Wonderful memories.

II

As I write, I sit in the delightful cafeteria on Winchcombe Rail Station, platform 1 on the GWSR line. The trains run on the hour each way between Cheltenham Racecourse and Broadway. These days I like to take my time doing things.

A lifetime of "on the go" even if it is nine hour shifts at the desk with intensity in writing, drafting documents, writing dispatches, commentary on events ... do still take their toll. When I questioned the GP a few days ago on the possible over-reaction to an ECG, I received an utimatum …

'It's either this or suffer a stroke.’  For once I did as I was told.

The family has been a little more direct.

Good news and not so good news from Thursday's 'sudden' CT scan has further chastened me. Now I know why things have not been quite so easy-peasy these last six months. No. That’s stretching it. More like 18 months.

So, it is sheer delight to take the train to Broadway, to wander quietly, to be far away from world events for an hour or two. To slip back as it were, into short trousers and the 1950s, to stand on the bridge at Cheltenham station (the bridge is still there, almost unchanged) with mum crouching down beside me as we watched the steam engine approach and both of us disappeared in a cloud of smoke. That’s how it seemed. I realise, though, looking back, that the smoke went way over the top of us, but I still felt like I was instantly transported into a huge cloud, another world where my imagination could run riot. Then watching all the open coal carriages passing beneath us, seeing heavy industry, and that wonderful duh-duh-de-duh, duh-duh-de-duh, duh-duh-de-duh, duh-duh-de-duh … and getting faster and faster as the Guards waggon at the end approached. And it became a really, really good day if the very smart guard waved up at me.

Desmond Budd Webb. I love this photo of Dad. At Rectory Cottage in late 2010, the last photo.

III

It crossed my mind that this restored line is in fact the line Grandma Webb took, with Dad (Desmond) aged 13.8, on the morning of November I5, 1940, following the previous night’s air raid and the Coventry Blitz. A large part of our family hales from Coventry. Dad recalled the smoke, the smell of cordite rising from the erased city centre, as they made their way to Grandma’s brother Arthur and his family, and his shock when catching a glimpse between the wooden planks forming the side of a railway warehouse on their return, of "more than four hundred plain wooden coffins, not shaped, just long and basic stacked up." I write more fully about this in Windsor Street Days elsewhere on this website.

As a boy I'd asked whether these plain boxes were empty.

'No, Ken.'

And the conversation ended with Dad's usual full-stop of his hand in a slight sideways scything movement. Another lesson learned. So that’s where I learned that from!

Well, if it was good enough for my father, then it’s good enough for me and has served me well, for nigh six decades.

IV

The Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Steam Railway is an absolute joy. What surprised me was the enormous length of the carriages. It took me back to my teens and early twenties when the trains swept round on what was then the Honeybourne Line, so fast that I often couldn’t count the carriages, especially at night when walking Sadie, and all I had were the lights to go by, passengers’ heads and newspapers spread out and held up by them all. A different world, a different age. My other Grandma, born in the Scottish Borders and meeting Grandad in South Shields, would love to see those same lights, and would always smile … ‘eye’ Ken, there she goes … the Newcastle upon Tyne express. Oooh I wish I were on it Ken, that I do.

We have to hold on to these memories. With the world in turmoil, I’ve noticed something that I had not anticipated. Even middle-aged News presenters are taken aback at what they are reporting, and that everything is a ‘first’. And it slightly unnerves me, for I know it is not a first, but a repeat. And, reader, truly, this is when I curse, and I mean, curse, that I have read so many works on all aspects of World War II. For that brings hurtling back that childhood dread.

Kenneth Thomas Webb
Liverpool and Gloucestershire

May 29, 2022
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© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022

One of the Fifteen Founding Members of the Leaders Lodge

Journal written March 27, 2022