London to Penzance: 29 March, 2023
The lovely plan:
Wake from a restful long night of slumbery recovery from jet lag, enjoy a full English breakfast in fine company, wander around to the massively impressive Paddington station, implement a Eurail Pass with a few advance seat reservations. After a leisurely stroll through the streets and parks of Knightsbridge and perhaps lunch, enjoy a one-seat 6-hour journey south west along the Great Western Railway into Penzance through the delights of Cornwall.
The reality:
The door knocking started at 3am… continuing in relentless bouts until 3.15. I staggered to the door: “What?!” A mousey woman apologised and ran away down the corridor. End of tapping on door. Back to fitful sleep.
Buffet breakfast, supervised by tough Polish woman and companion toast-server in rakish black hat, and surrounded by 25 German high school students on an UK bus tour. Very jolly.
Wander around the corner past the tourist-tat shops and Bureaux de Change(s?) and under the massive steel arched roof into Paddington. The mild thrill of anticipation.
The milling crowd was glumly staring at a bank of blank departure indicators. Only two boards showed information: a large red screen announcing that NO trains were leaving the station for the foreseeable future due to a fire at Maidstone. On the right hand indicator was the one exception: Heathrow Express. So, the only available train is the one you take to leave the country. At best, it was a little premature.
Decreasingly optimistic, I ambled through the largely silent crowd to the Great Western Railway booking office for some advice about getting to Cornwall (as only GWR run this service) or maybe some advance seat reservations????
There is a kind of seated professional shrug of polite indifference that has been mastered by generations of officialdom, now perfected behind protective safety screens between Official Types and the Great Unwashed/Unvaxxed. The intent is to pacify by providing solicitous advice when there is nothing to say. I witnessed an outstanding performance:
Do we know if trains might be running to Cornwall by later this afternoon? Shrug: polite shake of head.
Would I be able to make some advanced seat reservations for later in the week and around Easter? More pronounced shrug, shake of head, raised eyebrow, brief flicker of a smile.
When might I return for further (or any) information? Sigh, pronounced shrug, brief frown and stare at ceiling: “Your guess is as good as mine!”
A pleasant walk through more elegant and tree-lined streets of Paddington, Maida Vale (with extensive blocks of the kinds of genteel Edwardian “mansions” of flats inhabited by the likes of Rumpole) along the Grand Canal past lines of low boats still shuttered for Winter then into Marylebone.
At a handy local tube station I was pondering the spaghetti map of local train lines to find a faster way back to my pub. A station attendant wandered over. “Can assist ya, mate!”
“Only if you’re running trains as far as Penzance!”
“You’re on a pass, yeah? So you can use any rail company, yeah? See ‘ere: Waterloo station. You can take a South West train as far as Exeter, then hope for the best when you get there, yeah?”
Yeah.
Next train (on the handy Eurail app) was in 90 minutes after a short jaunt from my pub on the tube. I looked across the road to the Perseverance pub, took the advice and tapped the Oyster.
Which is why, a couple of hours later, I was thoroughly enjoying rolling through the place names redolent of my Anglo childhood (and the settings for so many Sherlock Holmes short stories): Clapham Junction, Wimbledon, Surbiton, Woking, Farnborough, Basingstoke… followed, after Salisbury, by a leisurely single-tracked wander through the bucolic Constable landscapes of redolent green, muddy fields and hedgerows, brimming streams tumbling through greystone-arched bridges, black-faced-brilliantly-white sheep, fleshy and complacent milk-chocolate-brown cattle, stone farmhouses surrounded by clusters of matching barns and outbuildings, modest whitewashed terraces on small lanes near the sites of former village railway stations…
This ended abruptly, arriving into built-up Exeter. Across the drizzly platform was the express to Penzance. It seems that I was not alone in taking this “work around” route to Cornwall as several of us crossed over to… closing doors. Very closed doors. Waiting, waiting, with platform staff giving the GWR version of teachers’ death-stares… waiting, waiting…for nearly 2 minutes before the s-l-o-w acceleration away… and and roughly an hour(?) to kill in a rough patchwork schedule of ongoing delays. Drizzle was becoming downpour less than half way to Penzance.
Exeter station platforms are planted with huge Costa Coffee hoardings, but the station waiting room has been darkly Starbucked. Increasingly grungy and damply well-worn, the couches have been crushed by the resigned butts of delayed trainloads of long-suffering GWR guests. At least there were charging points and wifi, and the overpriced coffee might warm you. A bit. Torrential rain blasted the idling trains outside.
Much-delayed, a Penzance express splashed in. It was warm, dry, welcoming, fast and sadly informative: due to engineering works, we would be transferred onto a coach at Plymouth for a 90 minute transfer to a connecting train at somewhere called St Austell.
So there it was, half way across the world, on the first day of extended travels, I was in a leaky, muggy, misted-window, sullen, bloody trackwork bus on the dark roads into Cornwall.
At St Austell they had not “held the train” as promised. The tiny station buffet had an excellent time serving reviving strong tea and buns for a 9.30 evening “meal” to the 30 remnant rassengers. I was not alone in hitting the phones to negotiate after-hours access to pubs in a strange town, still an hour away, on a blustery rainy night.
It was pitch-black in Market Jew St, Penzance, beneath a creaking swinging sign, in a horizontaly drizzly howling gale as the PIN box spat out my room key to the Longboat Inn.
Tomorrow: it’s a full day from Lands End to St Ives of rugged cliffs, twisting along one-lane roads of two-way traffic through tiny stone villages, vast moors and ancient tin mines, brilliant surfing beaches and arty St Ives. Starting with the Full Cornish breakfast? Yes, please!
That would be the plan.
Cornwall scenes from Lands End to St Ives:
St Michael's Mount, seen from Penzance
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