Stimela:* South African Railway Poetry

*(‘isitimela’: ‘train’, in Zulu)

One particular railway poem is cherished by most South Africans. Following the 1995 Rugby World Cup Final, it became familiar to many more round the globe – though whether it was recognized as a railway poem is doubtful:

Shosholoza Kule - - - Zontaba Stimela siphume South

(You are wandering on those mountains The train is from )

Wen’ uyabaleka Wen’ uyabaleka Kule - - - Zontaba Stimela siphume South Africa

(You accelerate, you accelerate on those mountains The Train is from South Africa)

Shosholoza Kule - - - Zontaba Stimela siphume South Africa

(You are wandering on those mountains The train is from South Africa)

The stirring anthem resounds over rugby and soccer fields today as once it did over mountain passes, in rugged krantzes and through fever-ridden swamps where railway construction workers sang as they sweated to build the southern African railway system.

A collection of railway poems is an unusual undertaking. More than an exercise in nostalgia, this anthology captures a large slice of modern South African life, viewed from different perspectives. Many of South Africa’s best poets have written railway poems. This is unsurprising, for railways hold special meaning for a variety of people – people in all walks of life – who find them not only fascinating but emotionally sympatico. The place of railways in the South African economy is changing rapidly, and it will be interesting to see in the coming years whether the less personal, more streamlined business model that is taking shape will attract the same naïve fascination engendered by South African railways over the past two centuries.

1 Imperial Ambition The anthology opens with a couple of poems focused on the mythology surrounding ’s cherished ambition of a ‘Cape to ’ railway. Africa has been, and still is, something of a laggard in the field of transcontinental railway construction. North America was spanned by 1870 and Asia by 1902, with the opening of the trans-Siberia railway. Australia followed in 1916. Rhodes’s dream remains to be fully realized. Imperialist poets like Lance Fallaw and Cullen Gouldsbury are rather proud of the upheaval brought to Africa’s primeval ways by the arrival of the railway, as we see in this extract from Gouldsbury’s poem ‘Rhodes’s Dream’:

Beasts scared off from the pools at dawning Grunt and growl as she rumbles by, Forest-folk in the misty morning Gaze aghast ere they turn to fly –

Africa’s shocked surprise is conveyed with relish because it dramatizes the heroic status of the railway enterprise. Such poems foreground the Empire’s technological superiority. Indigenous bewilderment, both human and animal, is treated simply as part of a stereotyped exotic context. Here is another instance, in Lance Fallaw’s poem ‘From the Cape to Cairo’:

Scarce from the beaten pathway hath the lean lion fled, till the baboon stands barking on ridges overhead. The savage, in dark gorges, where gaunt hyenas lurk, With the set face of stoic race watches the wizard work.

Imagining Africa’s response to the railway as one of detached, wondering incomprehension allows a sense of the unstoppable authority of the railway enterprise to slide unbidden into the reader’s consciousness. All the energy in such poems comes from the train, the imperial insurgence. The supposedly pristine continent may offer topographical and logistical challenges, but its inhabitants offer no resistance. With typical imperial aplomb, Winston Churchill once referred to the railway in East Africa as ‘one slender thread of scientific civilization, of order, authority, and arrangement, drawn across the primeval chaos of the world.’ In poems like those of Fallaw and Gouldsbury, technological rationality – the nuts and bolts of railway engineering – is subordinated to an exotic rhetoric of religiosity, mysticism and magic which imperialist and indigene supposedly share. For Fallaw, the railway is the ‘living way.’ The ‘old gods’ of the slumber while the ‘young god’ of ‘wheels and links/ Who lives by speed’ leaps among them.

2 African reactions What did Africans really think about the arrival of the railway? B.W. Vilakazi’s poem Woza Nonjinjikazi! is notable for its delicacy of feeling, holding praise and finely calculated protest in balance to make a rounded response to the railway phenomenon. As the poem opens, the train is admired for its vitality and grace: the steel monster is a ‘prancing dancer’ (picturing, perhaps, the motion of the connecting-rods at speed) moving effortlessly and gracefully over varied terrain. Like some marauding mediaeval dragon, the train has snatched the men-folk from the villages for two generations, and provides no news of them. The monster has brought heavy machinery and the mines into their experience; it is about to seize the speaker as well. The poet, representing his people, sits in the waiting-room anticipating the train that will carry him into the modern world. The spectacle of a glorious sunset forms a golden halo of benediction on the past, far outshining the material gold of the Witwatersrand, hidden from traditional Africa, which will be tomorrow’s story.

The fourth verse paragraph brings in the anguished note of self-laceration, the pain of a culture feeling itself at a loss, ugly feelings of inferiority. The speaker hears the sounds of the train approaching, the whistle sounding like the ancestral water-sprites playing in the waters of the Tugela river. The Vendas and the Tshopis are ‘Loudly singing songs of love.’ The poet hears their too-easy cooperation with the new, confusing world of railways, mines and modernity, an attraction which the poet feels as well. The beat of the engine becomes the stamp of dancing feet. He hears ‘strange new chants,’ so unlike the traditional songs of his clan. In the end he wants to stave off the monster’s arrival, stay musing on the predicament, or hide like a child among the pumpkins and mielie-stalks, watching the work-force of modernity passing by, morning and evening.

Vilakazi’s poem bears the hallmarks of his personal encounter with modernity. Closer to authentic praise poetry is the Sesotho poem of Demetrius Segooa, called here ‘The Train.’ Naturally enough, poems praising the train are not the traditional ancient praises passed from generation to generation as part of the oral repertoire. Instead, we have poems glorifying the train in the manner of praise poems. Two features are especially important: the poet’s intense imaginative identification with the train, and the sense of accomplished and appropriate vision. Segooa’s praise, for instance, starts: ‘I am the black centipede, rusher with a black nose.’ The metaphor neatly captures some of the visual facts about the train. The train is praised, not for any mushy romantic reason, but because it is powerful, mysterious, impressive: an appropriate object for veneration and evocation. The second line describes it as ‘drinker of water even from the witches’ fountains.’ Imagine the line-side water tanks as witches’ fountains, and the scale of the imaginative universe becomes clear. Impervious to the rival forces of night and day, ‘the train’ says:

I defeat the one who eats a person [the sun] and also the coal-black darkness where beasts of prey drink blood day and night. I am the centipede, the mighty roarer with an inward roar.

3 The train’s superior strength, on a cosmic scale, and its evident invulnerability to the frailties that ravage the organic universe of people and animals attract the poet’s admiration. The train belongs to the mysterious, unfathomable world beyond the known bounds of community; not needing ‘home,’ impervious to ‘hunger,’ never foot-sore or daunted by mountain climbs, a creature unknown to the ancestors. The consequence of allowing this homeless wanderer to break loose is the decimation of village life. When he tackles the migrant labour question towards the end of the poem, instead of the personal response we saw in Vilakazi’s poem we have the spectacle of the implacable train, like a river in flood, triumphing over reluctant labour recruits, carrying away whole villages at a time, dominating the economy and even the ‘captains of industry’:

What can the road owners do to me, the rushing black centipede, that keeps to time?

Perhaps the feature of praise poetry that suffers most in translation is its mode of delivery. Such poetry is intended primarily for the ear, not the eye. More importantly, the nature of English in its reliance on established patterns of stress, intonation and aural phrasing to convey meaning, militates against ‘hearing’ the power of the traditional praise poem in translation. In a traditional performance, clarity of enunciation is sacrificed to volubility and rapidity of delivery. The reciter takes a deep breath and delivers the poem literally at top speed, from deep within the diaphragm, pausing only when he (it is still usually a ‘he’) has run out of air. When he stops, he pauses for some considerable time, perhaps four seconds or so, eyes down-cast, then takes another deep breath and plunges into the next stretch with amazing rapidity and vigour. All this is lost in English, although in imagination one can, by extending the natural pauses at the full stops and diminishing those at other punctuation marks, realise some sense of oral performance from the English text.

One of my favourites among the railway praises is an unattributed Hurutshe poem in which the train is compared, not to a centipede, but to a rhinoceros, Tshukudu. The name itself sounds like the exhaust blast of a steam locomotive. The poem is remarkable in a number of ways. ‘Big-workshops’ and ‘tear-the-hands’ are place praise-names referring to the railway workshops. The regulator, the lever which controls the speed of the engine, is referred to first as ‘Point of a needle,’ later as a ‘teat.’ The train is female and is born ‘Out of the big hole of the mother of gigantic women’ (a tunnel), the shiny rails being the umbilical cord. The poet encounters one such ‘woman-of-the-track’ curving along the banks of a river. He is so taken with her that he wants to snatch her from her driver and take control, challenging the driver for her favours. The ‘Flock of red and white pipits’ is the rake of red and white coaches she pulls along (the carriages decked out in the old SAR livery), rolling carelessly behind her on the shiny track.

Railways and War The development of railways had a marked impact on the character of conventional warfare worldwide. An efficient railway system meant that armies could be moved in a matter of days instead of weeks. Troops could be de-trained fresh and ready for battle, instead of suffering exhaustion and debility following extended route marches. The South

4 African War (1899-1902) brought into sharp focus the strategic military importance of railways in the days before the internal combustion engine. The conflict was pursued over vast terrain poorly served by road communications. The railways in fact came to dominate the pattern of the war.

Military demands are seldom compatible with normal railway routines. Lieutenant- Colonel Sir , writing the official history of the railways during the war from the British perspective, makes this wry comment: ‘Civil officials have been heard to say that attacks by the enemy on the line are not nearly so disturbing to traffic as the arrival of a friendly general with his force.’ Timetables are disrupted; small sidings in the middle of nowhere become disembarkation points for large forces arriving piecemeal from different directions. Troop provisions have to be secured and guarded. Water supplies for the locomotives, often unreliable at the best of times, come under threat from the enemy. Above all, vast stretches of unprotected track – every siding, culvert, bridge, cutting and embankment – become vulnerable.

This is the context of John Runcie’s well-known poem ‘Crossing the Hex Mountains’, in which imperial aggression and pride is checked and softened by the lyrical romanticism of the speaker’s response to nature. The shabby context of the Anglo-Boer War is transformed by the magnificence of nature, and the contrast between rugged mountains and roaring machine mellows under the transforming influence of moonlight:

Sinister rise the mountains, jagged and bleak and bare Cloven and rent and fissured by fire and torrent there; But the Moon is a tender lady that loves not sights like these; And in her spell transfigured, all things must soothe and please.

The transforming power of moonlight probably comes down to the poem from Ovid via Shakespeare, Tennyson and possibly the opening of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). We are in de la Mare or Alfred Noyes country (compare ‘The moon is a ghostly galleon - - -’ from Noyes’ poem ‘The Highwayman’) and the Boer war context is little more than a disturbing dramatic pretext for the poem.

The construction of the Hex River pass was an engineering triumph. Opened in 1877, the line climbs some 760 metres over a distance of 42 kilometres from Worcester to the summit at Matroosberg. But Runcie’s poetic interest, while recognizing the thrill of the climb, concentrates on evoking a particular sentiment of being, a visual reverie which explores the contrast between the motionless heavens, the still mountains, slumbering passengers, the explosive drama of purposeful energy in the train’s passage, the wakeful attention of the sentries and the speaker on the platform. The poem celebrates harmonious difference whereby the train’s assertive ‘paean of conquering men’ is held in balance by the ‘moon-shot hills of God.’

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In Rudyard Kipling’s haunting and very accomplished poem ‘Bridge-guard in the Karoo,’ with its disarming refrain:

No, not combatants – only Details guarding the line.

– we come closer to the bitter yet mundane realities of war. The poem evokes a double sense of alone-ness. The soldiers are ‘details’ in military terminology, but also details in the ordinary sense of the word, as humans seen within two huge, incompatible settings: the overarching natural cosmos and the framework of military strategy in which they play a small part. The arrival of the train momentarily unites them with the ordinary human scale of things, warm and social, and its departure flings them once more upon their own frightened, frail resources.

A second strategy used in defending the railways during the Anglo-Boer conflict was the use of armoured trains. Early in the war the effectiveness of these trains was limited. They were sent on scouting missions ahead of military advances, often attracting attention from Boer artillery and causing major disruption to normal railway operations. Girouard notes that ‘Armoured trains were constantly rushing out, against orders of the traffic department, sometimes without a ‘Line Clear’ message, and thus caused severe delays to traffic.’ Armed only with soldiers bearing Maxims and rifles, there was little these armoured trains could accomplish.

But the war moved on and the British took control of all the railway routes. In 1901 the blockhouse system was introduced, putting a blockhouse garrisoned by about ten men every 1800 metres along the line. The armoured trains now carried guns and were accompanied by an armed escort in an armoured truck. Armour plating hung on the sides of the driver’s cab and, to minimise the impact of any mines which might have been laid overnight, the first train in the morning had two or three trucks in front of the engine to absorb any explosions. By this stage Boer artillery was scarce, much of it having been captured. Girouard concludes of these trains that ‘the enemy disliked them intensely’ and ‘the presence of an armoured train had a great moral effect’ – presumably more to do with morale than morality!

During the war Edgar Wallace, the future crime writer, was a young correspondent in South Africa working for Reuters His two railway poems, ‘The Armoured Train’ and ‘Song of the First Train Through,’ come from the early stages when armoured trains were a risky experiment and the blockhouse system was not yet in place. ‘The Armoured Train’ offers amusing confirmation of Girouard’s observations concerning the disruptive effects of armoured trains on the orderly running of railways:

I run not to time, nor to table, I’m neither an ‘Up’ nor a ‘Down,’ But ‘Full speed ahead’ is my order, When skirting the enemy’s town.

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Moderating the jingoism which scars much of his war verse, Wallace’s ‘Song of the First Train Through’ salutes the human cost of maintaining ‘Line Clear’ (that refrain which signals the safety and security of a railway system) after the battle of Magersfontein (1899). The poem mentions the death of General Andrew Wauchope, in command of the 4000-strong Highland Brigade, who was slain in a night attack on Boer positions at the foot of the Magersfontein Hills, along with a huge number of his men. The Boer forces were led by Generals Piet Cronje and Koos de la Rey. An endearing undercurrent in Wallace’s verse is his eager spirit of adventure, coupled with a fascination with communication technology. He was, after all, only 25 at the time of publication.

R. Ellis Gerard’s poem ‘15 Armoured Train,’ sub-titled ‘ A Favourite Recitation on Tyneside,’ recounts the romantic tale of Mima van Reenen who saves her British sergeant sweetheart (and unintentionally the train he guards) by secretly alerting him to plans to blow the bridge over the Doornspruit river. The poem belongs to the period after the blockhouse system had been introduced. The story is the better for its unqualified preference for love over war – and indeed the Anglo-Boer war was one of the sorriest episodes in British history, one which was to cast a long shadow over South Africa’s troubled future.

Guy Butler’s poem ‘The Parting,’ with its conflicting feelings of trepidation and excitement, repressed family emotions, and the incidental memory of two nightjars, memorializes the poet’s departure from his home town of Cradock on the edge of the Karoo for North Africa, Italy during the Second World War. The gap between knowledge and inexperience, the two generations, and the mingled music of nature, railways, youthful adventure and forebodings of war, clothes in wonder the inexorable fact of separation. This first parting from Africa would catalyse much of the poet’s later thought on the dialectic between Europe and Africa.

Steam-power Don Maclennan’s fine poem, ‘Lament for the Locomotives,’ strikes a keynote dear to the hearts of railway enthusiasts worldwide: the sense of loss occasioned by the passing of steam. The poem is redolent with the tough materiality of these machines and alive to the low-key heroism of the men who coaxed sweet labour from them under physically demanding conditions. It touches the thematic bases which help to explain the fascination of steam. The analogy with animal life, massive animal life like bison, or rogue mastodons, or elephant, is there. So is the derogatory comparison with diesel power, the melancholy attraction of the locomotive graveyards (‘acres of rusting willingness and beauty’) and the note of nunc dimitis at the end. Such poems are about more than the obsolescence of steam; they are about the passing of a way of life.

Many steam enthusiasts have felt a special affection for the 15F, that versatile workhorse which formed the core of the SAR mainline motive power towards the end of the steam age. Allen Cook’s poem, ‘Swansong of the 15F,’commemorates the final steam departure from before the changeover to diesel traction. In a letter Cook comments, ‘This is the only poem I have ever written, or ever will write.’ Such is the power of steam

7 to spur poetic endeavor! I particularly like the comparison between the 15F and the elephant (another endangered species, elsewhere if not in South Africa) which Cook describes as ‘short from the knees down’ – a dig at the relatively modest diameter of the 15F’s driving wheels – and as having ‘huge flat ears,’ a reference to the vast but elegant smoke deflectors. The 15F is assuredly an African rather than an Indian elephant.

The poem goes on to compare the grandeur of the steam locomotive to the slick and trivial way of life represented by the ‘Handsome TJ’ (TJ, the old Transvaal, vehicle number-plate) screaming by in his Alfa-Romeo en route to ‘a bored suburban debutante in PE’ (). The contrast is summed up as a contest between Hercules and a ‘lounge-lizard’ which, regrettably, the lounge-lizard wins.

Still with the Karoo, Mrs A. Steenkamp gives us a lament for the ‘Death of Condensers.’ It is quite clear that some women like railways just as much as men do! For twenty years (roughly 1954-1974) these magnificent locomotives took charge of trains between Touws River and Beaufort West. Designed for the desert, the Class 25 4-8-4s could show a saving in water consumption of up to 90% by directing exhaust steam to the huge condensing tender, where a battery of five cooling fans turned the steam back into water, to be used again. With no exhaust blast to induce draught in the time-honoured manner, draught had to be created using a turbine-driven exhaust fan in the smokebox. This gave rise to the characteristic ‘whine’ of these locomotives (‘The turbines’ glorious scream’ in Mrs Steenkamp’s poem), which was practically all that could be heard as they heaved a heavy goods train into motion. The poet’s outrage that these machines, stripped of their condensing gear to become the 25NCs, should be used on shunt is palpable. Though not mentioned in the poem, the weird-looking ‘sausage-dog’ tenders were the ultimate in the ‘defacing changes’ these locos had to bear.

Who today can imagine, let alone experience, a working running-shed with eight or more Class 25s in steam, raring to go, the Class 25 Condenser languishing in the shadows, a battered 12AR out of commission, the smell of oil, the orange glare of sodium lighting reflecting off swirling clouds of steam, the background sound of a shunting loco working the yard? Few railway poems get closer to the magic of the loco sheds in the glory days of steam than ‘Beaconsfield Loco at Dusk,’ again by Mrs A. Steenkamp.

A similar excitement pervades poetry which responds to steam in action: not the artificial ‘photo-opportunity’ steam-packages offered by preservation societies, but the real thing. Archie McNeil, for example, takes over rhythms reminiscent of John Masefield’s well- known poem ‘Cargoes’ to describe ‘Garratt C25’ tackling the Cramond bend in Natal on the long climb from the coast in the days when Garratts ruled. Technical engineering detail supports the visual, auditory evocation of the steel behemoth straining round the incline, flanges shrieking, with driving wheels grinding into the grit spewing onto the rails to help maintain traction. The title is something of a puzzle. To the best of my knowledge there has never been a Garratt class C25. But I may be wrong.

8 Train travel For passengers, railway travel is characteristically passive, relaxing, and it offers a distanced yet intimate visual relation with the passing landscape. In contrast, air travel abstracts us from the human scene in a mobile cigar-case above the clouds while sea travel cocoons and maroons us within a floating social microcosm, quite separate from the concerns of terra firma. Even road travel subjects passengers to long stretches of physical confinement and restricted views while, for the driver, concentration on the road ahead means almost total sacrifice of visual interest and entertainment.

Train travel, on the other hand, combines enforced passivity and physical relaxation with maximum opportunity for observation of the passing scene. The rail traveller’s consciousness – with all its preoccupations – is pulled through the landscape. One world has been left behind, another awaits. In this limbo, dream and reverie feed off the casual presentations of nature and human cultivation as they reel past the framed pictorial space of the train window.

Typical of this impulse is a fine poem by Harold Sampson, ‘A Train Window,’ in which the poet’s literal journey through the Karroo dawn modulates imperceptibly into a meditation on time, ageing and the ancient topos of life as a journey. What distinguishes the poem is the poet’s ability to hold keen physical observation, the sensation of travel, and philosophical reflection in unobtrusive harmony.

Every journey we make develops a specific character if we are alive to it. A good example is Ruth Miller’s skillful poem ‘Long Journey,’ where a train trip over dry mealie-lands, past desolate sidings, across dried-up rivers (the stark shapes of the bridge sections echoed by symmetrical shadows on the mud below to form ‘black parentheses’) and through the echoing darkness of tunnels, gradually takes on symbolical significance as we read. The journey is both itself and a landscape of the mind.

The passage through the tunnel is palpable in its sensuous accuracy:

Into the vacuous yawn of tunneled dark We creak, and yellow-wedged the walls lurch past. Sound solidified in masonry. Breath stops. Ears tauten. Memory Tries to forget the tonnage of the hill.

Almost too late the air grows clean, the arch Widens on sanity. The hills look small again, Each tunnel’s shining pinpoint piercing sight With pain but not with vision.

Emerging suddenly from the darkness, the eye contracts too late to protect itself against the oncoming blaze of undifferentiated light, as the train shoots from the tunnel. The speaker strives to ‘read’ the passing landscape, the fields of sunflowers, the stark line of the horizon punctuated by aloes which seem like asterisks marking a deleted or

9 withdrawn message. The poem is one in a long line of southern African poems in English where the speaker’s search for transcendent meaning is baffled by the harsh African landscape. The speaker speculates: was the message in the landscape urgent? Would it have transformed our vision of the world? Would it take us back to a beginning before our journeys started, or on to undreamed of destinations? Even where it verges on allegory (‘Through the bony continent of skull,’ and so forth), the poem never exceeds the arenas of significance implied in its material: the dawn sunlight filtering into the darkened compartment, the noonday veld reduced to the empty whiteness of a table cloth, each railway siding no more than a random crumb on its hot bare surface. The poem ends with some faint prospect of finality, where our lives may make sense to a cosmic sangoma:

Thus one cold morning we may reach awareness Of destinations, having learned to survive Distances immense with nothingness; While sullen with time the yellow rivers gather Each bordered province in a shriveled pouch Within which we, the cunning bones of witchcraft, Shake and stir.

Totius’s poem, ‘Repos ailleurs - Die Rus is Elders,’ translated here by Guy Butler as ‘The Grass is Greener,’ captures a moment of reciprocal longing. Totius is the pen-name of the Afrikaans poet Jakob Daniël du Toit. The speaker catches a glimpse from the dining car at twilight of a simple evening meal set out inside a candle-lit tent on a lonely plain. He imagines how his own casual yearning to be part of that scene might be matched by the longing of the little girl, standing by the tent and gazing in wonder at the speaker’s sumptuous repast as the glittering lights of the train flash by her. Rail travel yields such vignettes in incomparable variety. Sometimes the identification with these brief moments of vision is almost overwhelming. In ‘From the Train’ by Jessie Prisman, the speaker spots a man strolling along, his arms piled high with mimosa blossom, and her sensibility, in a moment ‘quick as pain,’ leaves the train and unites with his:

I, too, went singing down a lane Between Klapmuts and Kraaifontein.

Railway life: stations and sidings The sheer remoteness of country station postings was an ever-present reality for railway families. Each with its limited social resources, and particular rhythms of timetable and agricultural season, country stations supported a special claustrophobic world either loved and consciously sought, or barely tolerated until longed-for escape was won. The rail passenger sometimes sensed this atmosphere in the shimmer of heat-haze on a deserted platform, the line of immaculate red fire-buckets, the crunch of shoes punctuating the silence on neatly graveled verges; beyond, an array of Iceland poppies or serried ranks of strelitzia, the drip of water underneath the sock on the water tank, perhaps four identical orange face-brick houses, wire fences painted silver, a lone stand

10 of bluegums, the sound of sheep bleating in the pens, and a red dirt road leading to nowhere – or so it seemed to the observer.

That sudden stillness when the train stops offers space for insight into places and people with no specific relation to one’s own life, and into local settings never shared. The essence of many such moments is captured in Chris Mann’s much anthologised poem, ‘Cookhouse Station.’ Cookhouse is a rather bland junction set among the rugged aloe and milkwood-strewn ravines of the Eastern Cape. Passengers on the overnight train from Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth view it with their early morning eyes. The poet asks us to see Cookhouse Station – really see it – the way, for instance, that Joseph Conrad means when he urges that the task of the artist is ‘to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see!’

When I think of railway people, it is most often to imagine the life which goes on, or used to go on, in those remote sidings and stations, like Cookhouse, which the thirsty steam locomotive caused to sprout in the middle of nowhere. Many of them stand derelict today, having lost their raison d’etre. Pauline Melunsky’s poem ‘Steyn’s Halt’ explores the difference between the late-Victorian manners and milieu of those who established the original atmosphere of the halt, and those who pass unheedingly through it now. The silent call of the past, the shades of those who first dwelt there, contrasts disturbingly with the present as represented by the self-indulgent, lachrymose songs blaring from a transistor radio. Sometimes the poetic perspective shifts from the train to the empty station platform. In Harrismith 11, Phillip de Bruyn evokes the nightly drama of the Natal Mail arriving at Harrismith station on its way to Durban, and we see how for ‘brief and magic moments’ the torpor of the whole town, not merely the station, is transformed by its vivid presence. Tess Koller recounts the sad little story of a station-master’s wife (‘too little rose/And too much dog’s bone,’ in her husband’s view) who heads for the bright lights of the city and her boyfriend. The station master calls across to the house but there is no response. She returns to her ‘station’ in the morning, as the cock crows three times. Gavin Malcolm’s ‘Siding Scene in the Northern Cape’ is typical of these poems which suggest casual fascination with a fleeting scene, one which would perhaps be insupportable for any length of time, but which has the power to take us out of ourselves – at least until we are distracted by ‘a sweaty steward/ Serving custard with steamed pudding in the heat.’

One of South Africa’s finest and least-explored poets, Sydney Clouts, has written an amazing poem called ‘Karoo Stop.’ The poem works through the mesmeric auditory rhythm of a long coal train rolling past the poet’s stationary compartment as he waits in a passenger train at a ‘Karoo Stop.’ The steady pulses of dull sound are so invasive that they take possession of the speaker’s other senses, and his visual and mental processes respond in complementary bursts of perception. The serial flow of sound generated by the train is only halted by the smile of an old man, whose serried ranks of blackened teeth stanch the sound-sequence, overlaying it with a simultaneous visual analogue. The poem celebrates the exceptional power of human contact to subdue and transcend mere mechanism.

11 In ‘Men in Chains’ Mbuyiseni Mtshali dwells on a fleeting glimpse of six prisoners being herded like animals on to a train at a country station. The poem offers no ethical reflection on the causes of their predicament – none is possible on the basis of this slight visual scene – but conveys instead a powerful sense of utter hopelessness: for the prisoners ‘The train went on its way to nowhere.’ There is a disconcerting parallel with Nerine Desmond’s ‘Railway Junction’ which hauntingly evokes the numberless sad rail journeys of cattle from the ‘long sweet grass’ to their grisly destination in the cities. On a more cheerful note, Tony Voss’s ‘Kimberley Train Blues’, originally a song, celebrates the power of the train to bring lovers together, while in Peter Clarke’s poem ‘Phulaphulani’ (‘Pay attention!’), the cheerful unconcern of two schoolboys refreshes disenchanted commuters, stranded on a cold wintry platform, far better than the sexy Pepsi hoarding proffering fake summer exhilaration.

A group of passengers arrives by train at Bloemfontein Station at 2 a.m. one freezing winter’s morning in 1981. They have six hours to wait before their connecting train to East London departs. Railway officialdom, wielding its unsympathetic apartheid arrogance, can’t see a way to accommodate them in a waiting room of any description, not even the ‘non-white’ one which must have been available at the time, and instead instructs the group to wait outside the station. Their response is to take out the ‘gumba- gumba’ (a transistor radio or cassette player) and party the night away, though even this resilience is challenged by the cold and the long hours. The only sympathetic note comes when the sweet tones of a Xhosa-speaker announces the departure of their train. Such was ‘Bloemfontein Station 1981’ in the poem by Zola Sikiti.

Mafika Gwala creates an imposing figure of resistance in his ‘Mother Courage on the Train Carriage.’ This expansive matriarch, rather like her namesake in Brecht’s play, energises her passengers with a stirring litany of revolutionary sentiment, compacted social history, and practical encouragement, while selling cartons of sorghum beer in a Third Class carriage on the train between Cato Ridge and Durban. The residents of Cato Manor suffered forced removal to KwaMashu under apartheid policies of racial segregation. In Robert Berold’s ‘Travelling’, we share a precise and unnerving insight into the life of a railway carriage inspector and his family through sharing a compartment with him; while a fleeting glimpse of the grotesque seen in a clown’s face as the train passes, tears away the glamour from the circus in Chris Mann’s ‘The Circus Train.’ Finally in this section, two poems, one by Michael Shaw, written while still a pupil at Michaelhouse, and the other by Kathleen Wolfe, celebrate the magic of trains by night.

The permanent way Churchill’s ‘one slender thread of scientific civilization - - - drawn across the primeval chaos of the world’ can seem very frail and temporary despite its brave formal name, the ‘permanent way.’ Nothing in seems very permanent. This could be why the sight of a rusted stretch of rail, or a siding where the track has been lifted and the cattle-pens stand open and forlorn, or perhaps just an overgrown culvert left stark in the veld, its approaches washed away, take on a special poignancy. In ‘Shunted to a Side- line,’ Edward Lurie employs the forlornness of a disused railway junction to establish a human perspective from which the possibilities of making different choices, of taking a

12 different route to another destination, have long since vanished. The underlying thought is not unlike that of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’ Momentous choices disguise themselves in apparently trivial decisions. Here, the very possibility of alternatives has been abandoned. The Karroo is particularly hospitable to musings on the disregarded remnants of earlier engineering, because the landscape is so open. The discarded way, highly visible but useless, enacts a graceful counterpoint to the present rail route, which has its own contrived relation to nature’s undulations. For ‘Fitzroy,’ (the pseudonym of Mrs Fitzroy du Toit) in ‘Thoughts on a Railway Journey,’ the abandoned rail-bed is like a sloughed snake-skin shed gracefully alongside the train, its presence a significant monument to ‘the paths our fathers trod.’

We close with Phillip de Bruyn’s piece ‘One often sees a peach tree grow,’ which applauds the happy circumstance whereby peach-stones casually flung from passing trains grow into blossom-crowned trees gracing the permanent way. And the Epilogue is a piece of fun that appeared in Grocott’s Mail at around the time when the line from Grahamstown to Port Alfred ceased operations.

* * * *

Poetry represents a distinctively human activity which people exercise – whether as readers or writers – in order to understand and celebrate the experience of being alive. This is worth remembering because for some, I suspect, railways must rank among the most unpoetic of human inventions. Even railway enthusiasts, that cheerful and much maligned fraternity, may find the idea of poetry somewhat at odds with their habitual ideas about railways. Never mind. I have every confidence that people who can wait for hours at cherished photographic vantage points above, say, a gracefully curving upgrade when steam is ‘on the menu,’ who are to be found mooching respectfully around rusting hulks of machinery in locomotive graveyards, or for whom the merest trace of oil bleeding onto the dust of a deserted railway siding yields a small frisson of delight, such people already know that railways have a poetry of their own.

Enjoy the ride!

Laurence Wright Grahamstown August 2008

Works Cited

Churchill, Winston. My African Journey [1908] in The Collected Works of Winston Churchill. Centenary Limited Edition. Vol. 1 London: Library of Imperial History, 1973.

Conrad, Joseph. ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the Narcissus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Girouard, Edouard Percy Cranvill. History of the Railways in South Africa, 1899-1902. London: His Majesty’s Staionery Office, 1903.

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Acknowledgments

Any mistakes or inaccuracies in this book are my own.

My chief debt is to the railway poets, without whom - - -.

I am grateful for help received from staff at the following institutions: The British Library, The Cory Library for Historical Research, The Dictionary Unit for South African English, The Institute for the Study of English in Africa, The National English Literary Museum, The Outeniqua Railway Museum, Rhodes University Library, The Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University, The Transnet Heritage Foundation, The Wartenweiler Library, University of the Witwatersrand.

Research support from Rhodes University is acknowledged with appreciation.

The following people contributed to this project in various ways:

Susan Abraham, Marion Baxter, Cecilia Blight, Jean Branford, Bruce Brinkman, Cindy Brown, Eric Conradie, Jeremy Fogg, David Forsyth, Malcolm Hacksley, Ruth Harnett, Jennifer Holmes, Kenneth Jeanes, Nomangesi Kelemi, Jenny King, Debbie Landman, Martin Maluleke, Chris Mann, Dottie Mantzel, Lindiwe Msengana-Ndlela, Pat Papenfus, Leith Paxton, Jim Phelps, Cossie Rasana, Len Smuts, André Strauss, Dulcie Turner, Malvern van Wyk Smith, Zweli Vena, Crystal Warren, Horst Zander and, in particular, the late Guy Butler, who gave me seven railway poems a very long time ago.

I am grateful to each of them.

Laurence Wright April 2008

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