She puts me in mind of a plough pulled by a locomotive. No one speaks. All are preparing themselves for the ordeal of a long ride. Such concentration demands complete silence. The hard seats of shiny polished wood are not only short; they also have a downward slope. Sitting on them means: continually and hopelessly shuffling back up.

We go along a long road with dark buildings and dark spaces between them; plots with boards and fences that make no sense, no hope of ever becoming a garden, a field, or a house. The dead bodies of plots. The town refuses to end. If it ever does, though, you can be sure the next one will begin immediately. The towns hand the streets on. Each time, we stop in front of brown shelters of creosoted wood that look like the primal forms of stations in the wilder parts of America. Next come allotments, little hutments of roofing cardboard, the summer castles of the little man and the little rabbit. Jugs, pots and bowls have been spiked on fence-posts like so many severed heads. A red-brick factory, an iron fence, a little white stone gate-house with a visible clock-punch, behind it big puffing chimneys, four, five, six of them, ready to reproduce at a moment’s notice.

The country keeps being on the point of taking over, and making country again—and then it can’t. There are no buildings. The road could turn into a country road at this point. There are even trees at either side, preparing to speak up for it. But our tram needs its overhead wires, and the wires need long, bare, wooden poles, with a couple of china pots flowering at the top end, for purposes of electricity. A caricature of a snowdrop.

In the far distance, on the very horizon, nature is at pains to produce a wood. But there is no wood. There is a kind of beginning vegetative bald patch with comb-over fronds of pine. Next come the inns, one after the other, and each one announcing “picturesque garden location”. What can they mean, what is picturesque here? I imagine a restaurant with painted orange trees and laurel in flower pots; or a bit of a cabbage patch with a veranda; four fences festooned with wild Virginia creeper. There are no limits to the imagination.

Next comes a completely unscheduled stop. The driver gets out, the conductor follows suit, they meet somewhere in the middle. We listen to the rain. There are no signs anywhere. Chimneys, some stout, some slender, puff away in unrelieved torment. The rain shreds the thick smoke, pulverizes it, evenly, without rancour. The rain pulls curtains in front of the scene, curtains without ornaments.