It is awkward to sit like this, pressed against a past I am afraid will swamp me. I smile, and with some dumb-show to acknowledge my awkwardness, I open the window and lean out to watch the fields skid by. The road, fag-end of the famous north coast highway, tails off near here. Clogged with caravans and mobile homes, it turns wearily inland to feed holiday parks, resort camps, an army firing range, a summer water sports school, a private airfield and, off on an eerie shingle limb of its own, an old power station. The carriage rocks across a set of points. The fields are planted with cereals. In front of them, in a broad, bright band coming right up to the edge of the rail bed, poppies tremble beneath a cloud of moths. The moths are tiny, white-winged, light as ashes from a bonfire. The gust of our passing catches them and choreographs them, and for a moment they abandon their zig-zag trajectories and give themselves up to the slipstream’s swirl. Abruptly, the train is canalised again; it rushes along a weedy, rackety corridor made of fences, wickets, head-high breeze-block walls and here and there, in the more open stretches, flagpoles, greenhouses, gazebos, weathered trampolines and bleached-pink plastic pedal cars.
