Thursday, October 25
To the wild west on a great British expedition
Matthew Parris
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Published at 12:01AM, October 25 2012
Isles of Scilly Notebook: A glorious ride by sleeper train and helicopter
Helicopter flights from the Isles of Scilly to mainland England end next week, probably for ever — commercial flights, that is. I’ve just landed in Penzance having flown through the fog from the isles on a 34-year-old Sikorski. After almost half a century of service helicopters are no longer economic and, with the company about to quit (a source of anxiety among Scillonians), I wanted to experience what will soon be history.
Sleeper trains and dining cars too struggle to justify themselves commercially, so with First Great Western among the last to offer both, I decided to travel to the isles taking the Night Riviera from Paddington to Penzance and the air-bridge to the Scillies, returning by helicopter two days later to enjoy a proper lunch in the dining car. A Great British Excursion.
I joined the Night Riviera in Reading after midnight — lucky to have a reservation because the sleeper was full. The nine-hour journey gave time for a nightcap in the buffet, followed by the best sleep I’ve ever had on a train, rocking gently through Exeter and the West Country in an astonishingly comfortable bed.
What’s the dress code, though, for sidling down the corridor to the loo in the middle of the night? I moved fast and furtive, like a rat, gripping handrail with my left hand while holding up my alarmingly unelasticated boxer shorts with my right: terrified of meeting a disapproving passenger in pyjamas and a silk dressing gown. But I was lucky. I always am. Not once in my life have I been surprised semi-naked in the corridor.
Dawn brought a door knock, tea and a hot bacon baguette and The Times as we slipped out of Truro: service and the staff so much friendlier than on the French railways. Then a sunny early morning coffee by the Penzance seafront.
With a couple of hours before our scheduled flight to St Mary in an eight-seater plane from the grass runway over the cliffs at Land’s End (fantastic!) we decided to amble through the small town. Penzance, with its hilly streets and unpretentious stone Regency architecture, has a most distinct character: a forgiving and slightly peeling feel, as might befit the first landfall of a seasick sailor and the last big place in England you reach before the foaming brine becomes the alternative.
Economically I’d say Penzance was hanging on, but somewhat precariously: plenty of visitors; restaurants, bars and quirky shops packed with tat and treasure; a whiff of exoticism and a whiff of decay. The town’s modest quotient of charity shops and empty premises registers perhaps a couple of notches below the trigger for official concern.
So now would be the time to act — before the trigger. Your Mary Portas TV makeovers and your EU regeneration funds tend to kick in after it’s too late. It’s better television and it’s better politics; but on the whole in human affairs the point when rescue is required lies beyond the tipping point of no return. We should be readier to give up on people and places, and readier to channel effort into the very places and people that — having yet to tip — don’t yet scream for help.
I love the Isles of Scilly. So much wilder that you’d think — a scatter of green and grey and granite, and yellow grass strewn out into the Atlantic — the islands in autumn are a prime site for birder-watchers: those of us fascinated by the migratory patterns of genial middle-aged men in dull dun colours carrying binoculars.
On Tuesday I spotted a female of the species, very rare, resting on a rock. I also spent a happy quarter hour studying at very close quarters a sparrow: plentiful on the isles. Dowdy? Until you look properly, you will not know the beauty of a sparrow’s wings: a warm, subtle symphony of tawny browns, fawns, rust and black edging.
A sparrow sat on Harold Wilson’s grave where I’d walked, overlooking the bay by the lonely, small 1660s stone church at Old Town on St Mary’s. The late Lord Wilson of Rievaulx loved, lived on and, while Prime Minister, regularly visited the islands. His pale granite gravestone is a humble affair, uncelebrated, unsignposted. I liked him more because of it.
There’s something powerful about a hard, grey, English October mist: neither ambiguous nor blurred but definitive, in its way, of mood and season. For two evenings in a row after sunset I waded into the hazy Atlantic and swam in the flat, grey, seaweedy sea. Freezing, bracing, unforgettable.
I dispatch this diary flying east towards Paddington, over a super lunch in a comfortable (and busy) dining car: one of the last. Isn’t there something topsy-turvy about a Britain where a newspaper columnist can cheerfully celebrate the maintenance of these genial traditions, while a Chancellor of the Exchequer would be wiser to cower over a stale sandwich in standard class?
