The Kingdom By the Sea
“The Boat Train to Ulster THERE WAS a gloomy irritable air about the passengers on the boat train to Ulster. It was not only that they had been on board for five hours and had three more to go before the ferry. It was worse than tiredness. It was resentment—as if they were being exiled or forced back to school or jailed after a period of freedom. But in fact they were homeward bound.
I had joined the train at Carlisle. I expected to see either drunks or sleepers—it was midafternoon. But the pass...engers sat silently, holding their sallow faces in their hands, and they became gloomier as we progressed through the long Scottish hills of the border—Dumfries and Galloway. They were the sad-faced people in the wind at gray Stranraer.
By then the Scots had got off the train—the men who sat six to a table with a bottle of vodka and twenty cans of Tartan Ale; the families sitting in a nest of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and plastic bags; the poor stinking trampled terriers and their defiant owners; and the children screeching, "How much farva!" and "I can hear funda!" No trains got more befouled than the ones to Scotland, but this boat train was mostly empty by the time it reached Kilmarnock, and so on the last stage of its journey, along the Firth of Clyde, it looked wrecked and abandoned, the beer cans clanking and the bottles rolling on the floor, and an atmosphere of sour mayonnaise and stale cigarette smoke.MoreLess
I had joined the train at Carlisle. I expected to see either drunks or sleepers—it was midafternoon. But the pass...engers sat silently, holding their sallow faces in their hands, and they became gloomier as we progressed through the long Scottish hills of the border—Dumfries and Galloway. They were the sad-faced people in the wind at gray Stranraer.
By then the Scots had got off the train—the men who sat six to a table with a bottle of vodka and twenty cans of Tartan Ale; the families sitting in a nest of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and plastic bags; the poor stinking trampled terriers and their defiant owners; and the children screeching, "How much farva!" and "I can hear funda!" No trains got more befouled than the ones to Scotland, but this boat train was mostly empty by the time it reached Kilmarnock, and so on the last stage of its journey, along the Firth of Clyde, it looked wrecked and abandoned, the beer cans clanking and the bottles rolling on the floor, and an atmosphere of sour mayonnaise and stale cigarette smoke.MoreLess
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