Eurostar and its terminus at St Pancras in London exemplify a communautaire spirit that now seems to belong to yesterday. The bilingual service generated its own entente cordiale. It helped make London “France’s sixth city”. Because of Eurostar, I can navigate the streets of Paris, having discovered that most of the places I want to stay are walkable from Gare du Nord.
I have had Eurostar adventures, of an interestingly cosmopolitan nature. In February 1996, I was on the train that got stuck in the tunnel for an entire day, snow having infiltrated the engine. After five hours, they were giving out free wine in the buffet, which was illuminated by someone’s torch, the train’s lights having packed up. I was drinking with an Irish poet (self-declared) and a German engineer, who scorned my anxiety about the air quality, but said he was “interested to see” whether the train would eventually collapse through the bottom of the tunnel.
Despite its well publicised technical glitches Eurostar has 80% of the market between London and Paris and London and Brussels. This is particularly gratifying when you think how much more environmentally friendly it is than an aeroplane; and how much quieter and more beautiful. The new carriages are the same colour – blue and gold – as the sumptuous expresses operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, which was based in Paris, and whose trains, often starting at Calais, did such a good job of luring the British into Europe. This is why the Express d’Orient became the Orient Express in 1891, and why the principal breakfast option on the Blue Train, from Paris to the Riviera, was bacon and eggs.
There has been a persistent strain of Francophilia in British railway enthusiasm. You can see it as early as 1866, in Charles Dickens’s short story, The Boy at Mugby, a comparison of British and French railway catering: a matter of stale sponge cakes and “sawdust sandwiches” (as the Boy brazenly has it) against “roast fowls … a luscious show of fruit … decanters of sound small wine … ” It’s there in Railway Wonders of the World Magazine, which in 1935 compared the British Golden Arrow (London to Dover) with La Flèche d’Or (Calais to Paris): “… regretfully, we have to concede to our French friends the palm in the matter of speed”.
And it’s present in David Hare’s 2003 play, The Permanent Way, in which one character says: “Why can the French do it? I was brought up to believe the French can’t do anything. But they can run a railway.”
For my father, who worked on British Rail, France represented the socialistic railway ideal: not just a state-owned railway (we used to have that) but a properly planned and subsidised one. In the 1970s, when my dad voted to join the EEC and then to remain in it, we often travelled to France with the British Railwaymen’s Touring Club. We were on the Paris metro one day, and Dad said: “Look how there’s one exit if you want to leave the station, and one other option called Correspondence, which leads to all the other lines you might want to change to.” He thought that was typically French in its elegance, and his was a more practically minded Europeanism than the one that gripped certain dandified British writers of the interwar period, in reaction against the stuffiness of the Edwardian society of their childhoods. People like Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, Auden, Isherwood and Spender seemed to be on a permanent inter-rail holiday, and were classified by Martin Green as among Children of the Sun, in his book of that name, which I read when it was published in 1976. (It led me to believe that the natural culmination of a writing life was a large villa in France or Italy, which turns out not to be true.)
My father was a big fan of Eurostar, which dragged its own high-speed line in its wake. When the service first started in 1994, the train – essentially a French Train Grand Vitesse – had to lumber at “classic” (slow) speed from Folkestone to London. The embarrassment was intolerable, but Margaret Thatcher decreed that our high-speed line must be built with private money. She made the same stipulation about the Jubilee Line extension, and it was fantastical in both cases.
By the time High Speed 1 was completed in 2007 (having been bailed out by a government-backed bond issue) it had brought other French-style “Grand Projets” in its wake, including the regeneration of much of the Thames estuary and the railway lands of King’s Cross, and the internationalisation of St Pancras, which was chosen as the terminus partly for the very French reason that it was the most beautiful available station. Amid the excitement of “job done”, Britain was up for more dirigisme, and both Conservative and Labour committed themselves to building High Speed 2. But we are not in the mood for any further French lessons. The glamour of French railways has faded of late. Local trains and sleeper services have been cut back to fund the high-speed ones, which may now have reached the limit of their expansion in both France and Germany. In Britain, enthusiasm for HS2 is waning, but the irony is that it will probably go ahead to generate a stimulus necessitated by Brexit.
And now, in light of Eurostar’s announcement that it will be making cutbacks to its Paris and Brussels services from December, the trains at St Pancras International, quarantined behind the glass screens that prevent direct access to the platforms (because we have never joined the Schengen zone), seem to have taken on a lonely and beleaguered look. A press officer, reacting to the loss of 80 jobs, conceded that the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels were “a factor in what is a challenging era for the whole of the travel industry”, and it does occur to me that a notice flashing up every few minutes in the booking office might be rephrased. It’s a warning against collecting unexploded ordnance from first world war sites, but all you see from a distance is “Are you visiting the battlefields?”
The same press officer said Brexit is “another factor being considered”, but Nicolas Petrovic, the chief executive, was more forthcoming, volunteering “uncertainty following the vote to leave” as a cause of reduced demand in the second quarter of 2016.
On first reading the news of the cutbacks, I entertained doomy scenarios: St Pancras reverting to its pre-Eurostar shabbiness, with only one ticket window open, the station announcer apparently talking to herself; the Midland Grand hotel, once again, falling into ruin. Perhaps Eurostar will dwindle to a kind of cult: one increasingly battered train a day, a lifeline for a new generation of Children of the Sun, disgusted at their betrayal by their elders. I hope this is unnecessarily pessimistic.
Services to Amsterdam will start from late next year, perhaps the mooted services to Germany will follow, but today, the Eurostar in its tunnel is less a happy symbol of Britain’s connectedness to the continent; more a canary in a coalmine. It’s a test of Theresa’s May’s promise that leaving the EU does not mean insularity.
