I spent the last week back in Devon. On the first day home I was invited along to the birthday celebrations of one of the founding members of the Jamaican Hopscotch Mafia; the fraternity of misdemeanour within which my older brother Party Squid has risen to become a semi-prominent official. I arrived to find the entire brotherhood engaged in a veritable Olympics of back-garden party games played to much intoxicated fervour and competitive bias; sack races, egg and spoon races, arm wrestling, dance-offs, a bowls tournament, Jenga, and a provincial variant of Ring Of Fire so wild in its practices that I took a picture of the rules so I could use them as the defibrillator with which I could resuscitate many a drunken evening up here in the capital. By nine o'clock I was so worse for wear that Party Squid had to take me home; a fact that will undoubtedly be to my detriment should I venture to try and join the JHM's foreign legion via its online application exams.
In fact I was so mentally, emotionally and spiritually eviscerated by this high and potent dose of uncut debauchery that it took me a full three days to recover. I loitered around my parents' new house like a lonely ghost. Ultimately my mother Vino Squid grew so tired of my groaning that she assigned me the unenviable task of sorting through some of our children's books, to make myself useful and muffle my complaining. In the box I found our old Thomas the Tank Engine books, which had evidently spent many a year now in dusty captivity at the back of an old cupboard.
I was instantly hooked.
It took me a further two days to read them all. I drew some interesting conclusions. Essentially the core characters (forget the peripheral and utterly forgettable Bill and Ben, Donald and Douglas etc) are a pool of masculine archetypes whose arguments, misunderstandings, tensions and frictions constitute the sole narrative template for every small story.
As follows:
- Gordon is bossy, arrogant and stubborn. The big swinging dick of the island. Man's man. He considers himself the big fish in a small pond; a tenuous existence (even for a steam engine) which relies on never being successfully undermined. The fact that he is constantly undermined serves to remind him not to take himself so seriously.
- Henry - by contrast - is a raging hypochondriac. Too sensitive a soul. Toughen up, nancy. It's an unforgiving world out there.
- James is a younger, sillier hybrid of both Gordon and Henry. Bit of a prig. The kind of guy who entertains a group but you wouldn't trust one-to-one. Smokes cigarettes but never buys his own. Likes to parade around in Lyle & Scott but would never admit he got it all on sale. Know a few of them.
- Percy's role in life is to mock the others. Should he have holidayed in the area, Freud might have argued that this is a defence mechanism; a means of stifling others' growth by stifling their confidence, but I think Percy is one of those guys who just wants to be accepted. And because he can't do it through any semblance of skill or charm, he has to make jokes only ever at others' expense. As Captain Squid would say, 'rather be naughty than not be noticed.' To be pitied rather than admonished really.
- Thomas is a bit of everything. That's why he's the protagonist. He makes all the mistakes of all the others (albeit to lesser extents) so this is what makes the reader relate to him. You empathise with Thomas, because you are Thomas. He's three-dimensional. For a train.
I lay awake one rainy evening thinking these concepts over, and deciding who was my favourite. The answer though was easy. It was Edward. Reliable, dependable, honest Edward. Never snide or self-aggrandising, never looking for attention, or praise. Just gets on with it. Just satisfied by working hard and doing his best. Some people find these qualities boring; as though it's not fun to be reliable, or entertaining to be a good guy. That really fucking annoys me. In a world of duplicitous misadventure, to be of strong moral fibre is harder than anywhere. Edward isn't boring, he's heroic. He's the sum of Rudyard Kipling's poem If. And the fact that he's old and worn-out, that the other engines laugh at him and don't believe in him, just makes his heroism all the more laudable. The rest of the world can fritter their lives away in meaningless haberdashery, but it is those who work hard and speak the truth who will prevail in the end. I do believe that. The meek, after all, while not necessarily inheriting the earth, will probably get an appropriately decent share of its railways.
I will endeavour, now that I am back in London, to be more like him.
As I stowed the books away after having read them (and not made even the slightest effort to sort them) I realised that Edward was my favourite as a boy. Maybe we never really change, or grow up. Who knows. But it was good to be home.
Your loving friend,
Action Squid
(PS: If you got that the title was from The Flying Kipper, Captain Squid's favourite story, you win both a piece of Devon toffee and the last vestiges of my deepest respect that you didn't already own...)
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