I wrote my story on a Train

Every day I took a train for the one-hour journey from Gleneagles to Glasgow. It was not an unpleasant journey across the neck of land in the central belt of Scotland. After a few journeys to Glasgow and back I wearied of the unchanging landscape. I took my book out to read a few pages to help fill the journey.

I tried a longer sentence with my “Good Morning”, usually weather we were enjoying or avoiding by wrapping our coats more tightly around us.

It was usually a relief to board my train, only three carriages to commute myself and my fellow story journiers. A relief to escape the windy weather for the comfort of the train carriages The carriages of the train had comfortable seats allowing four people top sit at a table and read our books and newspapers. I usually found myself sitting at one of the tables with my book open in front of me. It was not an enticing book and easy to set down allowing me to stare out of the window,

Many people were not book readers. They would be writing essays on what, I did not know. Some were looking at the sheets of newspapers which was OK, only one or two people who showed an interest in politics or reports of football matches.

I had often thought of writing a family story based on the lives of people and places I read about in my genealogical research. I knew I could describe the reasons for their journey. My family had a few interesting people, and some were drawn from the agricultural life of the farm. Some were destined for the long journey from Scotland to America; the farms being too small to support large families. It seemed an easier way to bring them from being ancestors back to life in my mind. It was fascinatng the life they lived, but it did not seem very interesting if people just loved their lives in a fixed pattern of milking cows in the morning, mowing hay in the summer days, making sure animals were fed and counted to make sure none had been eaten as a nocturnal feast, or maybe some just got bored and wandered away from my story.

I took out a pad of paper and listed the characters in the family and briefly described who they were. I set a fiction to make them interesting. Their yearnings to leave the farm. I introduced confrontations between some. One was interested in politics, another was yearning to teach, another saw his life remaining on the farm and putting up with oppression and hunger as long as they carved their living from the land.

I soon had characters sketched out on a page or two of my writing-pad. It was just a jumble of who they were or their, often conflicting, lives about brave differences to be settled

I then looked at my list of characters and started writing about their lives and their yearnings. I found the train journey into Glasgow and home to Gleneagles would allow me to sketch out my story and cover a couple of pages about each of them.

It took me some time to place them together working for their personal goals. I found that everything was said and I read it through, for grammar and spelling and the fictious lives they were living. It took some time to place them altogether, as I typed them into my laptop computer. A good way to flesh out their characters and their stories.

One advantage of writing into my computer was that I could keep a count of how many words I had written on each page. I found my story to be a bit boring and short. I added little stories on events through which they were living.

The father, David, I made into a loving parent and farmer. I also gave him secret things he fought for. They were never openly discussed but David opposed the oppression of the farmers

In the next train journey the oldest son, Joseph, was political and joined a secret group of like-minded plotters. Joseph was more like his father but more outspoken.

The next train journey was less exciting, but it described the son, Robert. He wanted to be a teacher and was prepared to teach children in clandestine subjects, and he taught in thoughtful ways so they learned how to talk to each other and how differences could be debated and settled.

The next day brought the son, John, who was a bit of a tearaway. He liked to go dancing and meeting up with girls. As he walked his current love home she was killed by a drunken soldier. The murder caused the soldier to lose his job as a soldier. It set the soldier on the trail of John who he intended to kill.

The next day brought out the next son, Alexander, who was like their father and worked on the farm and dreamt of how it could be made more profitable.

On the final day two sons appeared on paper. They were the youngest and they enjoyed playing among the harvested corn in the field.

One of the sons, James, liked the oldest son, Joseph, he wanted to be like him. When Joseph went off with other rebels and fought a battle to try and get the occupying soldiers out of a neighboring town. Unknown to him, James, followed his role model and ended up on the front line of the battle of Antrim and it was there he was killed. Joseph took the body of James back to the farm with a heavy heart, and he told their parents what had happened.

Meanwhile Joseph joined others in upsetting the peace forced on them . A man who lived near them told the authorities of the sedition. As a reward his house was burned down along with his wife and family. David was arrested for his part in the house’s inflamation and hetaken to prison in Derry where the case against him was not successful. He was taken from there to a prison in Dublin where he was incarcerated for a year. The main evidence against him was from a man who recognized him by the light of the moon. When his came up in court a travelling salesman on the jury remembered being out on that night and he recalled it as one of the darkest nights. The court looked up a calendar, and it showed that there was no moon that night. The father was released but made his way home with pneumonia which he had got while in the damp cold prison.

While in prison the potato crop became ready for harvesting and the remaining brothers got ready and began to dig the potatoes. The word got around and into the ears of local paramilitaries. They all turned up on a day, none of them had guns, They just brought along spades with which to dig. They just helped the farmer and his family to dig the entire potato crop in a day. The gathering was peaceful and when the military came out to arrest them, they were not able to do that as no law had been broken. The story finishes with several of the brothers in Pennsylvania on a farm. The soldier who killed John’s sweetheart had followed the youngest boy, William, who set off to find what had happened to his brothers to find out where his family members lived. They had a fight and the malefactor was finally killed.

The story was thus sketched out over several days of commuting and all that was left was reading through the rough stories. I joined them together, smoothed them off and added extra sub stories. I found that the length of the train journey suited the various writing jobs I had in hand. It also kept them to a shorter length so that they could be developed separately. Ever since then I hoped to be held on a suitable length of train journey. I could write my way out of a topic.