Soon the Carnforth station clock, beneath which Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard nobly sacrificed love to duty in Brief Encounter, will chime again. And it‘s all down to the locals of this small Lancashire town, explains Chris Arnot THE MOST famous station buffet in the world was closed some time ago. Strictly speaking, it was a railway "refreshment room". No flame-grilled burgers and chocolate-chip muffins here, thank you very much. Bath buns and Spam sandwiches, more likely. Alcohol? Only a drop of three-star brandy might be allowed for medicinal purposes, during licensed hours. Coke? That was what you shovelled into the boiler to keep the place warm. Well, it was February 1945 when they came here to film Brief Encounter, one of the great movie weepies of all time. Unlike Gone With the Wind, Casablanca and Titanic, it was English through and through. It committed to celluloid a long-vanished England of emotional restraint and impeccable manners. Noel Coward wrote the words. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard spoke them through stiff upper lips with strangulated vowels and consonants as clipped as any privet hedge in the Home Counties.
But Brief Encounter wasn't filmed in the Home Counties - not the station location scenes anyway. They were done in Carnforth, north Lancashire, a town of 6,000 souls where the railway was the major employer at the end of the Second World War. The great film director David Lean liked the look of the station. He liked the way those big, steamy expresses thundered through on their way towards Glasgow or London. He liked those gently sloping ramps and the pedestrian subways beneath them. (Plenty of scope for Celia and Trev to kiss in the shadows and run for late trains.) Lean wouldn't like it now. Carnforth was recently voted the Worst Station in Britain. Think of all the possible contenders and you begin to realise just how bad that is Was this really the place that launched a thousand clips? Most of the handsome station buildings were boarded up years ago. Faded iron pillars are encrusted with rust and pigeon droppings. The pedestrian subways are damp and sinister, their stone walls stained with mildew. Dangling fragments of peeling paint shiver in the draught from passing Inter-City 125s powering past on the West Coast main line. They never stop. The only ones that do stop are local trains. Yet this ruined station is the gateway to one of the most scenic rail journeys in England, across Grange-over-Sands to the southern Lakes. So who do we blame for its current lamentable condition? Dr Beeching? Well, he was the one who decided Carnforth had no future. British Rail? It would be a surprise if they spent any more on this station than Celia and Trevor spent on tea and Bath buns in the refreshment room. Railtrack? Give them time. At least they've put aside �550,000 to restore the platforms, the subways and the overhead canopies.
Local campaigners have managed to trump that. With the help of councils, tourist boards and supporters world-wide, they've raised over �900,000 to restore the station buildings to their former glory. "We‘re going to turn the clock back to 1945," says Mike Chorley, chairman (21/9/1999 to 26/9/2002) of the Friends of Carnforth Station. Although still �300,000 short of their ultimate target, he‘s confident that work will be under way before the end of this month. The legendary refreshment room will be rebuilt from scratch. In wood. Just as it was in the film for which it was specially constructed. Tea and Bath buns will be served with Rachmaninov‘s piano concerto filtering through the sound system. The frustrated lovers will be recreated in wax. So tell us, chairman Chorley, is Carnforth going to be a station or a theme park? "If it wasn't for Brief Encounter, all Railtrack would require here would be a shelter on each platform. So we‘re going to make the most of the buildings we have." One will be a restaurant with a war-time menu. Brown Windsor soup, Spam and chips, semolina on one side of the card, black market duck, pheasant and decent wine on the other. All this will be housed in what was the station‘s real, stone-built refreshment room. Elaine Maudesley worked there when she was 19. "We sold buns and sandwiches - not curled-up ones either," she tells me at her spick and span, pebble-dashed semi. She also sold gallons of tea and coffee to a very regular customer called John. "We were married within six months" she recalls. "A bit of a brief encounter, I suppose." Elaine‘s good looks were not lost on the film crew either, and she was persuaded on to the set. "I‘m the woman on the platform in the opening shot," she confides. "Blink and you'll miss me. They had to shoot the scene umpteen times because Stanley Holloway kept coming up from the line and grabbing my leg. He was loads of fun." Trevor Howard was much more aloof, according to another local extra.
Alf Bergus preferred Celia Johnson, and not just because he was then a young man of 21. "She‘d come and talk to us in the cab and give us cigarettes," says Alf, who was a railway fireman at the time, seconded from normal duties to help Provide a realistic background for the film. "David Lean was a stickler for getting it right," he adds. "We must have gone in and out of that station between 100 and 150 times." But there were compensations besides the close proximity of the lovely Miss Johnson. Alf was paid �30 (over seven times his weekly wage) and allowed to dine with the film crew on the kind of "slap-up" meals rarely seen in Carnforth in ration-reduced 1945. "I was a country lad," he says, "and to see something like this was unbelievable." Even more unbelievable is the notion that his local station will once again look like the backdrop for Brief Encounter. And this time it'll be permanent. A little corner of Lancashire will be forever England - a well-mannered, sexually stifled and class-ridden England that seems remote enough to be another country.
Taken from Candis, the second best selling monthly family magazine. Published by Newhall Publications, Candis helps raise over �1.5 million for medical charities each year. For details call Norman Firkins on 0151 632 3232 Turning back the clock, Candis July 2000
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