The ferry rose and fell as it lurched drunkenly across a winter sea. We tried to stay on deck: my mother said you got less sick that way. But it was so cold I thought I was going to die. Then, when we went below, my stomach felt as if it were in my head and my insides kept trying to escape from anywhere they could. My breakfast ended up in a brown paper bag (as did my mother's).
I was still very queasy as we climbed into the big French train at Calais. My mother's eyes were glittering oddly in her pale, sea-sickened face. I curled up in the corner of a window seat and slept with her big jumper over me till just before the train drew into Paris. (Miranda Road, page 53)
Does anybody remember what going to Paris was like before Eurostar? ... when it used to take all day to get there and by the time you arrived you really did have the sense of travelling to somewhere exotic and different?
Do you remember that awful, slow train to Dover? ... the endless walk at the port and the struggle of embarkation with your suitcases (and possibly children, too)? ... and that anxious eye on the weather forecast the night before? When the Channel was rough and everyone was being sick into those reinforced paper bags provided for the purpose, it could be unmitigated hell.
And then the train from Calais and being excited by seeing the letters SNCF on the side of the carriages and remembering that old French teacher who taught you it stood for 'Société Nationale des Chemins de fer', and having to haul yourself and your luggage (and maybe your children) up the steep steps into the high train because the platforms, unlike English ones, were not raised to the level of the train doors.
Stopping at Amiens - looking out for the cathedral in the distance - you might buy 'un sandwich' from one of the vendors on the platform touting for business along the train doors. And, at long last, the arrival in Paris ...
I'm glad it was like that when I was young - but I'm even more glad that we now have Eurostar. True, it doesn't feel as if one is really travelling: a bit like nipping on the train to Birmingham. But, of course, it isn't Birmingham: it's Paris. And I love it as much as I ever did ... though possibly for different reasons from when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty ...
One of the small indications of the changes that have come about during the years covered by the narrative of Miranda Road is the difference in the journey to Paris. By the end of the novel, characters are whizzing back and forth on Eurostar.
Of course, you can still go by ferry, but I'm told the atmosphere on board is nothing like it used to be and, with a husband who is easily sea-sick, I don't propose to find out. Some changes are definitely for the better.
And yet, when it's a beautiful day and the water is calm, I feel a little nostalgic for the ferry and, in Miranda Road, allow Georgina and Eloisa a trip on such a day. (Eloisa is older than in the quotation above.)
Miranda Road, soon after five in the morning. I think it was the first time I'd seen it that early. It was light already, being July, but darker than it might've been because the sky was overcast. As we stood on the front step and did the last minute passports-money-tickets check, it began to rain gently. The air was so fresh and, as I breathed in the morning, my whole body felt alert for adventure.
We caught one of the first tubes of the day. The carriage was very silent. A few people read newspapers with shouting black headlines. Some dozed, heads jerking forward or back every now and then.
By the time we reached Dover, the morning had opened its eyes properly: the weather had cleared to a beautiful summer's day, the sea utterly calm, the sky utterly blue, the sea-gulls, the cliffs and the wake of the boat dazzling white in the sunshine. And beside me, leaning on the ferry's railings, smiling towards France, her hair pulled back by the breeze of the boat's movement, my mother looked beautiful. Grabbing the 'air camera', I lined up the shot and make a loud 'click' sound. She turned, saw what I'd done, and laughed. It was the first time I'd seen her laugh properly in ages. (Miranda Road p.174)
Miranda Road by Heather Reyes, £8.99, e-book, is published by Oxygen Books on 10 May 2014. 'Rich, poetic, painterly, wise and tender' Maggie Gee 'Hugely readable and quietly profound' Beatrice Colin
Louise Lalaurie @LLalaurie 
Oxygen Books @thecitylitcafe 
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