Alert – ‘As the train started to move I ran alongside smiling and waving… that was the last time I saw my mother’: Presenter Petroc Trelawny revisits his native Cornwall, recalling his love affair with trains and the bittersweet memories they evoke

It is late evening at Paddington Station. The halogen lamps cast a cold, uncompromising light over the concourse.

Pret a Manger and Caffe Nero have closed, their doorways now blockaded by metal shutters. Even Burger King is locked up.

Little in the way of greasy, starchy sustenance is available to the straggle of evening drinkers boarding the 22.48 to Neath, the 22.50 to Worcestershire Parkway, the 23.32 to Bristol Temple Meads.

As each last service departs, the column of glowing orange text that lists its calling points disappears from the information board.

Soon just one express train will remain – the Night Riviera to Penzance. Its rake of dark-green carriages rests at Platform 1, a gentle put-put sound coming from the Pendennis Castle, the locomotive that will power tonight’s journey west.

Petroc Trelawny journeys to coastal Cornwall – a trip down memory lane

Finally, it is time for departure and the doors are slammed shut. The no-shows are on their own now; they’ll have to make their own way to Cornwall.

The train dispatcher, himself eager to get home, blows his shrill whistle.

An introductory jolt, a lurch back, a more confident thrust, and slowly the Night Riviera pulls out of Paddington Station.

St Martin, on the Lizard Peninsula, was not the best place for a train-loving boy to grow up. The nearest station was 15 miles away. The branch line to Helston, our nearest town, had been shut down nearly a decade before I was born in 1971.

I have never seen St Martin in one of those coffee-table books about beautiful Cornwall. The cluster of cottages around the parish green are sturdy rather than pretty; while it is close to both river and sea, there is no beach, cottage-lined waterfront or 18th-century harbour to catch the eye.

Most visitors pass straight through on their way to the more obvious charms of Helford, Manaccan and St Anthony, barely giving a second thought to this community of houses snaking out along either side of the road.

But St Martin is my village. The place of my childhood.

My Cornish-born father Richard spent his life in the Army. One of my brothers was born in West Germany, another in Singapore. After producing four sons, I think my parents probably thought that the family was big enough.

A decade later my mother discovered that she was pregnant again, a ten-year gap that was to leave me in an enviable position – enjoying all the benefits of older siblings and all of that extra love and attention that an only child often receives.

When I arrived, Dad was stationed in Worcester. Soon after, he transferred to the Ministry of Defence in London; my early childhood was spent in the suburbs, living in a red-brick military quarter in West Byfleet in Surrey.

But when I was five he retired from the Royal Signals and brought the family back to Cornwall, moving into the house that had been the home of my late grandparents; the place where he had been born.

After a lifetime of packing and unpacking in married quarters around the world, my mother Jennifer could finally set to work on the garden she had dreamt of.

Her bedside table was crammed with books on the subject, dry-looking guides to hardy perennials and shrubs suitable for Cornish soil. She coaxed elderly rhododendron bushes back to health and created a rockery filled with heathers, cyclamen and gentian.

Aged around eight, Trelawny is pictured in his home village of St Martin, Cornwall

Her proudest achievement was her knot garden, framed by pastel-coloured roses that she trained on wire frames.

Immaculately trimmed box hedges and stone paths marked out the inner and outer borders, the beds within planted with marjoram, thyme, rosemary and camomile.

An arch of yew would provide an entrance, its shape echoing the lintel over the front door.

Meanwhile, a long wooden shed with a tin roof became my playroom. Dad built me a stage at one end, with a plasterboard proscenium arch and a pair of moth-eaten curtains that had once hung in my grandmother’s sitting room.

There were few trains to spot in Cornwall. By the early 1980s, the national railway system seemed gravely ill and the mainline services were infrequent.

I was not particularly interested engine numbers or rolling stock anyway – it was the idea of the journey that excited me.

If any member of my family was making a trip, I would beg to be allowed to call the British Rail inquiry line at Truro Station to clarify train times.

It was a place I dreamt of working. It seemed a heady prospect – sitting, telephone headset on, surrounded by every timetable book and official railway document available, providing essential information to the travelling public.

I was 11 when I made my first unaccompanied railway journey – the ten-minute ride between Falmouth and Penryn, springing the plan on my parents at the end of a morning’s shopping. On the way back to the car the words came tumbling out: ‘There is a train… twenty minutes from now… I could get it to Penryn… you could collect me there.’

Presenter Petroc Trelawny’s parents Richard and Jennifer on their wedding day in 1953

My father was not one for spontaneity and immediately dismissed the idea. ‘Another time,’ he said. ‘We’ll plan it properly and do the whole line to Truro. We can all go.’

That was the last thing I wanted. I saw myself as a solo traveller, an adventurer – not an accompanied minor. Then Mum smiled at me and turned to him. ‘Come on, why not?’ she said. ‘It will only hold us up a little.’ Dad shrugged his shoulders. My heart started beating faster. The journey was going to happen. The train was already waiting under the barrel canopy of Falmouth Docks Station. A Class 118 Diesel Multiple Unit, then the workhorse of branch-line Cornwall.

Three carriages, with doors between every set of seats that slammed shut, making a sound as evocative of railway history as a stationmaster’s whistle.

Once passengers would have gathered under an airy, glazed roof, their catering needs met by refreshment rooms operated by the Falmouth Hotel, the mighty Victorian edifice looking over the town beach. Now there was not even a solitary member of staff to sell me a half-single to Penryn.

Mum stayed in the car. After checking the train was running, Dad too left me alone.

‘Don’t forget where to get off!’ he shouted, planting a tiny seed of anxiety in the back of my mind. The last door slammed shut, and we departed, rolling slowly past overgrown sidings that once ran right up to ships moored in the docks. Not long afterwards, we crossed the 11 spans of the Collegewood Viaduct.

I don’t think I appreciated what an engineering feat the viaduct was – I was getting anxious about missing my stop and being conveyed on to Truro where inconceivable uncertainties might present themselves. Relief swept through me as we slowed for Penryn and I saw my mother walking down the platform, ready to help me with the fiddly lock on the carriage door.

 Exciting though the Falmouth branch-line was, it was the idea of the night train that thrilled me most – an express pressing ever onwards through the small hours, passengers at rest while the lamp on the locomotive lit up a seemingly infinite ribbon of cold steel track. And remarkably, Cornwall had its own sleeper service.

Occasionally my father would use it if he had cause to visit the capital. As he set off, I’d whisper my request that he bring me souvenirs of the trip.

The small cake of medicated soap issued to passengers would become an object of minor veneration, never actually used to wash, as that would destroy the double arrows of the British Rail logo stamped into the surface of the bar.

A branded bottle of water was equally treasured, so too the disposable shoe-shine cloth. This piece of flimsy, waxy paper had added value, as beside the logo were the words ‘Inter-City Sleeper’, printed in BR’s distinctive Rail Alphabet typeface.

The Helston, Britain’s most southerly railway. It runs on about a mile of the original line

Dad used the sleeper for the last time on a Sunday night in 1983, returning from Paddington to tell me the news that my mother had died the day before.

A booking mix-up meant that he had to share his berth with a jolly younger man, who kept joking and chatting until the early hours. Not wanting to face an awkward situation, my father refrained from telling him our terrible news.

The next morning at Helston School, the metalwork class had just started when I was called out, and told to report to the headmaster’s office, where I found my father waiting.

I’d last seen my mother three weeks earlier at Camborne Station, where we had put her on the sleeper that took her to London and the Army hospital where her breast cancer was being treated.

We held hands as the train started to move. Soon she had to let me go, but I continued to run alongside, waving and smiling.

The service picked up speed and the final carriage overtook me, its red warning light getting fainter and fainter before finally disappearing from view. I was 12. Her funeral was at St Martin Church. Dad was worried I would be upset, and arranged that after the service I would be whisked away by my sister-in-law Deborah. He thought it best if I was not exposed to the traumatic sight of her burial.

My older brothers carried the coffin, while I was back at home eating cake and drinking orange squash. It meant I was left with no finality – I hadn’t got to visit her in hospital, or had that closure that comes with seeing someone laid to rest.

Though we had a loving relationship, in the years after her death it was sometimes hard to find common ground with my father.

I – an awkward teenager – bottled everything up and Dad was a master at building walls to keep his feelings safely contained.

The one time we did talk was in the car. Every few weeks we would drive somewhere, park up and eat lunch together.

We would visit Bourdeaux’s Bakery at Praze and buy cheese and chutney or ham and egg rolls, with cans of brightly colour fizzy drink and sweet, greasy almond slices to eat after.

One of our favourite places to consume this feast was by a remote old railway bridge, a couple of miles north-west of Helston. Parked hard against the wall, we would sit and chat.

I would talk about my ambitions to explore and travel, to see famous places and witness great events.

Desperate to keep the memory of Mum alive, sometimes I would try to get him to talk about her, how they met, what her passions were, whether she was happy, how she dealt with her cancer.

I would not get very far. He would never actually close the conversation down, but he was adept at steering it quickly into safer, easier waters.

I was happy enough to hear tales from his Army career anyway, exciting vignettes of life lived in the Far East and Europe.

The other subject I never tired of were his stories of railway travel. He could talk of the Berlin Military Express, sleepers in Thailand or Continental boat trains, but what interested me most were his memories of our local branch line.

It felt galling that, had I been only ten years older I could have ridden the train to Helston myself. At least I had Dad’s memories of travelling the line.

The gully under the bridge where we stopped was filled with thick weeds and decades of dumped waste. But once there was a station here – Truthall Halt.

A poster by Great Western Railways from the 1930s promotes travelling by rail to Cornwall

My father died in 2013. A decade on, my niece Clemmie and I park by the same bridge.

The rubble and weeds have gone. A crisp white line runs along the edge of the platform.

Steel tracks glint in the late morning sun.

A Ruston and Hornsby shunting engine ticks over, in front of it a wooden brake van with a hand-painted sign proclaiming its name – Daisy.

Truthall Halt is open once again. It is now a terminus itself, Britain’s most southerly railway station, the end of the line for the 21st century Helston Railway, which runs over a mile or so of the original route.

Whistles blow, a green flag is raised. When the railway is busy they run a compartment carriage drawn by a steam engine, but today – with just five passengers including Clemmie and me – the brake van’s open platform is much more fun.

We disappear into a landscape of green fields, briefly slowing to check there are no cows waiting to be led across the track. Then, with a puff of black diesel exhaust, we build up a steady speed and head on to Prospidnick Halt for steaming pots of tea and homemade flapjacks.

• Adapted from Trelawny’s Cornwall by Petroc Trelawny (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £22). © Petroc Trelawny. To order a copy for £19.80 go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. Promotional price valid until 28/08/2024.