On the Way to the Balkans

      One of the problems about travelling round the Mediterranean under your own steam and not as part of a group is the cost of transportation. Luckily, by one of those miracles to which we fortunately are no strangers, we were offered a trip back to Venice, which we had so capriciously abandoned because it was foggy, on the inaugural run of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express.

      The scenes at Victoria before this inaugural train was hauled away by a humdrum British diesel (it had not been possible to use steam engines on any sections of the route because of lack of steam train facilities) were memorable for anyone interested in such trivia, which included us. For the first time for many a day the rich, or those making a stab at being thought to be so, like ourselves, could be seen travelling together and the station was awash with what Veblen described in his Theory of the Leisure Class as ‘conspicuous consumption’.

      It had been suggested that we come dressed in the manner of the thirties and as a result pre-1939 taxis and motor cars of the same period hired from specialist hire firms were rolling up, one of them a mauve Panther which to my untutored eye looked like an overblown Bugatti. These disgorged a merry throng: gentlemen in wing collars and Panama hats, ladies in white felt and pill-box hats, and yards of beads. Liza Minnelli arrived bowler-hatless in non-period black, which suited her. Denise, Lady Kilmarnock, a partner in the firm which was promoting all this, was splendid in a shocking pink turban and was the life and soul of the party. I had a new shirt for the occasion. My wife had a new white beret. Nigel Dempster, gossip columnist of the Daily Mail, also had a new shirt. Calmest of all was Jennifer, society columnist of Harpers and Queen. The best organized of all the recorders of this and succeeding scenes, she had done her homework on her fellow travellers. She had no need to go scurrying around finding out who was who. Meanwhile the Coldstream Guards’ band played away like anything.

      At 11.44 on the dot, having settled into a coach called Zena, used on the Bournemouth Belle from 1929 to 1946, we pulled out to the accompaniment of an enormous fanfare of trumpets. The interior was exquisite, the result of taking the whole thing to pieces and rebuilding it (in Lancashire) and the work of such people as cabinet-makers skilled in marquetry, and upholsterers.

      Soon we were tucking into a delicious collation: watercress soup; salmon with tarragon cream, carrot and fennel; iceberg and mint leaf salad; tomatoes stuffed with mushrooms; and ‘Henley Pudding’, sort of mousse; with the glasses and cutlery, designed in France, which you can buy if you have enough of the necessary, setting up a magic tinkling.

      Meanwhile, we were wondering who among this glittering throng was the Duchess of Westminster, Princess Esra Jah of Hyderabad, Rod Stewart, Sir Peter and Lady Parker (head of British Rail and designated ‘Folkestone only’), the grandson of George Mortimer, inventor of the Pullman Car, and Mrs Wheeler and son, the second people to book for this trip, back in 1978, all of whom were reputed to be on the train. As a result, although I had a pre-1914 Baedeker which would have given us a blow by blow account of the route to Folkestone, there was not much chance to use it or glimpse anything more than an occasional oast-house from the window.

      At 14.00 we left Folkestone (and the Parkers, who had been given a good old grilling by the press as to why Sir Peter’s British Rail trains weren’t like this one) on a Sealink ferry, preserved from the common herd in the Verandah Deck Saloon which was reserved for VSOE passengers, but not protected from the media, who had been totally pre-empted by teams of Japanese television cameramen who had recorded the journey, travelling with the train all the way to Venice on a trial run and also following it with a fleet of helicopters.

      Ninety minutes later, at Boulogne, we had our first sight of the European section of the train, seventeen coaches in the dark blue and gold livery of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits et des Grands Express Européens decorated with bronze cyphers, drawn up on the quay side. There were greetings from the Mayor, or was it the President of the Chamber of Commerce?

      Eleven sleepers, each with sixteen or eighteen compartments, restaurant cars, a bar car with a grand piano in it, staff and baggage cars, had all been restored at Bremen and Slyke near Ostend with what must have been a goodly slice of the £11,000,000 it had cost to get the two trains on the rails. These sleepers were Lx, L denoting luxury, the cars associated in people’s minds with the old Simplon – Orient. They had been everywhere, on the Rome Express, the Berlin – Naples, the Aegean Express and Taurus, the Nord Express to Riga before the war. We were in Wagon-Lit 3525, built at La Rochelle in 1929, decorated by René Prou, master of wagon-lit design, stored at Lourdes during the Second World War, last used on the Simplon – Orient and Rome Expresses between 1949 and 1961. Our luggage, which we hadn’t seen since Victoria, was already in the compartment. At 17.44, to the accompaniment of a band of serenading musicians, the train pulled out for Paris.

      Changing for dinner in Lx 3525 – the decree was that ladies would dress and dinner jackets would be worn – was a feat of acrobatics, like the Marx Brothers in the cabin scene on the Atlantic liner (some of these compartments got smaller during conversion) and I got the bottom fly button of my trousers done up through the top buttonhole.

      Down in the bar car it was like an Arabian night; everyone was dressed to the nines, with feathers and bandeaux. The champagne was flowing from those expensive Indian-club-shaped bottles. There we met an American husband and wife who owned their own parlour and sleeping cars back home in California where they hitched them on to trains and rode out to Kentucky or wherever the spirit moved them.

      Dinner, which cost £20 ($28) a head (lunch and drinks on the train in England were included in the fare), was served while we were in the outskirts of Paris. It was cooked and presented by the chef, Michel Ranvier, late of the three-stars-in-Michelin Troisgros restaurant at Roanne. Memorable was the Foie Gras de Canard Entier Cuit Tout Naturelle, the little lobsters served à Vinaigrette d’Huile d’Olive, and the Jambonnette de Poulette au Vin Jaune et Morilles.

      It took hours, due to one of the gas stoves in a kitchen going wrong, but who cared, we were not going on anywhere afterwards.

      There was a red carpet down at the Gare d’Austerlitz, but no nobs to see us off, the present administrators of the country disapproving of conspicuous consumption and no one else wanting to be associated with the venture.

      Then on through the night with a pianist, Monsieur Dars, at the grand piano in the bar, belting Scott Joplin and such as we roared down the line to Switzerland. The piano was such an impediment to navigation that sometimes I wished we’d brought a chain saw with us.

      At 04.22 we arrived at Vallorbe, 266 miles from Paris, a station in the strange no-man’s-land between France and Switzerland, where as always a man plodded past groaning ‘VALLORBE … VALLORBE’, while another tapped the axles with a hammer, as in Anna Karenina.

      I was asleep when they put the croissants