To me, the strange words ‘Marsh Gibbon’ once meant I was nearly home. My heart lifted as we creaked and shuddered into the little station at Marsh Gibbon and Poundon, on the slow and pottering line between Cambridge and Oxford. Usually it was dusk by the time we got there, and I can remember seeing the gas lamps lit and flaring, a pleasing moment for anyone who likes a little melancholy.
But equally remarkable was the lowness of the platform. Had it actually sunk into the marsh after which the desolate little halt was named? I recall a withered, gloomy porter in a peaked cap carefully setting steps by the door, for the few passengers wanting to alight at this mysterious destination. Without him, they would have had to jump. I like to think he may have been the original of Puddleglum, the magnificently pessimistic and steadfast swamp-dwelling Marsh Wiggle in C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair. Lewis often used to travel by the line (he called it the Cantab Crawler). And it is easy to see how he might have got from ‘Marsh Gibbon’ to ‘Marsh Wiggle’.
The porter, as pessimists usually are, was right to be gloomy. By then I’d seen enough railways shut to know that this one was probably doomed as well. And so it was. Harold Wilson closed it in 1967, just after my boarding school days ended, even though Richard Beeching, the hated slayer of railways, had left it off his death list. For a child who loved trains the era was a parade of sadness. The grim notices of closure went up, like printed curses. There were hopeless protests. There was a last run. And then the slick men moved in, swiftly demolishing bridges and selling stretches of track to make sure it never opened again.
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