Orient Express, from the Gare de Lyon. The Direct Orient finally ceased to run in May 1977, by which time it was infested with malviventi who drugged and robbed the passengers and subjected them to even worse indignities, which was the end of it.
In order to join the Simplon-Orient, or the Direct Orient, from London, you took the boat train from Victoria to Dover. A more chic way was to board the Golden Arrow All-Pullman train at Victoria and the equally luxe Flèche d’Or on the other side of the Channel. This just gave time for anyone of an adventurous disposition to take a taxi from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, stopping off at the Ritz Bar in rue Cambon on the way. Otherwise you could stay on the train and be trundled round Paris with your luggage, as Wanda had been, on the Ceinture to the Gare de Lyon. The scenes on the platform of the Gare de Lyon, for anyone interested in such trivia, and most people are, were in their way memorable. In those now far-off days the travelling rich could actually be seen travelling: on trains, transatlantic liners, even in aeroplanes – how they contrive to move about now is a mystery – and at the Gare de Lyon the platform was crowded with conspicuous consumers. Very few of these conspicuous consumers on the Simplon or the Direct Orient held sleeping-car tickets for the through carriage to Istanbul by way of Bulgaria. The majority boarded cars bound for Milan, Rome, Naples, Venice, Thessalonica or Athens, which could be detached from whichever of these two expresses they were part of along the line and, if necessary, attached to other expresses on other lines.
Wearing heavy overcoats (let no one tell you that it isn’t cold in Istanbul in winter), armed with passports stamped with hard-to-get Yugoslav and Bulgarian transit visas, without which the journey could not be made, we walked up the platform at the Gare de Lyon past the big blue sleeping cars with the bronze ciphers of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grand Express Européens embossed on their sides until we reached a voiture-lits with the magic words PARIS – LAUSANNE – MILAN – VENEZIA – BEOGRAD – SOFIA – ISTANBUL displayed on it in black letters on a white ground.
There, with the words of the wagons-lits conducteur ringing in their ears, ‘En voiture, s’il vous plaît, Madame, M’sieur!’, we set our feet on the portable mounting block which he had placed there for the convenience of his passengers and hoisted ourselves up the two tall steps to the interior.
Once inside the wagon, having distributed largesse to the porters who had unceremoniously shoved our heavy leather luggage through an open window, and to the conducteur in anticipation of further rewards, we were able to take a brief look at the compartment that was to be our home for at least the next 48 hours and 3,041 kilometres.
We admired the wealth of inlaid mahogany, the shining brass-work, the glittering mirrors, the water carafes, heavy enough to lay out the most thick-skulled train robber, the white linen drugget on the floor, the spotless bed linen and towels which would become progressively less so as the journey unfolded, the little hook on the bulkhead beside one’s bunk to hold a man’s pocket watch in a world in which almost everyone now possessed a wrist watch. We were also pleased at the thought, although we did not actually inspect it, of the chamber pot hidden away like a bomb in its special receptacle which when sufficiently filled enabled it to be up-ended and its contents deposited on the permanent way below, which was less hazardous than attempting to throw it out of the window in the Simplon Tunnel.
Then after whoever was driving the thing had caused it to give its habitual, shattering premonitory lurch in anticipation of the actual departure, we were off.
Because we were hungry we set off immediately for the dining car, in anticipation of the announcement of the premier service, as the train clonked out through the 12ème arrondissement, past the Entrepôts de Bercy, the great warehouses on the left bank of the Seine – now no more, as no more as the Simplon-Orient Express. The cutlery and the glasses tinkled on the snowy tablecloths, which even before the train left the station had begun to be speckled with tiny flecks of soot from the coal-burning engine.
And while we drank our aperitifs we studied the interesting menu which had the name of the chef de brigade and his team inscribed on it, while the train, gathering speed now, passed through Maisons Alfort and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, where Balzac’s widow once resided, places we would be unlikely to visit then or ever.
Then to bed with a little violet light burning high up in the roof of the coupé, as the train roared down the line towards Dijon, only to be woken at some ghastly hour to find it at a standstill, 462 kilometres from Paris, at Vallorbe, a station on the edge of the strange no man’s land between France and Switzerland, with a man plodding past groaning ‘Vallorbe! … Vallorbe!’ Here the train erupted with Swiss guards and customs men, all full of fight, who were content to look at the passports which the conducteurs held for their inspection in neat piles without harassing the wagons-lits passengers, saving their energies for those they would harass in the lower-class carriages.
Breakfast was coffee and fresh croissants – put aboard the train at Lausanne and eaten as it snaked along the shores of Lake Geneva in the grey early morning. Then up the valley of the Rhône, still in dark shadow, to Brig, where the Finsteraarhorn and the Jungfrau loomed over us, and then into the Simplon Tunnel to run 12½ miles under the Lepontine Alps, with the little violet light burning in the coupé. Then, out into the golden winter sunshine of Italy.
On Lake Maggiore the cork and cedar trees and the oleanders rose above the early mist that enshrouded the Borromean Islands.
At Milan there was plenty of time to buy a Corriere and stock up with Chianti, prosciutto di Parma, salame di Felino, black olives and the white bread called pane di pasta dura, for whatever periods of enforced abstinence awaited us in the Balkans.
Here, too, at Milan, a restaurant car was attached, in which you could eat delicious pasta al forno and drink Barbera, while the train drove on through the pianura, the great plain of Northern Italy. Then, some four hours outward-bound from Milan, we rumbled through the hideous environs of Mestre and out along the causeway to the beautiful, dying city in the Lagoon, which there was no time to visit.
After Venice we crossed rivers that in the First World War had literally run with blood – the Piave, the Tagliamento and the Isonzo.
After Trieste there was the Yugoslav Customs with rather smelly officials rooting in our luggage before the train climbed into the great limestone wilderness of the Carso, 1,200 feet above the sea; and from there it ran down through the Javornik Range, the densely wooded Slovenian mountains in which wolves and bears still lived. No more restaurant cars on the Direct-Orient after Trieste until we reached Turkey – we were glad of the food and drink we had bought at Milan Station. The conducteur brewed us tea and coffee. Things were better ordered on the Simplon-Orient – at least there was a Yugoslav dining car as far as Belgrade.
After Ljubljana, the train ran down the valley of the Sava to Belgrade behind a big steam engine that howled as it went, as if to express its feelings about the human condition. From now on it was steam all the way and it was difficult to sleep and everything became grubbier and grubbier. We spent hours talking with the conducteur of our wagon, who was from La Villette, behind the Gare de l’Est, and could by now have done with a shave.
He told us stories about such eminences grises as Gulbenkian père and Zaharoff, the armaments king, both of whom commuted on these trains; tales of the express being snowed up and attacked by bandits in Thrace; and girls being put on, and later taken off, the train. It was very cold now and he spent much time stoking the coal-burning stove in what was now, after Belgrade, the sole remaining wagon-lit on the train. Whenever the train stopped at a station, it was besieged by country people carrying huge, crumbling paper parcels in lieu of luggage. In the fields we saw men and women clustered around fires, wearing thick waistcoats and tall fur hats.
At Nis, 2,216 kilometres from Paris, the guide book said that there was a tower constructed with Serbian skulls by a Serbian despot in 1808, but it was invisible from the railway, and when we finally contrived to visit it years later, rather disappointing. At Dimitograd Bulgarian Customs officials were more friendly, less prying than the Yugoslavs. Perhaps they were too cold to care. Here, a huge steam locomotive was attached to the train which panted up with