The Full Text of “On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955”
The Full Text of “On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955”
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“On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955” Introduction
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"On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955," by James Berry, offers a thoughtful yet tongue-in-cheek memory of a white woman's well-meaning, bumbling attempt to bridge a racial divide. The poem's Black speaker describes this stranger interrupting his thoughts on a train to inform him that she is a big supporter of "racial brotherhood," and she then goes on to say all sorts of ironically and unintentionally racist things—for instance, assuming that the Jamaican speaker must be from Africa because he's Black. In spite of all her cluelessness, however, this woman ultimately touches the speaker with her earnest efforts to reach out. Sometimes, the poem suggests, even a small and clumsy attempt at connection can feel moving and meaningful. Berry collected this poem in his 1995 book Hot Earth Cold Earth.
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“On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955” Summary
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The speaker describes a woman on the train startling him by saying hello and "Nice day." The speaker agreed with her that it was, indeed, a nice day.
Then she went on to tell him that she was a Quaker, and that at the last Quaker meeting she attended (a religious service where people sit in silence until they feel inspired to speak), she felt moved to loudly recite a poem advocating for brotherhood between the races.
The speaker thought about that for a second, then asked her, what kind of poem it was that struck her in such a way. The woman replied that the poem had been spontaneously inspired in that moment. The speaker again took a second to reflect on that.
For no reason he could explain, the speaker had a vision of dim, empty city streets at dawn, juxtaposed with an image of his father's banana field at night.
The woman went on, asking the speaker where he was from. He told her he was from Jamaica. She asked him which part of Africa Jamaica was in. The speaker replied that it was in the same spot where Ireland touched the Arctic Circle. The woman said she didn't understand why the speaker would have moved away from such a warm place. The speaker replied that snow falls in other places. He found himself touched by just how beautifully earnest this woman was. Meanwhile, other people sat down around them.
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“On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955” Themes
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Immigration and Racism
"On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955" comically explores some of the trials of life as an immigrant in 1950s Britain. In this poem, the Black speaker gets accosted on the train by a well-meaning but clumsy white woman who wants to tell him that she's all for "racial brotherhood." Her efforts only ironically reveal the many parochial and racist attitudes she still holds. Life as an immigrant, this poem suggests, often means colliding with a lot of ignorance and cluelessness—even from the most well-meaning natives of one's adopted country.
Right from the beginning, the woman's efforts to connect with the speaker ironically demonstrate just how little she knows about the world beyond the UK and how deeply steeped she is in racist attitudes. "Startling" the speaker with an out-of-the-blue greeting, she abruptly tells him that she had a revelation in a Quaker meeting (a religious service whose participants sit in silence until they feel motivated to share a divinely inspired message): she felt moved to "speak a poem loudly / for racial brotherhood." While her intentions are good, her choice to suddenly introduce this topic to a stranger on the train simply because he's Black suggests that she isn't all the way to seeing him as a person: she seems to feel he's more a convenient representative for all immigrants of color, a figurehead on whom she can try out her new ideas.
The lady's embarrassing unintentional racism only deepens as the conversation goes on. When the speaker tells the lady he's from Jamaica, she promptly asks: "What part of Africa is Jamaica?" Besides revealing the lady's ignorance of basic geography, this question makes it clear that this woman assumes all Black people must naturally be African—a ridiculous assumption the speaker pokes fun at when he tells her that Jamaica is in that part of Africa where "Ireland is near Lapland" (naming two far-apart countries with majority white populations).
The speaker is obviously somewhere between annoyed and amused with this clueless lady, remaining quietly "thoughtful" as she speaks, as if biting his tongue to keep from laughing or groaning. But he also ultimately finds himself touched by her sincere (if misguided) efforts to make him feel welcome. For this speaker, even clumsy efforts like this woman's might ultimately be both "sincere" and "beautiful," an attempt to reach across a gap of understanding and make a connection. Nonetheless, the poem captures the frustrations and irritations of life in a new country whose natives don't necessarily know a lot about the outside world.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-10
- Lines 16-19
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Cross-Cultural Curiosity and Connection
The white lady who accosts this poem's Black speaker on a London train in the name of "racial brotherhood" proves herself unintentionally and ironically racist. But her efforts to engage the speaker also reveal a sincere eagerness to make a connection with someone whose life and background has been different from hers. That eagerness matches the speaker's own curiosity about the world and interest in what other lives might be like. The poem suggests that one of the great joys of seeing the world, living in different places, and meeting different people is the chance to reach across cultural gaps, connecting with people whose experiences might seem very distant from one's own.
When the lady on the train breezily jokes that she doesn't understand why the speaker would leave the "sunny country" of his native Jamaica, the speaker explains that "snow falls elsewhere." That answer reveals his foundational attitude toward immigration and travel. Even if your home is a tropical paradise, it might be good to see other parts of the world, to understand what it's like in the snowy parts, and to experience things you wouldn't at home.
It's this attitude that eventually allows him to find the lady "beautiful," not just rude, silly, and unintentionally racist. Even as she makes mistakes, she also makes a "sincere" effort to reach out to him and learn something about him—an effort that puts her in a position to one day learn a little more about the world than she knows now.
The speaker embodies that idea in a daydreamy vision of two different scenes lined up next to each other: "empty city streets" sit next to his "father's big banana field" in his native Jamaica. This juxtaposition vividly depicts what's going on between the speaker and this lady: their very different worlds are coming into contact. And while the speaker has now immigrated to the lady's world of "city streets," she's never had the reciprocal experience of seeing the world he grew up in. Her efforts to talk to the speaker, imperfect as they are, might eventually help her to truly understand worlds different from the one she knows.
This gently funny poem thus ends on an optimistic note. As "people [sit] down around" the speaker and the lady, there's a sense that the world might be full of potential connections and discoveries: with curiosity and patience, people can connect to each other across all sorts of differences.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 11-24
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955”
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Lines 1-6
Hello, she said, ...
... for racial brotherhood.This poem introduces its two main characters through a short, surprising, comical passage of dialogue. The title has already set the scene. Readers know we’re “On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria” in 1955—that is, on a train carrying people from London’s southern suburbs to the middle of town.
As the poem begins, a woman on the train—evidently a stranger—“startle[s]” the speaker with an out-of-the-blue greeting. At first, it seems as if she’s just wants to share some standard polite pleasantries: the pair of them agree that it’s a nice day.
Then, abruptly, the woman raises the stakes. She tells the speaker that she’s a Quaker, a member of a pacifistic religious group that believes God speaks through all people. Quakers worship by sitting together in silence and waiting for inspiration, only speaking if and when they feel God has moved them to do so. This lady describes one such moment of inspiration to the bemused speaker:
I am a Quaker she said and Sunday
I was moved in silence
to speak a poem loudly
for racial brotherhood.Through this dialogue, Berry shows readers something about these characters without needing to describe them directly. The Quaker lady is, almost certainly, white; the speaker is a person of color. And the Quaker lady has decided to act on her Sunday’s insights about “racial brotherhood” by befriending the first non-white person she sees on the train.
Already, then, there’s some comical irony in this scene. Readers might share a little inward groan with the speaker as this lady accosts him: her divine inspiration clearly hasn’t suggested to her that picking some poor hapless stranger and telling him all about her new thoughts on race might not be the best way to go about cultivating “brotherhood,” seeing as how it involves treating him as a generic representative for everybody who isn’t white.
Her description of her inspiration is also just the tiniest bit ludicrous. Perhaps, readers might imagine, she is the sort of person who’s often moved to “speak loudly” (and startlingly) out of “silence,” whether during a Quaker meeting or on the commuter train. Even the shape of her lines, with their slow-paced, stately enjambments (“I was moved in silence / to speak a poem loudly / on racial brotherhood”) suggest that she takes herself rather seriously. This isn’t the most self-aware person in the world.
Nonetheless, this poem itself will become a kind of “poem […] on racial brotherhood,” albeit a tongue-in-cheek one. Even as the woman clumsily stumbles into ironic racism, the speaker will begin to find himself a little tickled—and then touched—by her earnest efforts to reach out.
Berry writes this poem in free verse, without a rhyme scheme, regular stanza form, or meter. That choice helps the poem to feel informal, matching the tone of this brief encounter on a suburban train.
Here at the poem’s outset, the reader might want to think for a moment about the poem’s setting: a London train in 1955. That date sets the poem not long after what’s known as the Windrush generation began to arrive in the UK in 1948:
- After World War II, the UK government, hoping to attract more people to a war-depleted workforce, declared that members of Commonwealth countries (that is, people from the former colonies of the UK) could move to the UK and become citizens.
- Many people took them up on that, seeking higher education and good jobs. James Berry himself was a member of that generation (which was named for the ship the Windrush, which carried many immigrants from the Caribbean to the UK).
- If this poem is taking place in 1955, then, it’s happening at a time when the UK was experiencing an immigration boom—and when new immigrants were facing a lot of xenophobic suspicion from many UK natives. The train lady’s thoughts on “racial brotherhood” might have been fed by tales of segregation and racism in the news.
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Lines 7-10
I was thoughtful, ...
... was again thoughtful. -
Lines 11-15
Inexplicably I saw ...
... big banana field. -
Lines 16-22
Where are you ...
... elsewhere I said. -
Lines 23-24
So sincere she ...
... down around us.
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“On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955” Symbols
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The City Streets and the Banana Field
The "empty city streets" that the speaker envisions as he speaks to the lady on the train symbolize that lady herself, capturing her attitude toward the world.
By associating the lady with "empty city streets lit dimly," the speaker makes the point that she's an urban person, a Londoner who maybe hasn't traveled too far outside the city. He might also hint that she's just the tiniest bit "dim"!
More charitably, the image of the city "lit dimly" at dawn might suggest that this lady is experiencing the dawning of a new kind of understanding. While she's still pretty parochial and unintentionally racist, she is making her first clumsy efforts at connecting with someone whose background is different from hers.
The speaker's "father's big banana field," meanwhile, plays a similar role, working as a symbol of the speaker and his origins in somewhere quite unlike the place he finds himself now. The image of a fertile field growing tropical fruit reminds readers he's rooted in Jamaica, even though he's living and growing somewhere else now. (Unlike the lady on the train, however, he's experienced both urban Britain and rural Jamaica.)
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 11-15: “Inexplicably I saw / empty city streets lit dimly / in a day’s first hours. / Alongside in darkness / was my father’s big banana field.”
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The Train
The train upon which the speaker and the Quaker lady have their conversation ends up working as a subtle symbol for British society. By bringing together a lot of different people and pointing them in the same direction, the train provides a picture of how a vibrant, welcoming British culture might ideally work, allowing people with very different lives and backgrounds to share space and a common sense of purpose.
The speaker deploys this symbolism understatedly: aside from the mention of the train in the poem's title, the characters' immediate surroundings don't enter the poem much. But at the end of the poem, the speaker invites readers to think about how trains work "as people [sit] down around" the speaker and the lady. Just more and more people get on this train to head into central London together, more and more people might get on board the same country together—and perhaps take the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the other people sharing the space with them.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 24: “as people sat down around us.”
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“On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Irony
The white woman’s attitude to the Black speaker creates the poem’s central irony. This well-meaning lady’s very efforts to prove to him that she’s all for “racial brotherhood” reveal her unintentionally parochial and racist attitudes.
The lady’s awkwardness begins when she accosts the speaker on a train. She abruptly tells him that she’s a Quaker, and that in her most recent worship meeting, she found herself “moved in silence / to speak a poem loudly / for racial brotherhood.” It’s just a touch ironic that she here expresses her divine inspiration by choosing some poor stranger on the train to befriend simply because he’s Black. Her attempt to leap the bounds of discrimination is in itself a little indiscriminate and general; it’s asking a lot of the guy next on you on the train to introduce the theme of “racial brotherhood” out of nowhere. (There’s also some broad comedy in the idea that she might be a person who’s not infrequently moved to speak “loudly” out of “silence.”)
The cringey irony of the situation continues as the lady politely asks the speaker what part of Africa his native Jamaica is in. Again, her attempt to be friendly and inviting ends up unintentionally racist (as well as plain old ignorant): her assumption that any Black person must necessarily come from Africa reveals her narrow horizons and limited understanding. (Not knowing where or what Jamaica is just puts the cherry on top.)
The speaker winks at the reader through all this—for instance, as he teases the lady a little, telling her that he’s from that part of Africa where “Ireland is near Lapland,” and as he describes himself becoming “thoughtful” as the lady describes her poem (a tongue-in-cheek turn of phrase that suggests he’s keeping studiously quiet, maybe trying not to laugh or roll his eyes outright). In spite of all the lady’s ironic cluelessness, the speaker ultimately ends up forgiving and even appreciating her, seeing the “beautiful” sincerity beneath her limitations.
Where irony appears in the poem:- Lines 3-6: “I am a Quaker she said and Sunday / I was moved in silence / to speak a poem loudly / for racial brotherhood.”
- Lines 16-21: “Where are you from? she said. / Jamaica I said. / What part of Africa is Jamaica? she said. / Where Ireland is near Lapland I said. / Hard to see why you leave / such sunny country she said.”
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Juxtaposition
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Imagery
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End-Stopped Line
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Alliteration
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"On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Quaker
- Inexplicably
- Lapland
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(Location in poem: Line 3: “I am a Quaker she said”)
A member of a religious movement (originally Christian, now not necessarily) whose adherents believe that God resides in and speaks through all people. Quaker worship meetings involve sitting in silence until a member of the congregation is moved to speak.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955”
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Form
This poem uses an informal shape to capture a casual, chatty conversation. Flexible free verse, with no set meter or rhyme scheme, helps the speaker to naturalistically report his encounter with a friendly, oblivious Quaker who's making her best shot at supporting "racial brotherhood" by pestering a stranger on a train.
Across its five stanzas (which range between two and nine lines long), the poem switches back and forth between dialogue and commentary. The speaker sometimes reports excerpts of his conversation with the woman on the train and sometimes reflects on them, describing (for example) his daydream of the "empty city streets" of London at dawn juxtaposed with his "father's big banana field" back in Jamaica. This form makes the poem feel intimate and immediate. Looking in on the reader's thoughts, the reader gets to share the speaker's amusement and annoyance with this woman moment by moment—and to make their way toward his ultimate sense of her "beautiful" sincerity, too.
The poem's shape thus helps it to feel sweet, wry, and conspiratorial; readers are in on the joke with the speaker.
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Meter
This poem is written in free verse, so it doesn't use a regular meter. Berry uses flexible lines to pace this gently funny exploration of a stranger's well-intended silliness, letting the poem unroll like a real conversation.
Sometimes, the poem captures the back-and-forth between the two strangers like dialogue in a novel, with lines alternating between speakers, as in lines 16-19:
Where are you from? she said.
Jamaica I said.
What part of Africa is Jamaica? she said.
Where Ireland is near Lapland I said.And sometimes, Berry suggests the pace and tone of one person's words through line breaks and punctuation (or the lack thereof), as in lines 3-6:
I am a Quaker she said and Sunday
I was moved in silence
to speak a poem loudly
for racial brotherhood.Line 3 comes all in a rush, perhaps suggesting the woman's nervous energy as she works up to telling this stranger on the train that she's a great advocate of "racial brotherhood." Then, through line breaks, this passage slows right down: it's as if she feels the great importance of the message she has to share and delivers it solemnly, a little bit at a time. The shape of these lines helps to poke gentle fun at this lady's self-important tone, suggesting that she's unwittingly being more than a little clueless and clumsy.
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Rhyme Scheme
There's no rhyme scheme in this free verse poem. Instead, Berry captures this little slice-of-life episode in a naturalistic voice. While occasional touches of alliteration and assonance highlight the verse, giving it a hint of music (as in the speaker's description of his father's "big banana field"), the language here mostly sounds spontaneous and everyday, as if the speaker is recording a real-life conversation.
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“On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955” Speaker
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The speaker seems likely to be a voice for James Berry himself, or at least for someone with something important in common with him: like Berry, the speaker is a Jamaican immigrant living in London in the 1950s. Here, he tells the story of an encounter with a well-meaning, deeply earnest white woman on a London train.
Readers might expect the speaker to be justifiably annoyed with this lady, who abruptly interrupts his thoughts to tell him that she had been inspired in a Quaker meeting to declaim a poem in support of "racial brotherhood," then goes on to ludicrously ask him what part of Africa his native Jamaica is in. But though he gently teases her (telling her that Jamaica near that part of Africa where Ireland touches Lapland—that is, they're two completely different and far-distant places), he ultimately finds himself strangely moved by her "sincere" effort to connect with him.
The speaker's softness towards this lady (alongside a sudden vision of an English city juxtaposed with a Jamaican banana field) suggests that he's having his own thoughts about connecting across cultures. An immigrant to the UK, he's tongue-in-cheek but patient and "thoughtful" about this Englishwoman's sweet, fumbling efforts to make him feel liked and welcome (and to prove to him that she's an ally to Black people in general). She's not doing the best job, and she's more than a little silly, but he gently recognizes that she's trying her best and her heart is in the right place. He himself thus comes across as a kind soul, someone ready to be moved by the "beaut[y]" of sincerity even when it comes clumsily wrapped.
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“On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955” Setting
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This poem's title gives readers a snapshot of its setting: the speaker is on an "afternoon train" from Purley (a neighborhood on the southern outskirts of London) to Victoria (a central station) in 1955. That setting helps to contextualize the awkward, well-intended conversation of the woman who starts chatting with the speaker on the train. In telling him, unprompted, that she recently recited a divinely inspired poem "for racial brotherhood" at a Quaker meeting, she's doing her best to reach out, given the limitations of a time and place when the Civil Rights movement was just starting to kick into gear.
In 1955, segregation still hadn't been banned in the UK. Sharp racial divides meant that people of color and white people often didn't use the same pubs and shops, and many POC suffered employment discrimination at the hands of white employers. In this deeply racist context, the rather ham-fisted but earnest friendliness of the white Quaker woman might seem more "beautiful" than simply embarrassing, as the speaker indeed eventually comes to feel. While this lady is unintentionally and ironically racist in her approach to the speaker—treating him as a sort of representative of Blackness, assuming that he must come from Africa (and cluelessly guessing that his native Jamaica must be somewhere on that continent)—she's at least making an effort.
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Literary and Historical Context of “On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955”
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Literary Context
James Berry (1924-2017) was a Jamaican-British writer. Berry was a world traveler from a young age: he grew up in Jamaica, worked in the U.S. for several years as a teenager during World War II, and at last emigrated to the UK as a young man to pursue his education. Living in London, he became a member of the Caribbean Arts Movement, a collective dedicated to connecting Caribbean artists living in the UK and and spreading the word about their work. Other members of this influential movement included fellow poets Edward Kamau Braithwaite and Andrew Salkey.
This poem wryly explores a moment in the life of a Jamaican immigrant in London—a moment that seems likely to be pretty autobiographical. Berry first published it in his 1995 collection Hot Earth Cold Earth, so in a sense it's a memoir, a look back at the clumsy racial politics of a well-meaning Londoner in 1955, not so many years after Berry emigrated in 1948.
Berry earned many honors for his work: he won the 1981 National Poetry Competition, was awarded a C. Day-Lewis Fellowship, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Alongside his poetry, he was a noted and beloved children's writer.
Historical Context
James Berry was a member of what's known as the Windrush generation, the group of people who emigrated from the Caribbean to the UK in the decades after World War II. (They were so called because many of them arrived on a ship called the Windrush—though Berry himself did not.) The 1948 British Nationality Act granted citizens of the Commonwealth (the countries once colonized by the British Empire) the right to move to the UK, and many took the opportunity, often seeking higher education and wider work opportunities.
Members of the Windrush generation brought the UK an infusion of art, culture, and cuisine. They also faced immediate prejudice from many of their more xenophobic and racist new countrypeople—and bureaucratic difficulties that are still unfolding today. In the Windrush scandal of 2018, it was discovered that, in many cases, the UK government had kept no official record of the Windrush immigrants who were granted UK residency. Where records had been made, many were carelessly discarded. The upshot was that people who had legally lived in the UK for most of their lives would abruptly have their benefits cut off, their right to work revoked, and their ability to use the National Health Service curtailed; some were even unjustly deported. The consequences of this scandal are still unfolding.
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More “On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955” Resources
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External Resources
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A Celebration of Berry — Read Berry's obituary, which honors his many achievements.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a lively reading of the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Learn a little more about Berry's life and work.
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An Interview with Berry — Watch an interview with Berry in which he describes his reasons for loving poetry.
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