A friend in Norway recently asked me to explain what D.H. Lawrence might have envisaged when he mentioned a tram conductor “swinging round the pole”. No, it was not what all the jolly boys and girls did in “Summer Holiday”, when Cliff Richard and chums took a London bus — the sort with an open platform, divided by a pole, at the back, to Athens, singing as they swung, but the need to swing the pole which collected the electricity from the overhead wire to face the other way when the tram reversed at the terminus. I was, of course, happy to oblige, pointing out on the way that Lawrence had conflated two ideas about tram termini, as he mentioned the tram “sidling round the loop” which, if true, would have obviated the need to swing round the pole, as the loop turned the whole tram. Realising that here was a possible whole new area of interest in Lawrence scholarship, my friend turned to the tram museum in Oslo for confirmation of my interpretation. All confirmed, and the Oslo expert referred to me as a “ferrovial friend”, an appelation I accept with pride.
Incidentally, speaking of ferrovial non-sequiturs, the folk-song, “City of New Orleans”, about the through train from Chicago to New Orleans, talks of “nighttime on the City of New Orleans, changing cars in Memphis Tennessee”. Who or what is changing cars. Not the passengers, surely, this was a through train. Probably adding or subtracting coaches from the consist. But there — a crux!
