Edmund H. Pryce

Edmund H. Pryce was born within earshot of the line, in a borders village where the trains were the clock the whole parish set itself by. He went into the railway at seventeen, as a booking clerk, and came up the slow way — porter, signalman, relief clerk — until they gave him a junction of his own, a small two-platform station with a branch line that went up into the hills and mostly carried sheep and schoolboys. He kept it for thirty-eight years.

A stationmaster sees a town the way no one else does: at the hours it is going somewhere. The same faces, the same trains, decade on decade — the man always early who read the paper standing up; the woman who ran every morning and caught it by a yard; the traveller who treated the down platform as his office. Pryce came to believe a life could be read off the timetable more honestly than off any other record, and that the gap between a free man and an owned one had almost nothing to do with money and almost everything to do with how much of his own time he kept.

He found a thin book on the matter — Arnold Bennett's, left behind in the waiting room by someone who plainly never finished it — and read it between trains, quietly annoyed for years after at how right it was and how few people lived as if it were true. He is retired now, keeps a garden that runs to no timetable at all, and writes. He is not interested in saving you time. He is interested in whose time it is.