My mother’s first grown-up job was at the Arts Council. Every weekday she’d slip on her clogs, poncho and mood ring (or whatever the hell they wore in the 1970s) to board a commuter train that bore her far from the sleepy bucolic Sussex village our family lived in then, to smoky old London.

These were the days of slam-door trains and compartmentalised carriages. Like many commuters, my mother had a preferred compartment, which she shared with her “train buddies” – an unlikely band of prim secretaries, wispy academics and well-fed city gents who scratched and farted behind their newspapers. Despite their disparate natures this was their compartment and they all loyally saved each others’ seats on both outbound and return journeys.

At the time my mother was a young liberal with a head full of ideas and a spirit entirely unbroken by years of office drudgery. She regularly worked long hours, skipping lunch then belting across London to catch the last train back to Sussex. Unsurprisingly, once she’d greeted her train buddies and kicked off her shoes, she was generally asleep before the train left Victoria Station.

One rainy night, on the train home from London, my mother had the oddest dream.

She dreamt she was in total darkness – upright but somehow dangling, with a fresh breeze on her skin and whispering all around her. She couldn’t move much, just hung there limply – for some reason this didn’t frighten her and she began to realise she was in motion.

The darkness ahead of her broke up into lighter patches and soon she found herself emerging from a thick line of trees into an open field under a rain-soaked sky – still hanging in the air, a couple of feet above the dewy grass, quietly becoming soggy with rain.

My mother looked around herself wondering, with that absent, semi-aware dream-sense, about how odd dreams were in general.

Then she heard a noise and fixed her gaze on the other end of the field. Which is when she saw the train.

Her train.

A long dark bar lit with carriages, shuttling from left to right, parallel to the line of trees form which she’d just emerged.

My mother thought something like, How curious. This must be an actual field I see every day from the train and I’ve never consciously realised it.

And with that thought, she started moving forwards at an increasing, impossible speed.

Her hair whipped out behind her and the grass slapped damply against her stockinged toes with a fast, memorable fapp-fapp-fapp noise. The side of the speeding train grew larger and larger in her field of vision, until she was sure she was going to be squished against it – and then she was somehow being delivered gently onto the train – she remembers very clearly landing daintily on the lip of an end-carriage door.

And then she was inside the train – in a corridor outside some compartments.

Some moments later, and then only after some fierce self-pinching, my mother realised three things:

1. She was awake.
2. She was soaking wet.
3. She was shoeless.

Sheepishly she found her usual compartment and sidled into it to find her compartment buddies gaping at her. Where have you been? They demanded. Apparently at some point during the journey, my shoeless, previously deep-asleep mother had disappeared from the snug compartment.

Without any of her six companions noticing.

Nominally my mother puts this all down to sleepwalking into the corridor and leaning out of the window. Once when she was a young teen she awoke, fully dressed in school uniform, outside her school gates at five in the morning.

“But,” she will tell you at any of her dinner parties to this day, “That doesn’t explain the wet grass on my feet.”

I have no idea if that last part is true or not. But I have met two of her erstwhile train buddies who swear up and down to the meat of this story.

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