Hurricaneberyl Stories

"Clackety-clack clackety-clack, from Kalamazoo to Timbuctoo, from Timbuctoo and back!" As a young reader, I learned these words by heart from a favourite children's book, 'The Train to Timbuctoo' written in 1951 by Margaret Wise Brown. I daydreamed about the journey between these two strangely-named railway stations, evoked so perfectly by the author's prose and accompanying illustrations. Decades later, I discovered I had been sold a fantasy, it being as improbable to take a train from Kalamazoo (a city in Michigan) to Timbuktu (an ancient city in Mali) as it would to line up at Marrakesh station ticket office behind Graham Nash. Only recently did I learn that Timbuctoo (a different spelling from the Mali one) is in fact the name of: a ghost town in California; a small settlement in New Jersey; and a failed farming community in upstate New York, none of which boast a railway station. Whichever were the book's fantasy locations, I never did manage to travel there ... by train or other means. But it had stimulated dreams of foreign sojourns.