The Man on the Train

As my fourteen year old self sat on a busy train to Belfast, trying not to look anyone in the eye and praying to God that no one would sit beside me an old man got on the train. A very old man. And of course he sat down beside me. I smiled at him and he smiled back before I was absorbed back into my, super cool at the time, blackberry phone. A few minutes past when I could feel him looking over my shoulder.

He asked “what is that?”, and for a moment my young brain could not comprehend the idea that anyone on the planet would not know what a mobile phone was. I smiled and explained that it was a phone and you could go on the internet, take photographs and send text messages to people. He expressed his wonder at this, but what perplexed him most seemed to be the small size of the phone. He began to tell me a story about his life during the war.

He had worked with Morse code machines which, he explained, used to be the size of a desk. Then one day he came in to work and there was this small machine that barely took up any space. He remembered how perplexed he had been then and pondered that really my little phone was the same thing, just in a different time.

As we continued to chat I discovered he was a minister. At this point in my life I considered most devoutly religious people to be over zealous and often intolerant. He told me about talking in a school assembly as a young minister, were he noticed a group of children who had been left alone outside. When he finished the assembly he asked the teachers why those children were separate from the other children. They were Jewish, explained the teacher. He asked if he could speak to those children. At this point I expected him to tell me how he had attempted to convert them, but no. He told me how after assemblies he would talk to the Jewish children about their religion. He went to the dentist a few weeks later to have some dental work done and the dentist didn’t charge him. When he inquired why, the dentist explained that those little Jewish children were his, and he was so grateful that the minister had chosen to respect their religion and way of life.

We chatted for the whole journey about various things and when I got off the train my heart felt light. And to this day I remember that conversation like it was yesterday. I realised that people have amazing stories to tell if you give them a chance to tell them. What to my young mind was just a frail old man, was a human being with a past.

But what truly stood out to me is that old, man of the cloth spoke to me, a young 14 year old girl on a train, as an equal, with a story to tell.