Peaches and Cream

51 Shapes of Nits: The 33rd shape is the train

One of my first Nits loves was “The Train” – although I got my driver’s license a few days after my 18th birthday and chauffeured many of my friends and my sister around in those days… But after discovering the album “In The Dutch Mountains”, this song from the HAT album sealed my deal of a lifelong kinship with Nits for good. “Once on a cold grey morning” this is one of those first verses of a poem that everyone should know by heart. I always thought that if I said the words “Once on a cold grey morning”, the whole world should reply “I was walking home alone” … Isn’t this the way things ought to be?!

I guess any young person can relate to these lines. They have the aura of youth all around them, the melancholy feeling of youth, the loneliness in a world not yet – or no longer – your own, as if the keyboard, drums, the guitar and Henk’s voice were all staging a charming naivety play of the innocence of youth in the perfect poppy shape of a train on its railroad track. But still, life is there at your feet … waiting just there in front of your feet to be lived one step at the time. There’s timidity, uncertainty, there’s some fear of the grown-up world, but the little train still whistles with the fresh memories of youth, and life and joy are just there for the taking. It could be part of the soundtrack of a Bildungsroman. I must admit that my formative years were very much spent under the auspices of Nits. I was slow to grow up and get acquainted with the world and I think Nits let me prolong my youth just a little longer still. I liked my studies, but I felt that somehow something was lacking and Nits pointed me in the direction of using my imagination and keeping my innocence, looking at the world from my own perspective, which was most certainly influenced by my voracious reading at the time, but maybe even more so by listening to the music of Nits. They offered me an image of who I wanted to be, someone that felt like me. As if they said to me: “It’s ok to keep the child in you alive” even when you like reading Simone De Beauvoir. I mean they were these excellent musicians, taking their art very seriously, but nevertheless they kept this innocently boyish charm. By the way Simone was great too: she was adventurous and wild in her thoughts and in her way of living. She was different, just like Nits were different. They stood out and they helped me become who I am now and they still guide me. I suppose everyone needs those guardians in their life, custodians of the soul.

Isn’t that Nits’ greatest legacy throughout all their musical adventures of ingenuity and beauty, to assure us that keeping a fresh, open and optimistic view on life and world is the nicest way to navigate through the different stages of our life? To not get tainted or corrupted by the ways of the world. This one Nits song holds so much advice for life for the young not only in its lyrics, but in the music too. Is there anything sweeter and wiser in pop music than this trainsong I wonder? It’s all in that simple joyful train whistle that blows its love of freedom all through the song … combined of course with those cold grey morning skies. I was so smitten with that song … for a very long time – I still am … And now when I listen to “The Train” once more it still feels like my “partner in crime” so to speak, as if the song and I know what I have been up to in my life so far. I still feel that I am lacking certain grown-up qualities that I am supposed to have acquired by now, but I know that’s ok. “The Train” and I we are like peas and carrots, we go together like peaches and cream.

But then there came a time when I got to travel quite a lot by train. My husband and I moved to London and I regularly made the trip back home to Brussels on the Eurostar train to see my family and friends. I don’t think there has been a single trip between London and Brussels during this twelve-year period, on which I have not stared at my face in the darkened window of the train and remembered the words of the song: “The windows were like mirrors in this train…” It gave me the courage to travel too, since I have suffered from homesickness during my travels since I was a child.

I must often have looked sad and lonely on one of those big lonesome avenues of London, thinking “Hey what you’re doing with your life?”

And then one enchanted morning walking home alone along New Cavendish Street in the falling rain, I thought to myself … one day I need to write about this band that made “The Train” …

Joke Roelandt, May 2025