LAST TRAM BEFORE SEPTEMBER
THE ACCRINGTON HERALD
A FINAL SUMMER JOURNEY INSPIRES NEW SONG FROM LANCASHIRE MUSICAL
LAST TRAM BEFORE SEPTEMBER
One ordinary journey through Oswaldtwistle becomes a farewell to the summer of 1939
Nobody thought to remember which tram it was.
There was no reason to.
It rattled along the familiar rails through Oswaldtwistle, stopping where it had always stopped and collecting the same mixture of workers, shoppers, sweethearts and familiar faces.
Someone complained about the weather.
Someone had stayed too long at the pub.
Someone was carrying tomorrow’s bread.
And somewhere amongst them were young people making plans for September.
“Last Tram Before September,” a new song from Gabriel Undici’s Mind The Trams musical project, takes one such unremarkable journey and turns it into something rather more poignant.
Because the passengers don’t yet know what the audience does.
September 1939 is coming.
ALL ABOARD FOR HOME
The song belongs not to one character so much as to the town itself.
For a few minutes we become passengers.
Through the windows pass the streets of Oswaldtwistle: shopfronts closing for the evening, mill chimneys against the fading light, public houses beginning to fill and Lockwood’s Bakery settling into darkness until morning.
Inside, conversations overlap.
There is laughter from the back.
A tired worker closes his eyes.
Two young people sit rather closer together than either would admit.
The conductor calls the next stop.
Life continues.
“SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER”
It is an ordinary phrase.
At the end of August 1939, it would have meant very little.
Friends would see one another again. The ballroom would still be there. Work would begin on Monday morning. Trams would continue to run and young people would continue believing that life stretched endlessly ahead of them.
But history has a habit of changing the meaning of ordinary words.
Within days, Britain would be at war.
And suddenly “See you in September” carries a weight nobody intended when they said it.
THE TRAM AS A MEMORY
Trams have always occupied a special place in Mind The Trams.
They carry characters between Accrington and Oswaldtwistle, towards work, friendship, romance and home.
But in Last Tram Before September, the tram becomes something else.
A little moving room containing a community before it changes.
For the length of one final journey, everyone is still together.
Nobody has received a telegram.
Nobody has packed a kitbag.
Nobody is missing from their usual seat.
Not yet.
THE LAST STOP
There is no great ending to the song.
That would spoil it.
The tram simply reaches its destination.
Passengers stand, straighten coats, collect bags and disappear one by one into familiar streets.
The conductor rings the bell.
The tram moves away.
Tomorrow, everyone assumes, will look much like today.
And perhaps that is what makes Last Tram Before September one of the quietest and most affecting songs in this developing Accrington and Oswaldtwistle musical.
The audience knows something the passengers cannot possibly know.
Some ordinary journeys only become important after you realise they were the last.
THE HERALD VERDICT
★★★★★
“ONE LAST TRAM. ONE LAST SUMMER. A WORLD ABOUT TO CHANGE.”
Warm, nostalgic and quietly devastating — a Lancashire song which finds history not in speeches and battlefields, but in the people simply trying to get home.
FROM THE WORLD OF MIND THE TRAMS
A Lancashire musical of love, friendship, humour, community and the ordinary lives history so easily forgets.
Gabriel Undici — Lancashire author, songwriter and creator of the Mind The Trams musical project.
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