A London music publisher travels by train to a non-existent seaside resort called Benceston, where he kills his hated business partner, and is found guilty of murder. Back at home with his friends, he awaits the appointed hour of his execution in what he thinks is an alternate reality. Andrew Caldecott took to writing fiction late in life, after retiring from the colonial service – he was governor of Hong Kong and then of Ceylon in the 1930s and 1940s. What’s striking about Branch Line to Benceston is not just its uncanny sense of the possibility of living two different lives in two different realities at the same time, but also its contemporary postwar setting of city commuters and Green Belt suburbanisation. Could it be that what’s really terrifying here is not the unreal branch line but the real main line, whose commuters all take the same train every day for the rest of their lives?
