Underground, Overground (34 page)

By way of reply, Mike Ashworth hit me with some of the jargon: ‘The customer-facing ambience is important for pragmatic and operational reasons. If customers enter a thoughtful and well-organised environment, they have the impression of an organisation that knows what it's doing.' ‘So they move quicker?' I suggested. ‘That's it,' he said.

Doubtless the Tube will be ‘beyond capacity' again in thirty years' time. The restored stations should still look handsome, given good maintenance. It would be a shame if there were too many people in the way for the ordinary Tube rider to appreciate them.

In
The Subterranean Railway
Christian Wolmar writes: ‘There is a paradox about the Underground. The miraculous system created by the pioneers is largely disliked and reviled by today's regular users.' He cites overcrowding as one reason for this. The Underground also reminds Londoners of going to work, and whereas the commuting life once generated semi-affectionate satire – think of Tony Hancock in
The Rebel
, taking his seat on his morning train and sighing, ‘Journey number 6,833' – even that has now gone. The novelty has worn off.

But since Londoners are locked into Tube use, they accumulate experiences, and they share those experiences. When I was writing my column, a man called Mr Cross, from east London, wrote to me on the subject of the Tube user's rites of passage, the ‘notches on the Travelcard', as he put it, that signify the seasoned passenger. Mr Cross wrote that he had witnessed a ‘one under'
(a suicide); he had been led along the tracks (with the current switched off) from a train broken down in a tunnel; he had, from sheer high spirits when younger, run down the up escalator; he had left an umbrella on a train.

What Mr Cross had never done was pull the passenger safety alarm until, that is, the week before, and this was the reason for his writing. He had been on a Northern Line train at Camden, due to head south on the City branch. A drunk boarded the train and began abusing passengers. ‘Eventually,' wrote Mr Cross, ‘the drunk recorded his disapproval of the company he was keeping by being comprehensively incontinent on his seat just as the train entered King's Cross station.' Unable to bear the thought of any other passenger taking that seat, Mr Cross pulled the passenger alarm. A station attendant appeared (‘It was like rubbing a lamp'), closely followed by a British Transport Policeman. The drunk was led away; everyone was turned out of the car, and its doors were locked. Mr Cross settled into the car next to the one that had been sealed, only to be joined by another abusive drunk at Angel. This character roared expletives at everyone present, and then used the communicating doors to enter the car that had been sealed at King's Cross. ‘It was with a deep sense of satisfaction', wrote Mr Cross, ‘that I watched him squelch down in the seat recently vacated by his colleague.'

I would add to Mr Cross's Travelcard notches the first time an attractive stranger speaks to you on the Tube. I don't know whether to lament or boast about the fact that this happened to me only a few weeks ago. Her opening gambit (she was drunk, of course) was: ‘You seem to be older than me.'

‘For Valentine's Day,' an editor once instructed me, ‘I want you to write about love on the Underground', but I couldn't dig up much. I read in
Underground News
that on 30 April 1986 at Bank station a woman hit her eighty-year-old husband with a handbag, which sent him tumbling down an escalator. Just
before Christmas in 1989, an Underground labourer who had consumed ten pints of bitter had an unorthodox interaction with a cat on a Tube train. Then he fell into a stupor, and his first remark on being awakened by an appalled fellow passenger was, ‘What cat?' He was later fined £500. For many years the dating agency Dateline placed posters throughout the Underground that showed a man and a woman crossing on adjoining escalators. ‘A hidden glance, a forgotten smile', ran the copy. ‘Have you ever looked and wondered what might have been?' That drove me mad, because if you'd forgotten the smile then you wouldn't wonder what might have happened as a result of it. Even so, when the fashion designer Bella Freud (who launched one of her collections on a Tube train) said, ‘There's a strange tension on the Tube, a moodiness, a sexiness', I think she was right.

You're entitled to carve a notch the first time you see a celebrity on the Underground. My wife saw Tony Blair on a Tube train just before the election of 1996: ‘He was reading about himself in the
Observer
.' I have never seen a senior Conservative on the Tube. I do not read much into this, but they are reputed not to be familiar with public transport. I grew up on the story of the newly installed Conservative Transport minister who was being shown about the Tube by Underground officials. On boarding one train, he says, ‘I'm rather thirsty. Which one's the dining car?' In May 2010 a Mark Redhead wrote to the
Guardian
telling this story, describing it as ‘almost certainly true' and naming Nicholas Ridley (Transport Secretary 1983–6) as the minister in question, but I didn't believe Mr Redhead. I saw Anthony Hopkins asleep on the Piccadilly Line at Russell Square. I've seen Jonathan Miller twice on the Northern Line, and I saw Julian Barnes reading the
TLS
on an escalator at Euston.

Noticing a pigeon boarding a Tube train can also be a punctuation point in one's life. They do this commonly, especially on the cut-and-cover lines. They let the passengers off first, then
hop onto the trains, alighting one or more stops later, and the question is: do they know where they're going? Because pigeons do have highly developed navigational skills. They certainly look as though they know what they're doing, but then they always do; I mean … can a pigeon look confused? In 1995 this question of Tube travelling by pigeons was debated in the letter columns of
New Scientist
until a man from the RSPB authoritatively pronounced, ‘A pigeon's only incentive to step on a train is to look for food.' He meant any food that might be on the train, not at the next stop along the line.

Then there is the first time you are pickpocketed on a Tube train. This has yet to happen to me, but I am regularly warned against pickpockets by more or less deafening announcements. (There is also the more general announcement. ‘This is a message from the British Transport Police. Thieves will lose no opportunity to steal your personal belongings', which reminds me of Peter Cook playing a thick policeman in a sketch, and declaring, ‘We believe this robbery to be the work of thieves.') Pickpocketing accounts for half of all Underground crime, and the leading pickpocket in London, so to speak, is Keith ‘The Thief' Charmley, a stage pickpocket, who used to be a Tube train driver. He told me that, when riding on the Tube, he will often see ‘blokes who look like they're at it. The dipper might be scratching his eyelid to show the stall that he's just eyeballed the mark.' To translate: the dipper is the pickpocket; the stall is his accomplice – a person who might collide with the victim, or ‘mark', distracting him at the crucial moment. Keith worked on the Metropolitan Line and became fascinated by a certain bin at Whitechapel station where local pickpockets used to leave ‘skinned' (empty) wallets. He told me that if you see a man scrunching pieces of paper into a ball, and throwing them on the track – a common sight, he insists – then that might be a pickpocket, destroying the evidence.

There is an overlap between the notches of Mr Cross and the folklore of the Underground that expresses a truth about our relationship with the Underground, namely that it's all right to take an interest in it as long as it's a
morbid
interest.

Was a man with a wooden leg, Bumper Harris, employed to demonstrate that first escalator at Earl's Court in October 1911, the idea – perhaps – being to show that, if he could use an escalator, then how much more easily could a person with the full complement of legs? Of our leading Tube authorities, Jackson and Croome assert it as bald fact, Christian Wolmar describes it as ‘a myth'; Stephen Halliday describes it as ‘a semi-myth'.
Underground News
, the journal of the London Underground Railway Society, believes in Bumper Harris and has asserted that he was an Underground employee who had lost his leg on the job, and that he eventually retired to Gloucestershire, where – a clinching detail, surely – ‘he made violins and cider'.

There is also the ‘secret tunnel' genre. Does a secret passageway link Buckingham Palace to the Victoria Line in order to facilitate the emergency evacuation of the Queen? I once phoned the Palace to ask whether such a tunnel existed. ‘No,' said a woman, who sounded very
like
the Queen, ‘it does not.' ‘Are you sure?' I said, and she put the phone down.(There used to be a not-so-secret tunnel allowing MPs to access the District Line platforms at Westminster station.)

There are the books full of Underground ghost stories. An invisible runner pounds along the platforms at Elephant & Castle; children scream in the basement of what used to be the surface building of Hyde Park Corner, and which became Pizza on the Park. (They continued to scream it was said, even while the Four Seasons and Margheritas were being rolled out.) William Terris, an actor murdered in 1897, manifests in Covent Garden station. The best one I know of was sent to me in a letter a few
years ago. Late one night a Piccadilly Line driver was running his empty train into the depot at Northfields when he heard a knock on his cab's connecting door into the carriage. He turned and opened the door, saw no one there but noticed that all the connecting doors of the carriages were open, as though someone had walked along the length of the train. The driver refused to continue, so another man was brought in to close the doors and take the train into the depot. Shortly after he started the train he heard a knock … and all the doors were open again.

Francis Bacon on the Piccadilly Line. The Tube is a relatively upmarket way to travel, and the rich and famous are frequently to be seen upon it. The author has logged sightings of, amongst others, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Miller, and somebody who might have been Anthony Hopkins. He (the author) once asked a man had written books about the New York Subway whether Woody Allen used the Subway. ‘Of course, he does', came the reply. ‘He's not a schmuck.'

There is a great fascination with the closed-down stations, which are sometimes called ‘ghost stations'. A businessman, the somehow fittingly named Ajit Chambers, has set up the Old London Underground Company to provide ‘tourist adventures' in the abandoned stations and to offer them as venues for parties and corporate events. Mr Chambers believes the appeal of the closed-down stations lies in their ‘ghostliness'. It's an association clinched at the old British Museum station on the Central, which was supposed to be haunted by one or more Ancient Egyptians whose mummified remains were in the British Museum – a ‘farcical suggestion', according to
London's Disused Underground Stations
(2001), by J. E. Connor. Just before the closure of the station in 1933 (when the Central Line platforms at nearby Holborn were opened), a newspaper offered a reward to anyone who would spend a night there, and I do not believe there were any takers.

In the archive of Theobald's Road Library, I once came across a photograph of two Edwardian shops on Kentish Town Road. The first was called Henderson's Hygienic British Bakery, the window advertising Hovis Rusks (‘As supplied to His Majesty The King') and ‘Artistic High Class Wedding Cakes'. The shop next door was ‘H. Ritchie, Beef and Pork Butcher', and there was a notice in the window: ‘These premises have been acquired for the building of the Tube Railway.' In fact, the Tube railway – Yerkes's Hampstead Railway – would do for both shops,
and I wonder: was it worth it? Because the station built on the site was South Kentish Town, which I cycle past half a dozen times a week, and which was opened in 1907 and closed in 1924. You see, it was too close to Kentish Town station. In his short story ‘South Kentish Town' (1951) John Betjeman described the station as being ‘like a comma in the wrong place in a sentence or an uncalled-for remark in the middle of an interesting story'. In his own story a Pooterish chap called Basil Green is so engrossed in the
Evening Standard
that when the doors of his train accidentally open at South Kentish Town he gets off and spends a hairy night on the dark platform. Today retail has reasserted itself, since the Leslie Green surface building houses a Cash Converter (and also the enticing-sounding Omega Massage Parlour). The manager of the Cash Converter told me he doesn't often think about the closed-down station below, except that ‘Sometimes the blokes from the Underground come round. They open a trapdoor in the floor, and they go down and kill all the rats.'