I had been invited up to Birmingham for a wedding. Over the telephone, my Brummie friend told me that she had only been to London once. "I was with a party from the hospital where I work. It was wonderful! We went on the tube, and just shot from here to there in no time! There's nothing like it in Birmingham."
Instead of complaining about the Northern Line, we Londoners ought to feel grateful for the tube, the envy of other cities. Liverpool and Newcastle have local lines of faintly tube-like appearance but they go underground for very short distances, so I don't think they qualify as tubes. A coach service between London and Oxford goes by the name of the Oxford Tube, to give an idea of its speed and comfort.
Thirty years ago, my friend Pearl from Peacehaven came up to London and I showed her the sights. She had to be coaxed on to the escalator, and gave little shrieks of delighted horror as if she were on a funfair rollercoaster. Inside the train, she looked out of the window at blackness in alarm. Like all who gaze through underground windows, she saw not only blackness but her own reflection.
In those days there were two small black fold-up seats at the carriage ends. When you stood up, they snapped back against the wall. In a half-empty carriage, strap-hanging too had its gibbon-like delights. As a boy, I would jump off the top of the moving staircase, afraid that my toes and the rest of me might be sucked into the crack where the stairs vanish. At South Wimbledon, a few years ago, a member of the fire brigade helped me realise a childhood ambition by taking me under the escalator to see where the steps go.
When the escalator first began, my family tells me, many adults were frightened of it. Hence the unmoveable steps that sometimes run parallel to the moving staircase. My aunt, straight from a village in Poland, was struck with terror at the sight of the escalator, and refused point-blank to ascend. Those were chivalrous times, and two London Transport officials heaved her on and held on to her as she screamed, kicked and struggled. I bet they were glad when they reached the top, for she was a large aunt.
Two years ago, I became temporary chaperon of an African visitor to London, George Lekaukau. Tall, strong and stern, George was a Tswana herdsman straight from the Kalahari desert, mistaken everywhere in England for a Masai. He had never left Africa before, so with my aunt in mind, I looked forward to his gasps of wonder at the underground with its magic doors, staircases and machines that first swallowed tickets and then spat them out.
Unfortunately for me, proud George had made up his mind not to be impressed by anything in Britain. He had become disillusioned by London, as it contained no cows. He measured wealth by cattle, and it was easy to see that London, judged by such standards, was one of the most poverty-stricken places on earth. George followed me around the tube copying everything I did with effortless contempt, not a flicker of surprise moving his impassive features. So the Englishmen could make stairs that moved and doors that opened by themselves? It was just the sort of stupid thing he might have expected them to do.
We emerged from the tube at St James's Park, where I thought the sight of a pelican might remind him of his native skies. George gazed at the pelican with the expression of a Red Indian at the stake. That night he was asked how he had enjoyed London. "Ah, we walked for two miles to see a sparrow," he replied stoically.
Now, for those complaints about the Northern Line. My own remedy for boredom and anxiety when stuck in a crowded carriage that has stopped inexplicably between stations is this: I pretend that the Last Trumpet has sounded, but that it could not be heard on the Northern Line. When, after several days, we decide to break out of the carriage and explore, we find a people-less world that only passengers can repopulate. So I look up and down my fellow travellers wondering who will pair off with whom.
Mind you, I do have various complaints against certain Northern Line stations. Whose bright idea was it to rebuild the Angel station and put it inside a gleaming office block? The Angel is not only one of the cheapest items on the Monopoly board, it is also my boyhood tube station, long unchanged since those far-off 1950s. Like many antique tube stations, the Angel had lifts but no escalators until the horrific renovation of 1992. It was also unique in having only one narrow platform, with a track on each side. In the 1950s, this was alarming for mothers with lively children, but by the 1960s the Angel had settled down to its modern role as a meeting place for well-heeled young film and restaurant-goers. Now the narrow strip of platform with an abyss on either side has vanished. Valuable moral lessons have been lost along with this platform, for in northern mythology the path between this world and the next is pictured as just such a narrow bridgeway. "On Brig o' Dread, nae broader than a thread, Every neet and all..." It was only fitting that the Northern Line's own Brig o' Dread should have led to the Angel.
Once, according to a friend of mine, a real angel appeared at a tube station. Jarman, a recently retired line worker, told me this story: "I came here from Jamaica and got a job as a linesman for London Transport. In the 1970s, I worked at Whitechapel tube station. There was a shed out by the line where we could sit and drink tea. At that time, I worked with a man who kept saying 'You weren't born here! You don't belong here! Go home!'"
"You may have heard of men like that. At first he hid my teapot, so I couldn't have my tea. Then when we were in the tea shed, he forbade me to sit on my chair. Eventually, he began beating me. I put up with all this, afraid to lose my job and let my family go hungry. One day the man beat my head real hard. I began to pray to God, and a strange thing happened. As true as I am standing here, I could see the Archangel Gabriel radiant in the hut, and in this vision the angel laid his wings over my head. So when the man beat me, I felt no pain."
"I opened my eyes, the angel had gone, and I could see the man walking out of the hut. My boss and other men had come into the hut and seen the man beat me. The boss came up to me and said, 'I'm going to sack that man.' But I said, 'Don't sack him, because if you do, it will make trouble for all of us Jamaicans here.' So they transferred him, and no one touched me after that. That's the only time I saw the Archangel Gabriel."
Sophisticated Londoners, some of whom never travel by tube, seem to regard the underground as a hellhole. My complaint about the tube is that far from being dirty and smelly, it's too hygienic, constantly being blasted by icy cold winds from the plains of Siberia, by way of the air-conditioning machine. There is an underground underworld, composed of buskers, begging Irish tinker girls with babies and paper cups, purse snatchers who sit near the sliding door and slide their hands around independently of the rest of them, and punk drug addicts who get on at Camden Town. This underworld is monitored by tube officials with video camera screens. I am impressed by the speed with which they reach the scene of an impending crime. Police on the underground are more efficient than they are above ground because they cannot drive cars and have to walk their beat.
It is curious to see the two opposing sides of the former cold war using the underground. Gentle, silver-haired American couples consult guide books and maps, and ask for directions with elaborate politeness. Russians and other east Europeans are newcomers on the underground scene. Tall, shaggy flashing-eyed men and women, quite at home among the Siberian breezes, stride rapidly down steps and along platforms with the air of Vikings invading a city. Although these bogus refugees, part of a great migration westward that can only end in California, look like Norsemen or Mongol horsemen, the only harm I have ever seen them doing is roughly manhandling a chocolate dispensing machine. The underground, which served so gallantly as a shelter during the war, can surely withstand the detritus of the cold war.
The underground goes back a long way; steam-filled tube stations feature in Sherlock Holmes stories. According to John R Day's Story of London's Underground, published by London Transport itself, the Metropolitan Line was the first to open, in 1863. In the early days of the various tube lines, the underground had the function of taking overland train-changing passengers quickly from Paddington to Euston or King's Cross. By the 1920s and 1930s, the tube played an important part in creating a new suburbia, John Betjeman's beloved Metroland. In 1994, several of these suburban stations, mostly on the Piccadilly Line, were declared listed buildings. My idea of picturesque old world tube stations centres, or circles, around the Circle Line in Kensington, where shiny dark red tiles meet cast-iron place names, with pre-London Transport signs built into the walls. But the newest listed stations are all in suburbia, where I spent part of my childhood and feel most at home. I went to look at some, beginning at Sudbury Hill, which I had known as a child. A 1930-ish building, the station must have been completed ten years before I first used it. Whoever lists the buildings must be fond of 1930s style, with lots of brickwork, curved or at sharp right angles, and equally curved blocks of window glass divided into rows of small square panes. I had never really looked at Sudbury Hill before, so I stepped back to take in its fearful symmetry. I am no judge of architecture, but I could scarcely describe Sudbury Hill as sublime. For longterm suburbanites, however, it is loveable because of its familiarity.
Pleased at being asked, the Indian ticket-man told me that the station was indeed of historic interest. "There was a document about it, but someone's taken it," he said. In the spacious, cool hallway I was impressed to see toilets and a small newsagent's shop. Back in the station, a jaunty 12-year-old youth of great swagger and artful dodgerness begged for money, until the Indian ticket-man told him to go away. Singing a reggae song and half-walking, half-dancing to a tune inside his head, the youth sashayed over to a telephone booth and began shouting information about the activities of his gang, or "posse," to the person on the other end, who must have been deaf.
I rode on to Eastcote. At one point, there was a splendid view of Harrow Hill, the church spire rising from the hilltop trees. Church, spire and tube stations have all been immortalised by Betjeman, whose poems I first discovered in Punch as a teenager. Little thought of by Punch readers, his verses were illustrated by EH Shephard, of Winnie the Pooh fame.
Alighting at Eastcote, a station even more heavily wooded than Sudbury Hill, I found the listed building to be yet another example of 1930-ana in a forest glade. Outside, in Eastcote-Pinner, there were many gift shops, as if tourists came from far and wide to buy souvenirs from Eastcote. The Collector's Den, a toy shop for grown-ups, sold toys from the 1940s and 1950s, so that old boys in their 40s and 50s could recognise long-lost trains or zoo animals whose originals they once had cherished until their mothers had thrown away the pieces. Now they could avenge their mothers by buying them again at inflated prices. I bought a metal stag, but by the time I got home, its leg had come off. Luckily, my mother was still on hand to fit it with a wooden leg made out of a matchstick. Modern children show no interest in zoo animals, real or miniature, and never play with train sets.
After a delicious meal at the Knife and Fork restaurant, I boarded yet another train to the last listed station on my list, Rayners Lane. Eastcote and Rayners Lane stations are on the Metropolitan as well as on the Piccadilly Line, and were first opened to the public in 1906. I do not know who Rayner was, but his lane seemed a pleasant place, the shops and wide pavements a shade more grandiose than those of Pinner-cum-Eastcote. Inside the station, a young red-haired man in a corduroy jacket stood with market research forms in hand. "It's a passenger survey," he told me. "I'm really a student of fine art, but I also work for a marketing firm contracted by the underground. Look, I'm supposed to ask passengers how safe they feel, how useful the wall maps are, how easy it is to buy a ticket, what their journey has been like."
Across the road from the station stood an extraordinary example of 1930s architecture, the Grosvenor cinema. I sat on a seat and stared at it, while in the sky above me, an art deco sunset completed the scene. My feelings were a blend of horror and affection. If my grandfather had known about this cinema in the1930s, he would have taken my mother to see it, just as he took her to the zoo, not to see the animals, but to look at the prestigious architecture of the new penguin pool.
Eventually, I crossed the road and entered the cinema, only to flee in panic. For the Grosvenor was a cinema no longer, but the Grosvenor Cine Bar Experience, a rock music pub with a strict dress code. The young customers seemed friendly enough, but no dress code could ever be lax enough to permit my entry, and rock music is the bane of my life.
As night fell, I journeyed home by tube, passing station after listed station. I do not know who lists the buildings, but his listing is catching up with the present so quickly that soon architects will find that their plans get listed before one brick has been placed on another. As a long-standing passenger on the tube, I am in danger of getting listed myself.
What is the future of the tube? The Conservative party had plans to privatise it. Should Labour stick to them? I asked a former guard, who still works for the underground. "It just can't happen. Look what's happened to British Rail. Confusion and delay everywhere. If trains don't follow the timetable, you can complain to the government. But if they're privatised, the businessmen don't care about your complaint."
To get a second opinion, I telephoned a family friend who had once been head signal man at Baker Street. He had worked for the tube for 40 years, and is still called out of retirement for advice on occasion. "Tube? We have no tube," he said dramatically, reminding me of the Kipling character, who announced tragically "And now... we have no Navy."
"You can't call it a tube now, privatisation or no privatisation. When I worked there, each department had dozens of staff, but now you go behind the scenes and it's just one person and a computer. That person is not trained on how to think, only on how to press a button. I was shocked to see how few were employed in safety-no wonder there was a fire.
"In my last days at work, I could see that shallow young university graduates were being brought in as instant supervisors over men who had worked for years and understood the job. The tube high-ups who thought a university degree was better than experience now think a computer is better than a person! Unless things change, I despair of the tube."
As for myself, I am more optimistic about the tube than I am about London. Should London fall to enemy action, earthquake or hurricane, my beloved tube will offer sanctuary once more to its people.
