the Tube

I've been thinking quite a lot about the Tube (the London Underground) recently, sparked off by BBC-4's recent 'Tube Night', a whole evening of programmes devoted to it. Although I've never lived in London, it's always been a part of my life. My parents took me there regularly for day trips from when I was quite small, as we didn't live too far away from London. There were school trips as well; I remeber visiting the Tower of London and the Victory. I can't remember when I first went on my own, but I think it was probably in my early teens (it was the 1960s, and you could do that kind of thing then), and I can definitely remember staying in London with a school friend for a few days with some friends of my parents, just after finishing O-Levels, and buying a copy of Sergeant Pepper in Harrods - it had just been released.
Anyway, the Tube's something with which I've always been familiar and I've never felt intimidated or threatened by it; on the contrary, I've always felt a sense of exhilaration every time I get on the escalator and find myself being propelled down into the bowels of the earth. A lady on the BBC programme was taken down to a Tube station for the first time since she was a child. She had been part of the army of Tube-dwellers escaping from German air-raids during the last war so the Tube held very strong memories for her. She gazed around her in wonder, talking about the sense of utter safety and reassurance that overwhelmed her. Her feelings as a child had been so powerful that they had remained with her; they'd been submerged but reactivated after many years by going underground. Her face was a picture, suffused with happiness. I understood - I think it was the fact that I had visited the Tube several times as a child means that the experience is very deeply rooted and intense, as was obviously the case with this lady. Of course, it's also the fact that many people feel a sense of warmth going down there, something about being underground, although I'm sure that many feel the opposite - overcome by claustrophobia.
There's a great blog (it's listed as one of my links) called Going Underground, which chronicles everyday life on the Tube in words and pictures - it's great and I look at it regularly. Truly all human life is there - that's another reason why I love it.
I can't deny there's a thrill in being so far underground - it's another world and people do behave in a particular way. The BBC programme focused on this - the way everyone behaves as if they're in a bubble even while they're in close contact with multitudes. It's fascinating - conversation and interaction simply does not happen.
Another programme on Tube Night was a documentary first broadcast in the 1980s, The Heart of the Angel, a day in the life of the Angel tube station, admittedly one of the worst stations and now unrecognisable as it's been smartly refurbished. The pre-Livingstone Tube was a very different place. The Angel had no escalators and its lifts regularly broke down. The film showed elderly people coming off the tube forced to stagger up the Angel's steep stairs. The staff's sense of grim gallows humour kept them going, but the level of their desperation, cynicism, resignation and endurance was remarkable. I wondered where they are now - most of them probably dead or retired, there's certainly no-one resembling them on tube stations now and I'm sure ticket machines have replaced most of them anyway.

Anyway, I'm off to London next week and shall enjoy my brief trip on the Tube - Paddington to Baker Street, Jubilee Line.