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What lies beneath?

from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)

Times

March 19, 2004

What lies beneath?

By Stephen Smith

As terror alerts make the rest of us scared to take the Underground, our correspondent describes how he overcame his phobia by walking through the capital's subterranean labrynth at night

DEEP below London, I stumbled through a dark tunnel, trying not to think about the rats eyeing me from the gloom. It was impossible to orient myself in the unvarying brick passage, even though I must have been through it a hundred times before. I was on the Northern Line, but I was making the journey in a way that few commuters would care to experience it: on foot. Thankfully, I was not being led to safety from a broken-down Tube. Nor was this a horror conjured by terror alerts, in which I staggered from a train-wreck after an attack. No: I was pursuing a fascination I had developed with the subterranean city though, ironically enough, this itself had begun in fear.

Long before the threat of terrorism was making most people think twice about taking the Tube, my own aversion was already well developed. After years of living in the country, the Underground made me short of breath with anxiety. Where possible, I avoided it altogether. If there was no way around it, I would attempt the trip only once I was kitted out with a portable juju of smelling salts, battered rosary, a ring that my girlfriend had given me and a phial of tonic made to a fortifying homoeopathic recipe, ie, practically neat alcohol. I suffered from a kind of claustrophobia. It didn’t only apply to being in a confined space such as a compartment on the Underground, but it was there that it made most sense. It was really a city-phobia.

In time, I made the paradoxical discovery that there was a relief to be had from this in the lonelier stretches of the Tube, down where few people went and no mobile phones rang. Marc Augé, a French author who wrote a book about the Paris Métro, said: “Solitude: this would probably be the keyword of the description an impartial observer might be tempted to make of the social phenomenon of the Métro.” As is well known, though, the London Underground often makes solitude impossible. I came to wonder if it wasn’t the press of my fellow travellers that bothered me, more than the subterranean experience itself. Exploring the Tube by footslogging the track seemed a good way of putting this idea to the test.

To enter the Underground at night is to be a witness to the occult habits of the inverted city. In the early hours of the morning, the current is turned off and the Tube network, like a giant octopus uncoiled on a seabed, goes through its intimate routines of preening. Platforms are swept, lifts fixed. Chipped and distressed concrete sleepers are effortfully levered up and swapped for fresh slabs. The night shift is also the time when Tube workers tell tales about their strange, upside-down domain. “Do you know the main thing that we have to get rid of?” asked Mick Murphy, of London Underground, as he led the way along the tracks from London Bridge station to Bank. “Human hair.”

With thousands of people circulating through the network every day, there was hair loss of alopecian proportions, as well as a massive sloughing off of skin. The Tube was a wind tunnel of psoriasis. The other detritus in the tunnels was wallets, said Mick. I was baffled until he explained that it was a by-product of pick-pocketing: thieves snaffled purses and pocketbooks, filleting them and dropping what was left through the windows at the end of the carriages.

Mick and I were on our way to meet a man named Billy. Billy does an extraordinary job: he walks the Northern Line for a living. He’s a patrolman, pacing out the deserted tunnels with his lamp and his walkie-talkie and his large box-spanner. As he makes his solitary rounds, Billy keeps a lookout for cracks in the rails and checks the bolts that hold them on to the sleepers. He was only a conversation away by walkie-talkie, but he was lost to the eye in a maze of tunnels. At last, his lamp winked like a glow-worm in the gloaming. In his Ulster brogue, Billy explained that he had started his shift by getting on the line at Kennington as soon after midnight as it was safe to do so, and it was his intention to reach Old Street before sun-up — or, more pertinently, before the power came back on again.

Billy was an uncompromising ploughman of his own furrow. So, although the hour and the place were congenial to supernatural cogitations, I expected only the shortest of shrifts from him when I asked him who or what might occupy the tunnels at night — other than himself, of course. I was duly surprised when he replied: “I didn’t necessarily see a ghost but I had a very strange experience once.”

It was about ten years ago, he said. He was walking the Jubilee Line in those days. It was 2.30am and he was patrolling between Baker Street and St John’s Wood. He was taking a breather on a stretch of the line that was quite well lit. “I was sitting there, having a drink, and suddenly I felt this wee draught. You know how warm it can get down in these tunnels? Well, it was very surprising to go cold all over like that.” Billy had been staring directly ahead of him, his gaze fixed on the line. There was a powdery ballast between the rails, he said.

“As I was looking, I saw footprints appearing in the ballast. It was going right past me, whatever it was. I was frozen.”

As Billy watched, the ballast continued to be disturbed in the same way, with what appeared to be footprints heading deeper into the tunnel, as if an invisible figure were walking away from him. “After it got about ten metres away from me, it stopped,” said Billy. “The worst part of it was that I had to go in the same direction. I felt incredibly cold, like I was in a freezer. But after I got past those first ten metres, I started to feel OK again.”

Risking ridicule, Billy described what had happened to his fellow patrolman, called Wilson. “I thought Wilson was going to laugh at me. But not a bit of it. He said that at one time, a long time ago, there was a patrolman killed on that stretch of the railway. He was knocked down by a runaway train.” Billy smiled apologetically. “They say that the driver got out at Finchley to go to the loo and never put the brakes on.”

For the most part, the phantoms of the Underground favour its ghostly, disused stations, of which there are now more than 40. The abandoned stop of Aldwych once served the theatres of the Strand. It is said that an old palace of varieties was demolished to make way for the railway. A grande dame who once trod the theatre’s boards was so indignant that she haunts the old station.

Perhaps the most exotic shade inhabits British Museum, a lost halt on the Central Line. The station opened in 1900, but within half a dozen years faced competition a short distance away from Holborn station on the Piccadilly Line. Eventually, Holborn was expanded and Central Line trains no longer called at British Museum, though its tiled walls can still be glimpsed from trains heading west out of Holborn. Before it closed in 1933, there were reports that the station was frequented by the ghost of an Ancient Egyptian, a mummy who had fled from the nearby galleries, and newspapers offered rewards to readers who were brave or foolhardy enough to spend the night on the platform. This legend, one of many arising from the buried city, is echoed in a sarcophagus motif that decorates the walls of Holborn platforms to this day.

For many Londoners it's the future that haunts them now, not the past: the accident of timing that might place them on the wrong train at the wrong time. Some friends of mine have avoided the Tube since the anthrax scare of a couple of years ago, and today others are joining them. It is as if they have caught my former fears just as I have overcome them. Curiously, though the threat is real, the strange solitude of the Tube is not an experience I would now willingly give up.

Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets by Stephen Smith is published by Little, Brown, £17.99.

(posted 7314 days ago)

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