The Way We Heard - Killing in the Name

The Way We Heard - Killing in the Name

The London Underground often had Jimmy perplexed. It was something he wasn’t at all prepared for when he moved to England from the small town in Ireland where he grew up, and if truth be told it left his head completely banjaxed whenever he went near it. Unfortunately his personal circumstances dictated that he had to travel on the cursed thing on a regular basis as he lived in Ilford, the place where Essex meets West.

In 1864 the only complete skull of a woolly mammoth ever to be discovered in the United Kingdom was unearthed in Ilford, and during Jimmy’s time there they were still waiting for some more to die. Apart from the occasional armed robbery, little else happened in the town. And because he didn’t like wine bars, the music of Luther Vandross, Ford Capris with fluffy dice, or people who wanted to dislodge his front teeth on account of him speaking English with a peculiar accent, he chose to spend as much of his free time as possible in places somewhere beyond Bethnal Green.

The world’s oldest underground railway opened on January 10, 1863, just in time for people wishing to see the unearthing of the mammoth’s head. Originally it was called the Metropolitan Railway and ran for about six kilometres between Paddington and Farringdon using steam locomotives. If it had stayed that way Jimmy wouldn’t have minded. But then, London being London, it got a bit cocky and opened other lines, including the Central Line in July 1900. In 1908 the network adopted the name London Underground. Many Londoners shortened its name to the Tube. Jimmy always called it the London Métro.

Ilford wasn’t on a tube line and consequently became well known as a sad omission from that iconic map that could be seen in every tube station, train station, bus station, aeroplane station and souvenir shop in London. Among its fellow peripheral communities it was a laughing stock. Residents feeling jealous of subterranean travellers from just down the road in Barking and East Ham would sit in their cars (avoiding eye contact with other people in cars) in underground car parks and pretend. Those who sought to get away from time to time did so at the mercy of British Railways cattle trucks or the number 25 London bus with all its mystical eccentricities, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit flavour floorcovering and blood-stained seats.

To Jimmy’s dismay, much of the underground system ran above ground. But then, London being London, it was immune to the provisions of the 1968 Trade Descriptions Act. He could never understand the need to hop on and hop off so many escalators on a descent into the bowels of the earth only for the tube train to emerge into broad daylight after only two or three minutes of the journey. He always observed the unwritten rule of standing on the righthand side of the moving staircase so that people who were obviously busier and more important than him could dash past. He would have done this anyway as it meant he got a closer look at the passing advertisements for the likes of Rowntree’s Cocoa, AIDS awareness, and West End shows such as Cats, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Cats, and Whistle Down the Cats. For almost a year after seeing a sign at Leicester Square station that said ‘Dogs must be carried on the escalator’ he used the stairs instead because he didn’t own a dog.

The nearest tube station to Ilford was at Gants Hill on the Central Line. Its name alone sent his mind off in a tempest of confusion. Who or what were gants? Was it a typo and did the signwriters really mean gnats or giants? Should there have been an apostrophe and, if so, where? Where was the hill that had been named after the gants? And why was there no gents there?

But at least the platforms at Gants Hill were well and truly underground. Old Frank, the man in the ticket office, once told him that the tracks were fifty-seven feet  below ground and that during the war the station was used as an air raid shelter and the tunnels between it and Redbridge became a temporary munitions factory and as hundreds of people sheltered down there from Hitler’s Fokkers his brother Reg had proposed to a girl called Audrey the night before he was shipped off to Burma to have his leg shot off and they never had children.

Jimmy’s girlfriend was called Julie and also lived on the Central Line. Well not exactly on the line but in house in a street just a ten-minute-walk from Perivale station in the capital’s wild west. Perivale was twenty-nine stops from Gants Hill and the journey between the two always took an hour or more, depending on whether or not it was necessary to change at Ealing Broadway. Scrubbed up and dressed up on a Friday evening, and smelling like a whore’s handbag as Frank would often remark in his broad knees-up-mother-brown accent, the lad would jump on the escalator with a spring in his step whilst singing the Bee Gees hit, ‘How Deep is Your Love?’ The answer to that one, he already knew, was fifty-seven feet.   

To break the monotony as the hot, stuffy train rattled, shook, shuddered and screeched its way through endless tunnels he would read one of the many discarded copies of the Evening Standard, learning all about Leyton Orient’s latest signing and Ken Livingstone’s latest salamander, and getting his hands covered in ink at the same time. Two or three stops before the Lost City of Atlantis he’d been reduced to a dirty sweaty irritable mess. The cassette tape in his Woolworth’s Phoney Walkman would defy the laws of physics to play ‘Straight to Hell’ by the Clash on constant repeat.

Eventually he’d escape the underworld in close proximity to the toxic A40 artery and all the filth that bled from it during the rush hour period. Despite this, resurfacing into the daylight at Perivale came as a breath of fresh air. To overcome his love-versus-suffocation conflict, some Friday nights Jimmy would meet Julie at Waterloo Station just as the sun was setting and they’d have a night out in the bright lights of the city instead of the dim candles stuck in dusty wine bottles of suburbia.

A late-night journey back to Gants Hill was a precarious mission to attempt, especially if strong drink had been taken. Just past Leytonstone the line split off in all sorts of directions so Jimmy had to repeat his mantra ‘Hainault via Newbury Park’ over and over again before setting foot inside a carriage. Finding himself on the last train on any other branch of the line would mean a long walk or an expensive taxi ride to get home. Strangely, thought Jimmy, the producers of the BBC documentary series, Great Railway Journeys of the World never approached him, but that was probably because they could never find their way to Gants Hill on the Central Line. So although getting to Perivale was an ordeal, going there and staying there until sometime after sunrise took a lot of the stress out of a night out.

Another alternative was to catch the British Railways train from Liverpool Street. It was much faster but he had further to walk when he reached Ilford, and there were always gangs of soul boys in their smart slacks and brightly coloured mohair jumpers hanging around outside the station looking for somebody to get a light from or stab or both. The consequences of having a couple too many pints of Guinness in the pub, dozing off in an airless railway carriage and missing his stop were absolutely disastrous on this route. Beyond his targeted station the train would halt two or three more times in the swamplands of the Thames estuary before arriving at Shoeburyness, where he once woke up at half past one on an icy February morning.

The conductor shook him hard to wake him before announcing that he should alight there and ensure that he took all his possessions with him to sleep on a bench on the Siberian windswept platform. He further suggested that Jimmy should catch the 7:15 a.m. train to London Liverpool Street, calling at fuck-knows-where and Ilford. Sleeping on the train in a siding all night was an offence that apparently attracted a hefty fine, though nobody other than the conductor would have known.

Shoeburyness was a town somewhere between the middle of nowhere and Holland and everything, including the station’s café, waiting room and toilets, had closed up at around 10 p.m. the previous September. His only hope of survival was by pacing up and down the platform all night stopping only to pump twenty-pence coins into the vending machine that reluctantly dispensed broken bars of Nestlé Dairy Crunch. On inspection of his ticket, Mr Jobsworth, who seemed almost as miserable as Jimmy himself, insisted that he was required to pay the excess fare for the journey from Ilford and he would have to pay the full fare to return there the next morning.

The Saturday morning 7:15 train to London Liverpool Street turned out to be the very same train that had taken him to Shoeburyness the previous night. Having spent almost six dark and dismal hours marching up and down a strip of concrete in an attempt to keep warm, he was dog-tired, chilled to the bone, and worried that the warmth of the carriage might send him to sleep so he’d again miss his stop. To prevent what would have been a catastrophic repetition, he spent the whole journey standing by the door with his head halfway out of the open window.  

Feeling both foolish and sorry for himself, he vowed to never travel on that train again and has held a grudge against the British Railways conductor, Shoeburyness and its townsfolk (none of whom he met) ever since.

Despite its faults, the Central Line from Gants Hill to Perivale was clearly the best option, but Jimmy and Julie both got sick of it in the end. The final straw was the result of a terrible mix up when they each found themselves waiting in travel-weary states outside the other’s underground station at the same time. So they ran away to live in sin in Thurso, which was as far away as you could get from Gants Hill by train, though it was a mystery why the Northern Line didn’t go there. There’d have been no bounds to the way the story ended had the Channel Tunnel existed in those days.

Twenty-five years later in 2009, just before Christmas, Jimmy returned to London because his boss at work said he had to. He was only there a few hours but to reach his employer’s City office he had to travel a few stops on the Central Line. Waiting on the platform at St. Paul’s tube station on his return journey he noticed a wall-mounted vending machine that boasted bars of Nestlé Dairy Crunch for ‘only 50p’. They had increased in price by 150% since that perishing night on the remotest edge of Essex, but what the hell, he thought. He inserted a coin in the slot and pulled the drawer expecting it to present to him a newly broken bar of chocolate, like in the old days. But the chocolate was broken beyond his wildest dreams and so much so that the machine’s drawer was completely jammed.

He had lost his 50p, he had lost in his last ever attempt to taste a few squares of Dairy Crunch, he had finally lost all faith in the London transport system, and he was in a rage against the machine. Despite his anger he knew that killing in the name of an item of confectionery was totally unacceptable, and besides, he had a train to catch.

Image:

You could be forgiven for thinking that this is a sign directing London Underground passengers towards the town of Street in Somerset. But actually it’s showing the way from the platform to street level at St. Paul’s tube station. My own photograph.