Tooni Alabi is a third-year English Literature student who has enjoyed her degree in the way it’s helped her explore different periods and a range of writings, thus shaping and re-shaping her perspective. Tooni is an avid reader of different genres and hopes to be an author one day. Her passion for reading has translated into a love for creative writing, and she desires to help others escape through her writing and bring them closer to God.
The beep of the card or oyster. The mad dash through the barriers as your adrenaline pumps, in the rush to the platform, to serve at the altar. Slowly, it draws masses of people, and lures them into an inevitable synchronised dance, to experience the collision of multicultural London. The Underground acts as a skilful puppet master, yet it too is a slave to mankind. Every day is a reminder of its inescapable destiny to run up and down the same train tracks like an animal trapped in its cage. Carefully slotting millions of passengers into its various mouths, harbouring them in its digestive system, before finally spitting them out in places around the capital.
Today is just another day on the underground.
‘Kennington via Charring Cross leaves the platform in two minutes’ the omniscient voice announces over the tannoy
The frantic scuttle of commuter’s feet parodies each other, and we’re all puppets at the hands of the puppet master. We’re assigned different roles, as the tannoy evokes our brain into distinct responses. The choice to causally walk, and potentially run the risk of having to catch the next train, the fast walk and pray you don’t have to break into a run, because you would rather people weren’t watching you run, or you just run and guarantee your spot on the train. The tannoy has presented us with our options and we all participate in the game of the underground. You choose the fast walk, ducking in and out of those exiting the station, all obstacles to your goal, before finally doing quick jolt-like steps for the grand finale of a heroic jump into the carriage. A minute later the hiss of a closed door. The train begins to move, leaving blurred images of the casualties left behind. You already know how they feel. They’re left with marks to remember. The mixture of anger, frustration, and nonchalance. The truth is we all know how it feels to miss the train, and even more so to watch its slithering body race away from you. It successfully stirs up the memory of when you were left behind on your first day of nursery leaving you with the inevitable bitter gnawing of abandonment.
The thoughts of those who have failed the game’s first stage, quickly disappear and you settle into the next stage of the journey. The routine on the train is a response to Snapchat notifications, music and some light reading, the underground essentials if you want to survive the long commute. You find yourself thinking back on when you first became a devoted commuter, naively offering your money, which was inevitably swallowed at the moment of contact. You used to take in the sights of London, the merging of the city from the outskirts to the centre. But like everything in life that used to hold excitement and wonder, it burns bright like a comet or a falling star, before inevitably fading into the wasteland of lacklustre.
The screech and the jolts that come with the Northern line are familiar and comforting but may be a product of your desensitisation as it slides along the tracks. The train stops and starts as it makes its way closer to the centre of London, people getting in and out, adding and eliminating. Then the tunnel that establishes the entering into the Underground looms ominously, in the words of the psalmist King David ‘As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil’. Tunnels elicit two reactions nonchalance or hyperawareness. When you’ve been commuting for a while, tunnels are just the necessary points to help you get from A to B. However, tunnels experienced on the Northern line are a dark and noisy time machine. One moment you’re in the light, and the next moment you’re plunged into the valley of never-ending darkness, further perpetuated if the train has to wait for the signal. There are strange moments in the tunnel connecting Golders Green to Hampstead, where you see another train
straying off the track, a small glimpse into other people’s lives where you’re suddenly a voyeur. It’s two ships passing in the night and suddenly, they’re gone, making you think did you see that or is your imagination deciding to play tricks on you?
In moments like this, you take the opportunity to observe people on the train, knowing that London produces anti-social people. During the journey of racing to the heart of the capital, people are silent and glued to their phones, laptops, or music. To reinforce the need for silence the facial expressions say it all ‘Don’t talk to me otherwise we’re going to have a problem’. On the other hand, perhaps you embellish because not everyone is like that on the Underground, with the look of doom and gloom. The truth is that some people have an inviting facial expression and do acts of service by allowing someone else to take their seat. But, unfortunately, they’re rare because of the Underground’s unpredictable rhythms, the circumstances and the problems of different lives all seem to collide and, nobody feels like talking. We all resign into our separate worlds because it’s safer that way, it’s easier and, we don’t have to be social and interact. It’s the one place we can safely detach and as George Simmel put it adopt a Blasé attitude.
In philosophical moments like this, the Underground continues not waiting for your thoughts as it collects and releases passengers in a constant cycle. The carriages rush past like a game of Russian roulette or Tinder where we swipe right for the carriage we want. The countdown of stations begins, Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square, Charring Cross and finally Embankment. The train releases you with a hiss reflecting its serpentine characteristics, to find yourself in the heart of another train’s digestive system, as it whisks you to the next stop. Temple. A congregation for Kings Students getting on or off the train. It appears like a relic stuck in time, its pillars decorated in red and white, as though it once held up a royal palace in its youth before the ravages of time crept in. The stairs hold that same withered look. The weight of the passenger’s footsteps that have broken its soul. Then as though being transported from the past to the present and future, you see the waters outside Temple gently ebb in a greeting, sparkling and dancing in the sunlight. Or rather a gloomy sinister warning awaiting you, with echoes of what lies beneath the surface. The strong pillars of London loom in the background the Shard, the Walkie-Talkie building and those that surround it as sentinels. The journey of the Underground leaves you with a piece of beauty at the end before you inevitably turn away.
As you return home you encounter the joys of rush hour, a maniacal battle. Passengers inevitably squished against the carriage doors, as though the train is bursting at the seams. You manage to get yourself on, watching final heroic leaps into the carriage, as you desperately pray that you can get off at your stop, the overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia. You try to block out rush hour. Passengers are slow as though they’re walking through a field of daisies. Passengers are ignorant of which platform they’re going to and, stand there as though they’re an emperor overlooking their vast empire and wealth causing you to do a frustrated manoeuvre. The escalator stairs fall like a waterfall, offering a temporary moment of peace. However, you observe some obstacles. Somebody leaves a huge gap, someone standing on the left-hand side blocking those that need to get past them urgently. At the end of the waterfall, you find your train nearly here. It arrives at the platform like a wounded soldier returning from battle, unable to withstand the onslaught of rush hour. You discover your reaction is to enter, drawn to it like moths are to light. Though some who have just arrived barge past you, or some are too slow and want you to be abandoned by the train. Finding a seat during rush hour is like gold and you take it outwitting your competitors who were too slow.
The train speeds and screeches under the weight of its eternal imprisonment, condemned like Atlas to uphold a part of the world. You find yourself back on the outskirts of London, the sun tucked away, as night covers the scene with intermittent glowing lights of the city. You leave the Underground games and it leaves you to your fate of what night brings.
By Tooni Alabi.
