Moments after passing Gloucester Road

By Marc Robertson - Editor | November 1, 2023

A VEW FROM THE BRIDGE

Someone pulled the emergency handle on the Tube, halfway through the tunnel to Earl’s Court.
The London Underground train came to a jarring halt, and several passengers tipped into each other or poles.
There was no general panic. People looked up and down the carriage to see what was the matter, and so I did the same.
I hadn’t seen the old man keel over and land on the floor, but I had seen him upright in his seat moments earlier.
Now he was face-down on the floor. It wasn’t the kind of face-down position one associates with stepping on something slippery or tripping over an obstacle. People who do that usually recover quickly and tend to focus first on lifting the face off the floor. After that, there’s a sort of clumsiness, arms and legs going this way and that, and eventually someone stands up with an expression of surprise mixed with embarrassment.
Not so this time.
The man in the grey suit lay quite still. His nose was squished against the floor from the weight of his head. His mouth was partly open. I don’t know how you feel about opening your mouth against the floor of a subway train, but I’m confident it’s not something you’d leap at doing.
I think that’s how we all knew there was something wrong.
And that’s why someone pulled the emergency handle.
Well, it’s what one does, isn’t it? That’s what emergency handles are for.
Emergencies.
Alas, the gentleman in the grey suit was beyond emergency. Even though our train was deep under the streets of West London at four o’clock in the afternoon in a pitch-black tunnel whose walls were just inches beyond our smeary windows, the man had found his way up and out, high into the great Accountancy Pool in the sky, very likely just moments after passing Gloucester Road.
One does what one can. There were ladies saying “Oh, gosh,” and “Poor dear” even though they obviously had no idea who this chap was (or had been; he was quite dead by the time the driver slammed the brakes), and a take-charge sort of fellow in a jogging outfit had turned him over and was trying chest compressions. Other passengers were looking helpless but vaguely concerned. A gaggle of slightly pudgy Germans gathered up pink children with backpacks and moved to another part of the carriage.
The train driver’s voice crackled over a loudspeaker in the ceiling and everyone looked up at the little circle as though expecting deliverance, but of course it just crackled some more and no one understood a word.
“Is there a doctor on board?” The call went up and down the carriage. Other people stood up, blocking the path of any doctor who might come, and then the call was passed down to the next carriage and the next via the connecting door, until the tunnel under Kensington fairly echoed with the words.
Finally, after more crackling from the loudspeaker and an awkward silence in which no one knew what else to say, an elderly Indian lady in a shockingly bright sari came pushing through the gangly and colorless crowd, muttering “Yes, yes, yes,” with a vast wheelie suitcase in tow.
The loudspeaker crackled a bit more and the train jolted back to life, just as the Indian lady began kneeling beside the body and checking the man’s vitals. She didn’t give up on him. She kept checking and muttering and feeling for a pulse and doing all the other things that I think one does when one finds a body in a train.
“They can’t take him off here,” someone said to anyone who’d listen. “We have to go to Earl’s Court.”
We rode the rest of the way with a dead man at our feet while the Indian lady fussed and prodded him.
The doors opened at Earl’s Court to a line of medics and policemen, and I thought to myself that while we can’t really decide for ourselves when or where we’d like to be when the time comes, there can’t be many places that feel more like home to a Londoner than the tunnel past Gloucester Road.
I hoped, just for a moment, that the old fellow had been awake enough at South Kensington to see what they’ve done with the flower boxes there.
It’s always lovely.