Going Underground (GU) Thanks for very much for agreeing to be interviewed. I’m going to focus on the Underground even though I know your book has more to it than that. So apologies if I don’t dwell too much on the philosophical side of your book.

Firstly what made you decide to work for the tube or were they the first people to offer you a job after your travels abroad?

Christopher Ross (CR) When I returned to the UK after basically giving all my money away to kids living rough in India, I needed a part time job. I didn’t specifically need to earn too much money and I wanted a job that would allow me to unpack my thoughts. Initially I applied for a job as a street sweeper, but as soon as they heard my voice on the phone...I’m quite well spoken....They were a bit taken aback and told me I wasn’t suitable.

A friend of mine had once said I’d never got my hands dirty. I’ve had all sorts of white collar jobs in the past. I’ve been a corporate lawyer, an actor, an editor and even spent some time smuggling rugs.

When I saw the £8 per hour job being advertised in the Evening Standard for the London Underground I thought it would be quite appealing for what I was looking for at the moment. I wanted to learn a new set of disciplines and one of these was getting up early as I was used to sometimes lying in bed unitl 10am. With the Underground I had to get up every week day at 5.50am. So I applied for the job with no preconceptions at all, not knowing what to expect and seeing it as another sort of challenge.

GU When did you realise that you might be able to turn your experiences into a book?

CR Well I didn’t get the job specifically to write a book about it and I wanted to do bmy very best at the job. I often went to dinner parties in London and people were quite surprised abut what I did. So picture the scene I’m in a nice house in Notting Hill and someone asks me what I do for a living. I say I work on the London Underground. They say "Oh you’re a manager or something". "No" I'd reply, "I’m a station assistant (SA) I work on Platform 6 at Oxford Circus station". They’re quite taken aback and then I begin to tell them some anecdotes about day to day happenings. Some of them a quite funny and after this happens a few times, people say "you really should write these things down as they’d make great source material for a book". So basically that’s what I did.

After 2 months at work I began to keep notes with the hope of turning my experiences into a book.

GU Onto you as a person, how were you treated by your fellow colleagues?

CR Training school was great fun. I had an immediate rapport with all the people I met there and they liked me. However when I started at Oxford Circus I was working with people who’d been there 20 years. Some were real old hands and were cynical and a bit ground down. So like a new boy at school I kept my head down. I did my job but listened a lot and people gradually revealed themselves.

I really didn’t want to lay open people’s lives in this book, even though I know a lot about them. So you’ll find that I don’t go into too much details about the characters. I could have "exposed" a lot of things but I didn’t want to upset any one.

In general though I liked my colleagues. However because I have this attitude and work ethic of doing my best at all times, I was sometimes seen as a model employee. Some people probably thought I was a w**ker because of this. But I wasn’t doing it to show anyone up.

Funnily enough it’s quite an isolated work experience on the Underground. Supervisors used to joke about us being in "groups of one", and when you’re walking along the platform and doing platform duties you’re often by yourself.

All in all the people were interesting, but there was a hostile attitude to the management. One particular station manager was absolutely hated with a vengence.

GU Do you ever keep in touch with your colleagues and what do they think of the book?

CR Very few of the SA’s still there, particularly not as SA’s. I have one good friend who I was in training with and she’s been promoted there. The cupboard man - the one who’s idea of a good day is to sleep in a cupboard isn’t there any more though.

GU You mean he got found out and sacked?

CR Not at all he’s just working for a different station!

I had quite a surreal experience since writing the book. I’d gone back down on the Underground with to be interviewed about my book and the newspaper wanted to take photographs. It was quite weird as I was being trailed by an SA who I actually knew quite well, but he didn’t recognise me at all. I haven’t really changed how I look but I was wearing a suit and was the attention of photographers and he just didn’t know it was me.

When I last spoke to people the book had only just been published and no one had had a chance to read it so I’m going to go back and find out what they think.

GU The Observer newspaper describes you as "highly articulate and smiling", which I can agree with. But these aren’t normal adjectives used to describe tube assistants. How did this attitude of yours go down with passengers on the tube?

CR I’d really like to try to take the pessimism out of urban culture. I don’t think we should all wander round in a fog of cynicism.

I’m broadly happy and I think people approach you much better if you got a bit of a Mona Lisa like smile on your face. If people behave badly, in a way we should thank them, as they are showing us how not to behave.

The Underground is a showcase by virtue of its enclosed space. It’s a theatre of possibilities. So much is there if you only just look.

People often used to think that I had somehow scaled myself down to work on the tube. I speak quite a few languages and so when helping out people it was sometimes eaiser to use their own language if I could. A man overheard me speaking Japanese to a group of tourists and he looked amazed and said to me "You’re wasted down here". I didn’t think of it like that at all. What I did on the Underground was honest work, and far more honest than what I did when I was a coroporate lawyer.

GU How would you say the tube compares with the subway system in Tokyo?

CR Japanese railways actually have prep schools and universities and if you want to work for the railways there, you have to have gone to one of their schools from childhood. There’s a very high status attached to being a railway employee.

If that were to happen here you would need to restore a sense of pride in the tube system. At the moment you can’t as it’s being held together by Band Aid and chewing gum. The whole system could be a whole lot worse. I was often amazed at how well it worked considering the small amount of cash that it has. It needs so much more money to be ploughed into it.

GU There’s this brilliant bit in your book where you talk about the railway in Japan and you say that if your watch stopped all you would need would be a railway timetable and to be on a station platform so you could set your time by when a train arrived.

CR The funny thing about that is that people still run for a train even if they know there’s going to be another one along in 30 seconds. The system literally does run like clockwork and I heard that a manager was sacked once for allowing a train to be delayed by 3 minutes.

Tokyo is a train city. There are virtually no cars or buses. London could become a train city too. It’s smaller than Tokyo but so much more would need to be done to the system for that to happen.

GU Is there anything we as passengers could do to bring a bit more humanity into the tube?

CR I think that people should talk more to each other, but in a non challenging and non flirtacious way. For example you could be reading a newspaper and turn round to the person next to you and say I’ve just read this article about X, what do you think about it?

Importantly it should be nothing with an edge. Communication on the tube has two broad divisions. It can be neutral and saying ‘you’re not my enemy’ or it can be informational. Neutrality requires a certain lightness and we seem to have lost this as a social skill. People are very often fearful of others talking to them, but if it was all neutral we would have a sense of relief and probably open up to others.

There's an isolating effect on the tube. There's millions of people, yet everyone is alone. The only time people tend to talk to each other is if there’s some kind of crisis.

On the underground there are two categories of people:

Those who want to be there - eg some tube workers, buskers, pickpockets, beggars and suicides for a short period of time.

And those that don’t, which is everybody else.

If you’re somewhere you don’t want to be, that automatically puts you in a bad mood. It’s an attitude of living in the basement. Above ground there’s all these wonderful things going on - the theatre, cinemas, restaurants, parks etc and you’re just using the tube to get to those nicer places.

GU In the book, you describe a scene where you’re watching someone who had a heart attack and is literally being brought back to life by paramedics. Yet people are still swarming round you asking about exits and stuff. What do you think it is about the tube that makes people behave like that?

CR People tend to shut down their senses on the Underground, because you can get easily overwhelmed by all the sensory information going on. So you go into auto pilot, and become uninterested in the environment as it cuts out the stress.

Also a lot of people say stupid things in those situations which they don’t really mean. I was on a train once telling people that the train had been delayed as someone was seriously ill. A man said "well why don’t they just hurry up and die". I looked around and everyone was visibly shocked at what he had just said. So I turned around and said "If you actually thought about what you just said I’m sure you will realise you didn’t mean it" and I walked off. The tube brings stupidity in people.

GU What would you say was one of the weirdest things you came across?

CR Let me give you a story that’s not in the book. We were told that there were going to be a number of people travelling on the tube in wheelchairs one day. So me and another station assistant went down to meet them from a tube.

About 30 people in wheelchairs zoomed off the tube at top speed and sped down the platform, we were running after them. They came to the stairs and negotiated themselves down them in these special wheelchairs with no problem at all. Then sped along the corridors to the correct interchange. All the time, me and my colleague were still legging it after them.

They came to the right exit and zoomed onto a different tube to change lines. So they’d done the whole thing without our help. Just as the doors were closing I managed to pant at one of them - ‘Who are you?’ and one replied, ‘We’re the Canadian National Paraplegic Sprinting Team’.

GU Which writers have influenced you the most?

CR That's tricky as I read a lot. I really like Japanese authors and one particular book "Underground" by Haruki Murakami. It's a series of interviews with people who survived the Tokyo subway gas attack in 1995 where 12 people died. Murakami also speaks to some of the Aum cult members who were responsible for the attack.

GU In literature the tube is described as a maze or a labyrinth. How far would you say it is like that?

CR Very much so. You get orientation lessons when you first start and then gradually become familiar with all the tunnels. I can easily understand the labyrinth metaphor. I can move around it very easily now.

People often get lost or confused and I was constantly being asked for the way out, even when people happened to be standing right underneath a way out sign. Often it’s just because they wanted someone to show them the way.

GU You left because of pessimism....was it pessimism amongst the staff or pessimism from the passengers?

CR Yes I think I was starting to lose my grip. I was starting to snap at people. My friends were saying to me that I didn’t seem to be enjoying it as much as I did at the start. I felt after 16 months that I’d given it all the energy I could. Remember that after two months I had been thinking about writing a book. However, when I left, I left on good terms, so that I could possibly come back if the book didn’t get published or was a dud. I certainly didn’t intend to go back but I would have gone back if things didn’t work out.

GU What plans do you have for your next book?

CR It’s under wraps at the moment but it will be about my experiences in Japan.

GU Finally, if you would like people to go away with one thing after reading your book, what would you like it to be?

CR My book very much describes problems without necessarily providing solutions. It’s written in a bare way so that people can focus on the reality of the tube. Some people say it’s simplistic and it’s all about things we know. Well that’s true, but people may know what’s in the book and they don’t necessarily act on it. I feel a bit like Cassandra in the Greek myths. I’m a teller of 'bad' things but like Cassandra there’s the risk of being ignored.

I just want people to start thinking and ultimately think about their whole lifestyles. Think about your work and how you get to work and how you travel and live the majority of your life. Is it likely to increase your sanity, or is it likely to drive you nuts. If it’s the latter, then change it.

I’d like to thank Christopher for sparing me the time for this interview. If you’d like to read my personal review of the book, click here.

If you’d like to read more reviews from Amazon.co.uk and buy the book click here for hardback, here for paperback or to get it through amazon.com click here.

You can catch Christopher reading and discussing his work at two book festivals:

Essex Book Festival - Burnham on Crouch Library at 7.30pm on Wednesday 6th March, tickets: £4/£3 concessions.

Brighton Festival - 'Philosophy of Everyday Life' a joint talk with Dr.A.C.Grayling at 6pm on Saturday, 11th May at the Pavillion Theatre.

Transport Exchange

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