Alarming

What a relief to have made it to the weekend. It was a very busy week and looks set to be even busier over the coming weeks. I was hoping to get home at a reasonable time last night, but ended up getting home much later than normal. There were huge delays on most tube lines because of “communication problems” and lots of parts of the tube weren’t running. However, I thought of a route home that would take a bit longer than normal but I’d still make it home at a decent time. Alas this was mere conjecture on my part and hadn’t taken into account the ‘human factor’.

I was making decent progress but as the tube moved off from one station I looked up from the paper I was reading and there was a black rucksack totally unattended. I turned to the woman next to me and said something inane like “do you think that bag belongs to anyone?” and she looked at me kind of blankly and said that it probably didn’t. I asked the bloke opposite if it was his and he said no. No-one seemed terribly bothered and my brain started whirring – was it just making a fuss to do something about it? What if it was something and I just ignored it?

Anyway, we got into the next station and I walked to the door and spoke to a woman about to get on to see if she had seen a member of staff on the platform because there was an unattended bag. She said she hadn’t seen anyone and then just pushed passed me and got on the train and sat down. Then the doors started to close on the train and despite a voice in my head saying “it can’t be anything. Nobody else is concerned by it. Think of all the delay it’s going to cause” and so on, I pulled the emergency alarm.

All the doors reopened on the train and after a few seconds the driver’s voice came over the speaker and asked what the problem was. I said there was an unattended bag and he said “Ok. I’ll come and have a look”. Unfortunately I was in the very end carriage so it took him a while to amble down the platform but when he finally got there I pointed to the bag and he looked at it and then said he’d get the station supervisor to have a look. The supervisor then turned up and I explained that at the previous station a bloke had got on the train and then rushed back off just as the doors were closing. I didn’t know if it was his bag but I hadn’t seen it there before that.

The bag was totally sealed and there was no way to find out what was in it without opening it. The train driver said that he thought it was a very bad idea to even consider opening the bag, so the supervisor walked off and the next thing I knew there was an announcement saying the station needed to be evacuated immediately. I wasn’t really sure if someone might want to speak to me about it but the station staff seemed kind of busy so I just wandered out of the station and found a bus to connect to another tube line to go home.

The staff at the station were good. I suspect the events of last July changed the attitude of a lot of London Underground staff. Before the bombings there were various stories of people finding unattended bags and pulling the passenger alarm and train drivers telling them they had delayed the service and should have sorted it out themselves. But now I think the attitude is very different. More sober.

The thing is that if I hadn’t done something, I’m not sure that anyone else would have. I think I even heard someone make a comment about how it seemed a bit extreme to delay a whole train because of a bag. I have no idea if it was something serious or not, and the whole time I knew that chances were that it was nothing. Just someone carelessly leaving their bag behind. But what if it wasn’t? What if I had got off the train at my stop and it turned out to be something and my ignoring it meant people got killed or injured? I suppose in a lot of ways I am just surprised how apathetic people were. How unconcerned they were by the bag. Not that I thought people should have been running around panicking but that no-one was interested because it was too much trouble to care.