Of all the reasons the underground service grinds to a halt, from signal failures to insufficient staff to derailments, none has as much impact as a suicide. Almost everyone gets involved. The police, ambulance and firemen all pitch up; the underground's own emergency response unit, station staff, station managers and train managers all crowd around on the platform and try variously to save the person, move the person and clean up bits of the person.
How the tube got its reputation as a good spot for suicides is a mystery. It is a completely stupid choice. A large number of jumpers don't die immediately and plenty don't die at all. Those that are successful often manage because they get themselves crushed between the far wall and the train, instead of on the rails. It is very far from clinical. At the first "one-under" I attended, the woman was still alive underneath the train, screaming and trying to get up. The image stayed with me for years.
The drivers take the brunt of the trauma, frequently - ridiculously - blaming themselves for not stopping in time. Each takes it differently, of course, but quite a few never drive a train again, suffering nightmares and flashbacks for months. Others put it behind them, although, as one said to me, you never look at crowded rush-hour platforms in the same way again. A few have seen quite a number in their time, which is not so surprising when you consider that there is on average about one a week.
Not that all jumpers are inconsiderate. At one east London station, a man was seen placing an envelope under a stone on the platform before leaping in front of a train. When they opened the envelope, they found a £20 note and a slip of paper saying, "Say sorry to the driver, this is to buy him a drink."
On the other hand, some staff are very blasé about the whole thing. A story has been told of how two drivers threw a dummy in front of a train driven by a mate, who then got a few weeks off sick. One driver told me that after someone jumped in front of his train, he told the police, "Her arm went there and her leg went over there." The policewoman came back and said to him, "She had nice shoes, didn't she?"
Drivers who witness a suicide are at least entitled to money from a compensation fund and a couple of months off, which is an improvement on the old days, when they used to get three days standing spare while they waited to find out if they would be charged with manslaughter. This would normally have been in case they were drunk, but that was the rule rather than the exception in those days (see "Notes from underground," November 2004).
There is no compensation for the station staff who have to deal with the aftermath. It is one of those infrequent occasions when station supervisors earn their money; a week of drinking tea and reading the paper is suddenly transformed into a high-stress morning, running about like the proverbial blue-arsed fly, chaos all around and the smell of singed flesh in your nostrils.
The emergency crews, though, put it all in perspective, charging down to the scene without blinking, cracking jokes as they rummage around bits of brain. It almost makes you feel ashamed at taking a week or two off yourself. Not that ashamed, obviously.
After the initial burst, however, the supervisor has only one important job left - a job so vital that it was impressed on me several times when I was learning the procedure. When the body is brought off the track and the police are going through the pockets, the supervisor needs to pay close attention to what they find - not because of any magpie tendencies on the part of the police, but because they want to see if the person had a ticket. Perhaps, I said when I first heard this, they want to claim a penalty fare off the undertaker. But apparently many bereaved families try to sue the underground - on what grounds I can't imagine - and if the person was travelling without a ticket the lawsuit is automatically null and void. So the lesson is clear: if you're going to kill yourself on the tube, at least buy a ticket. In the circumstances, it only needs to be a platform ticket.
The underground might seem thoughtless and clumsy hurrying to get the victim tidied out of the way, but it is appreciated by people in the train behind, stuck in a tunnel. (The service is usually running again in an hour.)
Upstairs, the public are normally understanding, it being one of those few occasions when it isn't entirely our fault. Not always, of course. A woman once berated us for incompetence at the station gates. "Why did this happen?" she demanded. My colleague told her that the victim had been very depressed. She replied, "Well, who wouldn't be, with that escalator out again."
Doctors often ask to be of help, but the ambulance crew is sufficient. A priest once tried too. I looked at him for a second and said, "No, there's no room down there. They don't need help."
"Spiritual help?" he persisted, standing right in the way of the entrance.
"No thanks," I repeated. "There's nothing you could do I'm afraid."
"Well I could pray," he said.
"Well pray over there, will you?"
He didn't stick around long.
