You can tell the time of the day simply by looking at them. Not accurately enough to re-set your watch, of course. No split-second chronometer precision. But near enough. Take one glance at the faces around you, and you’d be right somewhere within ordinary sun-dial limits.
Up to 8.15 or thereabouts, they’re a pretty mixed lot—workmen, office-cleaners, early-shift postal clerks, messengers, doorkeepers, that kind of thing. But by about 8.20 the Underground system has begun to get its clients sorted out. From then on until a quarter-to-nine, youth has it. It is shopgirl and typist time, cashier and Junior secretary hour.
And with them a new sense of speed and alertness comes over the place, as though the whole world were celebrating its eighteenth birthday. The original spring freshness is still on everything. It’s all brisk. And snappy. And staccato. There’s the chink and rattle as the change is delivered into the little metal cup at the booking office. The quick snatch as it is scooped up again. And then the sprinter’s dash down the escalator and the panic fight to get on to the train. From the way everyone behaves, all the alarm clocks in London might have been set five minutes too late. But that’s always the way with the younger generation. Slapdash. Last minute. No proper planning. They’re living on borrowed time every one of them.
Then as nine o’clock comes round, there’s a second revolution. Sex and age go abruptly into reverse. Maleness takes over. Umbrellas and brief cases everywhere. Seasons as well as singles. Pipes as well as cigarettes. Indeed, the subtle, distinctive odour of Underground travel has changed entirely during the last ten minutes. And there’s one ingredient that has faded out completely. That’s the hot-house mixture of all the proprietary cosmetics, mingled regardless of their makers’ reputations, and blown about by the gale of ozone that the London Transport engineers industriously keep pumping along the platforms.
It’s the Older Woman who shares this predominantly male company. Confidential personal secretaries who are practically running the whole show. And the nearer it gets to nine-thirty, the more settled and unperfumed these responsible females become. Simply good straight-forward toilet soap and plenty of cold water, and the glint of no nonsense staring out from behind their spectacles. By five-and-twenty to ten, in fact, there is hardly a woman of under forty left in the whole Underground System. A sailor straight home from the South Pole could go all the way from Colindale to Kennington, and never have any reason to glance up except to check what station he’d got to.
For, by then, London has settled down to work. Only the old guard, the heavy stuff, are still travelling. It is chairmans’ and directors’ session. Take a look down any carriage and it might be simply the London editions of The Times and the Telegraph—merely open newspapers, with a black hat on top and a pair of neatly creased trousers underneath—that you are travelling with. Not a face, or even a waistcoat, anywhere. Just foreign news and home affairs and the financial columns all being borne along at thirty-five miles an hour underneath the streets and the houses, the sewers and the subways, the water mains and the telephone cables. It is a world exclusively of paper people. The nylon stockings and the toeless shoes, the Daily Mirror and little handbags—they’ve all vanished, along with the rest of the under-forties. It’s the same carriage. Same advertisement of the same girl with the same permanent wave. Same rattle and roar in the tunnels. Same stopping places. But it might be the inhabitants of another planet who are travelling.
That’s because it’s in the tail-end of Mr. Marx’s Class-Society that we’re living. And five minutes either way mean that you have changed Classes.