HUMAN WRECKAGE

Notes on the Underground

London is my favourite foreign city. My hunch is that this minor personal detail will remain a constant even as I continue to gather more experiences abroad. And when I think of London, I think of the Tube.

Once down the stairs or escalator you can pretty much go anywhere underneath the metropolis. A passenger on the Circle line can change trains for another line at multiple stations on its loop. The long and the short of it is which direction to go? A friend of mine with a time-share there once described route planning as “Tube physics.” Bearish on Paddington? Hello Bakerloo, goodbye St. James’s Park. The names of the stops evoke London’s famous boroughs and they will always resonate in film, history, literature and song. A ride for me is a trip into tunnels of love.

Say “jigsaw puzzle” to me and I think: “Beggars Banquet, side one track five, Jagger trying to write like Dylan.” I love the song but puzzles themselves are less interesting mental exercises than crosswords because I’ll take a thousand words over a picture most every time. My other soft complaint about puzzles is the finished image, if it doesn’t interest me then I’m not interested in expending my time and labour.

The Tube is a remarkable feat of civil engineering. What has fascinated me beyond the Underground’s echoes in the arts is London Transport’s usage of graphic design. The logo is simple and universally recognizable. There are patterns in station tile walls. Posters promoting the system’s convenience from bygone days and present day are compelling constructions of commercial art. The world cannot find its way without clever and easily understandable design. London Transport created a subterranean world with easy exits. Daylight up ahead, mind the gap.

The map of the Underground as we’ve come to recognize it online and on paper was initially devised in 1933 by a genius named Harry Beck. He contrived to constrain a sprawling river city, its environs and tunnels into a stylized, comprehensible rectangle which elegantly and necessarily distorts geography and distance. His Tube map is a staggering work of modern art.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of Ann’s and mine, a Londoner, a teacher and a music buff, took something of a busman’s holiday. He posted pictures of his progress on a puzzle of Beck’s continually updated masterpiece. He took some guff in the comment balloons for not beginning with the border, a near impossibility as it’s almost exclusively white. The map itself is essentially an abstract of intersecting coloured lines against a white field. Simple to interpret; difficult to assemble.

Last October Ann and I lingered in the London Transport Museum’s gift shop. We bought two reproductions of vintage posters to frame and hang in our front hall. A whimsical upside down cockatoo amid a floral jungle thrice urging readers GO TO KEW. The other shows every kind of people gently converging on a sidewalk Tube entrance, probably Piccadilly, most of them floating blissfully into THE LURE OF THE UNDERGROUND. We also purchased a Depression-era Chelsea versus Arsenal poster advocating inexpensive transit to the grounds, a gift for a football fan; some days I regret our generosity. It never occurred to me to buy a jigsaw puzzle.

I muttered my complaint to Ann. “There’s one in the basement storeroom,” she replied. “It’s in the cupboard with the sports equipment and the Lego.” Oh my.

Crosswords and puzzles are absolute. There is right and there’s just plain wrong. When Ann and I work on the New York Times’s Saturday and Sunday crosswords we always begin by filling in the grid with clue answers we’re certain of and then work off of those letters. Generally our openings are proper nouns but not always. With Beck’s Tube jigsaw we worked off the Underground logo bottom left and the map legend bottom right. Eventually they would have to be connected by the River Thames. Sticking with a pale blue theme, we pieced together the Victoria line which crosses the Thames and terminates at Brixton.

Our next project was the purple Piccadilly line because it shares three stations with the Victoria line and eventually ends up at the four Heathrow terminals bottom left, down near the Thames and the Underground logo. Ann then decided we had enough visual information to complete the puzzle’s frame. But one bottom border piece, plain white, appeared to be missing. I began to fret that the puzzle was incomplete, that a piece or two had been lost as cat toys and were mouldering under the refrigerator. However, her insight allowed us to begin construction of the red Central line from Epping, upper right corner, all the way to Ealing Broadway, middle left edge. Fifty-two out of scale miles of parallel track and 51 stations.

What constitutes cheating? Sometimes in a crossword a portmanteau isn’t just a valise. Employing the word’s secondary definition with a clue such as “part of a juice portmanteau” renders CRAN as in cranberry which then suggests a product like Ocean Spray cran-raspberry cocktail. The odd time when Ann and I refer to a dictionary whilst solving crosswords we always feel as if we’ve broken a sacred and tacit covenant. And so, how many sneak peeks were Ann and I allowed at the cover of the jigsaw puzzle box?

Our London stay is still relatively fresh in our minds. We had taken advantage of our Oyster cards (which we kept). Our lodgings had allowed three easily walkable Tube options: Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street and Warren Street. We’d access to the Victoria, Central and Northern lines. Our puzzle strategy went into the black, the Northern line. Despite its spurs and digressions, we figured we could easily connect two stations, Camden Town to the north with Waterloo to the south across the Thames. We’d spent some time on the Northern line.

Once we’d finally completed Beck’s map, the last half-dozen plain white pieces including the missing frame fragment, I said to Ann, “I guess it goes right back into its box now.”

Ann said, “Don’t you want to admire it for a while?”

So I did. Didn’t we change to the Jubilee line at Green Park for St. John’s Wood? Exit, turn right for Abbey Road. Didn’t we ride up to the Camden Town market? Hadn’t we endured a luggage-laden, cramped and sweaty hour on the Piccadilly line from King’s Cross to Heathrow - Ann managed to secure a seat, thank God. What a curious way to revisit a holiday. I had taken notes, impressions and sketches. We’d taken digital photographs. Yet this chopped up beautiful design, those fragments of coloured lines, sparked our memories and ignited kitchen conversation.

“It makes you want to go back, doesn’t it?” Ann said.

Time travel. Backward and possibly forward. I remembered all the details of our trip. I thought of all the stations on Harry Beck’s beautiful Tube map and the associations I’d made as Ann and I patiently filled in the puzzle: Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, George Smiley, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, the Beatles, the Clash, the Jam, Pete Townshend solo, the Who, all of this and World War II. And more. London Transport indeed.

I said, “Yeah. Soon.”  

              

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of intellectual distraction since 2013. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9.