(First blogged 20th April 2006 – the all-time record holder in the comments column)
I went to London this morning, on the train. Travelled back at about 12.30. Middle of the day, carriage half empty, idly reading a copy of the Sun that somebody had left behind on my table.
Didn’t take long. I think I’d got all I needed out of it by the time the train got to Finsbury Park. So I dropped it back on the table and got stuck into my book instead.
At Stevenage, a bloke sat in the seat opposite me and asked if the paper was free. The sort of bloke, to look at, that makes you momentarily wonder if you’re about to be engaged in conversation by somebody you’d really rather not talk to. Thirty-ish, trainers, stone-washed jeans and jacket, not too bright, crap haircut. There I go, discovering hidden irrational prejudices again – but no: he asked politely enough.
Next thing, he was joined by a woman. Mid-twenties maybe, scuffed pair of fleece-lined boots, dodgy complexion, rat-tail hair, talking soothingly over my shoulder to a child in a pushchair that she’d left in the corridor by the doors. She seemed a little agitated, I thought, but the man made calming noises from behind his paper.
As the train pulled out of Stevenage, she looked over her shoulder. There was a ticket inspector coming, and it was immediately clear why she was agitated.
I got my own ticket ready, as you do. Needn’t have bothered, because once the inspector asked this couple for theirs we were clearly going to be in for a long and confused conversation.
Here’s the gist of their story.
They didn’t have any money. They’d travelled down to Stevenage from Baldock (three stops) a little earlier that day because they’d been told to attend ‘the social’. Presumably they’d done this because they were hoping the social might cough up a little money. I’ve never heard of anyone going to a Department of Social Security office for pleasure. Because they didn’t have any money, they’d not bought a ticket. And got away with it on, for the first leg of their journey.
Turns out the social hadn’t been much help. ‘They’ve been messing us about’, the woman said, coming over just a tad aggressive, the way you get when you’re frightened and stressed but you don’t want to proclaim all your personal details to a half empty carriage of people who clearly do have some money and self-respect about their persons.
The ticket inspector was young and black, and spoke with a heavy accent, which slowed down the conversation a little. He listened sympathetically, and asked them for identification. The girl had a Tesco club card with her name on it; the man had a crumpled birth certificate in his wallet. He was clearly used to being asked for ID, and came prepared, in the absence of credit cards and other bits of plastic that might have done the same job.
There was no cash in the wallet. He opened it wide, so we could all see.
The inspector seemed nice enough. He seemed to be trying to figure a way out of the situation. But he also had a script in his head, no doubt seeded there by many hours of customer relations training, and in this potentially difficult situation the script came to the fore.
There was quite a lot of it, and it was confused a little by his accent and the woman trying to explain that none of this was their fault, but the salient point of the script was this: when a person travels without a ticket, they are deemed to be committing fraud, and are liable to be cautioned. And presumably fined, over and above the ticket price, though I can’t remember all the details.
By this time, I had begun to wonder what was in my wallet, and whether I could spare some, and started to wish the ticket inspector away so I could slip these people a tenner. Not that I cared about the ticket, but if there was no money in the wallet there probably wasn’t a lot of food in their kitchen cupboard either.
Then he let them off. Or at least I think he started to let them off, because he kept saying that if the next inspector came along they’d have to be cautioned, though he didn’t seem to want to do it himself. And both the bloke and the girl were thanking him, and it all seemed as if it was going to pass off well, and I would be able to slip them that tenner in a surreptitious manner after he’d gone away and everyone had returned to their reading matter of choice.
By now the train was pulling into Hitchin, the next station. Which – as seasoned passengers (sorry: customers) will know – is the cue for ticket inspectors, who always work in pairs, to hop from one carriage to the next and generally overlap each other in a thoroughly KGB-esque manner. With the upshot, in this case, that ticket inspector number one came face to face in our corridor with ticket inspector number two.
Who was a young woman, and spoke perfect English, and immediately wanted to know what was going on.
No sympathetic pissing about with this one. She knew the rules, and she was ready to proceed straight to the caution. We’d just about got to the fraud word again, when the man with no money politely offered to get off the train.
At which point, the doors being about to close, everybody seemed to wash their hands of it; and there was a scramble to gather up the child and the buggy; and there was no time to offer them my tenner because they’d already gone; and the ticket inspectors moved off tut-tutting down the corridor; and we all returned to our books without comment; and the big embarrassing problem had gone away.
Leaving the young couple who had no money, and had already made a fruitless journey to the social in Stevenage, stranded on the platform at Hitchin. Two stops from home.
I expect they got back alright. Maybe they hitch-hiked. Or called a friend to beg a favour. Maybe they just got straight onto the next train, reasoning that lightning doesn’t strike twice between Hitchin and Baldock.
That’s not the point.
When I was in my twenties, it was a little-publicised fact that if you ever needed to make a train journey and you had no way of paying for it, all you had to do was provide your name and address, and I imagine some sort of proof, and you would be billed by British Rail later. Not surcharged: billed. It happened to me once: I can’t remember exactly how it worked, but I was a student and I was skint, and I had no other way of getting home. The ticket inspector was sniffy with me, but there was none of this nonsense of a formal ‘caution’, and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to accuse me of fraud.
Fraud is what Robert Maxwell did. Fraud is what happens when an accountant or a bank manager salts away money that rightfully belongs to someone else and then absconds with it. Fraud is what Roman Abramovich may or may not have perpetrated on the Russian people to amass the money that bought the team at Chelsea Football Club. Fraud is what most British banks perpetrate every day when they overcharge their customers for slipping tuppence into the red and then blithely direct them to the six-point small print in paragraph eighteen sub-section H of appendix three at the very very bottom of the agreement you signed five years ago when you first opened the account.
The point is: fraud makes people rich. And the couple without any money on my train today were anything but that. They weren’t fraudulent: they were desperate. And the best West Anglia Great Northern Railway could do for them was shrug its shoulders and dump them on a station platform two stops from home.
There’s something wrong with this picture. I feel embarrassed, and it’s not just because my stupid British reserve stopped me offering to help when I could have done, nor is it a result of my stumbling across further evidence that Orwell was right and black now means white as sure as eggs is cheese.
Perhaps it’s just that I’m as muddled as everyone else, and it’s not embarrassment I should be feeling: it’s some much stronger emotion.
