‘Don’t look at me, I’m pregnant!’

‘Someone else, then!’

No one would do it. Even in my hysteria I knew not to succumb to the instinct to drop to the floor, which would create a hole in the crush into which others would fall on top of me. I managed to keep standing, legs juddering, eyes screwed shut – if I couldn’t see, the brain might forget the confinement! But the image of the carriage and its hellish press of bodies remained on my retinas.

Above the arguing, the driver’s voice droned through the PA system: ‘We’re being held behind another train. Can the person who pulled the passenger alarm please hang on, we’ll be on the move again soon and we’ll get assistance to you as soon as we reach the next station.’

The commentary altered:

‘He didn’t make the train stop, it was stopping anyway!’

‘They’ll be queueing for the platform. I was once trapped for twenty minutes.’

‘Twenty minutes?’

That was when the lights went out, a marginal relief for me, but a development received with universal angst by the others.

‘Oh my God, is this some terrorist thing?’

‘Is this guy in on it?’

‘Don’t be stupid, you heard what the driver said.’

But the ‘T’ word had been released and all down the carriage people were losing their minds. Someone began sobbing and the voice I recognized as the pregnant woman’s grew wild and raging:

‘This is unbearable! I feel faint! It’s so hot!’

‘Should we force the doors and let some air in?’

‘There is no air, we’re a million feet underground!’

‘Here, I’ve got some water.’

I opened my eyes, childlike in my gratitude, but the water was being offered to the pregnant passenger.

‘D’you think there’s been a power cut above ground, as well?’

One of the hundreds of things I knew about the Tube was that forty-seven million litres of water are pumped from the system every day and if there had been a mass power cut above ground, or an earthquake that caused the power to shut down indefinitely, then the pumps would have been down too. Would putrid water arrive at our feet and slowly rise?

I won’t relive it minute by minute, but we were in that tunnel for half an hour with no power, no messages from the driver. My skin burned as if I’d been shovelled into a furnace and yet somehow I stopped myself from passing out. Light radiated from torch apps, but all I could think of was the heat of a thousand devices turned on at once.

At some point, news arrived, passed from carriage to carriage: we were to be detrained. The train in front had broken down and was now being evacuated. We would have to walk through the tunnel and through this other train to reach the platform at Camden Town.

There was a gradual easing of the crush as the doors between carriages were opened and those further up began shuffling towards the front of the train. Then came the first sight of London Transport staff in hi-vis vests and directing powerful torchlight. ‘Is this gentleman all right?’

Gentleman. I remember that. A low calm voice, fractionally consoling. My throat was dry as tinder. Water was passed to me and my hands shook as I tried to drink, so I spilled it onto my shirt front.

‘We need to start moving to the front of the train, sir.’

I was escorted, hands gentle on my arm, through the evacuated carriages, past the faded seats littered with newspapers and discarded garments. Being on the tracks was even worse. It was just as airless but with the smell of scorching. We were rats in a clay oven. As I began to groan, my escort reassured me. ‘It’s just a bottleneck at the back of the train in front. Stay calm. We’ve put down boards to make it safe for you to climb up onto it.’

Breathe, breathe. But the air was so thin. My head throbbed, out of time with the thudding of my heart.

At last, we shuffled through the train in front. It had broken down just outside the station and light was visible from the platform, onto which we were assisted via a ramp. I was deemed capable of taking the escalator on foot and not stretchered to the area above ground, where those needing medical assistance were being assessed in the ticket hall. The northbound service had been temporarily suspended and at the barriers a crowd waited. Among the general rubbernecking, there were a fair few unkind looks and comments.

‘People get very agitated in this weather,’ a uniformed officer said to me.

The pregnant woman, coming up the escalator behind me, was mouthing off: ‘It’s got to be a criminal offence to use the emergency lever without a proper reason? He could be a terrorist for all we know!’

‘We will need a statement from you,’ I was told, just loudly enough for the nearer reaches of the waiting crowd to hear.

There was a fresh outbreak of jeers.

*

I wasn’t charged with anything, of course, but who needs police prosecution when we have our fellow citizens?

Someone had videoed the ‘action’ in the carriage, others the aftermath at Camden Town, and it was all over social media the rest of that day.

In the press coverage, my name was given, along with an erroneous attribution of guilt:

Mass Panic in Crush Hour as Train Evacuated in Tunnel

Overheated commuter James Buckby, 47, brought the Northern Line to a standstill today when he pulled the emergency lever and set in motion a complex sequence of delays. Three trains were evacuated and passengers led through darkened tunnels to safety. Emergency services treated Buckby and several others on site in temperatures of almost forty-degree heat and a woman thought to be eight months pregnant was taken to University College Hospital with suspected dehydration.

‘It was hell. Mass panic, started by this one bloke. If he’d just hung on, he would have been out of there in a couple of minutes. Instead we all had to suffer,’ said Abbie McClusky, a 26-year-old software consultant.

‘We were trapped in the tunnel for almost an hour,’ said Charlotte Silva, a working mother of three. ‘I thought we were going to die. We had to walk single file because of the live lines. I didn’t see the man who started it, but if I was him I’d go into hiding.’

A spokesman for TfL explained that Mr Buckby’s call for help was incidental to the factors that led to the emergency evacuation. ‘Extreme heat conditions caused the train in front to break down less than twenty metres from the station platform. Trains were backed up at stations and in tunnels all down the line. It was a perfect storm, I’m afraid.’ He added that rumours that Buckby’s act was in any way related to a foiled terrorism attack were entirely false.

Even so, commuters have continued to round on Mr Buckby for the inconvenience he has caused, many using #CommuterHell to share their anger. Were YOU trapped on the train? Contact us with your eyewitness account!

Twitter went into overdrive, if overdrives can be distinguished from the general tone of emergency, and one #CommuterHell tweet went viral: a picture of me balled up in a seat, hands crossed over the top of my head, the carriage having half-emptied around me, with the single-word caption: This.

An email came to my personal account that gave me palpitations: I went into labour after what happened. The baby almost died! No name was given, only the email address [email protected]