“No one ever told me,” C.S. Lewis said, “that grief felt so like fear”. For many people today grief and fear will be the dominant sentiments on the first anniversary of the London bombings. The family and the friends of the 52 innocent people who had their lives snatched from them will remember the spirit and characters of those who died and the futures that could and should have evolved. It is this aspect that is surely the most painful: the goodbyes that were never exchanged, the children left to grow unwatched, the families that would have been extended at a later moment but were not, rendering those left behind more alone, deeper in their despair for what is missing.

For while today is in many senses a national event, with silences respected and prayers heard in places across the capital and beyond, it is a public affair that serves as a bandage to wounds that are truly private. Today is about those whose lives were taken or transformed, people for whom phrases such as “closure” or “moving on” have scant merit. The most that they can hold, as Lewis again noted, is the knowledge that: “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”

If grief is the legacy for a comparative few, fear will inevitably be an emotion imbued in many others. An anniversary has the capacity to bring to the surface memories that have dulled over the past 12 months: of the shock of being evacuated from the Underground, as more than 250,000 people were; of the anxiety for loved ones until contact could be made; of the chaos of evening as millions sought to make their way home in difficult circumstances, dazed about what had taken place, uncertain as to what may prove its ultimate outcome.

It is that numbing fear that those who inspired the bombings, as well as those who executed them, attempted to revive through videotape yesterday. The images of Ayman al-Zawahri all but parading the dead assassin Shehzad Tanweer were designed not just to reinforce the memory of July 7, 2005, but to amplify, artificially, the prospect of further terrorist atrocities on British soil, and air yet again the crass allegation that these attacks were a reprisal that the country, via its Government, invited upon itself. Fear, the likes of al-Qaeda calculate, is a commodity that can be fashioned to their advantage.

But while grief is the proper prerogative of those who have buried sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, hope not fear should be firmly in the minds of all who will quietly observe the two minutes of reflection that begin at noon today. For the many predictions made that Londoners would never use the transport network as before, or that they might flee the city or turn on those in their midst who shared the faith of the four men who were responsible for the atrocities, have been shown to be shallow. This is not only because “life has to go on”: people have chosen that life will carry on, not forgetting 7/7, but not being the prisoner of that date either.

Which is why the bombings were a plot that failed. The words of Tanweer yesterday have a pathetic side to them. Here was an angry and deluded young man, incoherent as to what he was aggrieved about, exploited by a cabal whose notion of courage is to recruit other people to kill themselves and to kill those of whom they knew nothing, but from whom they would take everything. Such deeds may be the cause of this anniversary. They are not its legacy. Hope is that epilogue.