A KIND of blankness was written across the faces of people in the street. Everybody was walking.

The whole sound of London was different. As I made my way from the banks of the Thames to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, the roar of traffic and the clatter of trains had been silenced. In their place was the distant wail of sirens, the chop and thud of helicopters above, and around me only the noise of shoes: the pad of thousands of feet.

It was raining: the gentlest of rain from a grey London sky, soaking hair and shoulders. Few had been planning to walk. Caught without umbrellas we might have hurried crossly from shelter to shelter, but instead there was no hurry: just resignation. Wet faces in the soft rain betrayed neither anger nor fear nor even any great sense of tragedy, but only a sort of emptiness. “What more can you say?” we were thinking. “What else can you do?”

Nobody pushed or shoved, nobody shouted or laughed, nobody seemed impatient. There was a respectfulness between people. Intending bus passengers exchanged information about the whethers, wheres and whens. A dot-matrix indicator in a bus shelter said “No. 15 to Blackwall: 3 mins” but for all we knew it might have said that for hours, and still be saying it at the crack of doom.

A young mother who had walked to take her daughter away from school told me that she was worried about all the children whose parents had not yet come. Had I heard of any new bombs? she asked. “I think it was French people, Mummy,” said the little girl with great seriousness, “angry because Paris didn’t win.”

“Ssh, darling, don’t be silly,” said her mother, but gently.

It struck me that on the previous day everyone in the London street had shared the strange experience of being among millions who were all talking, in every language, about the same thing: the Olympic result. Today we knew the dark side of that same experience. There was only one topic of conversation, only one news item on every television and radio, only one thought on every Londoner’s mind: what had happened, what might happen, and where it would all end.

At Cannon Street, the way into London was blocked by the police. Turning right towards Whitechapel I sensed something odd about the scene: all the roadside payphone kiosks were full. Some people queued outside. Others tried to make their mobile phones work as they walked: a hundred thousand text messages jostling for transmission and all saying the same thing: “I’m OK.”

Outside the Royal London Hospital there were television satellite vans and a small crowd. Sheltering beneath a plane tree a woman, shaken and hurt, was talking to reporters. She had started her morning with the careful application of make-up to her pretty face. Now it was shot-blasted with little black pits and bumps and curious scratches no bigger than an eyelash.

“I was on the Piccadilly Line,” she said. “My name is Caroline Chrobok: c-h-r-o-b . . .” The big red Virgin helicopter, roaring on to the hospital helipad on the roof above, drowned out the rest. The Whitechapel street market was almost silent. “People aren’t comin’ in,” said the assistant at the nearby Sainsbury’s checkout. “I wish we was goin’ ’ome. ’Cept ’ow would we get ’ome?”

I got home walking, passing again through quiet streets, bleak faces, and the dogged footfall of Londoners intent on getting to wherever it was they had set out for before it all happened, indifferent to whether, now that it had, there was any longer any point. “I’ve started, so I’ll finish,” was the instinct. What else can you do?

It struck me that the disaster movies have got it wrong. Perhaps at the first hit those who are adjacent to the impact do panic, shriek and run. Perhaps for an hour or two the public mood really is of excitement, terror, agitation. Perhaps if you are among the minority caught in the middle of it, the adrenalin really does run.

But for the rest, life carries on. There is a polite determination not to be deflected. Call it displacement activity or call it sang-froid, but a strange, almost cold detachment comes over people.

Have you ever trodden on an army of ants on the move? Remove your boot and in that small patch is mayhem: a field of the dead and injured, while on the edge a few insects pause to look. But the army carries on, parting to bypass the tragedy, as a river parts to flow around a rock.

Those Londoners among whom I walked yesterday in the soft rain seemed to feel not indifference, but the curiously blank determination — the determination of those whom the boot has missed — to carry on.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Fern Britton: 'I still can't see that I was wrong'
• Extreme cooking
• Easy French: Tarte Tatin