A LONDON morning that began tinged with joy and incredulity at victory in securing the Olympic Games was plunged into horrified disbelief as explosives tore through the underground arteries of the city, bringing death and dismay where, a few hours earlier, there had been celebration.
The contrast between the jubilation and the carnage, the stateliness of the G8 summit and the chaos in London, served only to heighten the brutality, as the terrorist traffickers in symbolism had planned.
In moments, familiar London names became monuments to mass murder. Liverpool Street, Edgware Road, Russell Square, Tavistock Place: four bombs, more than 50 dead and hundreds injured in the most devastating terrorist attack on British soil.
The first explosion tore through a train near Aldgate, down the line from Liverpool Street; the second, five minutes later, killed more than 20 people between King’s Cross and Russell Square. Then a reeling pause of 20 minutes, and a third explosion on a train coming into Edgware Road, which tore through a wall and into another train. Then a change of terrorist tactic, possibly forced by the closure of the Underground: a fourth bomb, perhaps attached to a suicide bomber, tore off the top deck of a No 30 bus on the corner of Woburn Square and Tavistock Place.
Staggered, the city was immobilised and silent as traffic stopped, work ceased, banks closed and an entire urban population tried to locate friends and family, recalling 9/11 and Madrid with rising fear.
At first Londoners had reason to disbelieve the worst. The authorities talked of “power surges” on the Underground. But as the first casualties emerged, amid television pictures of a bus torn in two, the horrible reality struck home.
Stocks plummeted, the civil emergencies Cobra committee of senior ministers swung into operation, and police assumed operational command. The first day of the summit in Scotland was transformed into a conference of war.
Above ground, eerie silence broken by the mounting keen of sirens. Below ground, a vision of the inferno, a hellhole of fire, shattered glass, buckled metal and human pain. Smoke poured through the tunnels from each of the blasts. At Edgware Road one man, badly injured, was hurled under the carriages. “Everything was black, and filled with smoke,” a survivor said. “It was terrifying. People were incredibly calm but very, very shocked.” For half an hour the trapped survivors waited, choking and terrified, listening to the trapped man’s screams.
Somewhere in the streets of London, three or four murderers walked swiftly away; or perhaps they stayed to watch.
Ayobami Bello, 46, had just visited the bank and was 50ft away from the bus to Marble Arch when it exploded. “The bus went to pieces,” he said. “There were so many bodies on the floor. The back was completely gone, it was blown off completely, and a dead body was hanging out and there were dead bodies on the road. It was a horrible thing.”
Doctors and staff from the nearby British Medical Association gave first aid in the street.
Tony Blair made a statement in Gleneagles, terse and taut. “Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and other civilised nations in the world,” he said. In the short space between proclaiming London as Olympic capital in 2012 and defending her as a city under siege, he seemed to have aged a decade.
In a genteel Scottish hotel he spoke of barbarity, and the grotesque irony of random commuter-killing on the opening day of a conference aimed at saving lives. “It is particularly barbaric that this has happened on a day when people are meeting to help the problems of poverty in Africa and . . . change in the environment,” he said, before speeding down to London by helicopter.
A different hotel, a different scene: in the Hilton Metropole, the reception area and lounge were converted into a field hospital. Dazed, bloody and soot-stained passengers emerged blinking into the grey drizzle and were whisked away by buses-turned-ambulances to hospitals.
At 11.30, nearly three hours after the first detonation, Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, confirmed that there had been a “co-ordinated attack” with evidence of high explosives. The shockwaves reverberated outwards from the capital. Security scares closed Brighton and East Croydon stations, France cranked up its terrorist alerts and the US Department of Homeland Security increased its level of readiness.
Security at Buckingham Palace was stepped up, trials ceased at the Old Bailey and ambulances poured into London from Berkshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent.
An Islamic website, claiming al-Qaeda responsibility, declared that “Britain is burning with fear”. That was another lie, but anxiety and uncertainty, the terrorists’ allies, gusted around the city.
“It is difficult,” Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, told the sombre House of Commons. “There are a large number of rumours and uncertainties going around for perfectly understandable reasons.” As he spoke, a van carrying blood supplies raced through Russell Square.
Mobile phone networks were jammed, to prevent further bombs from being set off remotely and to facilitate the calls of emergency workers. Electronically isolated from one another, Londoners worried and wondered. The messageboards across the television screens told their own stories of agonised waiting. “David Crook, call your brother”; “Glyn Granville please contact your daughter Jenny”.
The bombs were aimed at the attention of powerful and important people, but killed only ordinary ones, workers and tourists. “This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty,” said Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor, before he hurried home from Singapore. “It was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners.”
“Stay where you are,” said Sir Ian, as if there were any choice. “The situation is being controlled.” He picked his words carefully, like a man edging through debris: he skirted the word “panic”, declined to talk of numbers or suspects. “Stay safe, don’t travel.”
The Queen, the clergy, the MPs all condemned the cowardice, balancing grieving for the dead with gratitude to the rescuers, using the words Londoners have been dreading, but expecting to hear for years.
But there was an edge of ugliness too. Muslim groups condemned the attacks from one end of Britain to the other, but British Muslims were simultaneously advised to stay indoors amid fears of reprisals.
In Scotland the leaders assembled for a photocall without smiles and issued a joint condemnation, a series of angry statements. “We will not allow violence to change our societies or our values. Nor will we allow it to stop the work of this summit. We will continue our deliberations in the interests of a better world . . . The terrorists will not succeed.” As they spoke, hundreds of London police officers involved in the G8 security operation were returning to the capital.
In Parliament, every party stood foursquare behind the Government. George Galloway, however, could not resist declaring that Londoners had “paid the price” for Mr Blair’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and calling for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq. President Bush provided the political counterpoint. “This is incredibly vivid to me,” he said. “The contrast couldn’t be clearer between the hearts of those of us who care about human rights and human liberty and those who kill. The war on terror goes on.”
There was no warning given; no verifiable claim of responsibility; but also, in retrospect, little surprise either. Given the glimpses we have had over the years into the terrorist mind, at what other time would they attack than the start of a huge international conference, with London in the grip of festivity?
The Underground remained largely paralysed as night fell, but the bus service slowly creaked back to life, most mainline stations reopened, and an ad hoc free ferry service of small boats plied up and down the Thames. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands set off from work on foot, a mighty pedestrian crowd trudging slowly home through a shocked city.
In the space of four bombs, the memory of success in Singapore seemed impossibly far away in a parallel reality. On Wednesday Trafalgar Square was thronged and riotous; last night workers streamed across it in watchful, sombre silence.
Charles Dickens once lived in the house alongside where the bus was bombed yesterday morning. What would the great writer have made of this atrocity, the cruel horror of the best of times, immediately followed by the worst of times? “It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,” Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities. “It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
In a short space, we have witnessed the tale of two cities in one: two shocks in quick succession, one joyful, one horrendous. But also, perhaps, two victories: one in the suddenly irrelevant world of sport, and one over terrorism. Near Aldgate Tube, an old man held an armful of evening papers and handed them out to any who passed; a woman touched the shoulder of the man beside her, a gesture of solidarity to a stranger.
Michael Henning, 39, emerged from hospital with facial injuries. “I feel extremely lucky,” he said. He was 10ft away when the bomb went off near Liverpool Street.
“It is through terrorism that the people that have committed these terrible acts express their values, and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours.” For once, Blair’s Churchillianism seemed rich and right. Fight them on the Piccadilly Line, at King’s Cross and on the red double-decker. “They will never succeed.”
Last night London counted the casualties, wept for the dead, swept up the glass and blood and, as if from a smoke-scorched tunnel deep in hell, crawled slowly back towards the light.
