As the 10th anniversary of the London bombings on 7/7 is
marked with wreaths, services of remembrance and moments of silence, my
thoughts are taken back to that day in a very personal way.
Like millions of other Londoners, I caught the tube into the
centre of London that morning. I count
myself fortunate that I was already off the tube and at my destination when the
first bomb exploded, tearing through metal, flesh and bone with indiscriminate
indifference.
I was visiting my wife, Mel at Bart’s Hospital (near St
Paul’s). She was half way through yet
another 3 months in hospital after her near fatal accident in 2003. It was not going well. In May she began a final series of
reconstructive surgery on her leg and abdomen, attempting to cover areas of
flesh which had been torn away by the tarmac and the lorry’s wheels. After the first operation she was held
together with over 120 shiny metal staples which made her leg and stomach look
like a giant zip, but the wounds intended to improve her appearance wouldn’t
heal, and bit by bit, the necrotic tissue which resulted had to be removed,
painfully and hopelessly.
I was in the ward with her when news of the bombs started to
come in. We had already heard an unusual
number of sirens outside, and now the hospital was gearing up for a major
incident. Beds were being emptied of all
but the most seriously ill. Patients
were being sent home or moved to less acute wards. Those being admitted for planned surgery were
being turned away, and the hospital staff were whispering the latest reports to
each other.
Our first reaction was fear.
They wouldn’t try to send Mel home, would they? With the number of tubes and machines she was
linked to, it would have been a nightmare.
We need not have worried. Mel’s
situation was too serious for that to be an option, and so we settled into
waiting in the largely empty ward – waiting for whatever would follow.
By now the streets outside were eerily quiet. Traffic was almost non-existent cut off by
the many road closures. The only sound
of traffic was the wail of sirens from ambulances, police and fire trucks,
often travelling at high speed along the empty roads.
A television was brought into the nursing station, and
hospital staff gathered there in every spare moment to try to glean more
information in the confusion which followed the blasts. Mixed in with the unfolding horror of what
had happened, there were fears of more bombs, more attacks.
In the end only a handful of victims were brought to Mel’s
ward, and only one stayed beyond a few days.
But the effect on that victim’s life was clear and dramatic. In the bed next to Mel’s was a young woman
with severe lacerations to her face, arms and legs. She too had parts of her body held together
with stiches and staples. She too had to
endure painful changes of dressings and wonder at the long term effects on her
life. But her wounds had not been caused by accidental negligence – they had been coldly and deliberately inflicted in a
planned and co-ordinated attack designed to kill and maim as many people as
possible. Mel and I heard her crying
with her fiancé and family, day after day as they came to terms with what had
happened.
At the end of the day, I remember having to walk home to
Brixton – along with many other people for whom it was the only means of
getting out of the centre of London.
I also remember all the security alerts on the tube in the
days that followed. In the heightened
levels of alert, every suspicious bag or situation was met with trains being
stopped, and announcements over the tannoy asking passengers to exit the
station immediately. I remember the calm
and stoic way in which commuters responded each time, without panic as we made
our way to the surface and tried to work out how to complete our journeys.
Finally, I remember the shooting and killing of Jean Charles
de Menezes at Stockwell tube station – one of our two local stations – by
police who mistook him for a bomber because of bungled intelligence and the
puffer jacket he was wearing. Yet another
victim of the bombings.
Today, 10 years on, what has changed?
For the UK, the focus has shifted from Al Qaeda to ISIS, but
the threat remains the same. Around the
world, acts of terror continue on an almost daily basis. Suicide bombers have become common
place and lone gunmen still wreak havoc in people’s lives, claiming allegiance
to some misguided creedal cause.
Over the last 10 years, the terror of rocket attacks on
Israel from Gaza have been met with the terror of missiles and artillery rounds
fired from Israeli jets and tanks. Iraq
and Syria have descended in to the anarchy which has allowed ISIS to grow and
impose its brutal power on millions. The
lives of people in hotels and shopping centres in Mumbai and Kenya have been
devastated and hundreds of children and young women have been abducted in
Nigeria. In the USA, marathon runners were blown up in Boston. In Europe, cartoonists,
journalists and Jews have been targeted with bullets designed to exact
retribution on anyone who believes that the pen is mightier than the sword.
In recent days, tourists were gunned down on a
beach in Tunisia, mosques were bombed in Kuwait and Nigeria, and a young white
man killed worshippers at a Bible study in the ‘black church’ which had
welcomed him in Charleston, USA.
So what is the answer?
Certainly not the law of revenge which seems to dominate the
conflict between the Israeli Government and Palestinians. Certainly not the spiral of violence that we
see in some parts of the world as different communities become more and more
sectarian, demonising those who have hurt them to the point where retaliations
are just as inhuman as the acts which led to them. Not even the ever higher levels of security
and surveillance which affect all our lives and yet cannot detect every
threat.
In the long run perhaps the only way forward is one which at
first appears weak – yet demands huge inner strength.
It is the path which family members of many Charleston victims have courageously sought to embrace when they faced the murderer of their
loved ones in court.
People like
the daughter of victim Ethel Lance:
“I will never talk to her ever again. I will never hold her
ever again. You hurt me. You hurt a lot
of people. But God forgive you. I forgive you.”
Others
acknowledged how hard it is to forgive and yet spoke of beginning that journey, “For me, I'm a work in progress, and I acknowledge that I'm very
angry. We have to forgive. I pray God on your
soul. And I also thank God I won't be around when your judgement day comes.”
In such
forgiveness, there is a powerful challenge – the challenge to change.
Anthony Thompson, the grandson of victim Myra Thompson, told
the killer, “I forgive you, my family forgives you. … We would like you to take
this opportunity to repent. Do that and you'll be better off than you are right
now.”
Nor is this simply a Christian response. Malala Yousafzai hit headlines around the
world after miraculously surviving being shot in the head and neck by a Taliban
gunman in Pakistan when she was just 15.
Two years later she became the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize
recipient.
When she addressed the UN on her 16th birthday,
she said these words,
“I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he
stands in front of me, I would not shoot him.
This is the compassion I have learnt from Muhammad-the prophet of mercy,
Jesus Christ and the Lord Buddha. This
is the legacy of change that I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson
Mandela, and Muhammad Ali Jina. This is
the philosophy of non-violence that I have learnt from Gandhi Jee, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa… That is what my
soul is telling me, be peaceful and love everyone.”
In the end, hate
can never conquer hate – costly, committed, forgiving love can.