In the U.K., a year of marvel ... and then murder

Chris Hampson London bureau chief • E-mail

LONDON — For a glorious hour or two, Londoners cheered and danced for joy in the city’s streets.

But their celebration of snagging the 2012 Olympics from the French was to be short-lived.

By next morning, the revelers were displaced on the capital’s sidewalks by the dead, the wounded, the distraught.

The so-called War on Terror had arrived on our own turf, right in our heartland, delivered in person to our door. 

For the first time, in a city whose history is all too well-acquainted with bombs, we saw close-up the cruel and indiscriminate handiwork of a modern phenomenon: the suicide bomber.

It was, in its way, a smaller echo of the outrage known to the western world as 9/11. It sprang from the same angry and fanatical roots.  And so it became known here, symbolically, as 7/7. 

Joy of Olympic win short-lived
The day before, a crowd of thousands waited in Trafalgar Square for the news that London had won the battle against Paris to host the 2012 Olympic Games. They cheered so loud that Lord Nelson, high above them on his stone column, must have wished himself deaf rather than famously blind in one eye.

Better still, we had “stolen” the games from our arch-rivals the French. To the British, victory always tastes better for a hint of garlic.

It felt good to be one of us.

It was a feeling shared by the nation's prime minister. Up in Scotland at the crucial G8 summit, Tony Blair broke away for a moment from the life-and-death business of Africa’s debt crisis to await the Olympic decision.

Less than 24 hours later he broke away again — to return to the scene of devastation and carnage wrought on three tube trains and a Number 30 double-decker bus, by terrorists who called this country home.

For Londoners, there is something special about a red double-decker bus. They are part of the lifeblood that runs through the city’s arteries. As buses go, they have character, familiarity, a friendly demeanor setting them apart from the ordinary, metal-hearted monsters of the city’s congested roads.

They have long served England well. During the First World War they carried troops to — and from — the slaughter of the trenches.

When I was a kid in Sunday school, they were truly transports of delight — conveyances for our annual day trip to the seaside. My dad earned his living driving one, and I used to stand alongside him, watching him in childish awe.

So of all the shocking images of that day, there is none more poignant for me than the pictures of a devastated London bus, with its upper deck turned inside out, burst like a paper bag by a bomb.

Thirteen people — all but one just trying to get on with their everyday lives — died in the explosion on the bus. A total of 52 innocent people perished that day, or later as a result of their injuries.

The bombers died too, sacrificing their young lives in the mistaken belief that they might achieve something other than infamy.

They, for sure, did not believe it was good to be one of us.

Carrying on
What followed was, to an extent, the intended consequence of terrorism. No question how such actions get their name. The massive and unsettling manhunt for those involved, the fear that other bombers would strike again, the trepidation of just trying to get to work, affected millions of us. It still does.

What is equally true is that the city and its people carried on with their business.

Two weeks later, bombers tried to strike again in copycat attacks. This time the explosives failed to go off. They escaped.

By the afternoon, the subway trains and buses were crowded as usual.

The alleged perpetrators were captured within days, dramatically, and at gunpoint. I now know what 15 million people sighing with relief sounds like.   

And so we wait, for the next time. We know, as sure as we can know anything, that terrorists will try to attack us again. Regrettably, it’s what some choose to do for their living — and their dying.

The gulf between what motivates them to want to hurt us — and our ability to persuade them not to — is for now as much a matter for the police as the politicians.

Be that as it may, for most of us, for now, life goes on. It has to.

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