Life marches on in London

Chris Hampson London bureau chief • E-mail

LONDON — Thursday July 7. It is the morning rush hour.

My usual train through the Western suburbs is canceled and so I take one that brings me right into the heart of London. It is inconvenient and time-consuming.

As I step out onto the platform a loudspeaker announces that the Underground station is closed. A moment later it says several Underground stations are closed.

My day is going badly. I’m late — and now I’m going to have to schlep across London.

I walk onto the train station concourse. It is bursting at the seams with people. Transport police seal off the escalator to the Underground.

I think about buying some shaving cream from the Body Shop kiosk. I stop and look. But something inside me says: Not now.

I walk out into the street, intending to look for a cab. There are hundreds of people walking, all talking on their mobile phones. It is difficult to get a signal. My news desk tells me there’s a “power outage” that has hit a number of stations.

As I walk further, the sidewalks are unaccountably filled with people — thousands of them outside their offices. There are sirens. A fire truck speeds by.

I call the new desk. It’s the last call I can make for an hour. But I manage to say: “This doesn’t feel right. This could be a terrorist attack.”

Twenty minutes or so later, in a square not far from the station, a bus explodes, killing many of its passengers. I do not hear the bang, though I hear more sirens. Fifty minutes earlier, I learn later, three bombs have detonated on crowded underground trains.

Terrorists.

Not the first time
This is not the first time I’ve experienced the aftermath of their work.

In Belfast, my hotel was blown up in an IRA blast (for years it carried the unenviable reputation of being the most bombed hotel in Europe). 

The window lay on top of the bed I would have been sleeping in, had I not been making merry late in to the night elsewhere. 

Huge shards of glass stabbed deep into the leather sofas of the hotel bar where I’d been a few hours earlier. The windows in the pub opposite — every one — lay shattered across the tables where I’d sat drinking Guinness. Thank god for the black stuff, I thought, for keeping me out of harm’s way.

Hometown attacked
But none touched me as much as the time my hometown of Warrington was attacked. 

A bomb was placed with evil cunning in a cast iron trash can in the main street, so that it became a massive blast of shrapnel. And in an act of unsurpassed cruelty, a second device exploded in another trash can 100 yards away — timed to catch those fleeing from the first.

These heroes of the terrorists’ cause killed a teenage boy and a toddler and wounded scores more. It was the day before Mothers’ Day 1993 — a pernicious sense of timing from twisted minds.

My first call was to my own mother, praying that she had not gone into town to do some shopping. I called some old friends. They were also safe, though almost too shocked to talk.

Then I got in my car and drove there as fast as I could. For a week I walked the streets of my childhood and stood outside the hospitals, reporting on men’s inhumanity to children.

The bombers presumably ran away from this, the "softest" of targets, stopping only to slap themselves on the back at another job well done.

How times have changed.

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