Ecopoeia
10-07-2005, 14:55
The following piece from The Observer really, for me, sums up London's reaction to the bombings. It certainly expresses how my friends and I dealt with events.
Link (http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1525378,00.html)
A kind word, a caring act and a city transformed by tragedy
Euan Ferguson
Sunday July 10, 2005
The Observer
You do, as they say, find yourself looking at your neighbours differently. For many hours on Thursday and a strange number on Friday, I did. Not looking at them with suspicion: not casting quiet second glances at unsettling combinations of skin colour, luggage, garb and facial hair. Looking at them, instead, with fresh, new and very un-London eyes, seeing them as people.
Late on Thursday, in the centre of the capital, I found myself quite involuntarily stepping to the side of an old woman who was hobbling with devastating slowness across one of the few still busy junctions: stepping to her right, my arm half-raised against the milling traffic, ready, I suppose, in some ill-thought-out piece of pointless idiocy to take the hit. Half an hour afterwards, a man with those awful summer three-quarter shorts, odd socks, sunken eyes and too much shopping paused for breath off Tottenham Court Road and I found myself asking, perhaps crassly, whether he wanted a hand.
For one day, the bombers managed the near-impossible: they made Londoners talk to each other. It won't last, of course; which is very possibly as it should be. Within the week the sullen shoehorned corn-rows of commuters will again be doing their best to avoid eye contact, feigning all-consuming interest in the wording of their ticket or, less fathomably, the writings of Dan Brown.
It started, this refreshing difference, as soon as I opened my front door to set off by foot for King's Cross. By the (empty) bus stop, people were comparing notes. One had returned from the shop with an A-Z and was sharing it around. Behind, a resident was making phone calls on her land-line and relaying the news from her open door. These people don't talk to each other! This isn't just London, it's Highgate, where couples can sit in cafés waiting for an introduction before they remember they've been married for 40 years.
Half an hour later I heard screams. Of glee. Rounding a corner into Polygon Road, I saw the girls and boys of St Mary and St Pancras Primary engaged in a hell-for-leather race across the playground, balancing coloured beanbags on their heads with wildly varying success. Around the next corner, a woman in a car was growing agitated at her inability to find any way around King's Cross, and one of the many workers on the Euro-terminal redirected to traffic duties guided her forward with the words 'Big friendly Irish feller over there, he'll sort you out.' And he did, with a smile and a stew-thick accent which, a very few years ago, perhaps wouldn't have been best received right outside a London station 90 minutes after four bombs had gone off.
Had they? Had they really? It was becoming hard, that morning, as a relentless warm, wet smirr dampened the centre of London, to reconcile London's reaction with what had just happened. Laughter, smiles, playground races, jokes. Beanbags. All within a stone's throw of King's Cross. Certainly, within another few minutes, all the evidence was there: miles of cordons, making the usually gridlocked Euston Road look like the start of a flee-all-is-lost disaster movie.
But shouts, fleeing, panic, tears: shock, even? Not then, not there. There was a kind of studied anger and a frustration, and much muttered swearing at the forbidding patience of police, some dark humour and an eager sharing of the latest news. I don't know if I would quite call it the Blitz spirit: I didn't think it then, and it seems a cliché, but in retrospect this probably was what much of it really was like in the East End those years ago - grumbling impatience and a caustic view of authority, rather than cheerfully sharing their apples and pears with raggedy urchins and singing 'Knees Up, Mother Brown'.
As the heavens opened, near one o'clock, many around the Tavistock Square area took shelter. In Mabel's Tavern, in Mabledon Place, an increased seriousness was creeping in, as we saw, via TV cameras, what we could not see with our own eyes around the cordoned corner. That looked like ... was that really blood, all over the walls of the headquarters of the British Medical Association? Alison, who had earlier come from there, nodded silently. She had heard screaming from inside the courtyard.
At other tables, strangers offered each other their phones when they managed to get them working; elderly Newcastle shoppers with Harrods bags leaning across to tell over-pierced teen midriffs: 'I've got a signal, love ... ' Sky News continued, behind them, to scroll ticker-tape news of the found and the missing. Dark smiles, too, when one floundering TV interviewer asked an expert: 'Would the indications be that this was planned in secret?' 'Course not!' called a builder. 'They held blinking roadshows about it, seaside roadshows, how'd you miss them?', except he doesn't say blinking.
Ken came on and the volume was turned up, and as he spoke with quiet anger at what had happened much of the babble stopped. Later, I heard that, as he finished, this newspaper's sports staff, drawn from such famous London boroughs as Kurri-Kurri and Belfast, stood in the office and clapped. Outside, the sun had come out. In Burton Street, a policeman was explaining with near-infinite tolerance to a besuited moron why he couldn't use his usual route. 'Sir, you may have heard about some bombs ... ' Beside us a doctor in a light-blue operating smock ran past, panting.
Knowing what we know now about the Russell Square blast, it seems odd that those above ground, on the day itself, were taking it so calmly. At the crossroads of Marchmont Street and Tavistock Place, right beside the cordon, a minute's stroll from bus and tube carnage, couples were sitting in the sun outside Valena's café, eating pasta, drinking rosé. It was terribly easy, for too many seconds, to forget what had happened. Then you glanced down: there by a bollard lie a couple of plastic containers, bearing the stickers '6 Continent Hotels. Orange Segments', full of water, brought out a short while back to give to the soot-blackened refugees from below. And beside them, white sheets, drenched in that morning's rain, left behind like forgotten laundry: used earlier, of course, to cover bodies.
There was an odd openness to faces, watching kindnesses, water and phones, offered from the kind of places you pass in London a million times without ever seeing them: Quaker halls, cheap tourist hotels. Those sitting on their own outside the cafés had a vaguely expectant look to them: feel free, for once, spoke the faces; free to strike up a conversation. It was pretty much the same all day, until an exhausted sun began to set. Commuters took to boats towards twilight, as mobile in-boxes began to fill in lumpy seconds with a dozen 'Are you OK?' texts, logjammed throughout the day, and joked weakly about 'Plan B' as they started their six-mile walks.
A friend's sister, caught in the city, just off the Eurostar and struggling to get north, called from Scotland the next day to thank me for the offer of somewhere to sleep, and tacit gratitude, I'm sure, for the fact she hadn't, after all, had to lie on the floor between my socks. 'Also, I sort of want to know who to write to in London to say thank you. I didn't think the city was like that. Everyone: taxi-drivers, London Transport staff, bus drivers ... they couldn't have been kinder, warmer, put themselves out more.'
And, as I say, it won't last; the city is already reasserting its grumpy worst. But for a remarkable while it showed how swiftly it can transform. To what, I asked one young City worker near dusk, as he trudged up Pentonville Road, did he ascribe the day's mood? He didn't want to give his name, 'because I don't want to seem callous. But, in a way, I think we knew it was going to happen, and now it has - and it sounds awful to say - but it's not as bad as it might have been'. Actually, of course, it is: for anyone who lost someone, it is more unconscionably rending than we can start to credit. The sentiment would not have gone down well either with emergency workers: exhausted and grim-faced and quietly very angry as they sat on kerbs and smoked, and knew there was more the next day. But I do, sort of, know what he means, or meant at the time.
London's reaction, this sudden coming-together, has been put down, by one or two commentators, to the new spirit engendered by the Olympic win; and, hell, who knows? But I really don't think so; I think it goes back further than that. We did know it was coming. We may have forgotten, for a while, but inside we still knew the bad stuff, like a smoker's relationship with his lungs. No one in this city can forget New York's reaction to 9/11; and a quiet part of Londoners - by which I mean, simply, people living in London - had been preparing for theirs. And as it turned out a bizarre glass of wine in the sunshine, with strangers, beside a cordon specked with blood, and an angry two fingers to them all, the life-hating young fantasists, the aberrations, was a significant part of it.
Link (http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1525378,00.html)
A kind word, a caring act and a city transformed by tragedy
Euan Ferguson
Sunday July 10, 2005
The Observer
You do, as they say, find yourself looking at your neighbours differently. For many hours on Thursday and a strange number on Friday, I did. Not looking at them with suspicion: not casting quiet second glances at unsettling combinations of skin colour, luggage, garb and facial hair. Looking at them, instead, with fresh, new and very un-London eyes, seeing them as people.
Late on Thursday, in the centre of the capital, I found myself quite involuntarily stepping to the side of an old woman who was hobbling with devastating slowness across one of the few still busy junctions: stepping to her right, my arm half-raised against the milling traffic, ready, I suppose, in some ill-thought-out piece of pointless idiocy to take the hit. Half an hour afterwards, a man with those awful summer three-quarter shorts, odd socks, sunken eyes and too much shopping paused for breath off Tottenham Court Road and I found myself asking, perhaps crassly, whether he wanted a hand.
For one day, the bombers managed the near-impossible: they made Londoners talk to each other. It won't last, of course; which is very possibly as it should be. Within the week the sullen shoehorned corn-rows of commuters will again be doing their best to avoid eye contact, feigning all-consuming interest in the wording of their ticket or, less fathomably, the writings of Dan Brown.
It started, this refreshing difference, as soon as I opened my front door to set off by foot for King's Cross. By the (empty) bus stop, people were comparing notes. One had returned from the shop with an A-Z and was sharing it around. Behind, a resident was making phone calls on her land-line and relaying the news from her open door. These people don't talk to each other! This isn't just London, it's Highgate, where couples can sit in cafés waiting for an introduction before they remember they've been married for 40 years.
Half an hour later I heard screams. Of glee. Rounding a corner into Polygon Road, I saw the girls and boys of St Mary and St Pancras Primary engaged in a hell-for-leather race across the playground, balancing coloured beanbags on their heads with wildly varying success. Around the next corner, a woman in a car was growing agitated at her inability to find any way around King's Cross, and one of the many workers on the Euro-terminal redirected to traffic duties guided her forward with the words 'Big friendly Irish feller over there, he'll sort you out.' And he did, with a smile and a stew-thick accent which, a very few years ago, perhaps wouldn't have been best received right outside a London station 90 minutes after four bombs had gone off.
Had they? Had they really? It was becoming hard, that morning, as a relentless warm, wet smirr dampened the centre of London, to reconcile London's reaction with what had just happened. Laughter, smiles, playground races, jokes. Beanbags. All within a stone's throw of King's Cross. Certainly, within another few minutes, all the evidence was there: miles of cordons, making the usually gridlocked Euston Road look like the start of a flee-all-is-lost disaster movie.
But shouts, fleeing, panic, tears: shock, even? Not then, not there. There was a kind of studied anger and a frustration, and much muttered swearing at the forbidding patience of police, some dark humour and an eager sharing of the latest news. I don't know if I would quite call it the Blitz spirit: I didn't think it then, and it seems a cliché, but in retrospect this probably was what much of it really was like in the East End those years ago - grumbling impatience and a caustic view of authority, rather than cheerfully sharing their apples and pears with raggedy urchins and singing 'Knees Up, Mother Brown'.
As the heavens opened, near one o'clock, many around the Tavistock Square area took shelter. In Mabel's Tavern, in Mabledon Place, an increased seriousness was creeping in, as we saw, via TV cameras, what we could not see with our own eyes around the cordoned corner. That looked like ... was that really blood, all over the walls of the headquarters of the British Medical Association? Alison, who had earlier come from there, nodded silently. She had heard screaming from inside the courtyard.
At other tables, strangers offered each other their phones when they managed to get them working; elderly Newcastle shoppers with Harrods bags leaning across to tell over-pierced teen midriffs: 'I've got a signal, love ... ' Sky News continued, behind them, to scroll ticker-tape news of the found and the missing. Dark smiles, too, when one floundering TV interviewer asked an expert: 'Would the indications be that this was planned in secret?' 'Course not!' called a builder. 'They held blinking roadshows about it, seaside roadshows, how'd you miss them?', except he doesn't say blinking.
Ken came on and the volume was turned up, and as he spoke with quiet anger at what had happened much of the babble stopped. Later, I heard that, as he finished, this newspaper's sports staff, drawn from such famous London boroughs as Kurri-Kurri and Belfast, stood in the office and clapped. Outside, the sun had come out. In Burton Street, a policeman was explaining with near-infinite tolerance to a besuited moron why he couldn't use his usual route. 'Sir, you may have heard about some bombs ... ' Beside us a doctor in a light-blue operating smock ran past, panting.
Knowing what we know now about the Russell Square blast, it seems odd that those above ground, on the day itself, were taking it so calmly. At the crossroads of Marchmont Street and Tavistock Place, right beside the cordon, a minute's stroll from bus and tube carnage, couples were sitting in the sun outside Valena's café, eating pasta, drinking rosé. It was terribly easy, for too many seconds, to forget what had happened. Then you glanced down: there by a bollard lie a couple of plastic containers, bearing the stickers '6 Continent Hotels. Orange Segments', full of water, brought out a short while back to give to the soot-blackened refugees from below. And beside them, white sheets, drenched in that morning's rain, left behind like forgotten laundry: used earlier, of course, to cover bodies.
There was an odd openness to faces, watching kindnesses, water and phones, offered from the kind of places you pass in London a million times without ever seeing them: Quaker halls, cheap tourist hotels. Those sitting on their own outside the cafés had a vaguely expectant look to them: feel free, for once, spoke the faces; free to strike up a conversation. It was pretty much the same all day, until an exhausted sun began to set. Commuters took to boats towards twilight, as mobile in-boxes began to fill in lumpy seconds with a dozen 'Are you OK?' texts, logjammed throughout the day, and joked weakly about 'Plan B' as they started their six-mile walks.
A friend's sister, caught in the city, just off the Eurostar and struggling to get north, called from Scotland the next day to thank me for the offer of somewhere to sleep, and tacit gratitude, I'm sure, for the fact she hadn't, after all, had to lie on the floor between my socks. 'Also, I sort of want to know who to write to in London to say thank you. I didn't think the city was like that. Everyone: taxi-drivers, London Transport staff, bus drivers ... they couldn't have been kinder, warmer, put themselves out more.'
And, as I say, it won't last; the city is already reasserting its grumpy worst. But for a remarkable while it showed how swiftly it can transform. To what, I asked one young City worker near dusk, as he trudged up Pentonville Road, did he ascribe the day's mood? He didn't want to give his name, 'because I don't want to seem callous. But, in a way, I think we knew it was going to happen, and now it has - and it sounds awful to say - but it's not as bad as it might have been'. Actually, of course, it is: for anyone who lost someone, it is more unconscionably rending than we can start to credit. The sentiment would not have gone down well either with emergency workers: exhausted and grim-faced and quietly very angry as they sat on kerbs and smoked, and knew there was more the next day. But I do, sort of, know what he means, or meant at the time.
London's reaction, this sudden coming-together, has been put down, by one or two commentators, to the new spirit engendered by the Olympic win; and, hell, who knows? But I really don't think so; I think it goes back further than that. We did know it was coming. We may have forgotten, for a while, but inside we still knew the bad stuff, like a smoker's relationship with his lungs. No one in this city can forget New York's reaction to 9/11; and a quiet part of Londoners - by which I mean, simply, people living in London - had been preparing for theirs. And as it turned out a bizarre glass of wine in the sunshine, with strangers, beside a cordon specked with blood, and an angry two fingers to them all, the life-hating young fantasists, the aberrations, was a significant part of it.