In the glitter of heat outside one of the filthiest and busiest of London's stations at lunchtime last Friday, the sun was being swallowed straight up by the 15 grim black barriers which sprang up the previous month to stop someone driving through the entrance and blowing themselves, and many others, up. Slug-like they squat, two long meters each of unforgiving steel-and-concrete composite; obsidian, authoritarian, fearful; sucking in light which will never return, draining of hope. They are covered in ketchup.
Ketchup, wrappers, sachets, little bubbles of spilt cola, evaporating fast. Books. People. The "vehicle access barriers" being tried at Victoria Station, and also at Waterloo, a year this week after four suicide bombers stole the lives of 52 people and injured 700, are as happy a testament as one could wish to the notion of resilience. Art students with their chunky portfolios, builders with their orange armbands discarded, a fattish lawyer swinging his legs and flicking through the Evening Standard in desultory fashion, a couple of Japanese lovers, perched cross-legged on top of one anti-terror plinth, sharing a straw: All are treating these reminders of 7/7 as so much street furniture, snacking and lolling and sunbathing on them as do children on the pillboxes of Normandy.
London, a year on. Today marks the anniversary of that drizzly day when four young men -- Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Germaine Lindsay; their combined age, when they died, 89 years -- attempted to do to London what their al-Qaeda heroes and mentors had done to New York. They brought terror, in the form of four homemade rucksack bombs, and today there will be memories: not so much of them but of their victims. There will be silences, and thoughts, and services, including an "inter-faith" one at St Pancras Parish Church, meters from where Hussain slaughtered 14 people on the top deck of the number 30 bus.
The church, I found as I walked past it in last week's heat, is dedicated to "The Roman Boy Pancratius, who was martyred by the Emperor Diocletian in 304." One thousand seven hundred years and he still has an area named after him: For how long, I wondered, will last year's "martyrs" be similarly remembered?
On the evidence before me, traipsing round this big difficult city, they're pretty much forgotten already. At the center of what we for a second or two called our Ground Zero, the Russell Square/Tavistock Square area, you can hardly move in the sun for happy, busy people. Just around the corner, in Cartwright Gardens, all the hotels, the Euro and the Crescent and the Avonmore and the Mentone and The George, have prominent "hotel full" and "no vacancies" signs on their doors and windows.
A group of drunk young Americans -- how did they manage to get that drunk? So early? And since when did Americans get happy drunk in London? -- ask me to take their picture outside a shop called "Gay's The Word" while they pose like, um, the only word is "poofters"; I sweetly decline. There is not, it has to be said, much fear in the air.
This was almost exactly where I stood, a year ago on July 7, held back by police scene-of-crime tape, as we all stared, up the road, at Russell Square tube station, from where most victims and injured were carried. Everything, some said that day, had changed: This had been our 9/11, and London life would not be the same again. Even back then, I remember, this struck something of a false note. Certainly it was an unconscionable act and a grim day: but even by three in the afternoon, after phones began to work again, there was some semblance of life to the city: life, and defiance. For once, Londoners helped each other, looked out for each other during their long trudge home.
And now? Perhaps the best testament to city-wide resilience is that, wandering round these same places, it is rather hard to remember the mood that strange, one-off day. The bar where many gathered to hear news on the widescreen, Mabel's in Mablethorpe Street, doesn't even have news on now, not even sport: MTV fills the room and two couples argue over lunch. At Russell Square station itself, a few days before this sad anniversary, you can hardly squeeze into the station for the rush of bodies, piling between roadworks on one hand and London's best-punctuated street grocer's on the other.
As tellingly as anything, the help-others mood has gone. Of course London is, in places, friendly enough -- just beside the station, the local paper-seller joshes a young girl in a wheelchair about her night on the tiles with the kind of fabulously overdone breezy Cockney charm that would have lost Dick Van Dyke the role in the first minute of the audition. But elsewhere, the mood I witnessed on July 7 last year, when men helped older women with heavy bags up the long Pentonville Road, and the few cars paused for thought, and for the pedestrians, has gone. Londoners are pleasantly rude again, banging into each other, and cursing, and hurrying, and not really giving much of one about other people: And this is probably pretty much as it should be, because it's not twinned with Amsterdam or Toronto or Narnia or some such, it's London, and all the healthier for it.
Perhaps the most telling moment came when I traveled down to Victoria, on the less than delightful Circle Line. I was probably the only one thinking, as we passed Baker Street, the old, old arches of London's first proper Tube station, that the brick arches and these half-lit dank walls would have been the last things properly seen by Mohammed Sidique "Sid" Khan before he took the lives of six, and injured 163, many of them savagely, in the Edgware Road explosion.
And the bombing was even more strongly in my mind five minutes later, when the train drew up just before pulling into Gloucester Road. The train stopped, and the lights flickered, and darkened.
We glanced at each other, hot and irritated. Self-help books came in useful, for once, as fans. Time passed. I began to notice the notices, realizing how pointless many of the anti-terrorism moves must, by default, be, given that as soon as someone puts themselves far beyond accepted levels of human behavior they instantly have a huge and unfair advantage. Please keep your bag with you at all times, said the notices, and everyone goes along with them. Please keep feet off seats [along with a diagram to show you how to put your feet on the seats if you hadn't earlier worked that out]; please give up your seat. Penalties for ... stand clear of the ... no exit ... stand on the right ... keep left ... mind the gap. No signs saying, simply: "Please do not, pointlessly, blow yourselves, never mind others, up."
And then the announcement came -- about "smouldering" on the line ahead -- and one or two glances were less sanguine than before. Minutes passed: 10, 15. "Smouldering" isn't a great word to hear down a darkened Tube, a year on. Another five minutes and we were asked, most politely, if we would mind all walking out of the train. There wasn't even the first smidgeon of panic. There was, actually, laughter. "This is a first!" I heard; and a teenager was asking eagerly if that meant he got to walk on the track. We didn't, in the end: just had to get to the nose of the first carriage and edge our way onto the end of the Gloucester Road platform: and it may have been a little bit of a relief for me to get upstairs again, into the sunshine, and the bad, bad traffic, because I had been thinking about this, but everyone else seemed to be laughing or cursing, which is, I suspect, not exactly the effect those four boys were aiming for, a year ago.
A little later I went back to King's Cross, where we are all now reassured about the presence of CCTV by the fact that pictures of ourselves walking are shown to us on screens, in color, on every corner. I went into the grim Euston Road McDonalds where Hussain, the bus bomber, went 10 minutes before he killed 13 people: I wondered whether he had noticed, even dropped cash into, the blue box on the counter thanking him for supporting "families and children in hospital."
I walked, slowly, towards Russell Square, thinking of the line below my feet. And around a corner, amid the dappled brick of the east side of Mecklenburgh Square, somewhere just above that bit of the Piccadilly line where Germaine Lindsay, the Jamaican outsider of the four, managed to kill almost as many as the rest put together, I saw one of the rarest houses in London: rare because it features two blue plaques from English Heritage.
On the right of the door, one to Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, 20th-century Muslim "reformer and scholar"; on the left, one to the historian RH Tawney. The scientist Sir Syed, who argued, against great opposition, that Indian Muslims should accept Western education and, to an extent, culture, and spent years planning the "Muslim Cambridge"; and the thoughtful socialist hero who preached every kind of tolerance except that towards acquisitive greed. They lived in the same building.
It was hard not to reflect that their arguments have been somewhat lost. The arguments from every side are less moderate: the arguments were carried out, a year ago, directly under their feet. But the city in which they chose to live, it would seem, speaks on: It ignores, mostly, the savagery beneath the streets, and the bumbling authoritarianism above: and, simply, rightly, gets on with being London.
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