After Thursday's golden dawn, Friday's grey skies echoed the previous day's bleaker sunset. As I headed down the Bow Road on my way to work it was clear that the streets were rather quieter than usual. Certainly far quieter than twelve hours previously when I'd been part of the steady trickle of displaced humanity walking in the opposite direction, making its weary exodus away from the paralysed capital. And unnervingly quieter than 24 hours earlier when a joyful London had still been basking in the heady afterglow of Olympic success.
The first bus to pass me yesterday morning was half empty. Normally there are passengers rammed into every doorway of every passing bendy bus, but suddenly taking a ride up west in a fragile metal box seemed far less alluring. Another East End bus was pictured, lost and empty, on the front of the newspaper I picked up outside the station. For the first time in four years the Muslim newsagent started up a lengthy conversation with me which stretched further than a cheery smile and a thankyou. He was concerned to hear how I'd managed to get home the previous evening and proceeded to relate how a member of his family had been unnervingly close to Aldgate when the first bomb exploded. Everyone, it seemed, had a story to tell.
Bow Road station was also much quieter than normal - no queues at the ticket office, no waiting at the barriers, no jostling down the stairs. Personally I was just glad that the station was still open, and still standing. A succession of regular recorded announcements advised us to keep hold of our luggage and to watch out for unattended packages - not that anybody really needed any prompting. While a handful of us waited, the tannoy recited a litany of suspended lines and closed stations. I think we were all impressed that the list wasn't longer. We stood around on the platform for five long minutes, after which gap the next train to arrive would normally be absolutely packed. But not on this particular morning. The doors opened and then, with an invisible one-fingered salute directed towards a gang of shadowy bloodied terrorists, we stepped on board and continued with our normal lives.
The Central line train I switched to at Mile End was even more unusual - there were several spare seats. Normally I get to stand squashed into my own tiny patch of space somewhere beside the far door, my newspaper clutched unopened beneath my arm, but yesterday for once I got the chance to sit down and open it. Reading about the tragic events across central London helped me to ignore the fact that I was doing precisely what so many of the slaughtered had been doing so innocently the day before. My fellow travellers (unusually for a Friday morning) were all wide awake and alert, surreptitiously scanning the floor of the half-empty carriage for suspect packages that obviously weren't there. There was absolutely no sign of alarm or panic, not even when we stopped briefly in a tunnel because of a security alert on the train behind us. Neither did we flinch at Liverpool Street where, 23 hours earlier, such tragic events had played out in the Circle line tunnel almost directly over our heads. Life continued.
I disembarked at a semi-deserted Holborn station. In the rush hour traffic above the surface central London appeared to be getting back to normal, but half a bus half a mile up the road told a different story. However bravely life goes on, however resilient the travelling public, a lot of patching up still has to happen before London feels wholly safe and safely whole. And there are some scars that will never heal.
Journey back to reality (ish)
