Dear all,
A little over a week ago, Steve and I left for eight (wonderful) days in Germany. The day after that were the London bombings, one directly across the street from us, the other at one of our nearest tube stations, the one where Mire arrived a year ago. Here's how it felt to be home again this past weekend when I wrote-but had no email access. At present, on a warm and sunny Monday morning, it looks as though many things will be much closer to normal quite soon. It felt worse on Saturday, as you will see below. Ruth
The dark is lifting slightly over leafy Tavistock Square. This afternoon, Saturday, they are preparing to remove the bus.
Steve and I got back from Germany on Thursday evening. Our simple plan for going home was just to do everything we had done eight days before in the reverse order: train from Stansted Airport to Liverpool Street Station, tube from Liverpool Street to Euston Square, walk from there. TV news that we'd seen in Kiel had reported about the tube lines being reopened, so the plan seemed reasonable. And getting in the tube eight days after three bombs had been set off in three different lines in London seemed to have the illogical scariness to it that most of us try to reason our way past. Pushing us along was the awful truth shown by the ghastly attack on the bus across the park from our flat that buses were no safer than the tube--and in any case we knew that there was no good bus connection between Liverpool station and our place. We walked from the train platform to the tube entrance.
On one level, the London tube system is a mess. Victorian entrepreneurs originally built it as eight or nine separate private ventures, each using its own prefered system of cars and tracks. Even now, the cars that fit on the tracks of the Central line won't fit on any other tracks. And the cars that fit through the narrow spots on the Picadilly line probably are too small for other parts. Being so old, the system is always fighting to modernise and clean up. Glitches are routine, of course, and so as you enter a station there's always a board up telling where problems are occurring. Liverpool Street, a huge transportation hub just inside London's dense financial district, has an electronic board to convey the updates. On Thursday night it was covered with a glistening array of service outages. Nonetheless, we walked through the familiar entry points. Ahead of us a folding gate closed off the entry to our usual line. The entry to the next line was barricaded as well. The third was operating but didn't bring us very close to home. Still, that was okay. We took it without problem, emerging on a street that goes directly past our house. King's Way, if I remember right, although since the street changes names about 8 times in two miles I might well be wrong. About five bus lines run up the street to Russell Square, a very short walk from our door.
We waited strangely long for a bus. Many people were accumulating at the stop. Nobody complained. There was a kind of sober calm. Not much traffic of any sort for such a normally busy street. When a bus at last arrived and we climbed on, we were startled to see it immediately turn off its usual route and take a long detour. But then of course it made sense.
It made terrible sense. We are in London in the immediate aftermath of an awful multiple attack on the city. Meanwhile nine days have past, but the investigation is far from over. Our entire neighborhood is closed except to residents. On Thursday night, when we could present no documents showing we lived at 33 Tavistock Square, a pleasant police woman excorted us to our door. Steve asked her when the bus would be removed. Her answer: "I don't know. We only have one chance to get the investigation of the crime scene right and we don't want any mistakes." That seems to us a very good indication of the careful, patient, sober attitude we see around us.
Our part of London was developed by rich aristocrats, early Donald Trumps building city housing for the medium wealthy. In addition to creating a special architecture that assembled row houses so that they looked in combination rather like palace fronts, these high-class developers also recreated bits of palace garden for the new neighborhods. So lots of the houses are organized around small parks, many of them private. If I remember right, the movie "Notting Hill" ends in one of the private ones. Our flat faces one of the small public parks. It is about a block long and a quarter of a block wide and filled with enormous sycamore trees. On sunny days, students come out of the dorms around us and sit or lie in the park. A statue of a contemplative, cross-legged Ghandi presides over the middle of the park, surrounded by a changing array of amazingly never-vandalized flowers. One section of the park is designated for dogs to play in. A bust of Virginia Woolf is in the corner reminding us that she walked regularly here as she was thinking about her novels. That was at a time when she too lived on Tavistock Square in a building that was destroyed during the blitz. Out our front windows we look into this leafy and highly civilized scene, with just a glimpse of Ghandi. The park is surrounded by a neat wrought iron fence, locked at dark, but open all day. To catch the bus, we always walk across the little park to Woburn Street. To go to the British Library, where I sit at this minute, I walk around the north end of the park and cross busy Woburn street at the zebra striped crosswalk--where traffic is required to come to a complete stop the moment I set my foot in the street, a privilege I try to use with a degree of judiciousness. Nowadays people don't have an entire 18C house, but usually only one floor of what used to be a 4 or 5 story building. This year we have the ground floor, the one you enter a few steps above the street. The trees shield us from the traffic that is so near us. Thanks to the trees and the park, our flat is wonderfully quiet and private even in its very central location, near four tube stations (giving us immediate access to almost every tube line in the city).
We knew when we came back from Germany that much would be changed. I knew I was glad to have been gone for the past week, so we were not near the ordinary double-decker bus where so many people died perhaps 20 feet from my usual cross-walk and about 10 minutes before my usual crossing time. Along with other people everywhere, we have been feeling miserable enough for the past week without being any closer than necessary.
And physical proximity matters, even now. Steve and I have mostly been feeling horrible ever since we got home. Even the trees that I love have a gruesome tinge, with white-clad workers standing in high metal boxes at the ends of long metal arms. They are picking through the tree branches, looking, looking. And rows of white-clad people below comb through the plants and grass again and again as the wind blows and the bomb's horrible cargo filters down, I suppose, a bit more each day. We show a bank statement with our names and London address on it to get through the gentle police cordon around our street. There is a kindness and display of good manners at the cordons that is a shade unfamiliar. Nobody could be living in a safer place anywhere than we are at the moment. Few places could be sadder.
But of course a few places are in fact much, much sadder and infinitely more dangerous. The death toll in London on one day would be hideously routine in Iraq, and not rare in Israel, just to name the two most obvious comparisons.
Now it is 9:30 p.m, dusk at Tavistock Square. Steve and I decided to go sit by the Thames at one of our favorite places while clusters of ordinary people and bevies of tv folk pressed up against the edges of the closed zone here, waiting to see the bus carried off on a flatbed truck under a huge blue tarp. After reading by the river for an hour or so while sipping a pint (i.e. a beer) and enjoying the beautiful evening we walked back home. Now I can look out the window to my left and know that the damaged bus is not there.
The investigations here are taking place in considerable privacy. Walls 15 or 20 feet high covered with opaque plastic wrap close off all the streets that had a view of the bus as well as the street in front of Russell Square Tube Station, where one of the underground bombs exploded. And here at the park, there are lower curtains of plastic tarps around the immediate blast site. I am grateful for them. I see more than enough as it is.
Yesterday morning I went to the Institute of Germanic Studies, my sponsor here in London and the place where I have a nice office and good internet connections, hence the place where I handle most of my email. Before going there, however, Steve and I had gotten up rather early and walked briskly down to the Royal Opera House to get tickets for last night's performance of Wagner's Die Walkure, starring Placido Domingo. We had decided before going to Germany that we would do this on our first morning after returning, and sticking to that decision seemed like a good idea. We got to Covent Garden where the opera house is located about 8 o'clock; 67 tickets are sold on the day of a performance. Steve and I were persons number 64 & 65 in the line. We got tickets in the last row at the very top of the house. (It was a wonderful performance and a welcome respite from everything else.)
Tickets secured, we went from the opera house to see Sarah Nightingale, the manager of the University of London's flats for visiting faculty. She told us about her day on 7/7, about having to walk the last stretch of her way to work because the tube stations were mysteriously closing, about sitting at her desk in the basement of a huge building several blocks away from Tavistock Square and suddenly hearing a disturbingly loud bang, about trying to call us and growing increasingly worried until she got an email from us on Saturday morning, about our entire street being evacuated from Thursday until Sunday, and about some of the University people who were casualties.
When I got to the Institute, I heard many more stories. Since it opens later than the housing office, the Institute staff were on their way to work later than Sarah. They knew the radio and TV stations were claiming something about power outages causing tube closures, but Chris, the young man who is one of the Institute secretaries, told me that by the time he got to King's Cross Station, where he would usually change trains, victims from one of the bombed trains (the one heading toward Russell Square) were already coming up to the street after trudging back through the tunnel since their way forward was blocked. He saw them and heard snatches of what they said about a bomb. But like almost everyone else, he was concentrating on getting to his job. He said the little side streets leading south toward the offices and businesses where thousands of people work were jammed with totally quiet, solemn walkers striding to their jobs just as he was. And then, just as he was passing down a little street parallel to Tavistock Square there was an enormous boom. Strangely, very strangely, people immediately began running toward the sound, not away from it. He was there in about 2 minutes, but on his way he had heard another terrible rumor, this one of a bomb at Victoria Station, where his girlfriend works. (It was unfounded.) He ran on, wanting to contact her, not stopping at the square but continuing another 3 or 4 minutes to the Institute. Yet even in just running across the street half a block from the exploded bus, the sight was uncanny, he said. Terrible things he wishes he had never seen, but also an unbelievably speedy and orderly response. Police tape was already up around the scene. Ambulences were already arriving. Doctors were already administering to the injured: thirty or so doctors who had been at a conference in the British Medical Association Building on whose doorstep the explosion occurred had rushed out to the street and instantly begun treating people. The response was surreal in its efficiency and calm and professionalism.
As I write this to you, I understand a little better why I have felt as though I'm constantly on the brink of trembling or paralysis ever since we got back. What has happened here is terrible, repugnant, sickening. Politicians say that Londoners are not afraid. My friends at the Institute say that is simply not true. One told of being in a bus when a child's balloon accidentally burst and everyone started from their seats. People are afraid, but they soldier on. One of my friends, an Austrian, finds the attitude worrisome, not sufficiently capable of admitting grief and pain. Many people are very concerned about white racists using the moment to incite more hatred against "Pakis," who are already probably the most discriminated group in Britain. I hope there will be no more dramatic events to recount. I'd prefer scenes like the routine ones behind the counters at the British Library, young Moslem women who somehow combine jeans with headscarves, working alongside Chinese musclebuilders, working alongside serious black women, working alongside talkative white men, working alongside a tall black man who seems to be the boss, and all of them speaking with movie British accents. Let's hope.
Aloha, Ruth
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