Feature
Out of an eerie silence
by Nick Smith
Londoners picked themselves up.
Kiwi social worker Megan Pacey works with troubled London youth in King’s Cross, near the site of the Tavistock Place bus bombing. And after the carnage, the bleeding, crying masses, the sirens and police roadblocks, “it was incredibly eerie being [at work] in that building and it being so quiet”, she says. “I thought there’s nothing right about this at all – it was peculiar, so incredibly quiet. I kept hearing people’s shoes on the pavement and you never hear that in London, ever – you could hear people’s heels.”
For Kiwi broadcaster Fiona Macmillan, at Liverpool St, where she and a camera crew headed when news broke, the strangeness of that Thursday was that “it was completely unlike what you’d expect: you might expect people talking, yelling and panicking. It was nothing like that. It was people walking along calmly and normally … it was just surreal. And people were making eye contact, strangers talking to one another … a woman said, ‘Excuse me.’ That is so un-London.”
Pacey says, “Londoners aren’t the most friendly people, but in these circumstances, everybody is your mate.”
On the way to work, she walked past Tavistock Place and saw “this bus, and people … pouring out of buildings, people bleeding quite heavily and looking incredibly dazed. Police [were] urging us to get out of the area.
“To the right of where the bomb went off is the British Medical Association and just behind that is the children’s hospital, Great Ormond St Hospital but there is no Accident and Emergency. So, I was pushing my way through all this carnage, and people all around me were bleeding and dazed, and there were large numbers of staff running from Great Ormond St with pillows and wheelchairs and stretchers …
“[I was thinking] that I was in trouble, that I was in the wrong place, that I needed to get the hell out of there.
“It was funny walking through the back streets … There was a field hospital set up in one of those cramped Victorian squares … the place was teeming with medical staff. And a little bit further on, in another Victorian square, a big helicopter had landed.”
Macmillan describes the reaction of Londoners as brilliant. “Everyone was like, ‘It’s a matter of when, not if.’ I thought people would think, ‘Well, that’s it, they’ve done us now, move on.’ But certainly, talking to people around London, they fully expect it to happen again. I was really moved – not in a sentimental way – I am genuinely impressed by [these] people. They all picked themselves up and got on with it.”
