OPINION
JULY 20 - JULY 26, 2005
WWW.KANSAN.COM
GUEST COMMENTARY
PAGE 21
Alumnus recalls London attacks
▼ SACK'S PERSPECTIVE
Steve Sack/STAR TRIBUNE
Editor's note: Mark Bradshaw is a 2001 KU graduate now living in London and attending graduate school. His neighborhood was one of many affected by the July 7 transit bombings in London. This is his response to the events and his recounting of the reactions of students in London.
London mornings are always noisy. I live in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of central London, a crossroads for tourists, office workers, and students like me. In July, it's light by five o'clock, and one begins to hear the steady rumble of rolling luggage on its way toward the Tube or a train and on its way to an airport. Cleaners and street sweepers start to work soon after, followed by delivery trucks, and construction crews fire up the jackhammers by eight o'clock.
Those are the sounds of a normal day. Today was different, louder than most. The city's morning chorus was interrupted by a great loud detonation. It sounded like thunder, friends tell me. We live on Mecklenburgh Square, about six blocks from Tavistock Square, where one of London's signature red, double-decker buses had its top blown off during rush hour.
I don't remember hearing the explosion myself, maybe because my room faces in the wrong direction or maybe because I was still half-asleep, a sluggish student still preparing to meet his day in the library stacks. I
took notice a few minutes later, though, when the sirens started, several different wails, all keening close at hand. "Good god," I thought to myself, "what's going on?" There are several hospitals and a police station nearby, but their various calls are normally distinct; this was a general onslaught of alarm.
I live in a residential college that houses several hundred graduate students who attend more than a dozen London universities. It's a neighborhood within the neighborhood, filled with scores of familiar faces from strange lands as well as some places closer to home. When my telephone began ringing in the moments following the morning's first unwelcome noises, it was a friend within the college, a young newlywed from Texas, who broke the story for me: "Did you hear?" she asked. "There are bombs in the Underground. Russell Square and King's Cross have both blown up."
The London Underground is the city's subway system, a network of trains that connects to airports, commuter trains, light rail, and a fleet of buses. It's the primary means by which people get to and from work each day, it runs right at its capacity during peak times, and the morning rush sees it at its busiest. To attack it is to target a broad swath of people. Its passengers include bankers and busboys, suit-wearers and sightseers. The two Underground stations my friend named weren't the only ones
hit, but they are the two closest to us, just blocks from our college. Close to home.
I tried to pull up the BBC Web site. It was slowed to a crawl, of course. I picked up the phone to dial outside the college. It was in a fugue, not surprisingly. I remember how these things go. After firing off a quick e-mail to tell my family I was fine, I grabbed a sweater – yes, in England, even in July – and I decamped to my Texan friends' apartment just around the block. They have cable news and an Internet phone to the U.S., both useful things on a day of surprises.
We monitored reports and made calls, corralling facts and accounting for friends. As America woke up, we called home to let people know that we were awake, too.
One friend had his German class cancelled. Another was detained for hours in the basement of a nearby salon while police inspected a parked van they suspected of concealing another bomb. I watched as the physicians - all here to study, not normally to practice - headed out to local hospitals, to aid however they could with casualties.
And that's how this morning's unwelcome noises have affected the people I see. I know there are dozens dead, but even being so near by, I only see them through the television's eye. Many more are maimed or wounded, lightly or severely, and still more have been given good reason to be afraid. But I think that sort of fear turns quickly to anger and resolve. From my time in Washington following September 11, I don't expect the life of the city to snap back to routine overnight, but I'm confident that London, just like my friend the future doctor, will press right on.
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