My experience of the London Bombings

Woah, that was close. I kinda missed those bombs, just. I was doing Work Experience. My dad and I were on the train with Jane, and just before we reached Tottenam Hale, she got a call from her mum who told her to get off at Tottenham Hale with us, instead of London Liverpool Street because there was some sort of explosion (Sarah, Jane's mum found this out from Jane's step-dad, Michael who had discovered that the tube network was closed upon arriving at London Liverpool Street (he got the earlier train than us)).

So we were all going to get off at TH, when a voice over the intercomm said that the tube was closed, so to stay on the train until it arrived at London Liverpool Street. When we got there, we weren't quite sure what to do. Jane got a call from Michael who said that the tube was closed because of an explosion, but at that point, they thought that it was some sort of power surge or something. Jane wasn't working too far from where my dad and I were working, so we decided to walk all the way, and drop Jane off, because she didn't have a clue how to get there. She's working at RADDA (a drama school) near Tottenham Court Road or something, and we're down Drury Lane. So we had to walk all that way from the station. I'll cut out a lot. We saw loads of jam-packed buses ... now this is scary, because any one of those buses that we saw could have been the bus that shortly afterwards exploded upwards and outwards because of a suicide bomber on board.

Later on, in my dad's office, we sat there for half the day. We listened for news on his radio, which he just so happened to have, purely because he wanted to listen to the cricket. We discovered that four bombs had exploded, and all of the were pretty close to places that we had walked past on the way to the office. We had missed each bomb by a matter of 10-15 minutes or so. My dad made lots of calls to his seperate shops to see how they were coping with staff being missing or whatnot. Then he got a call on his mobile, from my mum back at work in our hometown. She was worried sick, as one of her colleagues had come into work and told her that some bombs had exploded in London and my mum had tried calling my dad's mobile but received no answer. This was later explained, as it turned out that many people in London were using their phones, and the lines were blocked. Also, some companies shut down their lines for a while, in case any of the bombs had been triggered with a mobile phone and there were still bombs waiting to be detonated using the same method.

I couldn't eat anything. I drank an abnormally large amount of water (way more than I usually drink) and tea, and felt sick for most the morning and early afternoon. My dad, myself, and the few office workers with us were all listening to the radio, wondering how everyone we knew was. I personally was worried about Jane, as we had not seen her all the way to RADDA, rather to a road that she recognised, which was near RADDA, and so I therefore was not sure what the last part of her journey had been like.

I'm not going to go into detail about how we managed to leave the city. We walked some distance, over the river Thames, to Elephant and Castle, where we managed to get a bus, then later another bus, to Thornton Heath, where my nan lives (fortunately, we had already planned on staying at my nan's which is much closer to London than my own house). Later on that evening, I spoke to Jane on the phone, who said that students from RADDA had seen the bus explode and had come running into RADDA in tears. They were locked in the building, and not permitted to leave and so they had resorted to watching the news unfold on the television in the common room there. Jane was in her car, as I spoke to her.

She and Michael had met up and walked the 4-8 miles distance to Stoke Newington (spelling?) where Sarah had picked them up (Jane and Michael went to some old friend's I believe, as they used to live in that part of London). So yes, her journey was longer than mine. I was worried about her for much of the day. I was also wondering how some other girls from my school were coping. They are not girls I like, but I have seen them get off at Tottenham Hale for their Work Experience several times recently, and I am not sure how familiar they are with London (certainly Jane and I did not have a clue where we were, and if it weren't for my dad, we too would have been lost, and could have unwittingly run into one of the crime scenes), but I have a feeling that those two girls may have been lost and worried, so in a way I was concerned for them.