Postcard from London - we''re not afraid

Having been in London since just after the bombings last week and having been in the middle of the daily waves of news and information that there has been I thought it may be interesting to summarise for those of you reading from the quieter side of Europe how it has been here since last Thursday”s events.

Some bright spark on the very day that the bombings took place decided to set up a website called www.werenotafriad.com on which various pictures were posted of people or places with the message “we”re not afraid” or something similar forming part of the message. Within hours the site had grown to hundreds of pictures and it has now had several million hits in less than a week of existence.

This website has become a lightening rod for a groundswell of feeling that can be summarised as defiance but is also tinged with anger and frustration. This particular aspect of “Englishness” was on view when I contacted my car club (located less than a kilometre from one of the blast sites) the day after the bombing to check that they were still open to pick up a set of wheels for the weekend. The answer was an unequivocal yes with plenty of references to the Dunkirk and Blitz spirit.

My own Grandfather used to fire-watch on top of office buildings in Lower Thames Street in the City of London area between tours in North Africa and post D-Day in France between 1940-1944. After WWII he had an office on Liverpool Street itself, next to the blast site of the Aldgate/Liverpool Street metro bomb. Safe to say he was seething with anger and singularly unimpressed with the efforts of the bombers in comparison with the level of destruction experienced between 1940-1944.

Whilst there are relatively few people in London who remember the last time we had bombs that caused damage on the scale experienced in the war, the IRA regularly set off smaller bombs in London from the 1970s up until the mid 1990s. Londoners became so used to these bombs that people used to dismiss the risk in an almost flippant fashion.

It was reassuring for me to see this mindset repeated on Monday evening as I sat in a restaurant on the Aldwych, close to Covent Garden and opposite the BBC World Service and the Indian and Australian high commissions. This area has always been seen as high risk and indeed the IRA blew up a London Bus outside the building I was sitting in the early 1980s.

At 6.30pm several police cars and fire engines swooped into the Aldwych (a semi-circle four lane road) and blocked it off whilst evacuating several hundred people on the street that were in the process of trying to enter the various theatres in the area. The police informed the restaurant that everyone should remain inside (behind a huge glass front wall offering a perfect view and plenty of material to cause injury). The whole restaurant just carried on eating and drinking without a care in the world and an hour later the police reopened the street with people filling the pavement within minutes as if nothing had happened.

Earlier on Monday I decided to try out the metro for the first time since the bombing and I can say that there was a definite reduction in the level of Blitz spirit standing on the platform of Old Street tube stop in the City. I had a bag with me and it was clear that all non-bag carriers were flitting their eyes from one bag carrier to another to assess the risk they believed they faced be standing close to a potential bomb.

Even though it was early morning and the tube train had yet to heat up to its normal insufferable temperature levels I sweated throughout the five stop trip and was very aware of people who looked like their blood pressure was higher than normal.

By Tuesday and Wednesday morning the atmosphere on the tube system was improving but then yesterday there was an announcement that the bombs were detonated by UK born suicide bombers. For the five days between the day of the bombing and this confirmation each tube station ran repeated announcements to look out for abandoned bags or cases that could be bombs.

With British born and bred people living in Yorkshire willing to blow themselves up such warnings have become useless and anyone on the tube or bus holding any kind of bag or case (at least 25% of all passengers) is a potential bomber. Whilst the bombers who struck last Thursday are themselves dead and can no longer cause any further harm they left behind a bomb factory in Leeds and a car containing explosives just north of London in Luton.

It now transpires that at least two of the bombers visited Pakistan recently and the police are now looking for a ringleader who it is believed may be running other suicide cells. The head of Metropolitan Police in London, Ian Blair has said that there was a “controlling hand” behind the four suicide bombers and that another suicide cell is believed to exist with the chances of another attack in the near future “likely”. This has not helped the mood much.

As at Wednesday lunchtime 13 July no further attacks have taken place and hopefully by the time that you read this all is still quite. The test of how strong the English spirit really is will come when this style of attacks is repeated and more visibly than people being killed 30 metres below the ground. Only then will it be clear whether the English have retained their stiff upper lip or whether this has been lost along with our sovereignty and independence.

Oliver Meister is an English lawyer based in Bucharest working for CME, a US company that invests in television stations in Eastern Europe, including Pro TV, Acasa and Pro Cinema in Romania. He is also a director of Pro TV SA, the operator of the Romanian television channels CME has invested and is part of the management team that supervises the television station Studio 1+1 which CME owns in Ukraine