Woman Seated in the Underground
by Peter Wild
1.
I was just a child so what memories I have are more than likely a fiction, or a collection of fictions, each of which compete against how I feel on a given day or where my sympathies lay, whether I’m thinking of my parents with fondness or feeling badly done to or whether I’m feeling ambivalent. Of course I’m aware of the broad strokes. I know I was a child during wartime. I know I lived through what we’ve come to call the Blitz. I recall, with what is to me an often surprising vividness and clarity, gas masks and nights punctuated by whining bombs and tears, consolation, the casual gesture meant to convey whatever sympathy tired people felt they could spare. The years since then have demonstrated to me that we lived through scarcity that we did without but at the time it was all I knew. I think about my mother’s pinched face, the hard lines smoking left either side of her mouth, two stark creases dispelling the truth of any smile. My sister and I were shipped off in the end to the countryside but, before, I remember a night in which we were caught out, in which we were forced to find our way amongst hundreds of others into the London underground. I don’t remember now the how and the why or even, particularly, the where. There is just the knowledge that we were there, me, my sister, my mother, lying there in the dark, amidst the occasional, rippling song and the laughter and the cigarettes, flashing in the dark like crafty eyes, passed from one hand to another to another to another. It was almost impossible to believe we were where we were, just as it was impossible to imagine aeroplanes overhead dropping bombs upon us. It was tremendously exciting. For one night that incessant fear we all felt was replaced by a sense of our own invincibility. Somebody said they’d like to see Gerry get his bombs down here and we all laughed, I laughed, even though I don’t think I understood then who precisely Gerry was.
2
She is awake, awake and aware of the emptiness in the bed.
Her husband has gone. Her husband of very nearly 28 years has gone. Here she is, in the bed they shared, in the house they shared, in the life they shared, but alone, without him. Every night she lies awake, staring at the ceiling, numb, or choking, screaming, sobbing, snotty, face in the pillow. There is medication on the nightstand. Un-prescribed sleeping pills forced on her by her sister-in-law. Just to help you sleep, she said. But she can’t face them, knows if she were to take one she would take ten. She sleeps, though, eventually, and then, eventually, she wakes and there is a time in which shapes settle and assume their customary clarity, and she shifts in the bed, seeks out warmth, attempts to imagine the order of the day to come and then her husband has gone.
In the first few days and weeks it was as brutal as a snapped bone. She would be woken by a pain, the hurt from her fingernails digging into the palms of her hands as a result of the fists she clenched in her sleep, and - before she even had the chance to wonder why she was clenching her fists in her sleep - there it would be, the knowledge, what she knew, everything, and the day was spoiled, lost, irretrievable. Later, as the uncomfortable weight of lack of sleep and appetite took their toll, she didn’t focus as quickly, could sometimes reach the kitchen and invite the kettle to boil before it came: the realisation, the flood that swept her away only to leave her exactly where she was. Every grievance magnified every minor pain hilariously and crazily amplified, every honest word shamed, every joy, every sweetness, every shred of beauty in her life nothing, nothing beside the immense, eclipsing loneliness of the single fact that now defined her.
Her husband has gone.
She can’t even think of herself and the person whose husband has gone as being one and the same person. It is not and never my husband. My husband has not gone. No. It is her husband, and the grief, towering as it may be, is merely sympathy for another person in pain, another person whose husband has gone.
3
I didn’t think about my night on the underground again for almost twenty years.
I was attending the Camberwell College of Art & Design, pursuing what George in time came to call ‘that ceramic thing’. That ceramic thing - it is curious to the me now recollecting - was everything then. I can’t even quite say what it was I thought I was achieving or would achieve but, at the Camberwell College of Art & Design, I think now, I was full of hope and I was young and I thought that what I was doing was of worth. I fashioned brooches and necklaces and small pieces of ornamental jewellery which I sold via the friend of a friend’s father on Camden market, in order to supplement my grant and what little my mother and father put my way, and life seemed - ripe.. Life seemed voluptuous with possibility, as it does when you are young and are yet to be spoiled.
There was a chap who everybody referred to as Trotsky on account of the fact that he thought of himself as something of a revolutionary. Trotsky, a reed-thin, angry, Glaswegian redhead with more bone than skin, had a tendency to introduce himself to all and sundry with the statement: I fuck shit up. Most people at the time reacted like characters from a Noel Coward play. It was unexpected. Language like that wasn’t as prevalent in 1963 as it is today. The thing was, though. Trotsky used the line time and again. I fuck shit up, I fuck shit up, I fuck shit up. It wasn’t long before it became clear, to even the most casual observer, that Trotsky used the line in order to leap that first hurdle, the one that separated a strange man from a strange woman.
Trotsky said what he said to whoever took his fancy and, more often than not, was told in no uncertain terms what to do with his revelation. He did meet with success. There were times when his - fervour - persuaded. Oh yes. Trotsky convinced enough women to return to his grubby garret to persuade him of the veracity of his argument. As it were. But more often than not Trotsky ended each night at a table in the corner of whichever pub it was, ugly and sullen and alone.
With the benefit of hindsight I can see and make sense of a lot of things. I know, for instance, that Trotsky, like a lot of people, like most people, just wanted someone who would listen and care and look out for him. I can see that the man who used a provocative line in order to start talking to women and the man who got bored of being the man who used a provocative line in order to talk to women and the man who wasn’t smart enough to work out quite how to shake free of what he started and the man who fell in love with me were all the same man. He became what would nowadays be deemed a stalker. To all intents and purposes, he became a stalker. For roughly three months I couldn’t go anywhere without him appearing, as if by kind accident, with his uneasy smile and his nervous pockets.
When it became clear to him that, despite the fact I wasn’t seeing anyone, I wasn’t interested in him, he rallied with a series of petitions, each of his mossy friends taking me to one side in order to explain what it was that I was missing, what it was I didn’t understand. And to each of them I, in turn, kindly and patiently, explained why I wasn’t interested. Unfortunately, the fact that I was patient and the fact that I was kind only served to inflame young Trotsky and so the petitioners grew ever more bitter and steely and unpleasant. Did I not see? Was I so blinkered? What was my problem? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was upsetting. It got so, I would be out and - whatever I was doing, however much I was enjoying the company of my friends - the bomb whistle of the fact that - someone - at some point - would approach me in order to let me know just what a great guy Trotsky was, drowned out any enjoyment I could imagine having. I started losing my patience. I could feel myself burning down like a blackout candle wick.
It was June. Almost summer, 1963. Evening. I was out, there was a small crowd of us, politely dressed, sipping cocktails and talking about Profumo, more than likely. Everybody was talking about Profumo. Such a scandal. He was the big news of the day. I was laughing. I was happy, I think, happy in that unequivocal way you are in your twenties. And then I spotted a little man, a little man with an earnest expression on his face, easing his way through the crowd toward me and - something broke loose in me. He wasn’t even close to me, hadn’t even spoken, before I started in.
“No, no, no, no,” I said. “Absolutely not. No. I’ve had enough. Tell your” - (I gestured at this point, flapped my hand in the air like some desperate fish) - “tell your friend I have had enough. He’s a worm,” I said. “A worm.. And you are a worm as well. So turn around. Go on. Turn around and go - find the worm. Find the worm and tell him I am not and will never be interested in him or his revolution or his” - I drew a breath, knew the bomb before it broke - “or his fucked up shit! Tell him that!”
It was quite a performance. Enough certainly to drive most men, whether implicated with Trotsky or not, to the hills and more than likely beyond.
But George was not most men.
4
There were intermittent rages.
She heard Nilsson on Radio 2 singing “Everybody’s Talkin’” and the fact of its existence, the mere fact that a song could exist that had once meant something to each of them, had once meant something about each of them, drove her into a blinding fury. The ghetto blaster - or whatever you were supposed to call it - was the first victim that day, taken and raised high above her head in order to better propel the makeshift assembly of plastic and wire hard into the kitchen wall. Satisfaction was short-lived but the impact of electronic and tile provoked splinter and split and within moments she was hard at it, breaking nails and scraping her fingernails clear of skin as she tugged kitchen tiles off the wall, dropping the ceramic patina in a growing pile at her feet.
Another day, she found herself in the middle of the dining room with an active vacuum cleaner snoring at her feet. It was a feeling akin to misplaced keys. Misplaced keys to the power of ten. She had no idea, really and truthfully no idea, as to how she came to be standing there, in the dining room, with the vacuum cleaner. After all, she had no desire to clean. There was a moment of nausea and dizziness during which she wondered, comically, if she was about to collapse, and then the noise of the machine and the dull muffled numbness in her head and the telling toll of days met, and she roared, actually roared, and moved to raise the vacuum cleaner above her head. But, of course, such instruments are not made to be raised and, at something approximating shoulder height, the handle of the vacuum snapped clean in two. The body of the machine dropped to the floor and yet she didn’t move. She stood there, frozen, a demented samurai, broken vacuum handle raised aloft, until a neighbour who happened to be passing with her dog tapped on the window and asked if she was alright.
There were other unhappy eclipses. A bin bag filled to the brim with wasted food emptied in her bed. A blaze, old letters and photographs and ticket stubs, in the bathtub. A savage attack on the vegetable patch with a hoe and a cricket bat. She swam in and out of focus, not quite knowing herself in the midst of the carnage and then, afterwards, indulging her prodigal misdemeanours as if they didn’t mean a thing.
It wasn’t until her daughter Iris, sick of unreturned telephone calls and worried, genuinely worried, about her ailing and failing mother, came to the house unannounced and found her mother shitting into a jiffy bag with every intention of posting it to “your father, your father and his SLUT!”, that wheels were set in motion.
“We can’t go on like this, Mum,” Iris said, her fingers smelling of bleach, her mother weeping uncontrollably in the armchair. “You need to speak to someone. You need” -
Iris swallowed, a bolus of pain and hatred and hurt directed at her already forgiven father.
“You need help, Mum. You need help.”
5
George was an intellectual. This was how he advertised himself. The intellectual. The intellectual is hard at work; he’d say when I tried to interrupt his study with sandwiches or sex. He was studying art history, had a particular thing about sculpture, could talk for England about his likes and dislikes. His loves, Bruce Nauman, Marcel Duchamp, were unfettered and forceful; his hates, those Neoclassical pretenders, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, artists who more than likely had Canova and Thorwaldsen spinning in their sarcophagi, made me laugh. He took things so seriously.. All of the time he spent bent over his notebook, his hunched back and furious pen scratching. It was hilarious. And beautiful. And very quickly I loved him.
He took me home with him that first night, took me back to the surprisingly airy second floor flat he shared with his agreeable room-mate Joffe. And it was there, in George and Joffe’s front room, as George muddled through the vinyl propped against the aquamarine living room wall in search of some Thelonius Monk he said, and Joffe rolled the first of many spliffs, that I found my attention attracted by a painting, a print, that drew me from my position, reclining on the couch, to my knees and then my feet, where I hovered, bent, intense, scrutinising.
There was a dark tunnel stretching away into the middle distance and there were bodies, hundreds of bodies, lining each side of the tunnel on what appeared to be makeshift beds. It was the underground. It was the war. It was incredible.
“What is this?” I asked.
“What is what?” Joffe said licking the papers.
George looked up and the expression on his face flicked from interest to professional disdain in the space of a half second.
“Oh,” he said. “That. It’s Joffe’s.”
Joffe looked up at me and took in what I was looking at and then he said, “That isn’t mine. It’s a copy I made of a picture” -
“Listen to him,” George interrupted. “A picture. It’s a copy I made of a picture.”
Joffe spoke over George, as if he was used to the bitching, as if it didn’t mean a thing. “It’s a copy of a picture by Henry Moore called The Liverpool Street Extension. It’s a shelter picture. One of a series.”
“It’s the London Underground,” I said. “I was there. I slept down there. In the war. As a girl.”
George stopped flicking through the vinyl.
“You slept down there?” he said, gently.
“Mmmn,” I replied, distracted, dizzy, transported by Joffe’s picture.
“That’s amazing,” George said. “You were there. Wow.”
“Yeah,” Joffe added. “Like. Wow.”
The rasping chakk of a cheap disposable lighter and the concomitant huff of Joffe smoking, taking the smoke into his mouth like some insane jazz frog, broke the mood and I came back to the room, focused on what was happening, let myself get taken where George wanted to take me.
And now, with hindsight, with all of the years that George and I spent together, as a man and wife and as a father and mother and, in the end, as a brother and sister, I know that I can say, without fear of rebuke or reprisal, that I fell in love that night.
Not once, but twice.
6
Iris did all the hard work.
She called the GP and made the appointment. She told her boyfriend Stevie that her mum was, like, not so hot at the moment and so she was going to - you know, crash here for a bit, to make sure things were okay. She cooked. She washed. She answered the telephone. She cleaned. All her mum had to do was sit. Drink tea. Look out the window. Time reared up like a gigantic slab of hairy grey meat. The mornings and the afternoons and the evenings. What Virginia Woolf called the hours.
Her GP lectured her about depression, explained how she wasn’t ready for a treatment involving monoamine oxidase inhibitors because this was the first time she had ever really experienced these feelings, was he right? He prescribed a course of antidepressants, trycyclics and tetracyclics. The doctor spoke to both of them, took a real shine to Iris, or so it seemed. It would be okay. Everybody said that. The GP, the nurse, the chemist, Iris. Everything will be okay.
But in the night, as Iris slept, everything was not okay.
In the night all she had was the ability to shuffle from room to room, aching with tiredness but cold and unable to sleep, dead with pain, humbled with the shaking awfulness of questions, eaten out by the terrible void where her husband had been. Her husband. The words echoed in her head and then out of her head and along the upstairs hallway, filling the house with a deadening lonely silence. She didn’t know what she had done wrong. Nobody had even tried to explain to her what she had done wrong. The marriage had suffered, perhaps. All marriages suffer. Didn’t -? Children and. But. She loved -.
Eventually the questions receded. The panics had a tendency to climax and then ease. The pain and the uncertainty and the awful, bone-shearing sense of all the days yet to live (but without him, without him, without him) took themselves away and she was alone and calm and relaxed. She was alone and calm and relaxed like a dead person.
Each morning found her in the armchair in the living room by the window, breathing in and breathing out, and Iris smiled, because she didn’t know and hopefully wouldn’t know what could happen to a person, and said, “You seem better, Mum.”
And Mum said yes. She felt better. She could see a light at the end of the tunnel now. Oh yes. A light at the end of the tunnel.
And Iris clapped her hands, just like she did when she was a little girl, because some things never change, some things never ever change, and she said, “Maybe it would be okay if I nipped out for a bit. For a coffee with Steve. How would that be? Would that be okay?”
And Mum said yes. Mum said that would be fine.
And the instant that Iris stepped out of the house, Mum shuffled up the stairs to the bathroom where she ran a bath full to the brim with piping hot water, the obscure knowledge of the fact that blood pumps more quickly out of veins as a result of hot water soothing her as she rattled about the cabinets in search of the razor her daughter used to shave her legs.
7
It took me several years to see all of Henry Moore’s Shelter series.. These days, of course, they are collected in The Tate and it’s become something of a habit of mine in recent years to visit at least every other month and have myself a quiet moment. I don’t know why. I couldn’t begin to explain what it is about the drawings that provoke me, or indeed why a night spent sleeping on the underground decades ago should hook me as it does. I do know that there is a particular piece of work, Woman seated in the underground, which haunts me.
A figure, the woman of the title, has pride of place. She is drawn in what seems to me to be chalk, which has the ghastly effect of clothing her in what look like rags or bandages. Over her shoulder are the same rows of figures glimpsed in The Liverpool Street Extension and elsewhere, but Woman seated in the underground is not about those people. Woman seated in the underground is personal. The woman is haunted. There are huge caverns, what look like dark saucers, where her eyes should be. She is dark, submerged, and statuesque. The viewer is faced by the possibility that this woman has always been there, underground, and will always be there. The weight of the war, the dismay of people lost, doom, death and shock can all be read in the blankness of her features.
My mother died in 1971, of bowel cancer, and the painting took on new hues for me at that time. I saw real and genuine hope there, where before it’d glimpsed only loneliness and decay. There was an afternoon, my mother was buried in the morning and it was raining like you wouldn’t believe. I remember sitting there, I was wearing a woollen skirt and it was so wet that raindrops were dripping from me to the floor between my feet and I sat and I sat and I sat, for hours, until the gallery closed, staring into that woman’s eyes and knowing as something that I hadn’t known before. I can’t really explain. It was partly a realisation of my own mortality but also a sense that sometimes pain is too great to move, sometimes you have to sit and wait until the clouds pass. Because the clouds do pass, I believe that. If you endure, if you climb out of bed each morning and struggle and fight, anything can improve.
I say all of this because it can sometimes seem that life has a habit of eating away at anything good. When I look back, as I do a lot, as everyone does I think as you get older, I see a lot of unhappiness. We lost a child, a little boy, born stillborn, christened Daniel. In amongst the years of struggle and hardship, as George fought to make a name for himself in art criticism, and I juggled the housekeeping and my own fledgling design efforts, there wasn’t time to sit back and take in the bigger picture. As a result I don’t think I ever dealt with my pain about Daniel properly. I think it was always there at the back of my mind and my heart, like an awful toothache, and the comfort provided by my other children, the love I feel for them, does not detract from the fact that, even now, there are times when I find myself at the kitchen sink, hands plunged into soapy water, looking out of the window at the church spire opposite with my eyes full of tears.
But that isn’t to say we haven’t had great happiness as well. Marriage to George had its ups and downs as all marriages do, but I never doubted that marriage to George was the right thing for me. The talks we had, the love and companionship and generosity and warmth was all anybody would ever want from a relationship. And, as we grew older, and things got easier as a result of my own successes (I found myself working for a wrapping paper company, designing patterns to adorn their seasonal stock and it was a joy, a pure and unrelenting joy to marry colours and shapes and form a part, however distant, of so many different celebrations), the feeling between us only grew and became, to my mind, more profound, more unique, more reassuring. We had friends whose marriages faltered after decades together, but we, George and I, stood the test of time. Here was the benchmark for all others I told myself.
And then, without any kind of sign, without a warning, George was gone.
8
The days following her suicide attempt were perhaps the worst of all. They couldn’t leave her alone for a moment. She was demeaned. Brought low in the eyes of the world.
After all, what was it all about? A man left a woman for a younger woman. The woman left behind fell apart and tried to kill herself. What a cliché.
She knew all of this. Everything, every hopeful smile, every raised eyebrow, every glimpse she had into the world beyond her hospital bed, reinforced the idea she had of herself. She was a fool. An old fool. She was stupid and she was worthless and she was. On and on the litany ran in her head.
Iris did her best, but there was an unspoken grievance now, a sense of recrimination. The suicide sat between them like an unwanted table guest. Part of her wanted to know if Iris had told her father. Part of her wanted that bastard to know just what his wife had been reduced to. Part of her wanted him to suffer. She snapped after his pain like a hungry dog after meat. But at the same time she wanted to hide away forever, she wanted to be forgotten, didn’t want anyone to know what she had tried to do, wanted to erase it forever from the annals of history.
The hospital couldn’t hang on to her. They only kept her overnight because she was the age she was. A taxi took her and Iris home to a house once more meticulously swept free of dirt and grime. The ugliness of hygiene made her nauseous, and the urge to destroy rose up and made her dizzy. Iris took her arm, asked if she was okay. She wanted to say, wanted to explain to her, that she wasn’t and wouldn’t ever be okay again. Everything was wrong. All she desired was sleep. She wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again. At the same time, there was a curious urge, the urge to lose oneself in a crowd. She wanted to be part of something larger than herself, wanted to move according to the whims of the crowd. But she didn’t speak. Iris helped her up the stairs, helped undress her, put her nightie on, tucked her up into bed, left her for fleeting seconds to retrieve a book from her bag at the foot of the stairs and then returned to the seat by her mothers bed.
“I’ll look after you, Mum,” Iris said. “You don’t have to worry. I will be here for as long as you need me.”
Ugly weeks and months followed in which the most basic of building blocks refused to fit together. She lost a lot of weight. Her hands trembled all of the time. Sleep was a cupboard stocked with nightmares. The outside world became hideous and overbearing. Door handles took on all the attributes of complex machinery. Her breathing sounded laborious and forced in her ears. She started to imagine herself as some kind of Russian doll, a person inside a person inside a person, and the real her was now distinct, was now separated from others and from the outside world by an ash heavy integument. She felt terrible, truly terrible, all of the time and, it seemed to her in brief moments of clarity, there was always further to fall.
In time, she grew compliant. Obedient to the will of her daughter. The violent mood swings, the yawing crying jags and the blank periods in which she no longer knew herself cessated. A different combination of drugs helped. Iris took her on walks. It was a source of eventual comfort, the two of them linking arms, in the sunshine and in the rain. Her daughter took her to the park. She grew braver, took her shopping locally, made sure to keep any well wishers in their place. The two of them shuffled along, Iris making sure to match her step with her weakly medicated mother, talking nine to the dozen about the weather and the television and the books she was reading and the course she hoped to start the following year and never ever mentioning Stevie, who no longer called.
One summer morning Iris mentioned an exhibition, some chalk drawings of people who slept on the underground during the war, an art gallery, a tube journey. It would be a grand day out. They would have lunch in a cafe. Iris’ treat. No hurry. All the time in the world. Just a short tube journey and then a short walk and then - hey presto! The art gallery. We’ll have ourselves an adventure.
This was how she came to be sitting on the underground when the first bomb exploded.
9
It was the third anniversary of George’s death.
I was thinking to myself that you never quite get over these things. You get older and you learn to expect death. You know it will come knocking for you and for everybody you love. But, for whatever reason, you still hope there will be some advance word. George just dropped dead one afternoon on the squash court. He wasn’t old. Not what I would call old at any rate. There was a phone call. A dash to the hospital. A quiet word in a private room. And then of course all that business of the funeral. The children went to pieces. I didn’t have a moment in which to wonder just how I’d live without my George. Later, however, when I had many such moments it occurred to me that being busy is a state of bliss. The idle moments have a tendency to drive home everything you loved and everything you will miss. The best way I have of explaining things to you is to say that being a widow is a little like being an ant terrorised by a malicious child with a magnifying glass. If that makes any sense at all.
But you get on with it, because you have to.
Anyway, I was saying, it was the third anniversary of George’s death and I was thinking to myself that you never quite get over these things. I was sitting at the kitchen table half listening to the radio and making a list. I am forever making lists these days because my memory is not quite what it was, at least as far as the immediate demands of a day are concerned. I was making a list when a voice on the radio intruded to say that they would be speaking with a survivor of the London underground terrorist attack and I shuddered involuntarily, my mind conjuring images of all those ordinary people with soot and chalk and blood on their nice work clothes, standing in the street as if just standing in the street were some terrific miracle, which I suppose it was. I looked up at the radio, which was one of those DAB things, a Christmas present from my son, and. I don’t quite know how to say this to you without it sounding ridiculous in some way, but. There is a postcard on the notice board behind the radio, a postcard of Henry Moore’s Woman seated in the underground. It was partially obscured by a telephone bill. You couldn’t see the people over the woman’s shoulder. But I could see the copy at the bottom of the postcard, the artist’s name, the title, the year.. I could see the two hands, fingers playing with fingers, in her lap. The world seemed to stand still. I sat, staring at the postcard, numb with the world, and the woman from the underground, the survivor of the terrorist attack began to speak:
“We were going to an art gallery, my daughter and I,” she said, quietly. “I’d not been well, you see? We were having a day out. Iris, that’s my daughter, thought it would do me good, getting out. I didn’t know what happened. We were on the train. On the tube. One minute everything was okay and the next I didn’t know. There were two people on the floor to my left and they looked dead. Another person, a young woman, was on the floor by my feet and she was shaking, her whole body was shaking, and she was opening her mouth and it looked like she was screaming but I couldn’t hear her. I couldn’t hear anything. I watched the young girl, she was covered in blood, and the more she shook, the less she screamed, the less her mouth moved. Her eyes rolled back in her head and that’s when I noticed that I didn’t have any legs. It was quite matter of fact. I looked down and I didn’t have any legs.”
At this point, I put my face in my hands. I didn’t cry. I always find that the larger things, those things that truly strike a chill into your heart, don’t provoke tears. They draw wisdom and sympathy and they make the edges of your world more distinct, briefly. They can even make you laugh, at the horror of it all. But it’s rare, I find, that such horrors can make you cry.. And so I sat there with my face in my hands and, with my eyes closed, I could see the woman seated on the underground, the woman of pen and chalk and gouache on paper, the woman measuring 48.3 X 38.1cm, opening her mouth to speak:
“I wanted to close my eyes. I thought, if I just close my eyes everything will be fine. But then, it was like another voice in my head, and the other voice said, no. If you close your eyes that will be the end of you. I’d not been well, I told you that didn’t I? I’d not been well and. There were times when I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to carry on. And yet, sitting there, with people dying and dead, I thought no. I’m not ready to go yet. And that felt right. It was the first right thing I’d thought for a long time. But, at the same time, I was tired. I was losing blood, you see? I lost over a third of all of the blood in my body. I nearly died. They tell me that I arrested thirteen times in the ambulance. They say I’m a kind of miracle. I lost my daughter. They say she was sitting closer than I was, that I was tremendously lucky. I lost my legs but I was lucky, that’s how I feel. It’s set things right with me. You have to live.”
The presenter of the programme went on to talk about how terrorism had changed the mood of the nation. Once we were invincible, and now we lived in fear. And I thought once more about the little girl who slept between her mother and her sister as aeroplanes roared overhead with their leaden cargo, I thought about the cigarettes passed hand to hand, thought about the old men trying it on with the young girls, and I thought about the singing and the celebration, and I thought about my mother and my sister and I thought about George and I thought about the life I had lived and the life my children were living, and I thought, there but for the grace of God go I.