A moving tribute to victims of terror

Ian COLLINS

Next time you’re early for the train from Liverpool Street, and have a few moments to spare, take a little detour to the Museum of London and a rather makeshift exhibit just inside the doorway.

It’s a book of fairly recent manufacture that, very touchingly, is falling apart. The binding is split and the page corners are crumbling from being turned and turned again.

Do touch. Do absorb this album of smiling faces - most of them younger than me - the poems and the translations from foreign scripts and languages and all the testimonies from family and friends from all over East Anglia and all over the world. Keep the memory alive.

Victim

We all know the name of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian man the panicky and fallible police shot in the wake of the suicide blasts on London public transport in July 2005, believing - however ineptly it may now seem - that he was about to instigate more mass murder. He too was a victim of the 7/7 bombings.

But can you name any of the 52 people who died on July 7, 2005?

What an ongoing horror that they were going about their very ordinary and innocent lives when they were afforded no human rights whatsoever. How dare we, who are so obsessed with rights, ever forget?

Occasionally we hear from the still-struggling survivors of those three Underground bombs - and that bus in Tavistock Square packed with evacuated Tube travellers and then blown to pieces.

Recently Jacqui Putnam, of Huntingdon, expressed her shell-shocked sense of inhabiting another planet. “You end up feeling isolated because you no longer live in the same world as other people,” she said.

“My world is one where trains blow up.”

But the silence of the dead speaks volumes. Or, rather it speaks loud and clear in one terrible and beautiful volume now moved from St Ethelburga’s church (the City’s centre of peace and reconciliation carved from IRA-blasted rubble) to the Museum of London.

Survivors

Surrounded by photographs of survivors being led through subterranean tunnels and emerging with burned faces covered in protective gauze to waiting fleets of ambulances, and of the memorial service at King’s Cross, this Book of Tributes begins with a poignant foreword by the Prince of Wales.

And it ends with the astonishing acknowledgement of gratitude for the prince’s singular support for the bereaved families. “He alone from the establishment of this country took it upon himself to take the trouble to write to us all in our hour of greatest need. For that we shall be ever grateful.”

Ordinary lives

The pages in between convey the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives all later coming together in one fateful rush hour - with pictures of Polish girls on Baltic beaches, of a Nigerian woman gaining a university degree, a beaming police officer from Grenada and happy couples at traditional English weddings.

They came from Mauritius and New Zealand, Israel and Iran, Turkey and Tunisia, India and Sri Lanka, Kenya and Ghana, Italy and Romania and Afghanistan.

Anywhere and everywhere. They included a Vietnamese-born American and a Vietnamese-born Australian. They came to escape poverty or persecution or to gain or spread skills, to live or to visit.

They were Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian and none of the above. They were political - “Dearest Miriam: It is a travesty that you lost your life at the hands of bombers; you, with your respect for human life, your gift for making everyone feel valued and your active protest against war” - and apolitical.

They were students and teachers and hairdressers and radiographers and computer programmers and cleaners and managers and bank clerks and husbands and wives, mums and dads, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, lovers and friends.

Alongside this vivid portrait of a world coming to Britain I was impressed by how many of the Brits had travelled widely, especially for voluntary work. Our society is not as selfish as it is painted. There was far more give than take here, and each of these lives was largely positive and utterly unique.

Lost lives

Here are James Adams from Peterborough, a churchwarden and school friend of minister David Lammy; Richard Gray, stalwart of the Ipswich and East Suffolk Hockey Club; and childhood sweethearts from Hereford, Samantha Badham and Lee Harris.

And now that I’m turning the pages, it seems iniquitous to pick out any lost life in particular. But those of three young women resonate with me most especially.

Actually, I well recall the story of Fiona Stevenson from Great Baddow in Essex. Like me, she had moved to the Barbican weeks before the bombings. So handy for homeward trains.

A solicitor who was “passionate about human rights”, Fiona had just celebrated her 29th birthday when caught in the Aldgate blast.

Picture

I’m also struck by the picture of the brilliant student from Turkey, Gamze Gunoral.

This only daughter, who loved vintage Mercedes cars and baking biscuits, and who had just turned 24, left a last letter in her mother’s handbag which was only discovered weeks after her death.

She wrote: “Whatever I do with my life, I just want to make you happy... You are my rock in this life and I have found peace and love in your care. I love you so much.”

And then there’s ‘our’ Benedetta Ciaccia, a 30-year-old au pair turned business analyst from Italy who lived in Norwich with her (British-born Muslim) fianc‚ Fiaz Bhatti. They were two months away from their marriage in Rome and honeymoon in Sardinia and Corsica.

She was taken home for her funeral and buried in her wedding dress. I remember that the council hung posters all around that glorious city saying: “Benedetta, Rome hugs you.” But now I’m weeping afresh over her pages.

Linked by fate

How marvellous that Birkbeck College and Pearson have now combined to fund bursaries for poor students in her memory.

And now I have been reading this battered book for more than an hour and, looking up for the first time in ages, find a queue of Italian tourists waiting patiently behind me.

I apologise and head into the open air which, even on a grey winter’s day, seems fresh and pure and full of hope. The humdrum can be heavenly.

I have no train to catch, but walk rather aimlessly and find myself entering Postman’s Park, with its magnificent memorials to heroic lives sacrificed for others between the late Victorian era and the 1920s.

I find myself hoping that, a century on, 52 amazing human beings, forever linked in a fate over which they had no choice, will be as well remembered.

That this crime will stand out for its supreme madness. And then another thought occurs. Since that appalling and atrocious US-UK invasion of Iraq more than 150,000 civilians have died, so many of them in bomb blasts.

All those names and stories could not fit into one book. They would need an entire library.

The Book of Tributes is in the Museum of London, on London Wall (visit the website at www.museumoflondon.org.uk Open Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 5.50 p.m. Sunday noon to 5.50 p.m. Admission is free. (EDP24)