I WASN’T being brave or showing a stiff upper lip when I boarded a Tube train at Chalk Farm on Sunday.
I was faced with a simple question most Londoners have had to confront all week – how to they get about the capital unless they use public transport?
But as I looked around the almost empty compartment I couldn’t help counting the number of seats. There were 62. Add 20 or so standing passengers, I thought, and the figure of 80 filtered into my mind – and that would roughly be the number of commuters packed into the front compartment now buried deep under Russell Square Tube station.
The horror of the outrage on Thursday, for me, had taken on a new meaning. After the first shock wave came bewilderment – who was to blame and why?
Nearly 1,000 people of all types – leftie politicos, church ministers, Tube and bus trade unionists, poets like Michael Rosen and Adrian Mitchell, ordinary suburban families with children – assembled in the ‘peace gardens’ of the Quaker building, Friends Meeting House in Euston on Saturday.
It hadn’t taken weeks or days to organise the meeting but only a few hours of internet messaging on Friday evening and Saturday morning. But it was time enough because people – myself included – felt a need to gather together. To pay homage to the dead and the wounded? Perhaps but also many of us also felt a need to explore those regions of the mind where confusion lay?
Inevitably, by the nature of the meeting, called by the Stop the War Coalition, it wasn’t surprising to find that speaker after speaker essentially blamed Tony Blair and his Iraq war as well as sincerely expressing horror at the bombing by the terrorists.
Both Islington MP Jeremy Corby and Bethnal Green MP George Galloway kept on emphasising there was no “justification” for the outrage, that the bombs had killed ordinary working-class Londoners, but they drew a causal line back to the Iraq war and the treatment of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
Galloway described the deaths in Iraq – the number of which daily equal those killed last week in central London – as a “moral swamp” that would continue to breed bitterness and resentment, the feeding ground of Islamic fundamentalism – and terrorism.
Even Dr Azzam Tamimi, a member of the executive of the Muslim Association of Britain, a quiet, demure figure in black, while expressing repugnance at the action of the terrorists ended his peroration by reminding the silent audience that the social causes of the atrocity were to be found in the maltreatment of the Arabs in the Middle East.
The father of a British soldier Peter Brierley, a stocky, middle-aged solid looking Englishman, joined in the tirade again Tony Blair.
You could see he wasn’t used to speaking in public, that a speech at a wedding or a funeral would be a terrifying prospect for him, but as he spoke his eyes misted over as he probably thought of his son whose life had ended in Iraq.
After the meeting you sensed you had felt the touch of another side of Britain, one hardly reflected in TV interviews or those in the public print.
Then came yesterday’s (Wednesday’s) shock wave that the bombers were young men, British, well-educated, homegrown suicide bombers.
Unless you reach for the most facile, academic causes, a question for a simple soul like me remains: How can a 19- year-old feel so deeply about a cause that he is willing to blow himself up, and along with him, end the lives of innocent men, women and children?

A child is singing

A POEM that moved some of the audience to tears was read by Adrian Mitchell who introduced it as being based on a song sung by his niece, Ruth, aged four, while on a journey. The journey lasted four hours.
When he got home he wrote down some of the words – and then formed the poem.

A child is singing
And nobody listening
But the child who is singing:
Bulldozers grab the earth and shower it.
The house is on fire.
Gardeners wet the earth and flower it.
The house is on fire.
The houses are on fire.
Fetch the fire engine, the fire engine’s on fire.
We will have to hide in a hole.
We will burn slow like coal.
All the people are on fire.
And a child is singing
And nobody listening
But the child who is singing.

Kipper's eye view