7/7 anniversary: 'The bus blew up into tiny pieces. The people must be in tiny pieces'

On the seventh anniversary of 7/7, Jasmine Gardner talks to witnesses to try to make sense of the day she watched the No 30 bus explode
Jasmine Gardner7 July 2015

As the bus driver closed the doors in my face at the stop on Upper Woburn Place I wanted to scream. Swarms of people had got off. I could see people standing on the lower deck, but I knew I would have fitted. I swore at the driver — too late for him to hear.

Having already been thrown off the Tube at Euston, before sitting on a bus outside the station for some 15 minutes until I was told it would be going nowhere, I was seething. The No 30 went near my office, I was sure. I was already 45 minutes late for work and I needed to get on it.

Resolving to beat the crowds that were clustering around this bus stop and get on at the next, I marched after the bus, concentrating my gaze on its tall red back wall. When the No 30 bus blew up on Upper Woburn Place on July 7, 2005 I was 10 metres behind, trying to catch it. With a bang it seemed to vanish in a cloud of smoke — a horrific magic trick.

George Psaradakis, the driver of that No 30 bus, tells me he can no longer remember why he closed his doors at that stop.

I assume it was because he had been diverted from his normal route due to the police cordons. Whatever the reason, he stopped me stepping any further into danger.

“My prayers are always with the families of my passengers who lost their lives … I think about them a lot,” Psaradakis tells me.

Although he says now: “I don’t want to go back again through all the details. It’s too much.”

Another commuter, Anat Rosenberg, had also been ejected from the Underground at Euston. Instead of trying to get ahead of the bus like me, she walked back and boarded the No 30 at an earlier stop. She spoke her last words over the phone to her boyfriend as the bomb went off.

At that moment a shower of tiny pieces of debris fell down on me. Ahead, people in suits turned towards me and began to run. I stood still, shocked, until a man grabbed me, swung me around and rushed me in the other direction.

“The bus blew up into tiny pieces. The people must be in tiny pieces,” I kept repeating to him. “I was trying to get on that bus.”

“So was I,” he replied. “Don’t look back.”

I didn’t, but Psaradakis told the inquest that he had seen bodies dismembered and a leg stuck to the wall of his bus.

“When people ask me to talk about July 7 2005, the first thing that comes into my mind are all those innocent people, men and women, who lost their lives in such a horrible and barbaric way,” he says. “I don’t drive buses any more, but I still work in the bus industry and every time I see a bus it comes into my mind. Sometimes there are images and I think very strongly about them.”

Back at the top of Upper Woburn Place, the stranger and I parted. “I’m going to try to get to work,” he said, and I never saw him again.

While we rushed away, Dr Peter Holden, who was in London for a meeting inside the British Medical Association building, did the opposite.

“Everything went pink — that was the pressure wave hitting us. Then we heard the bang,” he says, talking today from a room at the BMA, directly above the site of the explosion.

Dr Holden is a GP but also works on two air ambulances and is a major incident adviser. “I’m trained for this kind of thing,” he says. “We deliberately waited two minutes and dropped the blinds. We had no doubt that it was a bomb… It used to be classic that there would be a secondary device. There’s no point being a dead rescuer.

“When I got downstairs two of my colleagues looked at me and said, ‘Peter, this is your scene, tell us what to do.’ I thought, ‘Oh deep shit.’

“I sat down for about a minute and wrote down my priorities, because that is the only way to deal with the issue…Then I moved back out and said, ‘Right, this is what we do.’”

The bus blast killed 13 people. Dr Holden prioritised 15 people according to their injuries and his colleagues set to work with nothing but two first aid boxes. He continued to manage the scene even when the emergency services arrived. “I was the right guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was just luck: I should have been elsewhere. I was told, ‘You have got a meeting with the minister at 12.30pm, so you had better stay and prepare. That’s how I ended up being here on that day.”

For me it had begun as a normal morning. I was 22 years old and still living with my parents in south-east London. I had taken my usual train to London Bridge and got on the Northern line just moments before the blasts at Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square — just early enough to be underground, cut off from news of what was happening. The Tube didn’t stop at Angel, my station, nor King’s Cross. By the time we were spewed out at Euston, I was cursing London transport — another day, another delay.

So, as I hovered vacantly on the road after the blast, the cause of the chaos still escaped me. “The driver must have known there was something wrong with the bus,” I thought. The word “bomb” did not enter my mind.

Police cordons prevented me from getting out of the area, so I sat on a bench outside the Friends House Quaker building on the Euston Road, with no concept of how I had arrived there.

I called my mother and managed: “A bus just disappeared in front of me,” before tears erupted. And once they started they kept coming, until someone from the Quaker building invited me in, wrapped me in a blue St John Ambulance blanket and gave me cake and tea.

A woman with a bloodied face followed me in, convulsing and signalling to anyone who spoke to her that she could not hear.

When the journalists arrived I was swept up in a storm of questions. My sister, who was in Mexico, first found out what had happened when she saw me on CNN. When my father arrived hours later, having navigated around several police cordons to get to me, I was talking to the BBC.

Although my story appeared in several newspapers subsequently, I felt then and still feel now like the fraud of 7/7. I was unhurt — not even scratched, where others were killed, injured or lost relatives. On the first anniversary I was keen to tell anyone who asked that I had not been affected. I had gone to work the next day on the Tube.

For some who suffered real losses, the past seven years will have stood still. For me, life has moved on. I have had two career changes. The first, in October 2005, perhaps subconsciously chosen because it took me out of London, off the buses and Tubes and into a car. The next into journalism.

For George Psaradakis, who drove the No 30, “There is not one day going by that I don’t remember what happened on that dreadful day,” he says.

“I remember on the eve of the London bombings most Londoners were happy for London winning the bid to stage the Olympic Games, but all that happiness and joy turned into bitter lamentation on the following day… I hope and wish London will have a successful and happy Olympic Games this year.”

For Dr Peter Holden, “It won’t go away,” he says. “I work two days a week where it happened. Four times a day, two days a week I walk past the place where I made some very crucial decisions, so it’s a constant reminder. Occasionally there are tears, of course there are, but oddly enough it’s not then [at the time] that you get it. Sometimes the tears are when you go out on a job.”

But he is ready to get on with life and being a doctor has helped with that. “I don’t specifically agonise over that event. Those of us who work with the emergency services, we have learned to cope,” he says. “I want people to move on. That’s not disrespecting the dead, but actually we all do have to move on.”

In my case, my parents may have been most affected by what nearly happened to me that day. Thinking of what might have been, my father bought me an AA pocket A-Z of London and advised I try to walk around the city.

I kept it in my bag, but it was only weeks later, while looking up some directions, that I realised the picture on the cover was of Tavistock Square and Upper Woburn Place.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in