“Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I love London so.
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner that I think of her wherever I go.
I get this funny feeling inside of me just walking up and down.
Oh maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I love London town.”
The words of the old cockney knees-up song by Hubert Gregg came into my head as I waited for a bus on Tuesday, the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings. Written in 1943 when the German bombs were falling on London, it remains an unofficial anthem for all Londoners, although LDN by Lily Allen may have replaced it (for me) for a few months in 2006, a year after the attacks.
Both songs contain an understated defiance that encapsulates the London spirit; a heart filled-to-bursting with pride delivered in a tone of cheeky nonchalance. (If you don’t know what cheeky means then that’s because all yuh Trinis don’t have an equivalent word—so I can’t help you.) I wondered if the first song might have been appropriate to perform, perhaps with a marching band, at the ten-year tribute to the 52 people who died, rather than the usual solemn hymns.
It’s the sort of upbeat song I would want played at my funeral and I think its resolute, stoical feel would have been in-keeping with the way Londoners dealt with the viciousness of the attacks, coming a day after we had celebrated being awarded the 2012 Olympic Games. The attack would have come on the day the Olympics vote was announced if the leader of the attackers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, hadn’t postponed it to take his pregnant wife to hospital.
The 7/7 bombings are a strange and difficult thing for us Londoners to have to think about now—because we still can’t quite comprehend them even though we expected them after 9/11, Bali and Madrid.
Yes we went back to work again the next day on the same tubes and buses that were ripped apart. Yes we saw the blood still staining the walls of the British Medical Association where the number 30 bus had exploded when Hasib Hussain, a British Muslim from Leeds detonated his homemade organic bomb stuffed into his rucksack. But although we are tough (and toughened after decades of IRA bombs) we still don’t quite know how to talk about 7/7, even ten years on.
Two of Hussain’s accomplices, including Khan, were also from Leeds and also had Pakistani parents. A fourth terrorist, 19-year-old Germaine Lindsay, was born in Jamaica, converted to Islam in Britain aged seven and later became radicalised.
Why they would attack one of the most multicultural cities in the world —killing people of all faiths in the name of Islam—is beyond comprehension. But we weren’t surprised, even though we were deeply shocked. Our country had carried out foreign invasions and occupations of Muslim countries. It was a matter of when, not if.
In the video recorded by Khan and broadcast by Al-Jazeera after the attacks, Khan said, “Your democratically-elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. We are at war and I am a soldier.”
In parts of Britain where racial divides between Muslims and white communities already existed—cities like Bradford, Oldham and Burnley—tension and distrust became more entrenched. It will take a generation or more for those places to recover. But in London, these attacks have not sown the discord or bred the violence or triggered the uprising that the bombers hoped for.
As former mayor of London Ken Livingstone said on the day, addressing the killers, “I can show you why you will fail…even after your cowardly attack people will come from the rest of Britain and around the world to become Londoners, to fulfil their dreams. They come to be free, to live the life they choose, to be able to be themselves.”
In a column in the London Evening Standard on Tuesday, Livingstone quoted Pericles—the first mayor of Athens 2,000 years ago—who said, “In time all great things flow towards the city, and in time the greatest of those is the people who come.” They come to the great golden dome of the Regents Park Mosque, to the Hindu Temple in Neasden to the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and to the dozens of synagogues both new and ancient.
In 1990, the coup in Trinidad was also carried out by home grown terrorists but although those men were also Muslims the parallels end there. Radicalised Islamists in Trinidad may emerge in coming years, but one gets the sense that the Trini version of Islam will mollify any turbulence.
“No one’s about to blow up the twin towers,” a Trini with a Muslim surname (but a devout belief in atheism) told me the other day.
“Consider this,” he said. “Some years ago a Muslim woman ran for Miss T&T. There was a bit of a kerfuffle in the Muslim community. The Mirror interviewed an imam about it. His response was, “As a Muslim I am opposed to what she is doing. As a Trini, I support her all the way.” God bless Trini Islam, and god bless London town.