KEY POINTS:
The world wars of last century may seem an age away but, for Megan Rutter, a world at war is a reality of less than a year ago.
A trained kindergarten teacher, Miss Rutter was working at the childcare centre of University College Hospital in Euston at the
time of the London bombings last July.
The hospital is near Tavistock Square, where a double-decker bus was bombed, and not far from the Kings Cross station, where an underground train was bombed on the Piccadilly line just to the south.
Some of the injured were taken to the hospital, which was put on emergency mode and was also cordoned off twice as armed police entered the building searching for a suspect.
While Miss Rutter was already safely at work, on an early shift, it could have been a different story.
"If I was on a different shift I would have been underground when the bombs were detonated. I used to get off at Baker St station, the one next to where the Edgware Rd bomb was."
Miss Rutter at times also used the Circle line, which was bombed twice.
She found out about the bombings when her older sister Nicole phoned to make sure she had got to work.
"At that stage we didn't really know what was going on because they just closed the underground network and the mobile phone networks were jammed but they hadn't confirmed a terrorist attack. I told my boss and we turned the television and radio on and we all just wanted to know everyone we knew was safe, but getting through on landlines was hard."
Her sister phoned home to New Zealand to let their parents know they were okay.
"We all got to leave by 6pm but then had to walk out of central London as no public transport was working. Walking through the London streets was a bit spooky as the normally packed streets were nearly empty and armed cops were everywhere."
Thoughts of terrorism continued to concern Miss Rutter while she was overseas.
"It makes you ask when is it going to stop? Cops with machine guns on the tubes - was that meant to make us more safe?"
The fear of terrorist attacks derailed a trip to Egypt.
"The bomb scares there put me off ... It was always in the back of my mind, 'Am I safe?' "
As to her grandfather's war, Miss Rutter admits that for years she knew little about it. "Nothing was spoken, we were not really interested. History classes in the third form touched on it but I probably learned more in Brownies and Girl Guides where they take you to parades so you can pay your respects to the people who fought for your country."
Miss Rutter says more information started coming out as her grandfather started planning his trips back to various reunions.
"He had just come back from the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Crete and was quite keen to talk. He speaks in depth about it now."
Miss Rutter feels people like her grandfather didn't talk a lot about the war because they thought no one would understand.
Her own interest had been building over the last decade.
Last year she attended the 90th anniversary of Gallipoli with Nicole, who is "really patriotic", and they found it "really eerie".
Before leaving on their OE the pair had planned to meet up with their Australian-based uncle John Rutter at Gallipoli but he died in 2004.
This morning, Miss Rutter plans to be at the Manurewa dawn service with her grandfather.
"I guess the war means more to me because Granddad is still alive."
Online link: The Auckland War Memorial Museum has a Book of Remembrance on its website for people to post messages on to remember those who served and died in war.
