Twenty years on, a survivor and her rescuer share their memories of the devastating London bombings.
On the morning of the July 7 bombings in 2005, marketing manager Martine Wright was working her way from Harringay, north London, to her office at St Katherine Docks near the Tower of London. It was later than usual – the previous night she had been out celebrating with her work colleagues following the news that London had won its bid to host the 2012 Olympics, and she’d overslept. There was a signal failure on the Northern Line, and the 52-year-old had what she now describes as her “sliding doors moment”.
“I thought, ‘Am I going to get off, go above ground and get the bus to Tower Hill, or shall I stay on the Tube?’ I decided to stay on, and so one of my last memories was running up the escalator at Moorgate, turning right at the top and seeing the Circle Line train in the platform, running towards it and thinking, ‘What a result.’”
As she was rushing, she didn’t get on her usual carriage, but her favourite seat was free – one in the corner. She picked up a paper, filled with jubilant articles about the Olympics, and pondered buying tickets for the opening ceremony.
Then the bomb went off.
“I don’t remember a noise, or a big bang. What I do remember is a flash of light, and it was a light that was all-consuming for a second. I remember thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
Shehzad Tanweer, a 22-year-old Muslim extremist from the Leeds suburb of Beeston, had detonated a bomb hidden in a rucksack, as part of a coordinated attack on London that killed 52 people and injured hundreds more.
Disorientated, Martine found herself surrounded by mangled metal and debris from the blast. She was yet to realise she had lost both her legs. “I just remember, in the beginning, trying to get up, and I thought, ‘Why can’t I get up?’”
Next to her were two survivors: Andrew Brown, electrocuted by live wires, and Kira Mason, with a severed arm. Seven passengers in the carriage had died, with Tanweer.
“The screams were awful. I can’t really describe what they were really like, and then people started to come past. It must have been the station master. He was talking to me through this hole.
“I had no concept of time. I just have memories; this gentleman talking to me, saying, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK’. Everyone’s just shouting, ‘Help! Help!’
“I remember trying to pull myself out, and then seeing this figure coming up. This was my guardian angel, Liz Kenworthy. I could see Liz, long blonde hair and blue eyes, coming towards me.”
Kenworthy was an off-duty police officer, and immediately got to work tending to both Andrew and Martine, gathering anything to use as a tourniquet to stem the bleeding.
“I remember one tourniquet was a belt,” recalls Martine, “and I remember pulling this belt and thinking I felt like [a character] out of a John Wayne Western, like I used to watch with my dad on Sunday afternoon. And all I kept saying to Liz was, ‘Please tell my mum and dad I’m OK.’ The irony was that I wasn’t OK.”
Slowly, the walking wounded were evacuated through the tunnels, leaving only the most severely injured behind. Martine had to be cut out of the twisted metal, although she has no recollection of this.
Having lost 80% of her blood, Martine spent over a week in a coma and it took almost two days of anguish before her parents finally found her, having spent the days ringing round the city’s hospitals.
“I just remember waking up in [the] Royal London [hospital] eight days later. James, my intensive care nurse, saw that I’d woken up a bit, and had to tell me that I’d lost my legs. I looked down and, you know, I saw half my body gone.”
Heavily drugged, Martine went back to sleep, but the next morning reality hit her. “I thought I was going to die. I wrote a letter [in my head], got the nurse to get me paper, but I couldn’t write. I asked to have my ashes scattered on Haad Yao Beach, Koh Phangan – my favourite place in Thailand.”
Martine spent 366 days in hospital, first at the Royal London and then at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton, in a rehabilitation centre for amputees. Out of all those who survived the bombings – passengers on two other Tube trains and a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square – Martine was the worst injured, and at first felt bitter and resentful.
“I went down to the physio, and met about five or six of the other victims. I looked around that room and I thought, ‘Oh, you’ve got one arm missing, you’ve got one leg missing, you’ve got one foot missing. I’ve lost two legs [above the knee]… Why?’ And then I found out that 52 people had died. I had no idea that so many people had died that day.”
Martine began talking to the other survivors, who make up what is now known as the 7/7 Club.
“That is a club that you would never choose to belong to, but a club where all you’ve got to do is walk into a room and see that person’s eyes and you’ve got this deep understanding of each other.”
And gradually, amid the trauma of what had happened, Martine discovered a new purpose. “I suddenly found myself holding hands with people and looking into their eyes, and I felt like I had a role to play, to say, ‘It’s going to be OK’. And I think now, looking back, that was really important for me in my healing process, thinking, ‘I can help people, I’m not useless’, reminding people that we were actually the lucky ones.”
Martine campaigned for better compensation for the 7/7 victims and, in 2009, discovered wheelchair volleyball. With the help of her physiotherapist, Maggie Uden, she began her journey to compete in the 2012 Paralympics. She was awarded an MBE in 2016 for services to sport, including her work as a role model for amputee athletes, and she also mentors amputees at the Royal London.
“I diverted my anger towards the Government. I met families of those 52 people, they were offered £8000 ($18,000) each. Bloody ridiculous. I remember meeting Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at the first memorial at St Paul’s Cathedral. Tony Blair could not look me in the eye. I thought it’s because he couldn’t relate to us. But Gordon Brown and Sarah Brown were fantastic.
“I still don’t understand why I wasn’t really angry towards the bombers. [Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Hasib Hussain, 18, Germaine Lindsay, 19, and Tanweer, all died in the attack.] I couldn’t get away from the fact they had left their family and left their babies, their children, their wives – they’d been influenced by someone else. [Martine herself has a son, now aged 15.]
“Not a day goes by when I don’t think I’m lucky. You know, [Tanweer] was 4ft away from me. I should not be here. And I’m here not just because of me, I’m here because of the love and support I’ve had.
“Twenty years on, this is normal. This is my life. Maybe five, 10 years on it wasn’t normal, but I’m very reflective now. I feel like I could not have done anything in my life to stop what happened, and that actually my life is more enriched, it’s better, than it was before. My legs might be shorter, but that’s it.”
‘I knew it was bad, but I figured she had a chance’: the rescuer’s story
Liz Kenworthy, an officer with the Met Police, was off duty on July 7, 2005, heading into London for a conference. Having missed the first train from Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, so she could have a chat with her daughter, Emily, on the platform, Kenworthy arrived at London Liverpool Street station later than planned and then headed to the Circle Line.
“I jumped on the Tube, with my rucksack on my back, my Daily Telegraph under my arm, because it was full of pictures of the excitement of the previous day, and the train pulled out, heading towards Aldgate,” she remembers. “Very shortly afterwards, there was a sudden crunch; the train came to an abrupt halt.”
The lights flickered on and off, and then there was a call on the intercom for anyone medically trained. Thinking that perhaps there had been a collision, Liz made her way through the carriages towards the front of the train.
“The next carriage was very different. There was darkness, there was newspaper blowing around. People injured and covered in dirt started coming towards me.”
Reasoning that these were the walking wounded and that there were likely to be more seriously injured passengers further on, she carried on walking through the carriages.
Finally, she reached the carriage where the bomb had detonated.
“The cables were coming out of the roof like spaghetti, the train had been disembowelled – the floor was ripped up, and there were bodies. I saw a human back underneath, down below my feet, and a big sheet of metal, which I had to stand on. The body down in the hole was [beyond saving], so I just had to ignore it.”
Liz’s police training had impressed on her that if there were more than three casualties, her job was to stand back, assess the situation and call for help. Liz sent a text to a colleague: “Accident Aldgate, I’m OK”, but the text didn’t send, so Liz crawled into the carriage, finding Martine and Andrew.
“I saw a lady on the right with her feet up. I thought, ‘Why is she sitting like that with her feet up on the seat?’ Then I realised that it was her shoes up on the sill, not her feet. It was an incredibly confusing scene.
“I didn’t compute what had happened initially. Then I realised she was badly hurt, but conscious. The man next to her had lost one of his legs, but he was conscious as well and then, to their left, there was a woman on her back in the debris trapped by her arm, and she was shouting and shouting.
“One of the rules we’re taught is: the more people shout, the less help they probably need; if they’ve got the energy to shout, then let them get on with it.
“So I thought, ‘I’ll stick with the lady who’s lost her feet, and I’ll stick with the man, and the lady who’s shouting. I’ll deal with them.’”
Liz worked to stem the bleeding from Andrew Brown’s leg, and sent a volunteer with her warrant card to find T-shirts, belts and ties to use as tourniquets. She did her best to comfort and tend to the injured, and could see that Martine was in a critical condition.
“It was bad, but I knew that people from the First World War had their legs blown off in trenches and survived. Obviously, I couldn’t tell if she had anything internal, but she was still talking and conscious. I figured she stood a chance.”
Some time later, Liz was joined by Sergeant Neal Kemp of the City of London Police. Kemp’s arrival took the pressure off Liz, who was exhausted by this point.
“I had probably done about as much as I could. I was starting to flag. I said to Sgt Kemp: ‘This is Andy, this is Martine. Remember their names. They’re going to live. They’re going to be alright, we’re going to make sure they get out safely…’”
Then approximately 45 minutes after the bombing, the fire brigade arrived. Liz made her way through the tunnel to the surface to see people being treated on the streets.
Liz wrote down as much as she could remember while it was still fresh in her mind, and drew a map of the scene on the train. Later, her sergeant came with colleagues and took her statement.
“I gave them the original notes, and I said, ‘I can’t write anything else.’ For a person who loves words, I’ve never, ever been able to write it down. I can talk to you about it. But I can’t write it down.”
Understandably, life didn’t get back to “normal” for Liz, as it didn’t for so many survivors.
“Once I knew what [the blast] was, I was extremely angry – the idea that someone would do that to people they didn’t know, and hurt people that were completely innocent, minding their own business, travelling on a train.”
Liz saw someone in occupational health, and talking about it helped a great deal. “I needed to talk about it and come to terms with not being able to do more, and wishing I could have stopped it. But, I did what I could in the circumstances, and I can’t beat myself up over what I did or didn’t do, because it’s done.”
For the remaining years of her service, Liz carried a first aid kit and torch in her backpack during her commute, “in case it happened again”. She received an MBE for bravery and retired on the 11th anniversary of the attacks, in 2016.
Unlike Martine, whom Liz is still in contact with, there is no forgiveness or understanding. There’s a deep anger towards the terrorists, and Liz is incredibly blunt in her condemnation.
“They’re beneath contempt. They’re evil people. I don’t care what their cause is.
“They’ve wasted their own lives. They’ve caused a lot of hurt and misery, and what have they achieved? Absolutely nothing. You want to blow yourself up. You really want to end up as a carcass in the bottom of a train? You’re not a hero. You’re just a dead lump of meat with me stepping on you. Me in my shoes, stepping on you. That’s how I feel about that.”