Travellers nervous but determined

Normally packed carriages were half empty. Picture / Reuters

LONDON - Anxiousness, nervous laughter, jumpy vigilance, ready suspicion, solid determination and even blithe insouciance - all were on display yesterday as London's travelling public attempted to get back to normal after last week's bomb attacks.

But normal is not normal any more on the London Underground and on London buses.

The heightened police presence at stations was very visible and appeals for people to keep their luggage close to them were frequent on every service.

And though the spectrum of emotions reflected different characters and travelling circumstances, in some places there was clearly a dominant underlying tone of anxiety.

It was most in evidence near those Tube stations where bombs had exploded, and at King's Cross in particular, where some of the travelling public had missed the fatal train by only minutes or had known people caught up in the blasts.

Janice Rose, 55, a traffic warden manager from West Ealing, said she felt "awful" as her day began.

"I think I am still traumatised by Thursday, and whoever I see around me on the train or the bus, I see as a suspect. I am really put off by the whole experience."

But, she said, she still had to come to work and was not going to be put off by the terrorists.

"We have to go on with our normal lives - that's the way it is."

Neil Gates, a 46-year-old human resources director from Stevenage in Hertfordshire, said he had been unable to sleep on Sunday night because he normally catches the Circle Line train which was caught in the blast.

"The atmosphere on the train coming in this morning was very quiet," he said.

"Normally you have to stand but the train was half-empty so I don't know if people had decided not to come in to work. But it was definitely subdued."

Although London Underground said numbers riding the Tube were "back to normal", widespread anecdotal evidence suggested otherwise.

On some services, carriages that were normally packed tight throughout the rush hour were half empty.

Vigilance and suspicion were widespread.

"I will be looking at everything, at the way everyone is behaving and what everyone is carrying," said Florence Churchill, 41, a planning consultant from Milford in Surrey.

Denise Murray, a 39-year-old case clerk at the Crown Prosecution Service, said she looked at everyone who got on and off her Waterloo-bound train from Brentford in west London.

"I even kept looking in the overhead luggage rack and I had my own coat there," she said.

London's Mayor, Ken Livingstone, took his normal Tube ride to work.

"We are going to work. We carry on our lives," he said. "We don't let a small group of terrorists change the way we live."

- INDEPENDENT