The Observer: June 4, 2006
His bloodied face became one of the iconic images of the 7 July terrorist attacks on London.
Now survivor John Tulloch has written a moving book about his experiences that day. In this exclusive extract, he describes coming face to face with the Edgware Road bomber moments before the explosion, the dramatic rescue operation, and how he is rebuilding his life
The Circle Line train pulled in to Euston Square station. I toyed with getting into the first carriage because I could see the second was crowded. But I saw just one vacant seat in carriage two, next to the end of a bench seat along the wall between two double doors. There was a very big guy in the next seat, sort of spilling over into what seemed too narrow a space for me and my bags. Other people were obviously thinking the same thing and not taking the seat. You make split-second decisions. I didn't have time now to pull my bags back to the first carriage, so I plunged in and squeezed into the gap, with my roller case tight against my legs. My laptop bag was on my knees and my black cabin bag was on top of that. We set off, typically packed in, towards Paddington.
I'm not sure where they got in but, after a while, I was aware of two American voices, students I thought, in the two seats next to me on my left, with the big man still on my right. They were talking like people who knew each other well. I didn't listen particularly to what they were saying, but their cheerful voices were a ray of pleasure in that humourless, everyday dash we all do to work each morning.
Then, at Edgware Road, the carriage emptied of half its passengers. I was surprised because that tends to happen at Paddington, not the stop before. But it suited me because all the people in the aisle got out or found seats and, even better, the large man next to me left the train. We rolled out of Edgware Road, with me and a tweedy, lugubrious but gentle-looking man sitting facing each other, and me breathing easier because I had more space, and because the train sometimes stops for ages at Edgware Road and this time it didn't. I was anxious about getting my connecting Cardiff train at 9.15, and only 50 metres into the tunnel from Edgware Road I began to push down on the seat with my hands to stand up, get my bags organised and be ready for a quick exit in the doorway.
But it was still only 8.56 by my watch, so I eased back into the seat because it was too early to get up. That action saved my life because I was now sitting only three feet from the suicide bomber standing in that doorway. Had I been standing, there would have been nothing but air between me and the bomb. And three seconds later, it happened.
Everyone injured or bereaved by the 7/7 explosions will have had the phrase running around their own or their comforters' thoughts: 'The wrong place at the wrong time for me/for my loved one'. It is true, but also a cliche and not much to work back from, because it underplays our freedom to make everyday decisions about where we are and when. We who experienced the explosions had made active choices to be doing what we were doing at the time of the terrorist attacks. We were also subject to a wide range of factors determining why we were there and what happened to us. Some of those contexts are very cruel. However, not all of them were, and to forget the loving ones, the ties of friendship and professionalism, the loyalties, preoccupations, obsessions and coincidences that put us in 'the wrong place at the wrong time' is to do more of the terrorists' work for them.
So why was I at the wrong place at the wrong time? Normally, because I work on a 70 per cent research contract and live in Cardiff, I would have travelled home on Wednesday evening, 6 July, and so would not have been in London the following morning. However, the next Tuesday, 12 July, was the annual degree presentation for our school of social sciences and law at Brunel University. It would be my job to announce the PhD graduates that afternoon, and there had been a training session for us on the Wednesday evening. So I had stayed in London that night.
I might have set out for Cardiff earlier on 7 July if I had been staying in the comfortable small flat I rent from my friends, John and Maire, near Tavistock Square, where a bus was blown up that morning, and under which a Piccadilly Line tube train was destroyed. However, one of John and Maire's daughters had asked to use the flat during July and August. So, on the night of 6 July, I was staying at the Camden flat of my friend Janet, and requiring a start-off to Cardiff from the same tube station I would have used if I had been staying near Tavistock Square: Euston Square. My walk from Janet's flat would normally have taken 10 minutes but that day it took longer because I had three bags: my long-haul flight luggage from Australia the previous weekend.
At the station, I bought my ticket, struggled through the barrier with my bags and manhandled them down the two flights of stairs to the westbound platform... and that was how I came to be sitting on that train at 8.56 at Edgware Road. In the next instant, there exploded suddenly into my vision a strange and uncomfortable image of that carriage. Everything turned a horrible, urine-coloured yellow. The carriage seemed to be distorting, being pulled and displaced as though it were a flat, rubberised photograph that someone was yanking at the sides. I heard no sound. (I read three days later that experienced soldiers tell you if you don't hear the sound of an explosion you are probably about to die.)
Next, I was on my back, slumped on a wrecked seat, my spectacles blown away, blood all over my face and head. It was dark in the carriage. There was blood everywhere. The support pole at the end of the bench seat was at an extreme angle over me and had probably caused the damage to my head. But at that moment, at underground zero, I wasn't connecting such things. I knew something bad had happened to me, and I remembered those two, fresh American voices near me minutes before.
I rolled to my left to ask them for help - to help me find my glasses so I could see. I think I even began to speak to them. But then I saw them, one slumped on the seat, the other on the floor, both in a terrible way and bleeding. Only then did it occur to me that something bad had happened to everybody.
There is a strange and embarrassing sense of solipsism about this, which I talked over with my Australian social worker, Lou, when she visited me two weeks later. Lou had been in contact with the victims of the first Bali bombing and explained that in a near-death situation, the body moves quickly into survival mode, generating huge amounts of adrenaline that give us the energy to fight (to protect ourselves from danger) or flight (away from trouble). So, Lou said, that 'me, me' focus at the beginning was programmed and normal, and it certainly helps explain what happened next. Despite the considerable pain in my head, and my extreme shock at seeing the two badly injured women next to me, something brought my attention back to the good parts of my body. My feet and legs felt really good and I was determined to try them out. So, the next thing, I was on my feet, going looking for my cases and glasses. I think my obsession with retrieving them was my reaction to extreme threat, the only narrative thread I had in my moment-by-moment life then.
With my impaired vision - no glasses, one eye completely closed and the other half-closed - I couldn't see much in the dark and the smoke. I could see considerable damage to the floor of the carriage in front and, to my right, some sort of concave shape to the floor, and in that lay a man's body. I worried instantly for the man opposite, but I'm squeamish at the best of times and knew that looking at him wouldn't help either of us. Besides which, I was in survival mode, the only person on his feet in the carriage and heading off to look for my bags.
Those bags had almost certainly saved my legs, especially the roller case, which was between me and the bomb. (It was returned to me in a shocking condition a couple of months later by the bomb squad. Likewise, the laptop and its case. They all looked, in the words of the bomb squad detective, as if he had taken to them with a high-powered gun.) The case and my laptop would be in tatters and, at the time, covered in blood and, no doubt, body parts. But they were not my body parts, which were driving me across that wrecked carriage. The only shrapnel in my legs was in my thigh. Otherwise, my feet and legs were in fine shape and the strong shoes I was wearing bore only a few traces of shrapnel in the right toe. Having crossed the carriage diagonally to the bench seat opposite, I was now looking straight across and beyond the two injured American women, and I saw for the first time another train next to ours. It was a surreal image of contrasts.
The other train looked whole; ours was wrecked. The other train was lit up; ours was dark and in smoky gloom. The other train had people all on their feet, scrabbling silhouettes at doors and windows. Our carriage seemed to have just me on my feet, with everyone else silently spreadeagled or slumped and moaning in pain, only too solidly material and twisted, unlike the shadows of the next carriage. The two trains seemed wholly incommensurate, not of the same system, visually discordant with each other. But that second train did enable me to begin to fill in my new, everyday life. I thought then that we had been in a train crash.
Then out of that train, figures came. One was Wing Commander Craig Staniforth. I seem to remember them climbing in over the remains of a wrecked door, but Craig assures me there were no doors and that he had to jump from his lit train into the cave-like dark and smoke of my carriage. Craig is the head of a medical support team at RAF Lyneham and was on his way to a meeting in London when his train, travelling in the opposite direction, ran into the doors and other debris of my train. He told me later that it took him 15 minutes to realise there was another train in all that chaos, and to be alerted by a man bleeding profusely from the face that there were people in it urgently in need of help. Craig had no equipment with him and his training would have urged extreme caution in making the decision to jump across live rails into complete uncertainty.
Craig's first task was to estimate the stability of my condition, given the head wounds he could see. If he had been able to see my eyes, he could have assessed me more quickly. However, he had no torch (he now carries one everywhere with him), and my eyes were almost closed anyway. He had to assess me by asking questions. Here he met an obstacle. I don't remember this at all, but Craig tells me that my first response (after telling him my name and what my job was) was to say that I wanted to lie down and sleep, and to ask if he could go find my bags and glasses. It seems that with the arrival of Craig, my body and mind switched instantly from heroic survivor to victim mode.
Craig admits now that, at the time, his decision to look after me made him slightly anxious and guilty. 'Am I going for the easier option here? Should I not go forward and still look for more patients that I should probably be doing cardiac massage on, or should I be tying someone's limb up? But in the end, you have to make that decision. And I was very conscious that you had a head injury and, with a head injury, you do not know what is going to happen. And the person has to be monitored continuously.'
Then, given his choice, knowing I needed constant attention, should he disturb the two bodies, a risk, and get my bag? Again, he made his informed decision and I was so lucky that he did. And once he had my attention by returning the bag, he still had to pick a conversation topic that would drill down to my very concussed attention. He had ascertained early on that I was an academic; his daughter was doing A-levels and thinking about which universities to apply to, so here was the area to catch my attention. And he did hold my attention, so that to this day I remember the subjects that Craig's daughter is interested in and even the names of the universities she was thinking of applying to: Exeter, Aberystwyth, Manchester, Reading. That memory detail contrasts with my remembering little or nothing of the earlier part of our conversation, and tells me that I was looking for something to pull my old story and my horrible new one together.
Meanwhile, Craig was busy assessing my condition. As he told me later: 'When casualties are assessed, the basic categories are as follows: Priority 1: requires immediate life-saving skills; Priority 2: requires immediate treatment; Priority 3: requires treatment when time permits; Priority 1 Hold: the injuries are so great that there may be a need to deal with P1-3 in the first instance. In your case, my initial assessment was a P2.'
Craig reckons it took between three-quarters of an hour and an hour for the emergency services to reach us. He surmises that this was a responsible policy decision on the part of the police, acutely aware of the loss of emergency service lives and resources when the firemen went quickly into the World Trade Centre in New York on 9/11. If you lose your resources (and in the case of 7/7 there was also a worry about further explosions or dirty bombs or chemical warfare), you lose your power to help. This is a rationale of emergency and security retrieval and help.
Eventually, the emergency services did arrive and some workers say they came before the all-clear. After all the other injured were removed, I was helped to walk through the train by Craig on one side and a paramedic on the other. As soon as I had walked through the intervening door to the third carriage, I was amazed. It was empty and, to my surprise, seemed fully intact, with its seats and fittings all in their places. Given that I still thought this was a train crash, I immediately thought: 'If the third carriage is OK and my second carriage is so bad, what must the first carriage be like?' So I was already rejigging my theory from the idea of two trains sideswiping (after seeing the second tube train next to ours), to one of a head-on crash, and I assumed there could be no survivors in that front carriage.
It was a long stagger down the full length of that underground train in the dark. When I got to the very back and to the little train ladder that I'd never seen before, leading from the rear door to the ground, there was another positive sight. Not only were there lots of emergency people there busy with stretchers and other support, but I could see Edgware Road Station not more than 100 metres away, bathed in sunlight.
Given the surface nature of our tube line, immediately obvious even to my concussed mind, I was already beginning to puzzle over why it had taken so long for help to get to us. Still, the emergency services were a very welcome sight now and were wonderfully friendly and efficient. I must still have been in survival mode - the adrenaline rush that Lou told me about can last for weeks - because I told the paramedics I was perfectly able to walk across the complex web of train lines to Edgware Road Station.
Sensibly, and affably, they told me they were having none of that nonsense, and got me stretchered and out of there quick-smart. They lifted me up the slope at the end of the platform, and I remember wondering whether they would have to tilt me even more up the stairs to the station entrance. It was a bizarre concern, but maybe the first hint of feeling the dreadful vertigo I encountered briefly (but which would return later as a major symptom of my injuries) as Craig and my emergency service helper walked me to the side entrance of the Edgware Road Marks & Spencer, where an area had been cleared for the walking wounded.
From his monitoring of me in the train, Craig advised the paramedics I was a Priority 2, and then, once he could see me properly in the daylight, a Priority 3. And so it was that the photographs of me at Edgware Road in newspapers round the world showed a label round my neck: 'PRIORITY 3'.
In Marks & Spencer, they bandaged my head and prepared me for transfer to hospital. At this point, Craig felt it was OK to leave me. I asked him to give my best wishes to his daughter as he left. Then, with Craig gone, for the first time I turned to the victim sitting on the row of chairs next to me and asked what he thought had happened. He was the first to tell me there had been an explosion and he had seen a crater in the ground.
I was wheeled into a plastic cubicle in A&E and laid with great care on a bed. I was hurting a lot and in complete victim mode in my head. No more walking-wounded survival heroics now. There seemed to be so many medics, all looking after me personally in that cubicle. One started to sponge my blood-encrusted forehead so gently that even where the pain was worst I felt soothed. Another was carefully lifting my watch off my right arm, and another the watch off my left. (I always wear two watches when on long-haul flights and was still wearing them.) Given that I had been in hospital in London briefly the previous Saturday with open wounds on my hands after treatment for a skin condition in Australia, and given that the bomb blast had made these infinitely worse, those two careful medics taking off my watches were much appreciated.
Then there seemed to be another person removing my shoes, yet another my clothes, another giving me medication; in all, there seemed to me up to 10 people looking after me. All were caring, careful, professional; I have never felt so helpless but in suc
On February 24th, 1834, six farm labourers from the Dorset village of Tolpuddle were arrested on a charge of taking part in an 'illegal oath' ceremony.
