7/7 families remember loved ones

As the coroner delivers her verdicts on the victims of 7/7 Esther Addley talks to some of the families they left behind At around 9.45am one sunny morning in July 2005, John Hyman took a call from his daughter Miriam. There had been some sort of problem at King’s Cross, she said, and she had been evacuated from the tube. She was fine, though, and he wasn’t to worry. Her father suggested she find a coffee shop and wait until things calmed down. In the hours and days that followed the terrorist attacks on London, the Hyman family clung to that phone call like a lifebuoy, desperately telling themselves the call had come after 9.49am, the moment when 18-year-old Hasib Hussain blew himself up on the upper deck of a number 30 bus to Hackney. Four days later, after touring the capital’s hospitals, putting up posters and making appeals via the media, they were at last told by a police family liaison officer that Miriam had been identified by her dental records. She had been sitting directly in front of Hussain at the moment of explosion, and was blown from the bus and on to the pavement, where she died very shortly afterwards. Almost six years later, Esther Hyman, Miriam’s older and only sister, has found a way of talking about the family’s loss without being overwhelmed by it, but there is a heavy sorrow as she sits in the garden of her parents’ home in north London, where she and Miriam played as children and smoked as teenagers. Miriam was 32 when she died, a freelance picture researcher who, thanks to a brief contract at News International, was claimed as “Sun girl Miriam” by the newspaper, a title which, her family delightedly note, would have amused and appalled her in equal measure. She was known at work, says Esther, as “the smiley one”. “A gentleman came up to me at her funeral and said: ‘I met Miriam only once but I loved her.’ And that’s what she had the capacity to do, to really make a direct connection with people.” Like her mother, Miriam was a talented artist, and had been planning to start a greeting cards business when she was killed. Mavis Hyman had come from Calcutta in the 1950s, and both her daughters delighted in their mixed-race heritage, says Esther. They loved music, and the weekend before the bombings they had gone together to an Elvis Costello concert on Hampstead Heath, and danced all the way home. “I will always treasure that and be grateful for that.” Philip Russell was also evacuated at King’s Cross and also boarded the No 30 bus, in an attempt to get to his banking job. His parents had seen him the previous weekend, when his sister Caroline’s baby daughter had been baptised in their village in Kent. Philip’s birthday was round the corner, on 11 July, and the family had given him a DVD player. “The last time I saw him was walking across the footbridge at the station, carrying his birthday presents,” recalls his father, Grahame. It was on the Monday following the bombings, the day he was due to turn 29, that his parents learned that he, too, had been murdered by Hussain. Though they were a very close family, Grahame and Veronica Russell have been a little surprised by some of the things they have learned about their son since his death. Philip was a very quiet and reserved young man, says Grahame. “He was no problem at all. One thing about Philip, he was never a problem.” He had a large and close circle of friends, they knew, but they hadn’t appreciated the extent to which Philip was the quiet centre of his social circle, or how fondly he would talk, at work, about his parents and sister, and his two adored nieces. His employer, JP Morgan, set up a book of condolences; “he’s got articles in this book, people have written from New York, Chicago, Hong Kong. And they have all put something in that makes you proud to know that he was your son.” Those same bleak few hours and days after the attacks – the slow realisation that something was awry, the frantic hunt for information, the agonising wait for their fears to be confirmed – were being repeated many times around the country, and much further afield. Andrea Watson lives just over the Welsh border, not far from Chester, and so when the first reports emerged of explosions in London – “London is quite far away for a lot of people here” – it didn’t really occur to her colleagues to be sensitive about the fact that her father and sister both worked in the capital, and that neither were answering their phones. ‘So me and my mum kept on trying, we emailed everyone we knew, and slowly friends started clocking in to say ‘Yes, I’m fine.’” Her dad got in touch eventually; he’d been stuck in a building where he couldn’t get a phone signal. But still nothing from her big sister Fiona Stevenson, a criminal solicitor. “I wasn’t even worried about her, because I thought, Fiona will be at court. Fiona is just jammy like that. She blags her way out of things like that. She’s just jammy.” Shortly afterwards she had a cup of tea with a friend, “and I remember … just shaking, and I didn’t really know why”. The following morning, she and her husband drove south to her parents’ home in Essex. “And I remember having this very strange memory, that at the time I was packing I thought, so calmly, well I’d better put in some black trousers, in case there’s a funeral.” It was more than a week before they were told that Fiona had been killed on the underground at Aldgate. Though she had always been committed to a career in law, perhaps specialising in human rights, Fiona, who was 29, hadn’t found it easy to find work, says her sister; as a result she worked incredibly hard, spending weekends and evenings doing paperwork or at police stations with clients. “But at the same time, she would always have the energy to then go on to a party or to a ball, and then go on after that or to a leaving do. She always managed to squeeze everything in.” She was headstrong, full of energy, very kind. A family memory has toddler Fiona warming cotton balls on the radiator for her baby sister’s nappy change. “That was the kind of relationship that we had.” Both sisters phoned their parents most days, and on the night of 6 July Fiona spoke to her mother, Emer, about her new flat in the Barbican, and her plan to come home at the weekend, “a normal family occasion, as they would normally have”. She had recently returned from a three-month sabbatical in Belize, says Andrea, where she had been working with the government on developing the law around child protection, a trip that came as a revelation. “I think Fiona suddenly realised what she wanted to do with her life. When she came back, she was not only tanned and lovely, but she also had a mind clarity, in a way.” The next chapter of her life was about to begin. Fiona Stevenson, Philip Russell and Miriam Hyman had never met, but for their mourning families, as the inquest process draws to a conclusion, there is one important factor in common, namely that all are believed to have died very quickly after the bombing, without regaining consciousness. The Russells were reassured relatively soon after 7/7 that Philip had died immediately. For the other two families, however, the inquest has offered important and precious answers. “We have been told that Fiona wouldn’t have felt any pain,” says Andrea Watson. “I suppose, listening to some of the other survivors talking, it would have been like a light going off. That is something we really wanted to hear, because some of the other people weren’t as lucky as that.” The Hyman family made an even more striking discovery. They had been contacted, two years after the bombings, by Clive Featherstone, who had been working in Tavistock Square when the bomb went off, and who had held Miriam’s hand in her final moments. “At first we didn’t get back in touch with him … [But] since then we’ve become very close with him.” It was only during the inquest process that they discovered the existence of another man, a passerby called Richard Collins, who had gone to Miriam’s side after Featherstone had been told to move along by a policeman. Initially they thought he must have been mistaken and confused Miriam with another victim, but no. “Richard told us afterwards: ‘I would have felt a bit silly if it had turned out not to be Miriam, as I actually had her initials tattooed on my chest.’ It’s his only tattoo but it turned out that he had been so moved that he had this indelible mark put on himself. We find that exceptional.” The loss doesn’t get any easier, says Grahame Russell. “[Philip] appears when you talk about things, Something will come up and you’ll say, do you remember when we did this … Sometimes you’re remembering a young lad, sometimes you’re remembering him as a boy, or a guy.” But you learn to accept, he says. “It doesn’t work all the time, because certain things will suddenly come back and bite you. But you accept it. The thing is, it changes … If anyone has lost a child, they know that it changes their life for ever.” For all three families, it has helped, a little, to invest in establishing a legacy for their loved ones. JP Morgan helped set up a travel bursary at Kingston University, Philip Russell’s old college, for students who propose a project that will in some regard help others; his parents sit on the panel that awards the prize each year. Andrea Watson and her parents, unsure at first how best to use the financial donations given after Fiona’s death, talked to the charity with which she had travelled to Belize and learned about the number of young children who die from drowning each year. It seemed fitting, given her love of diving, to set up a memorial scheme to teach children to swim. This year 200 poor children will graduate from the scheme, which will also offer lifeguard training to 100 young people to help them find work in the tourist industry. Friends hope through fundraising to develop it further. Miriam Hyman’s family used donations , and the compensation they were awarded, to fund an eye hospital in India at which 20,000 people have been treated since 2008. They are also working on an ambitious education project, in collaboration with Copthall school, where Miriam and Esther studied, that they hope will teach citizenship and non-violence, “hopefully to minimise the chances of UK citizens ever feeling the need to take arms against their fellow citizens in this way again”. Many other bereaved families, during the inquests, have spoken of their own legacy projects working with individuals spread throughout the world, like little points of light in the darkness. What does the end of the inquest process mean for them? The past six years, says Andrea Watson, have been about waiting. “We waited to find out if she was dead, we then waited to find out information. We then had to wait for different criminal cases to happen in the courts; we waited for a memorial. We spent a lot of time waiting for things. I don’t know what happens after this, but from our viewpoint, we’re not then waiting for anything else. “I still have to explain to my daughter why she doesn’t have an aunt, and I don’t know how I am going to go about doing that. So I don’t think the feelings will ever stop, or the grief. It’s more that the waiting is over.” 7 July London attacks UK security and terrorism Crime London Esther Addley guardian.co.uk

Posted by on May 5, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.