'I grabbed my handbag and ran'

2005-07-08 10:29

Waldimar Pelser

London - When their train suddenly came to a grinding halt at 09:00 hardened Londoners continued reading their books and kept listening to music on their iPods, totally oblivious of the bomb explosion further ahead on the railway line and the chaos waiting on them.

Jearelle Wolhuter, 30, a Stellenbosch resident who works near the British parliament in Westminster, told on Thursday how she and hundreds of fellow commuters were told to leave their train after a bomb had exploded a few stations further on the same line.

They were recommended to rather take a bus - but a bus had also been bombed on Thursday and traffic came to a standstill.

Wolhuter's train was on its way to Liverpool Street, the station where emergency crews were called to shortly before 09:00 after the first bomb had exploded.

An announcement on the train told of a "power failure" and that a generator had exploded.

"We were told to rather make use of buses but the bus was moving at a snail's pace and there were police and ambulances everywhere," Wolhuter said.

"Nobody knew what was going on."

When a colleague phoned her and told her to get off the bus immediately, she grabbed her handbag and ran, hearing sirens wailing all around.

"I asked a policeman for directions to Westminster.

Far safer

"When he heard I wanted to go in that direction, he said it was far but also far safer.

"The streets were full of tourists who did not know what was going on.

"In St James they were feeding the swans and the streets were teeming with people in office dress who had been thrown off trains."

She walked for hours to reach her office, where her dismayed colleagues reminisced about one of them being killed in the World Trade Centre when terrorists stunned New York on 11 September 2001. At the time, the person was told to remain calm and stay at her desk, but she decided to flee and saw the building collapsed behind her.

The calmness of the Londoners in the face of terrorism surprised Wolhuter.

"They remember their exposure to the IRA (Irish Republican Army)."

- Beeld