It was a day made up of little shards of silence. At 8.50am local time, at 9.47am, at 11.15am, at 11.30am, at 2.38pm, each a minute of quiet, punctuating a day of reflection. At memorials in parks, at stations and in cathedrals, people came together and remembered a day, a decade ago, when 52 innocent victims were killed in the London bombings.
Neither silence, however, nor the passage of time, can truly heal the wounds that were inflicted.
One of the most moving moments was during the afternoon ceremony of remembrance in Hyde Park. Emma Craig was a 14-year-old schoolgirl on the day that went down as one of Britain's worst terrorist atrocities. She was on the train at Edgware Rd that was blown up by Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the bombers. Six of the 52 victims were murdered here.
In front of an audience of about 400, including the Duke of Cambridge, and struggling to fight back tears, Craig said: "We all lost our innocence that day. Quite often people say, 'it didn't break us, terrorism won't break us'. The fact is, it may not have broken London, but it did break some of us."
She was one of a number of survivors, or members of the emergency services, who spoke of the terror that still haunted them, of the guilt that they survived and others did not. After her address, relations of the victims and survivors processed through the Hyde Park memorial to each lay a single yellow gerbera on the plaque, which records the names of all the victims. Bright flowers of hope and innocence. The Duke lay a bunch of half a dozen. It was the final remembrance of many that took place across London.
