Will Heaven

What I saw on London Bridge

Just after 10pm on Saturday night, I was in an Uber minicab with my wife, heading south over London Bridge. We’d been out for a tapas dinner and were on our way home. It had been a lovely evening.

Suddenly I noticed something odd on the pavement on our side of the road. It looked like a woman had collapsed. There were a few people around her and they had draped their coats over her. It was troubling, but at least she was being looked after.

Then a shock. On the right-hand side of the bridge, a few yards on, we saw a man, also prostrate on the ground, with passers-by desperately trying to administer first aid. And our taxi driver shouted that yet another person lay injured ahead. It was now blindingly obvious: this was the aftermath of a terrorist attack. The sound of sirens grew louder.

Traffic on our side had stopped dead but some cars continued coming from the south, the Borough Market side of the river. A black cab driver stopped and wound down his window. ‘It’s Westminster all over again,’ he shouted. Fifteen or twenty people, he said, had been mown down by a white van.
The most urgent question then was: ‘is it over?’ It wasn’t at all clear and we were stuck in the middle of the bridge. I wanted to get my wife, who was in Tavistock Square on 7/7 when a suicide bomber blew up a double-decker bus, to safety.

Dozens of people began running from the south over the bridge: in retrospect, this was probably in response to police gunfire. But that was all the answer we needed. It was time to get out of the car and go with
them.

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