WHAT is there to say? After the shock, the disbelief, the tears, and the there-but-for-the-grace-of-gods, what is left? Whatever words one reaches for sound trite, insulting in their inadequacy. Stupid words; they are never enough when the real blows strike.
There will be time for talk, for action, but for now, with news of the Manchester Arena bombing still only too raw, all there can be, human to human, is desperate sadness for all of those affected, for those who went to a pop concert on a Monday night and never came home.
Listening to the radio overnight and reading reports online, the images conjured up of the moments before the bombing were terrible in their familiarity. Mothers and fathers and other family members lined up outside the Manchester Arena, waiting for the emergence of the excited youngsters they had dropped off just a few hours earlier to see Ariana Grande. Just like standing at the school gates again, but that had been years go. The children and teenagers they watched pass through the doors of the Arena were too old now for that last look back over the shoulder to seek reassurance, the little wave. Have fun. It will be great. Text us when it is over, we’ll be here.
Some of the tickets had been Christmas presents. I expect they had not shut up about it since. And the noise in the car going to the concert, all that shrieking and singing the songs. Bet it nearly took the roof off. Girls. When they get to a certain age and pitch it sounds like they are communicating with dolphins in the distant seas rather than the pals who are mere feet away.
Ah well, to each generation its own. Once it was the Beatles, the Stones, then Donny Osmond or David Cassidy, and onwards, onwards, down the years, the objects of adulation changing, the towering emotions staying the same. My chauffeuring days took place during the Spice Girls era. To this day I know every word to every song and probably always will. “When you’re feeling sad and low, we will take you where you gotta go. Smiling, dancing, everything is free; all you need is positivity. Colours of the world…” Daft. Gloriously daft, and what harm does it ever do?
One youngster was lucky in that she had her mother with her in the Manchester Arena. The final song was over and the lights had gone up. Folk, young and old, girls and boys, were looking towards the doors, wondering if they should wait a while till the crowds cleared. As you do. Some of the audience were holding the big pink balloons that had fallen from the ceiling when the concert ended. Laughing at their luck. Then it happened. A loud bang. Like nothing they had ever heard.
“Then we were running for our lives,” said the girl. “Something that should never happen to people like us.”
People like us. Sometimes words do say it all. It should never happen that people, especially ones so young, should lose their lives at the hands of a bomber, a shooter, a knifeman, a driver ploughing through pedestrians, a murderer. Or suffer such dreadful injuries. Or see sights that will stay with them forever. Or be sent into a state of mute, uncomprehending, terror. But that is what has happened in Manchester. In Paris and London. In New York and Boston. Berlin, Baghdad, Mumbai, Sousse, Lahore, Brussels: the list goes on. People like us are the people on the front line in the modern terrorist era. People like “us” are the ones that people like “them” can get to. All they have to do is go where we go, do what we do. Go to work, go on holiday, take a train or plane, go to a pop concert. Unlike conventional forces people like them do not need to travel huge distances, to move forces across land and sea. They do not need enormous wealth behind them. They do not need vast armaments. The stuff of ordinary life, the nuts and bolts in every sense, if packed into a bag with enough explosive, can do the grisly work. Oh, you bloody coward.
The atrocity at the Manchester Arena is the worst terrorist attack in the UK since the Islamist suicide bombings in London on July 7, 2005. That day felt like yesterday in the way it wrought a terrible clarity about what mattered in life and what did not. On that morning in 2005 I was at Gleneagles for the G8 summit. It all seemed so terribly important: the issues, the world leaders, the ambitions and communiques.
Then reports began to come through of a “power surge” affecting London Underground. Get on the phone to those heading from Scotland to London that day. Best not to travel. Except one could not get through. The phones were down. It is at that point you begin to see the worry grow in the eyes of people like us. Then, as in the Scottish Parliament in March as news of the Westminster attack surfaced, the alarm spreads and the normal business of life, now seeming so trivial, so pointless, is suspended.
So people like us go home and get on with our day. We tell each other, for we must tell each other, that life has to continue as normal, that the terrorists will not win. We express our solidarity, our defiance, with Manchester, Paris, London, whatever place has been unlucky this time. Mere words again, but they are all we have, and they come from a place that is right and good and decent. One thing we know from experience is that people like us, when attacked by people like them, instinctively try to help the less fortunate. It could be seen in Manchester on Monday as people offered places to stay, lifts home, water, basic human comfort, to those wandering around shocked and dazed. Social media, before Monday a scourge of society, became a village message board for those trying to trace missing relatives and friends, strangers passing the messages on like prayers. People like them would never do that for people like us.
As was seen in Paris recently, if there is a method in the terrorists’ madness it is to strike during an election period. People like them despise the democracies of people like us. People like them are the enemies of freedom and choice, of diversity and tolerance, of peace. It was only right and proper that campaigning in the General Election was suspended yesterday. But now we pick up and go on, even with the knowledge that what happened in Manchester will grow ever more dreadful as names and faces and ages, dear God the ages, emerge.
We go on, because that is what people like us do.