It is a year since the start of a wave of attacks in the UK – Westminster; Manchester Arena; London Bridge; Finsbury Park – when the response became: “There’s been another.” This ITV documentary is about the people for whom it was more than a terrifying news story. Not Khalid Masood, Salman Ramadan Abedi, Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane, Youssef Zaghba or Darren Osborne. The attackers barely get a mention. It is about the innocent people caught up, about the stories within the story. Stories of terrible sadness and loss, but also of amazing bravery, kindness and humanity.
Dani Singer is a student who was working as a tour guide on an open-top bus, and ran to help 75-year-old retired window cleaner Leslie Rhodes who was hit on Westminster Bridge. Leslie died, but Dani was with him and was able to offer some human contact.
In Manchester, the parents of eight-year-old Lily thought they had lost her when they found the hole in her leather jacket, felt the blood and saw her lose consciousness as they tried to get her out of the arena. Lily survived and is back at school, but didn’t want to tell her friends too much about it in case it gave them nightmares.
Figen Murray somehow knew she had lost her son Martyn, she could feel it. She said goodbye to him in a hospital room, gave him a kiss and a hug.
After driving round all the hospitals, Lucy Jarvis’s dad found his daughter, peppered with shrapnel wounds. He told her he loved her very much, just before she went in for surgery. Lucy made it and is OK now.
Back to the capital for more grief and heroics. For Ozzie Gandaa, a security supervisor, it was about getting involved at London Bridge, taking on the terrorists, but also remembering he had a son and making sure he got back to him, no matter what. Baker Florin Morariu also fought; growing up in Romania had a way of making you fight for yourself, he says.
And then Gerda Lapinskaite, searching for French boyfriend Sebastien for four days after the attack, refusing to accept it even when the police came and asked for his toothbrush, even when she went to see his body. “I imagined I’m going to go in there and I’m going to be like: ‘Well, it’s not him, you did your test but it’s not him’,” she says. “But then I walked into that room and … and it was him, and he was there. I barely could touch him, I had to do one thing, touch his nose …” A tear rolls down Gerda’s cheek. Mine, too. There are lots of teary moments in this powerful, affecting documentary, but there is something about Gerda and Sebastien, a story of young love in London with all but the first couple of chapters so rudely torn out, that is especially poignant. Plus the nose touching.
Then came the hate crime and the reprisals and the van attack outside Finsbury Park mosque. And Imam Mohammed Mahmoud’s response, which was to protect the terrorist from the angry crowd.
Yes, I remember Mohammed. And Gerda. And Florin, and Lily in Manchester, and some of the other stories, too. Seen all together like this provides something new – not just a reminder of the scale and the awfulness of three months last year, but something of the national response to it all as well. There was hatred and polarisation, the flames of extremism fanned. But there were positives, a glimmer of hope. Solidarity, as well as bravery and kindness. Ozzie admits to fear afterwards, had a panic attack the next time he saw a Muslim in a van. But then, as a black person who had experienced prejudice when growing up in London, he was determined not to become someone who is automatically suspicious. Dani, as a member of the LGBTI community, knows a thing or two about prejudice, too. Their responses, as well as Mohammed’s wisdom and magnanimity, are reassuring and peculiarly British. Between the tears, I felt a little bit of national pride, too, the nicest kind.
Understandably, though, not everyone is ready for it yet. London geezer Brett Freeman is already ’avin a larf about it. Brett was stabbed at London Bridge. “It was a bad day all round, lost my money at the races, got the wrong train … terrorist attack, four stab wounds,” he says. “One of the terrorists had an Arsenal shirt, hopefully that weren’t the one that done me.”
I don’t know if that means Brett’s a Gooner, or a Spurs fan, maybe? Anyway, he is joking about it; and the guy who stabbed him is dead. I reckon that makes it 1-0 to Brett.
Also teary and extraordinary – My Baby’s Life: Who Decides? looks at whether it can ever be right to let a baby die. Catch up on All 4 if you missed it, and you’re feeling emotionally strong enough
