‘Who wrote the opera Fidelio?’ Jenny Nicholson texted her mother Julie on July 6, 2005.
It had been a day of joy for the 24-year-old. With thousands of other excited Londoners, she had flocked to Trafalgar Square to mark the city’s successful Olympic bid. The Red Arrows left a trail of red, white and blue across London’s grey skies as British flags waved beneath. To wind down later that day, Jenny settled down with a crossword and texted her mother for help with a question about the opera. It was the last message Julie would ever receive from her daughter.
On July 7, 2005, Jenny left the Reading home she shared with her long-term boyfriend James and travelled into London again. The talented musician worked as an advertising sales executive at Rhinegold Publishing and was based in the heart of the city near Holborn.
There were issues with the Bakerloo line that morning, so Jenny was forced to take the Circle Line. She stepped off the station platform and into the second carriage of the six-carriage train as it trundled through Edgware Road. It was there, at 8.49am, that terrorist Mohammad Sidique Khan detonated a bomb.
Nearly 280 miles away in Anglesey, Jenny’s mother made breakfast.
‘It was a pretty wonderful day,’ Julie, 71, tells Metro over Zoom. ‘I was a parish priest in Bristol for the Church of England and had taken a few days off to drive my parents to visit family in North Wales. We’d had a couple days of really heavy rain, but the morning of the 7th was so sunny. It was quite a lazy morning and we didn’t have the TV or the radio on. Everything seemed glorious, until the dominoes started to fall.’
Julie’s other daughter Lizzie, 22 at the time, called in a panic. Something had happened in London, she explained.
Julie switched on the news and found out there had been incidents on the Underground, on or around 8.50am, in the vicinity of Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square stations. As a result of the lack of Tubes, Londoners had piled onto buses in a bid to reach their offices. Then at 9.47am, a bus diverted via Tavistock Square exploded. A blanket of terror engulfed the city as police realised that these were not accidents, London had been attacked.
Jenny wasn’t responding to her family’s messages and Julie discovered she was the only person at Rhinegold Publishing not to arrive in the office that morning. After the Nicholson family called a number shown on the news for people concerned about loved ones, they were advised to ‘sit still and wait’ for further updates – but the minutes turned into hours.
With Jenny’s grandparents, Julie watched endless news footage of the scenes in the capital. Shell-shocked commuters gave shaky interviews and first-responders were filmed with their heads in their hands after being met with unfathomable horrors in underground tunnels. Julie, who felt like ‘a wandering soul’, booked a train from Bangor to London for the following morning. She couldn’t bear to sit still any longer.
‘I didn’t go to bed that night,’ she remembers. ‘The television was on constantly. I had a shower at some point in the early hours of the morning and had a terrible, immense feeling of loss. But I didn’t allow myself to give any space to that thought. I told myself: “Jenny has to be alive. She is so full of life, she can’t be gone. I’ve just got to find her.”’
The next morning, Julie travelled into London and met with Jenny’s boyfriend James, who had found out that survivors had been taken to the Royal Hospital London. Once there, they were met with scenes of chaos. Devastated family members, some of whom didn’t have English as a first language, grasped pictures of their missing loved ones. Julie recalls an ‘amazing’ police officer called Joanne who tried her best to help despite the unprecedented conditions. After several hours, it was confirmed Jenny was not at the hospital and her family were given a police liaison officer who promised to get in touch with any information.
The remains of a No 30 double-decker London bus in Tavistock Square, shortly after the detonation of a suicide bomb at 9.47 am on July 5, 2005
It was five days after the bombings, in the living room of her sister’s Reading home, that Julie was hit with ‘a metaphoric tsunami’ which washed away any remnants of hope. Jenny’s body had been identified, she was one of 52 people to have been killed on 7/7.
A travel pass, £3.82 and a gold umbrella singed black had been found by her body. Investigators had also discovered a watch, the hands of which had stopped at 8.50am.
‘I started to push to see Jenny. There was a sense that I wasn’t being told things in order to protect me from the horrors of it at all,’ Julie continues quietly. ‘But I wanted to see pictures from the scene, to see her body. As a mother, I hadn’t been able to protect her and prevent her death, so I needed to be close to her through knowledge and understanding.’
Julie was taken to Jenny’s body in a London morgue. As she reached out to touch her cold hand, memories flashed through the mother-of-three’s mind. She recalled those delicate fingers dancing across piano keys, the shade of nail polish her daughter liked to wear.
On July 14, Julie donned a black armband and travelled into London for a two-minute silence. Train stations and airports fell silent, buses pulled into the kerb and busy shopping streets became still, as people stopped what they were doing to pay tribute to those lost.
George Psaradakis, the driver of the number 30 bus targeted in the bombings, told the crowds: ‘In today’s silence we remember them. With quiet dignity and respect we show our deep contempt for those who planted the bombs and those who masterminded them. As we stand together in silence, let us send a message to the terrorists – you will not defeat us and you will not break us.’
Julie had her first ever panic attack on the way back from the two-minute silence. Unable to walk over the threshold of the nearest tube station, she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to Paddington Station to catch a train to her sister’s home near Reading.
The driver glanced back and asked if she had known someone involved in the 7/7 attacks. After hearing her story, he drove her all the way to Reading and refused to ask for payment. Instead, the taxi driver told Julie: ‘You don’t owe me anything; this is my gift. But I’d just like you to do something for me. Remember that there are more good people in the world than bad.’
In the aftermath of her daughter’s death, Julie resigned from her parish in Bristol due to the fact she was unable to forgive her daughter’s killer. Whenever she looked at Mohammad Sidique Khan’s face in the newspapers, a feeling of loathing washed over her.
Julie recalls: ‘The Mayor of London said something like “London will stand strong and these terrorists who are intent on destruction will not succeed.” But 52 families would say the terrorists had succeeded.
‘The harm they caused was spread in ripples. There were the people killed that day and their families and the people injured who will always live with the memories of what happened. The ripples also spread into their [the suicide bombers’] own communities. The harm was done in a way to instill fear in people’s hearts.’
When it came to her Jenny’s funeral at Bristol Cathedral, Julie read her daughter a bedtime story before tucking her in ‘one last time’, and Build Me Up Buttercup, a favourite song of Jenny and her siblings Lizzie and Thomas, played as her coffin was lifted upon pall-bearers’ shoulders. Sunflowers could be seen across the Cathedral, as a nod to Jenny’s favourite bloom and her love of summer days.
Julie allowed her daughter’s spirit ‘to shine’ when she went on to write a book, A Song For Jenny, which was adapted into a BBC film starring Emily Watson. She is also sharing her story in a new BBC documentary, 7/7: The London Bombings, which offers an insight into the attacks and the subsequent investigations.
Julie wrote ‘A Song for Jenny’ to tell her story of love, tragedy and heartache for the first time
In one scene Clive Holland, a counter terrorism investigator, is overcome with emotion as he recalls the sound of phones ringing by the bodies of victims. ‘The people we were looking at were all innocent,’ he tells the documentary tearfully. ‘They weren’t in conflict with anybody.’
Meanwhile Dave Skiffins, part of a body recovery team, explained how he swallowed his own vomit so as to not contaminate the crime scene. As he moved corpses from stifling underground tunnels to the surface he thought: ‘Don’t think of yourself, think of them, these people didn’t ask to be here who have been taken away in the prime of their lives. Get them out.’
Julie says she agreed to be in the documentary because it offered a ‘bigger picture’ of the entire devastation caused by the suicide bombers. This July marks 20 years since 7/7 and while time passes, it does not heal.
‘Every day is an anniversary in a way. 20 years is 20 years, 17 years is 17 years, 23 years will be 23 years. In that sense, it’s always just another year,’ she explains.
Jenny (third row down, 6th from left) was one of 52 people killed in the 7/7 attacks
‘In the documentary I was asked what I have learned [since 7/7]. I don’t know… I think I’ve learned we are all fallible humans. People make mistakes. The police don’t always get it right. Governments don’t always get it right. But I believe people try their best and that, as we enter a new year, we should all try to be a little bit kinder to each other.’
Julie moved from Bristol to the small village of Shipton Moyne in Gloucestershire in 2018 following Jenny’s death. Life is good, she says with a gentle smile. She works as a reverend and enjoys the peace the rural area gives her.
‘There are still dark days of course,’adds Julie. ‘The loss of Jenny is unspeakably impossible for all of us who were close to her. We’ve just had Christmas and while it was a lovely day, there was an empty seat at the table.
‘The grief doesn’t go away. It’s always there, a companion walking alongside you in life.’
7/7: The London Bombings starts on Sunday 5 January and Monday 6 January at 9pm, on BBC Two. The entire series streams on BBC iPlayer from Sunday 5 January.
‘I lost my daughter in the London 7/7 bombings, this is her story’
‘I lost my daughter in the London 7/7 bombings, this is her story’