‘My instinct was just to help people – it changed my life’

A woman who treated victims of the 7/7 bombings said she realised what her life’s purpose was after an oxygen tank was thrust in her arms.

Carolyn Williams was 25 at the time and working as an administrator for Metronet, the company responsible for maintaining the London Underground. She was sitting in an office next door to Edgware Road station, when the device was detonated on the Circle line. 

‘It was so loud it sounded like a trained had derailed,’ she tells Metro. ‘We looked outside the window and saw a mass of people coming out of the station. Then we got a message through from one of our colleagues telling us a bomb had gone off.

‘It was an out-of-body experience, and I felt incredibly vulnerable. I buried it all quite deeply and not fully dealt with it emotionally yet.’

Some of Carolyn’s other colleagues arranged taxis to take them home and away from the scene, but she chose to stay, rounding up all the trained first aiders and walking into the thick of the crowd.

Some of the others were terrified, but my instinct was just to help people,’ she explains. The scene she witnessed was grim. The walking wounded clutched serious injuries and appeared disoriented as many had lost their hearing. In total, six people had lost their lives at the scene.

‘The memory of seeing a woman hold a burns mask to her face is seared into my mind, which a photographer at the scene managed to capture,’ Carolyn recalls. ‘I remember thinking it was weird loads of people didn’t have shoes on, but now I know the force of the blast knocked them off.’

As chaos surrounded them, she and her colleagues helped reassure people, guiding them to points where they could receive proper medical attention. The scale of those injured was so great, even the emergency services began to rely on them for support.

‘All of a sudden a fireman thrust an oxygen tank into my arms, and told me to administer it to someone laying on the ground, but I just didn’t know how,’ says Carolyn. ‘It was at that point that I realised I never wanted to feel that vulnerable again.’

‘I was the first police officer on the scene at the 7/7 London bombings’

Jenni Dunman, was just a trainee detective when she was ordered to Edgware Road where one of four bombs was detonated across the Underground and bus system 20 years ago today.

She tells Metro: ‘A crackle came through our radios that another bomb was expected to go off, and that was when I truly realised my life was in danger.

‘But as a police officer you can’t let fear wash over you – you have to be there for public and let your sense of duty take over.’

With her team stationed just outside the station, Jenni was able to help the walking wounded and get those in shock to safety.

This included giving first aid to a man, aged around in his 80s, who began displaying symptoms of a heart attack.

‘I don’t know what happened to him in the end. But I think about him every day,’ she says.

Jenni was also part of the team who raided the homes of suspects later that day. The four people identified as responsible for the attack were Mohammad Sidique Khan (30), Shehzad Tanweer (22), Germaine Lindsay (19) and Hasib Hussain (18).

Thinking back to how the people of London coped on that that horrific day, Jenni recalls: ‘‘Everyone was coming together and opening their arms and homes to complete strangers, from the wealthier residents to the homeless man at the end of the street. No one was on their own.’

Watch Jenni’s story here.

The events of the day stayed with Carolyn, and she took a year out of work to consider her next steps.

She toyed with the idea of becoming a police officer, until an advert to become a paramedic for the London Ambulance Service appeared in Metro.

‘I felt really uncomfortable at the thought of coming back to the office after the attack, it had made me rethink my purpose. Seeing that ad in the paper was a sign.’

Carolyn went onto train as a paramedic, with the day of the attack haunting Carolyn’s 14 year career. Then, in June 2017, she suddenly found herself in an all too familiar and horrific situation. 

That evening a van deliberately drove into pedestrians before crashing into the Borough Market area and randomly stabbing people, killing eight and injuring 48 more.

Although Carolyn and her crewmate were diverted to continue responding to incidents outside of the attack, hearing it on the radio ‘took her right back to the London bombings’.

 ‘But this time it was different. I felt very scared, but confident,’ she remembers. ‘I knew what I was doing, compared to all those years ago at the scene of the bombings.

‘My crewmate and I just looked at each, took a deep breath, and nodded. We knew what we were doing, and this is what our training was for.

‘I still feel anxious on the tube, but that anxiety no longer runs my life like I used to. I’m a fighter, not a flighter.’

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