7/7 ON HER RECOVERY 15 YEARS ON I was just 14 and held back my emotions for so long I started to lose my voice
hour walk home. “I watched TV, trying to understand what had happened but it all felt so unreal. I was numb, but you try to carry on. You don’t want your family upset by knowing what you went through, and they won’t bring it up as they are protecting you.
But that just meant we never spoke about it. Yet the anniversaries come round and it’s like a big sign going up saying, ‘Remember that?’”
Emma didn’t suffer nightmares like many survivors. “I had more of what they call ‘body flashbacks’,” she says.
“It’s when your brain doesn’t quite recognise it is having one but your body reacts, putting you back in that ‘fight or flight’ situation. So my brain was telling me I was fine and safe, but then I started to lose my voice.”
Emma was 21 and in her third year at university studying Russian and German when the 7/7 trauma manifested physically. “My voice got husky and it was hard to talk,” she explains. “I felt I was pushing from my shoulders to get a sound into my throat.
“I was sent to a speech specialist who asked if anything had ever happened to me that I’d never been able to talk about. I went, ‘Ah… well’.
“She explained how, when we try not to cry, our voices break because we’re holding back tears. I’d been holding back emotion for so long my voice was constantly breaking.
“My body was telling me I really needed to talk, by not letting me talk.
“I had counselling. But it was so hard as I had to retrain my voice to be able to speak about what I went through. And so many people had died – I thought their families’ problems were much worse than mine, that I should be able to deal with it. “It was classic survivor’s guilt.” Emma still finds it difficult to relax. “My body doesn’t seem to know how to. Because this happened in my formative years, I think my body learned relaxing wasn’t good as it meant I wasn’t on alert.”
Emma was 10 days from her 15th birthday when 7/7 happened and the shockwaves rippled through her adolescence. “It must have changed me, but I don’t know how,” she says.
“I was more grown-up. I lost my naivety, the childish belief everything will be okay. And I carried survivor’s guilt – wondering if I had to live for someone else who died instead of me.”
Did it affect her ability to form relationships? “You end up picking and choosing who you tell about it,” she says. “And you wonder if this is too big a thing for someone else to deal with.
“It would be a bit awkward if, say, a memorial came around and you said, ‘Sorry, I’m in a bit of a mood because this one day I got bombed’.
BROKEN
“But my boyfriend has been really supportive and we’ve been together for more than five years now.”
Meeting other survivors and joining support groups helped her too. “We’re a weird group – one you never want to be part of,” she says. “So many different people have been united by one terrible event.“
When Emma made her 2015 speech she wanted to explain how survivors’ experiences differ greatly too. “After 7/7 people kept saying, ‘London could never be broken’. I said, ‘Fine, but it did break some of us’.
“Some survivors have done amazing things. They set up charities and fight extremism. But others have had breakdowns or marriages have broken down because they lost a child – many families were irrevocably broken.”
Tuesday’s 15th anniversary memorial service, which will be broadcast at noon on YouTube and Vimeo, will be very different this year because of the pandemic.
But Emma is going to speak again via a video message, highlighting the continuing legacy of terror.
“Now, when I talk about 7/7, people will say they were at Westminster or Borough or London Bridge. So the number of people struggling increases year by year.
“I’m now one of the old guard – and the Manchester Arena bombing really brought that home. To see hundreds of young people starting out on the long, hard journey I’ve been on was a real kick in the guts.
“I hope they can get help. But talking can be the hardest part when you are a kid. And it breaks my heart to think of them suffering in silence.”