‘After 7/7, I want to help others’
Martine Wright, who lost both legs in the 2005 London bombings, tells Eleanor Steafel of her duty to talk about her ordeal
When Martine Wright woke on the morning of May 23 to news a bomb had gone off in the Manchester Arena, one thought went through her head: “I can’t believe it, it’s happening again.”
Twelve years ago today, Wright was on her way to her marketing job when suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer detonated a bomb on the Circle Line between Liverpool Street and Aldgate in London, an attack that killed seven people. A total of 52 people would lose their lives that day when Tanweer and three other terrorists blew themselves up on the capital’s transport network. Aged 32, Martine became the most injured survivor of the 7/7 bombings, losing both her legs.
When Manchester was targeted more recently, so soon after the attack on Westminster Bridge, it wasn’t the sight of the twisted metal carriage or the people howling out in pain that she recalled. Her thoughts instead turned to her family, who had spent 36 terrifying hours desperately searching for her. Watching these terrible attacks would bring back some deeply traumatic memories for them all.
“I had to ring my dad up and say ‘stop looking at it’,” Wright says. “He was in tears. I had to say, ‘I know it’s hard but please stop looking, turn it off.’ I always know now, when you turn on the TV and the newscasters have got that tone of voice… I just think of all the families caught up in it and the pain they will be going through.”
Over the past three months, Wright has watched as so many victims and families have had to suffer as she and her loved ones did. It begins, she says, with the unimaginable trauma of not knowing for hours, sometimes days, whether your relative is dead or alive. Wright’s family were desperately trying to find her that day, calling hospitals, calling her phone. After searching for nearly two days, they were stopped by armed police as they tried to sneak into the Royal London’s intensive care unit. Luckily, a nurse took pity and listened to their description of Wright’s new trainers and how she had a mole above her lip. The nurse went away and when she came back, she said: “Which side of her face is the mole on?”
While her mother Maureen waited anxiously outside, siblings Grant and Tracey were taken to see if the woman in intensive care was their younger sister. When they saw her, her legs amputated above the knee, her body covered in contraptions and face swollen almost beyond recognition, Grant banged on the wall, shouting: “It’s not her!” They called their mother in and as soon as she saw her, she said, as only a mother could: “It is her. It’s because of her eyebrows.”
Following the recent tragedies, Wright has watched families endure even longer delays in finding their loved ones. The trauma this causes, she says, is unbelievably cruel, and she can hardly believe the issue of hospitals not being able to identify the patients has still not been addressed.
Just being told the number of victims in any given hospital, and how many of those were unaccounted for, would help. As would allowing families to give descriptions of loved ones to hospital staff. “These small pieces of information might seem insignificant, but when you’ve got a family going for days not knowing, the memories of that last a lifetime.”
The past three months have been extraordinarily upsetting on a national level, but for the survivors of 7/7, it has been unimaginably tough. Tony Walters, 52, who suffered multiple shrapnel injuries in the Edgware Road blast (which killed six), was found dead at his home hours after the Manchester bombing. Friends said “he didn’t want to live in a world where attacks continue”. Wright didn’t know Walters but understands the pain these events bring with them. She was quick to make sure the “powers that be” know that if any of the latest victims want to talk, she is there. “If I can do anything…” she says, trailing off, the enormity of what they will be going through at the forefront of her mind.
“You are propelled into this world that you never thought you would be in. It’s very early days, and I remember the early days, when I didn’t want to see anyone. All I kept doing was looking down at myself and saying: ‘I’m not Martine, my life is over.’ It’s a dark time in the beginning. There aren’t many of us that have gone through it.”
While the word “journey” may have almost completely lost its currency thanks to talent shows and reality TV, the past 12 years have certainly taken Wright to places she never could have anticipated. Before 7/7, she was a bright and happy young woman living in north London, in a loving but not yet serious relationship with her boyfriend, Nick. On the morning of the attack, she had dragged herself out of bed, hungover after celebrating London winning the Olympics bid the night before. Seven years later, after losing both her legs, she would be at the Olympics but as a Paralympian, competing for Great Britain in the women’s sitting volleyball team.
She admits that there were times when what happened to her threatened to engulf her. It was only after her physiotherapist at Stoke Mandeville Hospital encouraged her to take part in a game of volleyball that she started to believe her life might be worth living. “I would not be here if it wasn’t for finding that. It absolutely saved me,” she says.
On display in her living room is a photograph of her emotional family holding up banners saying, “Good luck Mummy!” in the stands at London 2012. “That is my favourite picture.”
Earlier this year, she received an MBE for her services to sport. Speaking to Wright – now a bubbly 44-year-old who lives in Hertfordshire with her now-husband Nick and son Oscar, aged seven – it’s clear that while the memories will never fade (“you just get better at dealing with them”), she doesn’t let them rule her life. Today, she is acutely aware that, though she was the one who was physically injured, it is her family who have suffered more emotionally.
“I feel like it’s up to me to help them,” she says. Her mother now lives down the road from her, and her husband is the man who 12 years ago was just her boyfriend, but who stayed by her side in hospital for weeks. Telling Oscar at just five years old what really happened to mummy’s legs was hard, but he chose to only see the good in it. “Now I tell every child the way I told Oscar, which is that a bad man got on the Tube and he had a bomb, and the doctor had to take my legs away. But I am so lucky, because I have robot legs, and I’ve taken part in the Paralympics.
“With recent events… [Oscar’s] teacher talked to them about it in class. I asked her if he’d been OK and she said: ‘Yes, actually, he couldn’t wait to put his hand up to say, ‘That’s sort of what happened to my mum’.”
Wright has written a book about her experiences, in the hope it may prove useful in some way. “We live in a world where it’s happening more and more, so I feel I have a duty to talk about how I dealt with it,” she says. “There is part of me that’s still the old Martine but I’ve learnt so much that if I can share that with people, if I can help, then that would be pretty wonderful.”
Unbroken by Martine Wright is published by Simon & Schuster on July 13 (£18.99). To order your copy for £16.99, plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk