A Song for Jenny author Julie Nicholson reveals the cost of the 7/7 bombings to her family - and her faith
Ten years ago, Nicholson’s daughter Jenny died in the London terrorist attacks. Now a BBC1 drama starring Emily Watson tells her story...
Nicholson, now in her early 60s, recalls being asked, very soon after Jenny’s death, if she “still had hope”. “This was from a very senior member of my profession – a dear, kind, good person – and it’s so typical of the questions the Church will ask. My answer was ‘Yes, of course’, but what was going on in my head was, ‘Yes, I hope I can continue getting up in the morning and getting into the shower. Yes, I hope I can continue to be a good mother to my surviving children. I hope I can continue to pay bills. I hope I can just survive this.’ Hope as a verb, I understood. Hope in the abstract was meaningless.”
Accuracy, linguistic and emotional, matters a lot to Nicholson. She has not tried “ever so hard” to forgive Mohammad Sidique Khan for Jenny’s murder, because she is not convinced parental forgiveness is appropriate.
“I would say that this whole business of offering forgiveness on behalf of someone else is a very wobbly subject. I can’t forgive on behalf of Jennifer, I could only consider forgiveness for the wounds to me as a mother, and those wounds remain raw. So it’s not something I’m going to countenance.”
Such exactness can appear brisk on paper. In person, Nicholson is softer, with a clear, candid smile. She looks like she’d be very good at confidences. She did try, very hard, to find out, and understand, where Khan was coming from: “But I found that almost impossible. I think Muslim communities were, understandably, afraid of engaging with someone like me. I have always said – and believed – that I do not blame all Muslim people for what happened to Jenny. Who do I blame? The man who detonated the bomb and took her life and the life of others. If you ask me who do I hold responsible, then that’s another question, and I suppose, at one level, we all have to take responsibility for the world and the society that we live in."
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Julie, left, and her daughter Jenny
“I think that the simple, personal faith of people, whether that’s Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam, is at heart a beautiful thing. But when faith, any faith, becomes religious fundamentalism, that is a huge problem for me. And I think there is a fear of doing the wrong thing, or making mistakes, or stirring up a hornet’s nest, that stops us from engaging, in an honest and productive way, with religious fundamentalism in this country. We’re not getting to the root of the enormous disaffection among young British Muslim people, and in particular, young British Muslim men."
“From what I hear reported, there are initiatives for police and social services, and schools, but it’s not really about what we can do for people who are in the process of being radicalised, or who have become radicalised, it’s about what happens before that. You can look at issues of poverty, issues of education, but not everyone becomes radicalised, so what is that thing that is happening to some and not to others?”
The recent addition of “British Values” to the school curriculum is unlikely, in Nicholson’s view, to bridge cultural and ethical gaps. “I think there’s a big grey area around what constitutes ‘British Values’. I would rather people talked more about common humanity.”
