Rowan Pelling: Brave? No, just fatalistic

It was bound to happen - talk of doughty Londoners showing Blitz spirit in the face of terrorist outrage. The reference springs all too readily to mind with this weekend's 60th anniversary commemorations of the end of Second World War. But it's an inadequate analogy, all the same. Do this week's detonations, however horrifying, come close to the sustained blanket bombing of the East End? In the Forties the British knew who the enemy was, and why the blood sacrifice was a price worth paying. We knew Hitler's aims, could appraise his logic and abhor it.

In 2005, our civic leaders tell us the bombers aim to divide Londoners and destroy our way of life, but evidence suggests that you cannot demystify the terrorists' actions to extract something as readily comprehensible as a motive. Blind hatred of the West, and a wish to visit hellfire upon its citizens, obliterates any thought so subtle as a wish to destabilise democracy.

Back in 1939 Hitler's aggression demanded retaliation. Today, many Londoners believe that Britain's participation in the Iraq war was unwise, if not unjust, and would provoke dire consequences (none of which means harbouring an iota of sympathy for the psychopaths who carried out Thursday's murders).

But only the most blinkered would deny that such outrages may have occurred anyway. In 2005 it's hard to be united against a common foe when you don't know who he is, where he lurks, or his strength. It's difficult to unite in patriotic fervour when London is now, blessedly, one of the most diverse cities on the planet.

So, although I understand the need to boost morale, I just don't buy all this fighting talk and the politicians' declarations that we will not let the terrorists "win". I don't see vast delegations of farmers and housewives from the shires swarming aboard trains to London to show Johnny Terrorist what we're made of. In the fanatics' eyes, killing 50 Westerners and maiming 700 constitutes a triumph, whether we care to admit it or not.

It may help many people to cloak the necessity of living and working in London as an act of "defiance" - and good luck to them - but in my experience the majority of those people are men, for whom a sense of impotence is the most corrosive emotion. It's as absurd to talk about bravery in relation to using public transport as it is to talk about it in cancer patients: in both cases you have little viable choice.

No woman I know feels defiant when she uses public transport. When I catch my usual King's Cross train next week and board the Tube, I certainly won't be thinking, "That'll show those fiends!" Instead, I'll feel much as I did after various IRA bombs, the Soho nail bomb and the Hatfield rail crash (all of which happened on what was then in some way my home turf): sombre and utterly fatalistic. Unpalatable though it may be to admit it, I feel a bit safer following a major incident, as though the gods signalled, "This was not your day to die."

What various people have invoked as "London pride" I believe to be a different sort of resilience based on pragmatism - which I have observed in other cities used to bloodshed. But it's just as admirable in its calm acceptance of life's adversities. Londoners know their city can survive a variety of assaults and yet prosper, so there's no point in hysteria: some will die, many, many more will live. I suspect that one of the most painful lessons for New Yorkers was to see that nothing - not even their own city - let alone the world, ground to a halt after 9/11.

None of this means that we shouldn't applaud Londoners this week. And we should thank people for dropping their reserve (the true London pride) and communicating with one another. It's only now I learn how many commuters have, like me, stepped off a tube or bus after observing a suspicious passenger. But we were too afraid of appearing foolish to share our concerns.

We were in danger of forgetting that a heightened sense of danger and a modicum of fear is an essential part of London's defence mechanism.

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