Witness: 'All I wanted to do was get out'

He arrived at the cordon at 9am yesterday, almost exactly 24 hours after a bomb had exploded on the train in which he was travelling to work.

He spent half an hour underground with hundreds of other passengers, hearing screams of the injured and seeing the broken bodies of the dead before he managed to stagger to safety outside Liverpool Street.

Mr Boyce, 42, a father of six, said: "When the bomb went off I wasn't really sure what had happened because we were near the back of the train and we weren't injured. All I wanted to do was get outside into the fresh air. People were talking about the fact it might have been a power surge or a crash so I thought everything would be OK once we got outside but then when we got to Liverpool Street I realised something much worse had happened."

Mr Boyce, an insurance broker, walked to Fenchurch Street where his offices are but found they were surrounded by the police cordon that had been thrown around Aldgate station in the wake of the bomb.

Desperate to talk to his wife and children, he tried to use his mobile phone but the scale of the disaster meant that the network had crashed and he could not get through to them.

"All I wanted to do was see my wife and kids," he said. "I kept on trying to get through to them to tell them I was OK and eventually I did. I wanted to see my family. It didn't feel safe in London - no one knew what was going to happen next."

Yesterday morning, with the travel still disrupted, Mr Boyce was determined to make his journey into work, despite knowing the cordon probably had not been lifted and he would not be able to enter his office.

He said: "I didn't want to stay at home brooding about it, worrying about what it would be like to walk into the office again or get on the train. I felt really emotional this morning and I just needed to do something.

"I needed to prove to myself that I could do it and there was part of me, I suppose, that wanted to show the people that did this horrible thing that they hadn't won and that life goes on.

"It was strange getting dressed and getting on the train and I felt a bit shaky but it was alright.

"Arriving here, it's really emotional seeing my offices beyond the cordon.

"People say there are still bodies trapped under there. It's very strange to think about that."