I was fourteen on the day the Twin Towers fell and living in the UK, we had a very different experience of the event. For one, this wasn’t something we woke up to -- it happened for us in the middle of the afternoon. I finished my school day unaware of what had happened and rode the bus home where I was greeted by my mother looking unnaturally concerned. She told me something dreadful had happened and led me to our living room where the TV was switched on, showing footage of the second plane hitting the World Trade Centre and the towers collapsing. My initial reaction was the same as my mother’s had been earlier in the day -- an assumption that this was a trailer for some new disaster film that I hadn’t yet heard of. I remember the creeping realisation that this wasn’t faked, feeling numb, staring at the screen completely unable to comprehend what I was seeing. Five months previously I had been lucky enough to take a school trip across the Atlantic to New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC, it had been my first trip to the United States. Our itinerary had taken in most of the major historical and political sights of the three cities and had included a visit to the Twin Towers, although we had not entered them, just stood in the plaza. The memories then were very fresh, I could still remember in vivid detail the way my neck had hurt trying to look up at the tops of the towers, lying on the floor with school friends to take pictures because that was more comfortable. We have nothing in England to the scale of the towers, they had been quite literally the biggest man made structures I had ever seen and it simply would not compute in my head that they could have fallen.
Over the next few days, we in the UK struggled to come to grips with what had happened. It is often said that the UK and US have a “special relationship” that brings us closer together than many other nations, and we certainly felt it over those days and weeks. Although it wasn’t our nation that had been attacked, it felt as if it had been. Families here lost relatives and friends although not nearly in the numbers felt in the US, even my school was not immune with one girl in the year below me losing her mother as we found out in a special assembly the morning of September twelfth. We mourned the losses from over three thousand miles away and tried to offer what support we could whilst also feeling the looming threat that we could be next. National security was tightened in a way that we are still feeling today.
In my home town of Manchester, an enormous tribute concert and football tournament was organised at the city’s arena -- the largest in Europe -- in October 2001. Manchester’s city centre had been destroyed by a terrorist bomb attack five years previously and was still being rebuilt, giving the people of the city some feel for the devastation New York was suffering, perhaps more than any other UK city. Over 15,000 people attended the event, myself included, which eventually raised over £70,000 for the Greater Manchester Fire Brigade's New York Firefighters Dependents Fund -- set up to help support the families of the 343 firefighters who gave their lives on 9/11. TV stars, veteran players from Manchester’s world famous football teams and popular opera singer Russel Watson all took part, the latter singing God Bless America to a tear filled audience, but the loudest applause and standing ovations were given to New York firefighters Thomas Gogarty and Joe Torrillo who had travelled over from America to receive the cheques and thank the crowd.
As it happened, the UK was indeed targeted but not for almost four years. Just as we began to feel that perhaps the storm clouds had passed, London became the victim of its own day of terror with the7/7 bombingsthat killed 55 people, a small number in comparison to the atrocities of 9/11 but no less harrowing for the families and friends of those involved. I remember that day just as well as 9/11, my would-be husband waking me up to tell me that the first bomb had gone off. Spending all morning on the phone with my mother and sister as we watched the events unfolding and hastily cancelling our weekend plans that had called for us all to travel into London the very next day. In our time of need, the US stood by us as we had done years before.
The events of 9/11 are still playing out ten years later on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world. These are the events that will fill the history textbooks our grandchildren will study, and as new events continue to unfold and new revelations are brought to light, we still don’t know how those books will read. What I do know is that by standing together, we are stronger and that the one thing 9/11 (and our own 7/7) didn’t manage to achieve was to weaken us and send us scurrying into the darkness. We have emerged from these tragedies with a new resolve and if anything a deeper love for our countries. Tragedies have a way of pulling us together and ten years later the US and UK are closer than we have ever been, standing together to face the future, whatever it might bring.
