Fire Doinks
Unregistered
I don't think my school mentioned it at all, maybe at Friday assembly or something but definitely not on the day or the day after.
Hotel Scorpio
The Priority
Didn't find out until I got in from school either. That was the first time I watched one of the 24hr news channels properly and was glued to it.
shaun.lawson
Punta del Este, Uruguay
I was at LSE. The deadline for my Master's dissertation was the following Monday, 17 September. And for about the only time in my entire life, I'd got myself organised, written it up faster than I anticipated, and handed it in that morning. Degree finished.
So I was full of the joys of early autumn, went for lunch, then went back into the library and got chatting to my friend Lena*. Whereupon she glanced at the computer screen, and suddenly, her voice started shaking. "Shaun - two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center".
Quickly, I decided it was best to get out of there, pronto. If they'd attacked New York, why wouldn't they attack London too? On the walk to Holborn tube, I swear everyone looked like they were thinking that. Then as I descended the escalator, I also thought: "Shaun, should you be going underground at a time like this?"
On the platform, I started fretting. 10 days earlier, I'd spoken with another friend from the course, Amy - who was from New York, had been jobhunting, and had told me she was having an interview with Cantor Fitzgerald. I worried about her all the way home - and when I got back, was so relieved when she picked up the phone. She hadn't got the job. If she had, she'd have been in One World Trade Center that morning. Cantor Fitzgerald had offices between the 101st and 105th floor, and lost 658 of their 960 employees.
I rang around other friends both in London and the US - then don't think I slept for the next 72 hours. It was the memorial service on the Friday which got me. I'd not cried before that, and was in absolute floods throughout. Those poor, poor people. Those poor, poor families.
On the night of 9/11, I sat chatting with my Dad, and we were both convinced (wrongly) that someone had put a missile up Flight 93. There was so much panic in those first couple of hours. No-one knew what was going on; the US seemed like it had been taken over by terrorists, the news kept reporting possible new attacks, and we both figured that whoever was responsible for American air security had probably taken the "better be safe than sorry" option with UA93. Other than that though, I've never had any truck with any conspiracy theories: which I find grotesquely offensive, even if they're believed by some of the bereaved families.
9/11 was our JFK moment. There's no question it changed history. On a personal level, it also changed how American friends interacted with me, and my fellow Brits and Europeans. It made them wary, scared, paranoid at times... made them feel like their whole way of life was under attack. A mindset which, sadly, was what led to Iraq.
Yet in historical terms, I'm not sure it was more significant than either 9/11/73, which Mak rightly mentioned; or for that matter, in UK date style, 9/11/89: the day the wall came down and Europe was at last reunited. But I don't think there'll be any other experience in my life which'll result in me inwardly panicking whenever I hear an aeroplane flying past for months afterwards; nor which will have me feeling angry, raging almost, if I see people laughing and having a normal conversation in the immediate days afterwards. Yet that was how it felt. The whole world seemed to have been turned upside down.
*Lena and I have discussed it several times since. Apropros of nothing, she went on to become Nick Clegg's Head of Communications and is now an OBE.
shaun.lawson
Punta del Este, Uruguay
Roger H. Sterling
Category 3 Poster
Snake Plissken
Snake? Snake!? Snaaaaaaake!
I was at an open day for Strathclyde Uni, realised after about an hour it wasn't going to be for me so a mate and I tried (unsuccessfully) to get a beer at the Union, we were playing pool when the footage of the first tower ablaze came up on the TV screens. Watched it unfold as it happened.
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