That. Was. Deliberate
Paul Linford recalls watching the second plane smashing into the South Tower of the World Trade Centre and his wife imploring him to come home.
11 Sep 2011, 09:00
Paul Linford's 9/11 Memory
I was then the political editor of The Journal, the morning regional daily of the North-East, sharing a room in the Parliamentary Press Gallery with other regional newspaper and agency reporters. As was so often the case in that room, it was the late, great Ian Craig, political editor of the Manchester Evening News, who first alerted us to the story unfolding 3,000 miles away in New York.
Ian had returned from lunch, rather earlier than was his custom, to say a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Centre. We turned Sky News on in our room, just in time to see the second plane smashing into the tower. My old friend Bill Jacobs of the Edinburgh Evening News was the first to break the stunned silence.
Bill's comment - "That. Was. Deliberate" - may now seem like a statement of the bleeding obvious, but until that moment we had been hoping against hope that this was some sort of tragic accident.
Then it was simply a case of hitting the phones to our head offices, briefing newsdesks as to the potential implications and hastily re-writing the stories we had filed earlier on Blair's now-aborted TUC address. While I struggled to put together a new piece for The Journal, my wife Gill came on the line, imploring me to come straight home. We had been married for just six weeks and had moved into a flat in London's Docklands, in the shadow of Canary Wharf. Gill was terrified that either Parliament would be blown up with me inside it, or that or a hijacked plane bound for nearby London City Airport would smash into One Canada Square and reduce the whole surrounding area to rubble.
I told her: don't worry, they're bound to evacuate the Commons in a minute and then I'll have to come home, but as it happened, they didn't.
As journalists we tend to become somewhat inured to the tragic events we sometimes have to write about, and I don't think the emotion of it all really hit me until a few days' later, when Gill and I sat down to watch the Last Night of the Proms.
The American Leonard Slatkin, then the principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra until he was unaccountably sacked three years later, replaced the usual tiresome jingo-fest with Barber's elegiac Adagio for Strings.
"In times of tragedy most countries have a piece of music that they play as a memoriam....This is our music of grief," he explained.
And then I did shed a tear - and from time to time, I still do.
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