"Tom, Switch on the TV..."
Tom Harris, newly elected to Parliament in 2001, remembers 9/11 and a visit to New York.
11 Sep 2011, 01:00
Tom Harris's 9/11 Memory
Carolyn was away for a couple of days at a health spa – a Christmas gift from me which, thanks to the general election and the run-up to it, she had been unable to cash in before now. It was she, phoning from nearly a hundred miles away, who told me, in a nervous voice, to switch on the TV.
Even as I walked swiftly to the living room to look for the TV remote, I knew it was bad news. Just something about Carolyn’s tone: very bad news. Oddly, and with hindsight I have no idea why the thought sprang to mind, I feared that the prime minister had been assassinated.
Donald and I watched as the screen sprang into life, unsure of what we were watching. A skyscraper somewhere in America had somehow caught fire. But within seconds, the footage of the second plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Centre was replayed, probably for the hundredth time. And then I realized that both towers had been hit by separate planes and both were on fire.
It’s difficult to articulate emotions at such a time; even more difficult to recall them ten years later. Anger, certainly. Actually, no – more than anger: outrage. And fear. Fear that even as we watched reports of a third plane hitting the Pentagon, there was more to come.
A fourth plane crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania. Was that the last one? Was the Whitehouse a target? Could America’s allies be hit too?
And above all the questions was the big one: who? That this was terrorism was beyond doubt, but what kind of terrorism? Had Timothy McVeigh’s demented and hate-filled compatriots wreaked the ultimate revenge for Waco? Or was this a sign that the mad men of the worldwide Islamic jihad had “progressed” from suicide bombs against Israel and US embassies in Africa?
My experience of 9/11 was no different from that of millions of others, sitting watching the awful drama unfold, trying to make sense of it and failing miserably. A few days later I was back in the chamber of the Commons listening to an emergency debate, led by Tony Blair and featuring Iain Duncan Smith making his first set-piece speech as the new Leader of the Opposition.
And two months later, as part of a delegation of MPs to the UN headquarters in New York, I found myself laying a wreath at Ground Zero in tribute to the many British citizens who had died on September 11.
That was only my second trip to the city; the previous occasion had been a brief overnight visit almost exactly a year earlier. I vividly recalled the excitement and vibrancy of New York, the almost constant sound of car horns as the traffic made its way at a snail’s pace along Fifth Avenue. It was the car horns I recalled above all the other sounds; they were almost a tradition, just something you did when you found yourself behind the wheel of any car in Manhattan. No-one took it particularly seriously, it was just part of the driving – and pedestrian – experience.
A year later, with America’s greatest city still in shock, still trying to come to terms with the unprovoked and merciless attack upon its citizens, the cars were still meandering slowly down Fifth, pedestrians were still taking their lives in their hands in a peculiar game of chicken as they defied the drivers by crossing, even when the signs said “DON’T WALK”.
But now, just weeks after 9/11, there were no car horns.
I always guessed the horns were a kind of show anyway, just something New Yorkers expected of each other. And I like to think that, for a short time at least, the people of New York were giving each other a break, being a little less impatient, a little more kind, in unspoken acknowledgement of the terrible experience they had just shared.
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