A strange coincidence: the trees outside the house in Wimbledon where I grew up are False Acacia; here, in New Mexico, the trees in our back yard are Locust Trees, also known as ... false acacia. There's so little correspondence, environmentally, between south-west London and Northern New Mexico as to make this improbable, were it not for the commonality of sandy soil. Still ... it's a correspondence that I cherish.
It was a day for reflection on the transatlantic, not just because of Emma Raducanu's stunning victory in the US Open (how could she be so consistent, and good?) - but, of course, because of 9/11. Twenty years ago I had just, literally, moved to the US. It was my first full week teaching at Rutgers, and I was still pretty much figuring out how to navigate NJ roads (let alone NJ; let alone American academe). So when the first plane hit, I was driving along Route 27, listening to something on the radio - I hadn't yet figured out NPR stations - when the news broke through as a news flash, followed by a weirdo assortment of people phoning in live: I remember well one ex-airline pilot saying this was only explicable by an error in the control tower. By the time I was in New Brunswick, the second plane had hit. I was in my Mine Street office, and a guy from maintenance was round, trying to fit me out with bookcases, and we agreed that this was weird.
I'm proud of one thing - that I realized well enough that something unusual was happening, and I called my parents - before, as it turned out, international telecommunications went down - to assure them that I was OK, and that I wasn't in New York, whatever was happening there. In Murray Hall, my new English Department colleagues were in a state of understandable shock and concern. We had a department Executive Committee meeting: before that, I ran into several people in our mail room and then - this is the bit I'm not so proud of - I was super calm, simply because I wasn't taking on board the magnitude of it all. Unlike probably most other people there, I'd had years of IRA bombing campaigns in London: blasts round the corner from the bus stop where I was standing; endless disruption - I initially saw this as much of the same.
But then the EC meeting was endlessly interrupted by Ros, the department's administrator, sticking her head round the door with updates: one tower had collapsed. Another plane had flown into the Pentagon. The second tower had collapsed. In retrospect, this was surreal, horrific, unthinkable. At the time ... it felt as though my arrival in the States had taken a very unpredictable turn that I didn't have a clue how to deal with. And then Ros delivered the message that Rutgers' president had said that we should all go home, and be with our families. Home? That was still, to my mind, some 3,000 or so miles away. Walking away from Murray Hall, people kept asking if they could borrow my cell phone - I guess I was holding it: these phones weren't yet ubiquitous in the US, but I had one, since they were already common in the UK. And so I drove back - to what was now, suddenly, perhaps, very much home, because the very events of 9/11 welded me to the country, especially since we were so close to NYC - and hung out with the cats, watching TV, and wondering what I'd walked into.
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