The 20th anniversary of 9/11 has revived the collective memory of the day that changed the world forever.
From Chamberlain’s radio broadcast to declare the beginning of the Second World War to the newsflash that announced Kennedy’s assassination, every generation has its “where were you when” moment.
But 9/11 was different. The immediacy was brutal – there was no time for any filter of carefully chosen words or media packaging.
Millions of us watched those astonishing and terrifying events unfold live on television. Just as we were coming to terms with what appeared to be the terrible “accident” of the first plane, the second plane smashed into the World Trade Centre before our eyes.
And as the footage of the planes slicing fire into those gleaming iconic towers was replayed relentlessly, we struggled to articulate a response. But we couldn’t. The cliches of the Hollywood disaster movie gave us an emotional buffer zone. The only way we could process the images on the screen was to relate them to filmic special effects, for how could this possibly be real?
Amazement, disbelief, calls and e-mails to friends and family to make sure they were watching too, sharing in the drama. Numbed by mantra-like bulletins, breaking news captions and explosions seen from new angles, there was no sense of the personal or human cost, just astonishment at the sheer magnitude of it all.
That evening, the might of the media machine was in full swing. The expertise unveiled was staggering. Pundits filled every moment of airtime with analysis of foreign policy, geopolitical strategy, economic repercussions and the malignant underworld of terrorism. And again and again, the footage of those consecutive impacts, now combined with terrifying images of the collapse of both towers.
With the radio on my pillow, I listened in the darkness into the early hours, still guilty at the inability to respond with any other emotion but stupefied disbelief.
Unable to sleep, I got up and fetched a photo album of my first holiday to New York in the summer of 1996.
It had seemed the most exhilarating city in the world, each street a film set where steam rose from the pavements to rise your skirt like Marilyn Monroe and people wisecracked like Harry meeting Sally in art gallery queues.
While it conformed to stereotype it also broke a few. New Yorkers could be raucous but never rude. A bewildered look at a map on a street corner would elicit a “You lost honey? Where do you wanna go?”.
There was the restaurant manager who provided a free dessert as a reward for our “polite accents” and the cabbie who spent the entire trip to the airport giving a hilarious insight into New York’s cultural melting pot by taking us through his Irish-Italian family tree, branch by convoluted branch.
The towers of the World Trade Centre were in almost every photograph, dominating each skyline vista or providing the 1350ft lookout for awesome views of the city. I looked at the picture of myself, windblown and grinning on the rooftop of the South Tower and remembered finding a wad of notes dropped on the base of the binoculars there.
Almost $200 were held together by an engraved metal money clip. It read “Happy Anniversary Chuck & Betty”. Amused to discover such blatantly American names existed and thinking it might be the holiday money of a couple of mid-Western tourist pensioners, I went to the enclosed observation deck to hand it in.
Like most of New York’s visitor attractions, it was staffed by workers who had come to the States from across the world. A young Latin-American girl with faltering English looked bemused.
After much smiling and gesturing, I handed the money over, resigned to the fact that she probably thought she was getting the biggest tip she’d ever had rather than safeguarding Chuck and Betty’s lost property.
On the night of 9/11, I closed the album and began to cry. The memory of that young girl gave an imaginable human face to the unimaginable carnage we had just witnessed.
In the years to come, I often thought of that girl and the symbolism of the destruction of the World Trade Centre. For the terrorists’ it was a direct hit on the shining corporate heart of the American Dream yet the Twin Towers were also multicultural America in microcosm.
In the week that followed 9/11 the media coverage gathered a momentum which propelled it into realms it should have left alone. ITN put a horribly inappropriate musical soundtrack under a montage of slow-motion images of the devastation – as if they needed any more dramatic emphasis. The Mirror carried tasteless stories about Nostradamus and “spooky faces in the smoke clouds” and like many other newspapers churned out special picture supplements that only just stopped short of souvenir status.
The Guardian’s website offered an audio-video step-by-step guide to the disaster while the BBC almost reduced former American ambassador Philip Lader to tears with the insensitivity of its Question Time debate.
It was perhaps inevitable that the media attempted to dramatise what was already beyond hype because 9/11 felt like the first terrible historical event that had played out in real time with a global television audience.
The paradox was this only served to make it feel even more unreal.
As one journalist put it this week: “That day has often been described as a disaster movie no screenwriter would dare imagine.”
And at the time there were moments that needed no further drama. They were the individual human tragedies that conveyed the awful enormity of what had taken place.
The picture of the office worker plunging to his death with limbs flailing; the answerphone message from the sobbing wife calling to tell her husband she loved him – these are the images and sounds that spoke for themselves. Twenty years later they haunt us still.
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