September 11th. Someone mentioned it today in the office and until then I hadn't actually noticed the day, or remembered the significance. Eleven years ago. It's our 'Kennedy' moment, though I am old enough - vaguely - to remember Kennedy's assassination. More ingrained in my memory is my 'Churchill' moment since it was the one time I remember my father slapping me after I complained about not being able to do something which had been cancelled because of his funeral. Nobody slapped me in 1963.
Eleven years ago everything was different. My children were all still in school, the youngest 9, my eldest 17, head girl at her poncy private school and about to enter her final year there. I was a restaurant critic for the Financial Times.
One thing, however, was the same. I was fat. I'd just come back from Weight Watchers.
I was fretting about an email I'd seen on my husband's computer in which he had arranged to have 'a drink' with a 'friend' in a London hotel. The etiquette of snooping. How do you confront someone about something you are not supposed to have seen? You don't. You just seethe quietly, and worry, and fight alternating panic and sorrow like you're standing in a tennis court having balls shot at you by one of those automatic machines, swatting one emotion out of the way in time to deter the next.
The scales were not kind to me when I weighed in, but they were harder even on my friend Maria and we came back clutching our little ration books ready to embrace the rosary of calorie counting. I dropped her off and walked into the house. It was a beautiful day. Sun was streaming through our rarely washed sitting room windows, which gave the room a wonderful golden glow of diffused light. My husband met me at the door.
Did you hear? He asked.
Hear what? I wondered, my first thought turning guiltily - me the guilty one - to his forthcoming assignation that evening at 5pm.
The World Trade Centre. Someone has flown a plane into it.
The TV was his witness and tuned to the footage of, what we did not then know was only the first, plane going in to the tower, over and over again.
Oh my God, was it us? Please say it wasn't us! I'll never forgive you if it was us? I gasped, rushing to the sofa where I crumpled like one of the imminently collapsing towers.
Al-Qaeda, he said instantly. The Palestinians couldn't manage anything as carefully planned as this. It has to be Bin Laden.
There was an instant wash of relief that the kids wouldn't be vilified, the phone wouldn't be tapped, the shame wouldn't taint us, followed by horror as the second plane hit.
Everything after that is a communal experience. I think most of us watched the towers fall, over and over and over and over and over again as if, by chance, just once they might wobble and remain erect. And we all waited like the empty hospitals for the survivors who didn't come. And some of the shame settled on our shoulders anyway since we had Arab surnames. Palestinian or Saudi was a nuance lost in the Spot a Man of Middle Eastern Appearance witch-hunt that only subsided somewhat after Asians blew up the trains a year later, and turned attention back to a minority many had long been waiting for a reason to target.
Funny that the first thing I remember though is the house. The sunlight. The welcome of walking into a warm, bright, home - and my husband meeting me at the door as he had done a hundred, a thousand, times. The nostalgia for that moment, when everything was still intact and I was still the mother of four kids who would come home in the evening with muddy football kid, and overflowing schoolbags, and lunch boxes; who would change into their pyjamas and sit with us on the sofa and eat cereal at the wrong time. It's like a huge tsunami of pleasure.
It was only when I probed further that I remembered the woman at the hotel bar that my husband was going to meet and buy, with his customary generosity, several expensive cocktails, and - well who knows what else. I'll never know. The one good thing about the twin towers coming down is that he didn't go. He cancelled. I presume.
But not before I needled him in the car later that day and he smacked me in the face. It was the one and only time - and provoked as it was by my unspoken knowledge and his unspoken guilt, it stung all the harder.
I think I preferred the Kennedy assassination, all things considered.
Eleven years ago everything was different. My children were all still in school, the youngest 9, my eldest 17, head girl at her poncy private school and about to enter her final year there. I was a restaurant critic for the Financial Times.
One thing, however, was the same. I was fat. I'd just come back from Weight Watchers.
I was fretting about an email I'd seen on my husband's computer in which he had arranged to have 'a drink' with a 'friend' in a London hotel. The etiquette of snooping. How do you confront someone about something you are not supposed to have seen? You don't. You just seethe quietly, and worry, and fight alternating panic and sorrow like you're standing in a tennis court having balls shot at you by one of those automatic machines, swatting one emotion out of the way in time to deter the next.
The scales were not kind to me when I weighed in, but they were harder even on my friend Maria and we came back clutching our little ration books ready to embrace the rosary of calorie counting. I dropped her off and walked into the house. It was a beautiful day. Sun was streaming through our rarely washed sitting room windows, which gave the room a wonderful golden glow of diffused light. My husband met me at the door.
Did you hear? He asked.
Hear what? I wondered, my first thought turning guiltily - me the guilty one - to his forthcoming assignation that evening at 5pm.
The World Trade Centre. Someone has flown a plane into it.
The TV was his witness and tuned to the footage of, what we did not then know was only the first, plane going in to the tower, over and over again.
Oh my God, was it us? Please say it wasn't us! I'll never forgive you if it was us? I gasped, rushing to the sofa where I crumpled like one of the imminently collapsing towers.
Al-Qaeda, he said instantly. The Palestinians couldn't manage anything as carefully planned as this. It has to be Bin Laden.
There was an instant wash of relief that the kids wouldn't be vilified, the phone wouldn't be tapped, the shame wouldn't taint us, followed by horror as the second plane hit.
Everything after that is a communal experience. I think most of us watched the towers fall, over and over and over and over and over again as if, by chance, just once they might wobble and remain erect. And we all waited like the empty hospitals for the survivors who didn't come. And some of the shame settled on our shoulders anyway since we had Arab surnames. Palestinian or Saudi was a nuance lost in the Spot a Man of Middle Eastern Appearance witch-hunt that only subsided somewhat after Asians blew up the trains a year later, and turned attention back to a minority many had long been waiting for a reason to target.
Funny that the first thing I remember though is the house. The sunlight. The welcome of walking into a warm, bright, home - and my husband meeting me at the door as he had done a hundred, a thousand, times. The nostalgia for that moment, when everything was still intact and I was still the mother of four kids who would come home in the evening with muddy football kid, and overflowing schoolbags, and lunch boxes; who would change into their pyjamas and sit with us on the sofa and eat cereal at the wrong time. It's like a huge tsunami of pleasure.
It was only when I probed further that I remembered the woman at the hotel bar that my husband was going to meet and buy, with his customary generosity, several expensive cocktails, and - well who knows what else. I'll never know. The one good thing about the twin towers coming down is that he didn't go. He cancelled. I presume.
But not before I needled him in the car later that day and he smacked me in the face. It was the one and only time - and provoked as it was by my unspoken knowledge and his unspoken guilt, it stung all the harder.
I think I preferred the Kennedy assassination, all things considered.
