September 11th/12th 2001

If my calculations and the time difference is right, the attacks on The World Trade Centre that occurred on September 11th 2001 actually occurred on 12th September in my part of the world, Wellington, New Zealand.

I remember my wife at the time waking me up with the radio playing, to say something about a plane crashing into The World Trade Centre in New York. The news had little effect on me. I was waking up to another day as a nurse aide at Wellington hospital, general ward 14.

As we didn't have a television, we weren't privy to the visceral images of the planes plunging into the buildings against that clear blue sky the buildings collapsing or the ghostly looking people coated in fine dust or the plumes of wreckage pouring down the New York streets and avenues, so the news that came over the radio was tame compared to what was being witnessed all around the globe.

I was on an early shift, 8AM to 3.30PM. I got up, showered, ate breakfast and went to work. Once there it was straight into the never ending list of things to be done. As per usual there were nurses busy changing shift, meetings, briefings, patient reports, laundry, new admissions, releases, beds to be stripped and made, breakfast to hand out, tea and coffee to be made, shit to clean up.

Slowly the news would filter through in snippets. What started as an occasional remark built, as the day progressed and more and more became thee topic of the day. Still, it had little effect on me, I barely gave it a second thought, something else bad was happening in another part of the world, I had work to do, always too much work to do.

My lasting memories of the talk during that normal working day are two separate statements made by people who had seen the news footage and were following the updates on the television situated in the visitor room. I remember an English nurse describing it as "a work of art" which left me bemused, and a patient saying that "They (presumably the American people) had it coming".

I finished work, tired as usual, but by now the talk was off little else. Thousands dead, buildings collapsing, the Pentagon bombed, America under attack from the air, all kinds of rumour and speculation. I signed my time sheet and left work, not once thinking about the fact that I had spent the day on the top floor of the highest building in Wellington Hospital.

When I got home, my wife asked me if I had heard any more news and I probably said something along the lines of yes, but thinking no. I imagine we talked about it. I hadn't seen any footage so it's impact on me was lessened than that of the millions watching from around the globe.

I tuned into The World Service and the talk was off what had unfolded. I was shocked to discover that yes, it had been an deliberate terrorist attack, and that another hijacked plane had crashed in a field and that the bombing off The Pentagon was in fact yet another hijacked plane, but soon I grew weary of the barrage of opinion and rhetoric, and turned the radio off, turned on some music, ate, read and went to sleep without thinking much more about it. That was September 12th. 2001, Wellington, New Zealand.

I had been in New York only two years earlier. Had seen the 'twin towers' from all angles, but they had left no lasting impression on me, unlike say, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chrysler building, the Guggenheim or the Dakota Buildings where John Lennon had been murdered...no, the twin towers didn't really fit with my overall memory of that great city, not until much later. Not in fact until I saw the space left from where they once stood, the void remaining. It was the lack of them that made more of an impression than the buildings themselves.

The next day I bought a paper, a "commemorative" issue of The Wellington Post, and I thought about other commemoratives, and I imagine these things came to mind...the 1977 Queen's Silver Jubilee, the Northern Ireland hunger strikers, the first space shuttle blast off, the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London, the Hillsborough disaster, the Enniskillen remembrance Sunday bombing. On reading, the enormity of what had occurred on that day started to sink in. "Would the world ever be the same again"? "New York's Pearl Harbour", the headlines read.

Some time later I found a tourist map of Manhattan, a keep sake from my time in New York, and there on the cover, shot from an amateurish angle were those huge towers. Looking at a photograph of me and my wife taken on the Brooklyn bridge, there they were again. A shot from the Staten Island ferry and they're dead centre. In movies and documentaries with scenes shot in New York, they always featuerd.

I've watched only two related documentaries since that time. Jules Naudet's film "9/11", shot by him and his brother who by chance, happened to be making a documentary at the time about a New York Firehouse...what ogreish serendipity. The other was a poetic film by Henry Singer and Richard Numeroff called "The Falling Man" about the identity of a man who jumped or fell from one of the towers, caught in a series off still images by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew. That for me was enough. I have no need to see any associated images or footage again. They are seared into my memory.

What happened in the aftermath is history. The invasion of Iraq, the overthrow and demise of Saddam Hussein, the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan and of course most recently the killing of the man widely blamed as the mastermind and financial backer of the attacks ten years ago, Osama Bin Laden.

But that's not what this is about. September 11th. 2001 will forever be a, "where were you when you heard" day, this is simply my memory and my experience of that day. Run of the mill, unremarkable, mundane, tiring, work a day, ordinary and safe, in my own part off the world and my own place in the world.