Remembering 9/11 - Memories from Scotland

As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devestatilng 9/11 attack on New York, I am repeating a post I first wrote on the first anniversary in 2012. 

11th September 2001 - I was working at Library Headquarters that day in the Local Studies Room when my daughter phoned to tell me that a plane had crashed into the twin towers in New York. I had visited the city many many years ago, long before the twin towers were built and I was a bit hazy about them, but my first reaction was "what an appalling accident".

 

Photograph, courtesy of Pixabay.
 

I told colleagues of the disaster  and we logged onto the BBC website and saw the dreadful news of the second strike. There was an American visitor in the Study Room and we broke the news to him - he immediately went outside to phone friends and family. We then dashed to the Training Room where there was a television. Two work colleagues had daughters holidaying  in New York and had the agonizing wait of days, with communications down,  to hear that they were safe. 

Words cannot describe the horror. What struck in my mind most was the experience of those on the planes who had left Boston,  to discover they were flying to their death - yet whose thoughts were to phone family expressing their love.

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A week later we were on holiday on the west coast of Scotland and took the ferry from Oban to sail to the Isle of Mull and then onto the Isle of Iona. It was the most perfect September day you could have asked for - sunny blue skies, a calm deep blue sea, a panorama of hills, lochs and sea, with  the seals bobbing around the ferry.    The atmosphere was strangely quiet and subdued. There were many American tourists on the boat, and   people were going up to them to shake their hands and extend their sympathies. 

Sailing  out of Oban with the hills of Mull in the distance.



The tiny island of Iona,  off the southwest coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, Is top of my list of favourite places.   It is only  1.5 miles wide by 3 miles long, with a population of around 120 permanent residents, but everyone talks about  the magical nature of this   seat of Scottish Christianity where St. Columba founded his Abbey in 563AD. Later it became a place of pilgrimage and learning,   and over 40 of Scotland's earliest kings were buried there.  It is amazing that even though the boat seemed busy, visitors spread out on the small island and it seems as if you have the place to yourself. 

 It was so peaceful - a beautiful haven in what suddenly seemed a very evil world. 

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