A light drizzle fell from the sky – quiet and not enough to get wet. Everyone was already silent as I approached the square: several hundred people just staring at that space outside the BMA, screened off by black boards. I passed a group of people all holding white balloons, ready to release them into the London sky after the silence.
I can remember the rain on my face when the clock struck twelve. The man next to me shifted position – sort of like a military stand at ease. I found myself looking at the ground, standing very still. Suddenly the whole city fell quiet. Everything stopped. Seven million people stopped talking, typing or walking and just stood where they were, silent. I could hear the sound of the traffic behind me on Euston Road fall away to nothing. The only noise was the drone of the large air conditioners in the buildings either side of us and the screaming of the gulls circling overhead. I was aware of the beacon beside me over the crossing flashing on and off uselessly through the silence, scores of people standing in the road on its crossing.
When the two minutes were over everyone remained silent. A few people began to weep. Slowly in the background crept in the wail of sirens, in an ominous reminder of last year – the almighty bang, the screeching and squawking of the birds and then the sudden terrible silence, before the rising blare of ambulance and police sirens. I looked behind me at the group huddled opposite the Ambassadors. All their balloons were gone. I looked up but couldn’t see them in the sky. Everyone there held each other instead, crying and not talking.
From behind the boards then came the procession of survivors and families of those killed. I watched one women walking alone, crying unashamedly in total silence. I have no shame in admitting she reduced me to tears of my own. The image of her seemed to sum everything about today and the horrific events of last year, so close to my neat, ordered, convenient and lucky everyday life. I can remember sitting at my desk – around the time I’m writing this now – unable to concentrate on anything because a busload of people had been murdered several yards away in Tavistock Square. Just a normal, unremarkable and everyday London square, somewhere where I sit and eat my lunch. She was hurt and bereaved, but kept walking. Still moving. Life, pedestrian and everyday as it can seem, does and must go on.
I had to go there today. No matter where I end up in the world, this will always be my home. You only needed to look at the person standing next to you to see the same belief, and that is what community is.
This is lovely. Thank you for sharing it. Having participated in such events – some impromptu, some planned – in NYC, I know how they feel, and you really brought that feeling back to me.
Long ago on my blog, I posted something I wrote after going visiting downtown Manhattan on Sept 12, 2001. It’s not a great piece of writing or anything, but people always say it makes them cry when they read it – as you just did for me.
Also, thanks for the link.
As I said to a friend recently, I think, oddly enough, things like this sum up everything there is about humanity. On one side there is the wickedness – the stupidity and hate of people who will do this, the vulgar concept of a holy war or the twisted righteousness of taking innocent lives for a cause totally alien and detached from them.
But on the other, there is a huge proportion of the world – countless millions of people – holding a short silence to show respect and compassion for people they have never met, in a city they’ve never been to. A city that came to a complete and total stop to remember (in pure cold and comparative mathematics) a small handful of people who lost their lives. Or people who make the trip to the site they died to lay flowers because they want to make sense of it all. Or just the fact that the silence in that square was there as soon as you arrived, and remained long after the two minutes were over.
Humans can be so wonderful sometimes. When they make displays like that you feel proud to be part of the human race. At least that’s what I found so moving about the experience.