Describe your memories of some major world events that have happened in your lifetime…Part 2

September 11th, 2001 is a date that no one will ever forget. It will go down in history – in fact has already done so.
I was working that day for a former British cabinet minister, from Mrs Thatcher’s time, who shall remain anonymous. He was staying at a château near here, and I was their chef for their holiday.

I was in the kitchen cooking, with the radio on. As the news came on, I was only half heartedly listening, and wasn’t quite sure that I had heard right, or even understood correctly.

The minister man came into the kitchen and asked me if I had heard the news. I said I had, but I wasn’t sure I had understood right and he explained it to me, and I went to watch on the television.

We saw the plane going into the first tower and that was incredible enough, but when the second plane went into the second tower – it defied belief. All I remember feeling is complete disbelief and thinking “oh my god, I’m watching history in the making”. It was complete shock and terror. If they can do that, what else are they capable of? The terror of knowing that so many hundreds of people were trapped in there, seeing scenes of people fleeing through the streets terrified for their lives – it was simply unbelievable.
The one thing I found very hard to understand was that some people there actually had the presence of mind to whip out video cameras to film the whole thing as it happened. I would not have been able to do that – I would have been running fast in the opposite direction with all the other people.
I don’t know how anyone could have got over being involved in that – either first hand or second hand if they had lost someone that day.

The scary fact is that it could happen again. Indeed it did happen in London in 2005 when they tried to cripple the capital with several bombs. Luckily, security had been tightened up to such a degree that what happened in London was by no means as catastrophic as what happened in New York, but they still caused devastation.