In The Olden Time: Before 11 September - 19 October 2001

"In the olden time" was the phrase an old friend of mine used, to preface some marvellous, unbelievable story of his boyhood in Poland.

By "the olden time" he always referred to life before the day he, a boy of 13, his younger sister and his mother in a shawl, presented themselves to an Irish immigration inspector at Ellis Island - who, hearing their unpronounceable name, did the usual thing, said: "Well we can't have that now can we?" wrote down "Sonnenberg" on a scrap of paper, with the injunction: "That'll be your new name, then."

I find myself about to begin an occasional sentence these days with "in the olden time" and pull myself up just in time.

To me it means any and all the time before the fateful 11 September.

And once a week now, and I suppose for more weeks to come, I think of some of the topics I was going to talk about - from missile defence, to the protection of the spotted owl, from the proper tributes paid to the late Dr Christian Barnard and the absence of any tribute to his teacher - the greatest pioneer figure in heart transplantation.

And then to describe the admirable way in which the very young Tiger Woods has handled his vast fortune and publicity and countered the noisy criticism that he was sponsored by a slave wage corporation - a charge the corporation met by fast becoming the American business in Asia paying the highest wages and initiating a workers' healthcare plan.

But now these and many other things seem trivial, at least postponeable, and as for the issues in Congress that were hotting up, a little more than a month ago - improving the school systems without imposing federal standards, whether or not Mr Alan Greenspan was going beyond his authority in handling the economy - what else? I can't even remember which issues were burning and which were - as the saying goes - put on the back burner.

Last week when I talked about anthrax and the outbreak of attacks in Florida I hoped they would turn out to be - as one famous commentator called it - "nothing to attribute to Osama bin Laden, we're all obsessed with him, this is the work of some loony copycat."

Within days of the identified three takes in Florida an assistant to the chief commentator of the National Broadcasting Company opened a letter addressed to him, not from Florida, positively containing anthrax.

Next day another network's anchorman was threatened.

A pattern began to emerge which looked less and less like the ideas of a loony copycat.

First one, then two, then four despatched anthrax letters, all aimed at the mass media.

Remember the first victim, the only one, so far, to die, was on the staff of the publisher of the biggest and loudest of our national tabloids.

The whole staff of that company - 350 - were the first to be tested.

However, came Tuesday and when I woke in a half-dream, half-conscious state, I thought I was waking up to a ship's newspaper - you know what a ship's newspaper is, was? - not many listeners I think.

Well in the olden time - and now I'm thinking of any time before the 1960s, when passage across the oceans was by sea, when 365 days a year the great passenger ships of many nations - chiefly British, French, German, American, Italian, Scandinavian - plied their majestic way back and forth across the Atlantic between New York, Boston, Cobh, Liverpool, Southampton, Cherbourg, Hamburg.

A few impatient businessmen took the required 10 hours or so to fly by bouncing propeller plane. But the rest of us - I for over 30 years - went by the passenger liners.

They were killed off very quickly, in a year or two, by the arrival of the commercial jet, which flew above the weather.

One of the hilarious minor pleasures of travelling by ship was the daily arrival at breakfast time of the ship's paper.

It was the only newspaper to which you had access. It was no more than four pages, usually, was briskly written, brightly printed in large type and the stories didn't run to more than about 50 words.

They were a mixture of two or three sentences from the wire or radio news services, a spate of rumour and the whole served up with bits of saucy gossip.

I have to tell you that the papers I was impatient for were the French.

The French didn't pretend they were filling in for Le Monde. They wanted you not so much to be informed by the news as to be tickled pink by it.

They were consciously free to mingle surprising events with a dash of imagination.

So do I well recall 63 years ago, the morning after an outrageous storm on the board the Normandie, four of us out of 2,000 went down to dinner and the second largest ship afloat was bouncing around like a toy duck in a bathtub.

Next morning we woke to a shining day, gliding along towards New York.

Breakfast brought the newspaper and for once a four-column headline, it said: "Hurricane à New-York" - the French always printed it that way because, as Mark Twain said: "They print better than they spell."

Hurricane at New York? Ridiculous - there hasn't been a hurricane north of Florida, the Carolinas anyway, for over a century.

With a faintly contemptuous chuckle I got down to the fine print and at once had the chuckle torn from my curling lips.

Place names, familiar place names, and numbers of the dead - Southold - where my father-in-law had a Dutch colonial house on 90 acres: The main street turned into a not very scenic railway.

Westhampton Beach: The cinema lifted and deposited out to sea with its afternoon audience of 20 or 30.

New London - the harbour town across Long Island sound: Seven feet underwater. Most of New England's white birch ripped up.

Well it was all true enough. And when we were met at the pier by my father-in-law, an austere Yankee if ever there was one, not given to public emotion or sentimentality of any kind.

He said, with a moist eye: "It took 40 years to plant and sow. We have to begin again."

So when I came to last Tuesday morning and opened up the New York Times I thought for a second I'd got hold of a ship's newspaper.

The headline read: "From Berlin to Brazil - the anthrax letters" and there followed only one of 10 separate stories - there are times when it's less than a pleasure and a pride to reflect that the New York Times has the largest and most unmatchable team of overseas reporters of any paper on earth.

This one story summarised the new truth. In, at last count, 16 countries there had surfaced letters with powder identified as anthrax.

And in hundreds of thousands of offices and public buildings around the world, no longer only America, the office workers, the staffs, the parliamentarians, were being evacuated and tested.

And by now, I suppose, millions of harmless surprised civilians are wearing surgical gloves to handle mail.

Germany's White House was evacuated. Four buildings in Paris. Canterbury Cathedral.

Alert evacuations, gloves, masks distributed in Mexico City, in Leipzig, in Ottawa, a computer parts building in Holland.

Powder on a newsstand caused, on Sunday, the shutting of Vienna's international airport.

Of course some of these, many, must have been hoaxes - what a marvellous new and simple way open to lunatics who want to terrify a community.

But Tuesday was the day which exploded the belief that all these attacks at home and abroad were either loonies' hoaxes or the work of amateur biochemists.

The grimmest item came from the United States Senate where the office of the Democrats' leader - Senator Daschle - received a letter containing anthrax of a great potency and fineness.

So said the two United Nations experts who spent three or four fruitless years trying to get Saddam Hussein to reveal the sites of his nuclear and biochemical facilities.

They also said its manufacture was so sophisticated that only four nations could have made it - the United States, Britain, Russia, Iraq. Possibly Iran.

Next day 29 staff members of Senator Daschle's office tested positive.

The House of Representatives closed down till next Tuesday while a massive detective cleanup was attempted of the offices, the halls, the air-conditioning, the ventilation shafts of the House and four huge adjacent buildings.

The Senate swore it would soldier on while attempting the same biochemical sweep.

Meanwhile, the president and the attorney general, the secretary of health, kept insisting what eventually the media themselves had to confess, that the media had over-reacted, causing the general public to do the same.

After all, they pointed out, there has been so far only one death and anthrax is not contagious. After all 20,000 Americans die every year from the flu.

Nevertheless so widespread has been the distribution of suspect letters in so many wildly unpredictable places that 70% of the public think they could well be a target.

Around the turn of the 19th - 20th Century, the early 1900s I think, there was an outbreak in Europe of assassinations - of royals, statesmen - and so many wanted terrorists fled to England as safe haven that the country went into a fairly panicky decade.

HG Wells, who at the time was the most influential writer of early science fiction, wrote a novel about the prospect and the success of germ warfare.

My father, a great admirer of HG Wells as a liberal thinker, was also the gentlest and I suppose most gullible man.

And he was shocked at the very turn of Wells's imagination. He called the book "morbid".

At the very end of his life Wells thought it was the way the world would end.

At the end of his life, one obituary writer explained that Mr Wells was highly eccentric, if not unbalanced.

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