'How are you coping?' - 2 November 2001

"How are you coping?" is what they all ask and in a kindly way.

Well, I work at my broadcast talk. At noon I hear airplanes and shortly afterwards the wail of a siren. People are becoming quite used to these interruptions.

I don't think that that drone in the sky means death to many people at any moment. It seems so incredible, as I sit here at my window and watch yellow butterflies playing around each other.

That is a paragraph from the wartime diary - the Second World War - of a famous English journalist, upper class, now - then - in a government office, former diplomat, who a day or two later was taken to luncheon with the Queen - the present Queen Mother.

He tells the Queen that whenever he leaves London during the bombing he feels homesick.

"That's right," she said, "that's what keeps us going. I should die if I had to leave."

She also told me that every morning she's instructed on how to fire a revolver.

"Yes," she said, "I shall not go down like the others."

Well within a week or two the Nazis had bombed Buckingham Palace and a whole side of its windows were blown out.

London was ablaze from the bombing that was to precede the invasion.

During that week of the Queen's shooting lessons the prime minister was at Downing Street turning down the appeals of two cabinet ministers to negotiate a peace with Hitler on terms that the British ambassador in Washington confidentially called "eminently satisfactory".

Churchill's fiery response in cabinet was: "We will never, never parlay or surrender.

"If this long island story of ours is to end at last let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground."

The prime minister's face was drenched with tears. The cabinet exploded in applause - a very rare scene. Nobody ever mentioned negotiations again.

During the same week an equally famous English journalist - name of James Agate, he was not in the government - he was writing his diary too.

An eccentric, brilliant, bouncing, inquisitive type who loved the theatre, the French language, classical music, show horses, Cockneys, golf and whisky.

Agate too lived in the heart of London throughout the Blitz and this was typical of his daily bombing reflections:

Leo Pavia presented me today with a hairbrush with the date 1845 dyed into the bristles. This was given to his grandmother by Rossini. Saw in a Jermyn Street window a pair of dove grey gloves I wish I could afford. Not feeling too happy about the top floor I have descended, for sleeping purposes, to the study.

September 7th, 1940. Lunched at Lords and had a long discussion on how to get Sir Henry Wood the Order of Merit. At 3.30 this afternoon the biggest air attack on London to date. Has been going on ever since, the time of writing being 2am.

From the roof of the Café Royal I got a fine view of the blaze, Tower Bridge being cut out like fretwork. In one corner of the foreground a large flag fluttered, making the whole thing look like one of those old posters of the melodrama A Royal Divorce, with Napoleon's cavalry against a background of red blazing ruin.

At the same time a previous volume of this critic's diary had just been published and a friend complained that there was almost nothing about the war in it.

The diarist countered: "Do I seriously mean that the reopening of the proms next week is of greater interest than, say, what Stalin is going to do? The answer is yes. In 20 years certainly, in a hundred years, when my big toe began to ache and when it stopped aching will be of more interest to anybody coming fresh to the diary than the peace terms. It will be news, they will be merely history."

Well I sit here thinking of my broadcast talk. Looking out on the rolling ocean of foliage of Central Park, marvelling, as I've marvelled for over half a century, at how at this time of the year the greens are slumping away into dark shadows and are flooded by the fountains of gold and lemon of the oaks turning.

A scene which these days is in itself a refreshment, a cool hand on the brow as you try to stop thinking about anthrax, the starting up of unemployment lines, the cruel irony of 7,000 suddenly-unemployed hotel waiters cueing up for canned food.

You see and offer a passing salute to the mayor who is down there again at the smoking hell of Ground Zero reporting with a thumb up that the count of cleared away rubble has just passed 400,000 tons - only two million more to go.

This scene can stay undisturbed like this for as long as half an hour or be broken every minute by a passing plane.

But the airplanes are almost a soothing sound as they fly along the western rim of the park. They're only a mile or two from their glide path into La Guardia airport. So they may be said almost to trundle in.

After 11 September there was an eerie week when the silence in the western sky - the lack of any sound at all - was truly ominous.

That was when all commercial flying in the United States was suspended. Normally there are 4,200 planes in the air, covering over 20,000 daily flights.

Which reminds me now of a casual remark made in a telephone call from an American friend.

He suggested that perhaps the horrendous of 11 September might have been avoided by "some elementary precautions".

I let it go at the time and then began to wonder what they might be. Eventually I went into it with the help of the Federal Aviation Authority and a veteran Vietnam pilot - now retired chief pilot of one of our big airlines.

First you had to make a whacking presumption that the FBI had learned there was to be an aerial attack on a public icon - Hoover Dam, the Seattle Needle, the White House - somewhere across a continent of airspace.

All right, send up 4,200 fighter jets to convoy 22,000 flights, close enough to be able to divert or shoot down the attackers within the 10 seconds it takes to decide to fly into a building instead of alongside it.

Preposterous? Of course, it was a preposterous question to begin with, a begged question if ever there was one - that's to say, a question that presumes the answer it's seeking.

How do you take precautions against a bolt from the blue, an action unexpected and unknown in character, nature, time or place?

So I was saying that for a week or so the bosky lovely scene I'm looking at was more placid still, but in a creepy way, because of the reason for the silence.

And then, from the second week on, the planes came back again - very few and a very different sound.

Since Washington's National Airport remained closed, until last week, all those Washington shuttles to La Guardia were still not to be heard.

The new sound was not a trundle but a momentary ripping sound through the air. It was, from time to time, the sound of a fighter jet - just one of the huge fleet that was now taking "elementary precautions" over the American sky from Key West to Vancouver, from Rockland, Maine, to the Mexican border on the Pacific.

The actual fact of the entire American airspace being patrolled - over six million square miles - is even more mind-shattering than the September announcement that it was going to be done.

And the mere thought of it brought into the public consciousness the new heroes of this new war: Not so much the men bombing or probing the caves of Afghanistan but the pilots up there, here - night and day scanning the great dams, the 103 nuclear power plants and heaven alone knows what else that could be so disastrous to the people, their health and safety.

And down on the ground we've learned a new and national admiration - this side, idolatory - for firefighters in general and most for the thousands from many parts of the country who came to New York to descend and work in the downtown inferno.

This past week that parson friend of mine came down from Vermont. She it was who was troubled by the fragility, the sulkiness you might say of her congregation after the September doomsday.

She was the minister who told her flock they'd been living for 20 years in a dreamland, a material paradise - "You have been living in the Garden of Eden. You have been expelled and you'd better get used to it."

I think she's realised since that her part of Vermont - a village in the mountains, life lived around the woods, the maple trees, the skiing, the fruit stands, the great quiet, the colonial church - is really not much different from life in 18th Century New England.

Vermont has few very poor. A tiny black and Hispanic population. Few of the social problems that nag other places or rage in the big cities.

She thought she'd better get the feel of life on the frontline. So the moment she arrived here she took off by subway for Downtown and visited the scene.

The first startling thing was the silence and then the acrid smoke and the hosing down, still, of the fires.

"It was," she said slowly, "a very sobering sight."

I think it made her understand why I - we - find telephone messages and the few letters we get from outside New York, from abroad, even from California, sound and read as from another planet.

The friend says: "How are you coping?" and then tells about a jolly dinner party in Spain.

An old English friend urges me, over the transatlantic telephone, to read a new book on economics.

"Unreal, unreal" as the golf pros say, when they see Tiger Woods pull off an impossible shot.

I asked one even older friend, an Englishman here, how he'd put up, so like James Agate, with living through London in the Blitz.

He said: "Same way, I suppose. Like him I was never really much interested in politics."

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