Like most folk, I have a very clear memory of when I heard. One of those bright, chilly September days. I was sitting at my desk in the small meeting room me and my team mates had commandeered as an office. The phone rang, my wife was on the line, wasn’t unusual for her to call around then. We’d gotten back from visiting her parents in Boston a couple of weeks before and she was still shifting back into a UK sleeping pattern.

“Somebody’s flown a plane into the world trade centre”

“What? Like a microlight?”

“No, a plane. A big one. Go find a TV.”

I went through to the kitchen, where my two team mates were playing pool and told them what happened. I remembered somebody had moved the TV from the kitchen to the main open plan office for Wimbledon and it had never been moved back. The person who’d done it had probably been laid off in the round of redundancies that had happened while I was on holiday, the dot com collapse was in full flow and I’d found out maybe 20 of my friends had lost their jobs in back channel email.

BBC1 had interrupted it’s programming and was showing News 24. I’d never seen that before, usually it didn’t start until the wee small hours. It was going to become a familiar sight over the next weeks and years. Smoke was billowing out, the presenter didn’t seem to know much of anything. People started gathering round the small, black CRT with rabbit ear antennae on top of a filing cabinet.

And that’s where the memory starts to fade. A few people asked what was going on, I don’t remember if we watched the second plane hit or if it was after that. I think we did, but it might have been a repeat. I’ve seen that footage so many times over the last 10 years I can’t trust that. I do remember grimly remarking about how my parents-in-law had lunch with us at the airport gate in Boston and thinking how different and relaxed airport security was there compared to the UK. A metal scanner, a bag check.. nobody asked for your boarding pass until you tried to get on the plane.

What I do remember is sitting in the smoking room while the towers burned, calling my wife and chewing over what had happened with the other half dozen regulars in there, and the half dozen more who joined us. It didn’t take long to realise that, regardless of insane project schedules, nothing else was getting done that day.

And so I spent the next few hours alternately smoking and on the internet trying to find friends and family.

I remember getting home and sitting on the floor, having wired up the monitor and keyboard to the server I remember the heat from the computers and the early ADSL modem, and staying up late talking with folk in the US, and smoking. A lot. A friend describing the amount of ash and dust that was billowing past her window in New York.

A few days later we had a company meeting in the kitchen to discuss it. Then now faded memories of Kenya and Yemen were fresh and along with the sorrow for the deaths and the fear of future attacks there was a dread of what the response would be and what that would mean for the people in the countries the US would retaliate against.

Kate adds:

It’s one of those memories where everyone will remember where they were when it happened.  I was at work, in a meeting.  A very important meeting with very important people.  All the way through, our mobiles were humming and vibrating.  We ignored them.  Important stuff to discuss, two hours worth, which in the end produced some very worthwhile results for some of Scotland’s most marginalised people.

The boss’s landline rang as soon as she switched the ringer back on.  Her boyfriend was almost incoherent.  He worked in high finance and had business associates in the towers.  Effectively the message was turn the TV on, the World Trade Centre is on fire.

I’d left the room at this point, not wishing to intrude on a private conversation.  A shriek beckoned me back.  We stood there in open-mouthed silence, trying to compute the images on the screen with the fragments of information we had.  It was discombobulating actually.  The whole office suddenly whirled, with everyone up from their desks and in and out of each others’ offices.  The internet crashed.  News sites were jammed.

And so it continued for the afternoon, with everyone trying to work out, find out what was going on.  But work beckoned, so dipping in and out was the best that could be managed.

I do remember an uneasy, fearful quiet settling eventually.  A sense that what ever it was, it was huge, an event of such enormity, it was difficult to grasp.

And most folk going home early.  I picked my bairn up from school, came home, switched the TV on and spent the evening holding my wee man close, flicking constantly between channels, tears rolling down my cheeks most of the time.  Still trying to sort through the snippets from the day and make sense of it all.

In the days afterwards, the mood was strange.  Subdued but with everyone being kind and rather gentle.  Everything slowed, and the facts leaked out.  Not just the World Trade Centre, but the Pentagon.  The astonishing bravery of firefighters especially, but also, all those others who ran in the wrong direction, to try to save.  The unbearable sadness of all those final messages home.  The tragedy of so many ordinary lives made utterly extraordinary by circumstance.  By being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Everyone had an opinion on what, how and why.  It was the only topic of conversation.  But in amongst all the conspiracy theories and the almost unbelievable truth, a universal realisation.  That everything had changed.  That things would never be the same again.  And so it has proved.

Malc’s recollection:

I’ll be demonstrating my youthfulness by comparison here, but on 11 September 2001, I was 17 and in my final year at Keith Grammar School.  It was a Tuesday afternoon and we had P.E – which various members of my class frequently missed.  Thus one of my friends was sitting upstairs in the cafe watching on TV as the attacks happened.  When the class was over, he came down to the hall to tell us what had happened.

P.E was the final class of the day for me, but we were due to head to Aberdeen to a schools public speaking competition at the end of the school day.  The bus left at 4, so when the bell went I ran to the school’s computer room and  got myself to the BBC website to see what was going on.  Even at that stage I knew I was watching a world-changing event, though we didn’t know the whole story.  At that point, the details were still hazy – the Twin Towers had been hit, but they were still standing, and there was no news about the other two planes at that point.

What remains with me are two clear memories after that.  The first of those was the school bus to Aberdeen.  Strangely enough, for a public speaking competition – even though there were only 3 of us involved – we took around 25 pupils with us as support.  I’d never been on a quieter school bus – especially when the news came on the radio.  There were younger kids on the trip too – 12/13 year olds who would usually be joking around – and even they were quiet, desperate to find out what had happened.

The second memory is from the following day at school.  Our sixth year was quite a small group – around 40 or so pupils – and so a few of us had a free period and were sitting around in the common room.  It was very quiet – a very strange, subdued atmosphere for a school common room.  Someone brought a US flag which we hung up in the room.  I remember a few of the folks were quite upset so we decided that – just as a group of 20 or so, when we were all together – we’d go to the hall and observe a couple of minutes silence.  A small gesture, meaningless in its simplicity and its practical implications.  But it was something that at that point in time, we could do.  And even though none of us – I don’t think – had any physical connection with any of the victims of the attacks, we had felt a connection with America that day, and that was a connection we felt, as a group, we had to commemorate.

As a politics undergraduate, and subsequently an International Relations postgrad, specialising in Terrorism, the events were a key influence on my area of study.  Making sense of it at the time – as a 17 year old – was impossible.  Making sense of it 10 years later, with an MSc in the subject isn’t any easier.