A Special Relationship - nearly a quarter of a century later

Revisiting thoughts and feelings in 2001 after 9/11

Dateline September 2001. This piece was published on 28th September 2001 as a sort of love song to the USA after the horror of the attack on the World Trade Center. The events of the past few days (early March 2025) reminded me of my feelings then and how things have changed.

Here is what I wrote then.

“I got your letter telling me you were going to marry an Englishman. I just can’t bring myself to write about it.

Your loving mother”

With those discouraging words began a special relationship between a small East Anglian family and the whole of the United States of America.

My parents had met one another in Germany after the end of the Second World War, when my father (scarcely qualified as a solicitor and quite recently recovered from a head injury incurred during the war that left him unconscious for several days) had been sent out as a judge advocate to deal with breaches of curfew and other trivial offences. My mother, a qualified doctor, was taking part in the United Nations refugee relief effort. They met, fell wildly in love and married 3 weeks later.

The ecstatic message which they sent to her mother in Scottsbluff Nebraska prompted such a killjoy response because a few years earlier an Englishman had made his way across the mid-west swindling and defrauding everyone in his path. She immediately came to the conclusion that all Englishmen were in the same mould. The idea of her rebellious and talented daughter marrying a crook was more than she could bear. Such is how the misunderstandings develop which bring nations to their knees.

For years afterwards she assumed that my parents lived in abject poverty and would send regular food parcels brimming with cake mixes, jelly beans and good old American cookies.

Initially she was right. They did live in poverty. Like many people getting over the war, it was a question of slowly picking up the pieces. My father’s starting salary as a solicitor was £7 a week. Even making back adjustments for inflation, that is not a large sum to keep an American wife (and incidentally a new-born baby – for it was about then that I appeared on the scene).

Despite the opposition of a formidable mother-in-law the marriage was entirely successful and only ended this time last year when my mother died. A cruel celebration of the first anniversary of her death was arranged by the terrorists who perpetrated the destruction of the World Trade Centre, part of the Pentagon and an airliner Pennsylvania. To me (and to millions of others) it was like an unimaginable bereavement.

The crazed men and women who caused such death and destruction clearly hated the United States. So what is it about that country which engenders such passion? Could it be the same quality which makes me feel a sense of homecoming every time I set foot on American soil?

The reality is that it has not always been the charmed and privileged nation it now appears to be. My family were early settlers. They gradually moved west as the railways opened up access into regions which must then have been about as inhospitable as the surface of the moon. My grandparents (including the ferocious one who did not take to my father) were homesteaders. In order to acquire land they had to occupy and cultivate it for a year. If they left, even for a few days, they would lose it. Inspectors from the government regularly checked up on them.

The Nebraska territory (it did not become a state until 1866) was prone to violent extremes of weather, pestilence and drought. It is an area the size of England in the centre of north America. It is rolling countryside, with large parts of it only suitable for meagre grazing of cattle on vast ranches. The entire state is higher above sea level than the highest mountain in England. The atmosphere is so clear that from its many rocky outcrops you can see for hundreds of miles. It has a population of about one and a half million people, most of whom live near the winding course of the river Platte (described by early settlers as being a mile wide and an inch deep). I like this kind of American hyperbole. The muddy water of the Mississippi is considered “too thick to drink, and too thin to plough”.

To the state of Nebraska came people from all over the world. The telephone directory reads like the United Nations. It contains few Smiths and Joneses, but many Wertenbergers and Arvidsens. They came there to struggle to make a living in a harsh environment. Some did not make it, like my grandfather and Rebecca Winters.

Rebecca Winters died on the Oregon Trail just next to our family farm. Her tombstone is the metal rim of a wagon wheel dug into the ground. When they found it the railroad company moved the line of the track so that her grave would not be disturbed. My grandfather was so overwhelmed by the worries brought about by the Great Depression in the 1930s that, like thousands of others at the time, he took his own life.

Present day America has undoubtedly been forged by the hard upbringing afforded to the early pioneers. What we have now (if I can encapsulate a country as diverse as the USA in a handful of words) is a people who are immensely proud and grateful for what their land and country have provided for them. It is more than that. Anyone who has lived there will know that its people demonstrate immense hospitality enthusiasm and kindness (even if they sometimes haven't a clue where England is!). The fact that you are a distant cousin of a friend of a friend is often enough to prompt offers of food, accommodation and friendship.

This gentle land, with its gentle people – in every sense middle America – is what was attacked on 11^th September. These are people who endured the pioneering days and triumphed to become an extremely successful nation.

Even before September 11^th the pioneering spirit was alive and well. We may not always like the runaway good fortunes of the Bill Gateses of this world, but they came from nowhere and succeeded in their business enterprises. Now the country is united as it has never been united before. If my grandmother were alive today, I am sure she would have been flag waving with the rest of them. If signs of the last week are anything go on, she would probably even have had a small Union Jack in her left hand as she unfurled a Star Spangled Banner with her right, because one of the people who has grown enormously in stature in the last few days is our own Tony Blair. The Americans love him.

What a pity he did not pass through the state of Nebraska in the 1940s. It would have saved my father a great deal of grief.

The terrorists did not destroy any of the American spirit, but what I hope they did destroy was any last shred of support for terrorism as a means to any end anywhere.

Published in the Solicitors Journal on 28 September 2001

Postscript.

Would I have said the same things now, faced with that or a similar traumatic event? The rose tinting would I think have faded. My hopes for the end of terrorism were naive. Though my surviving cousins remain the kind of wonderful people I describe here, I sense a cooling of that warmth that I loved. The world has also changed and the future has become uncertain on so many fronts. Tony Blair is no longer a key player. Elon Musk was not to become a US citizen until a year after the piece appeared and to most people here in the UK at the time the word trump simply meant to fart.