That evening the Germans decided to transport Driver Taylor on a horse, without a saddle, to the nearest town. Fearing he would fall off, my granddad tied a piece of string around one of the animal’s ears, hauled himself onto its bare back, and set off nervously. At that very moment, however, a German machine gun went off and the horse bolted, catapulting my granddad into a razor-wire fence. Bloody, terrified, and exhausted, he finally made it, on foot, to the camp. The next morning he was ordered on a three-week march to Germany, covering thirty kilometers a day and sleeping in cattle fields. What little food he ate was given to him by locals who pitied the starving prisoners. In the town of Trier he was shoved into a railway truck and eventually taken to Poznan, a port on the Warta River in Poland. There, as British Prisoner of War No. 4552, he joined a working party that tore down the Poznan zoo so that it could be turned into a military airfield. He also operated a crane in a quarry (at one point the POWs tried to kill a Nazi guard by dropping a boulder on him). He spent the rest of the war as a laborer near Freiwaldau—now called Jesenik—on the Czech-Polish border.
Within two weeks of returning to Newcastle, Dvr. Ross Taylor married Florence and was put on paid leave by the British army. Then he came down with tuberculosis, caused by five years of malnutrition. Doctors treated him by collapsing one of lungs and putting him in a sanatorium for nine months.
He survived all of this, needless to say, without the need for Zoloft, trauma counseling, or French existential literature. After recovering from TB, he put himself through night school and set about making himself a member of the English middle class. Sometimes, on my way to Dr. Ruth’s clinic, I would think about my grandfather, and I would feel guilt, the heavy, suffocating kind.
It wasn’t just my health that was bothering me in New York. I was also thoroughly sick of lift and view. I met up with other English foreign correspondents to see if they shared my frustration with rehashing other people’s stories. Toby Moore of the Daily Express told me despondently that foreign reporters were a dying breed: The paper’s new proprietor, onetime porn magnate Richard Desmond, had decided to get rid of all overseas bureaus apart from New York. This made Toby the last staff foreign correspondent ever employed by the newspaper founded in 1900 and bought sixteen years later by Lord Beaverbrook. Ironically, the Express had once been famous for its global reach, and in 1936 had the largest circulation of any publication on earth. In place of foreign correspondents, Desmond used young, poorly paid reporters in London to follow up stories from the online editions of overseas newspapers. Clearly it wasn’t just Joanna who knew about lift and view. Within weeks Toby was back in the UK: Desmond had shut down the New York bureau to save more money. I feared my job could also disappear. The dot-com boom, after all, had turned into a financial catastrophe and the economy was lurching into a recession. The New Economy, it seemed, wasn’t that new after alclass="underline" It was just a plain old speculative financial bubble. Patience started to reject my expense claims and, in one curt phone call, warned me to cut the overhead of the New York bureau. Manhattan, however, was in deniaclass="underline" The hedonism of the nineties, as epitomized by Sex and the City, was still the norm.
There was also, however, a palpable sense of foreboding. Repossession trucks towed Porsches from outside fashionable loft apartments, such as the one I lived in at 666 Greenwich Street. The West Village’s trendy, candle-lit restaurants started to feel emptier on weeknights. The homeless multiplied. And the cheesy Europop of the nineties had been replaced by the depressive bleeping of Radiohead’s Kid A. Then, of course, there was George W. Bush—a president no one in New York seemed to like. The war virgins, I concluded, had been spoiled for too long.
Part of me wondered whether it would be stress or Patience’s budget cuts that ended my stint as Wall Street correspondent. I decided that a holiday in England—my first return to Britain after moving to New York—might help clear my mind. So I booked myself a ticket through News Corp’s travel department and turned up at John F. Kennedy Airport, only to discover that the company had automatically put me in first class, at a cost to Patience of $5,126.32. That was it, I thought, I was done. The travel agent had assumed I was a News Corp executive traveling with Rupert Murdoch’s entourage. I couldn’t face telling Patience about it in person, so I e-mailed her instead. “Oh dear,” was her two-word reply, followed by a week of silence. I spent the rest of my holiday convinced that she would fire me. In the end, however, she let me off, even though I had offered to pay the difference in fares, which amounted to $4,739. For the first time since Patience had arrived at The Times, I wanted to hug her. By the time I got back on my United Airlines jet at Heathrow, I was exhausted, still unwell, and not sure I was happy about going back to New York. But weren’t people supposed to love New York—the city that never sleeps? I tried hard to feel love, but none came. At least, I thought, I could savor a guilt-free, first-class flight.
I needed all the sleep I could get.
The date was September 10, 2001.
6
THE ACCIDENTAL WAR CORRESPONDENT
It’s 8.45 A.M. the next morning. I’m in my apartment at 666 Greenwich Street, wearing only a pair of white boxer shorts, debating whether or not to go into the office. I’m suffering from a mild stomach upset, probably caused by yesterday’s seven-hour flight from London. I fear, however, that it might be more serious: gallbladder disease, perhaps. I make a note to call Dr. Ruth.
Above me, to the northwest, an American Airlines Boeing 767, piloted by Islamic terrorist Mohammed Atta, is traveling at 470 miles per hour toward Lower Manhattan at an estimated altitude of two thousand feet. In the aircraft’s coach-class cabin, Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant, is talking on a mobile phone to a colleague at Boston’s Logan Airport. “I see water and buildings,” she is saying in a low voice. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” At this point the aircraft is probably now directly over 666 Greenwich Street—a mile and a half north of the World Trade Center and one block east of the Hudson River. In Boston, 216 miles northeast, Amy Sweeney’s colleague is unaware that one of Mohammed Atta’s suitcases is currently circling, unclaimed, on a baggage carousel only a few yards away from him. He doesn’t know who Atta is, nor that the terrorist passed through Boston that morning after coming in on a connecting flight from Portland. Atta’s suitcase contains airline uniforms, flight manuals, and a four-page document, in Arabic. It instructs him to “feel complete tranquility, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.”