Dialogue: Horror beyond understanding

By ROANNE PARKER

Do you ever feel as if you know absolutely nothing about anything? As you read this, I will have been feeling that for about 160 hours.

There are surely two types of knowledge. On the one hand, you have the first-hand knowledge and, on the other, you have the secondhand. Usually I grasp for the first-hand experience. I'm no good at being left out of anything and I want to live it all up close. But there are some things I am perfectly happy not to live through and would much rather rely upon hearsay.

You and I could have a conversation about war. First-hand knowledge means you know what it feels like to have to raise children with a ration book and a husband you haven't seen for months and may never see again. The other kind means you know that Hitler was a xenophobic bloke with a nasty streak.

I don't pretend to have a clue about war other than what we learned in sixth-form history. All I know even semi-first-hand about the last big one was that my mother was born right in the guts of it and my grandfather died of cancer a few years later.

In between, my grandmother, like yours no doubt, must have had days when it was all she could do not to fall to the ground in a puddle of despair and wish she could make the war stop.

The deaths that will number in the thousands in America hurt most of us in a secondhand kind of way. The surreal horrors of watching those buildings fall made the rest of the past week seem pointless and flippant.

But I am alive and I am glad to be. I got to pick my kids up from school that night; there were some kids in New York who waited at the school gates to be collected by a parent who had been killed six hours earlier.

Last week when I watched Frasier on television I had no idea, had no thought, of the show's creator. This week I know his name, and I know he is dead.

I don't know much about death, and I don't have any idea what happens after it, but I know it means no more hugs, no more sex, no more warm breath in a partner's ear in bed at night, no more cooking and looking and smelling. I don't want any part of that.

I am scared of death and I am scared of the madness of hate and the disregard of humanity.

It is the madness that is so terrifying.

It is impossible to rationalise something that we have seen with our own eyes to be totally irrational, or even worse to acknowledge that it was an act calmly calculated, chillingly executed, stunningly effective and, to its perpetrators, absolutely justified.

If the terrorists wanted to let us know that they can, in fact, do anything they please, we heard them loud and clear.

Nothing we can say or do or think will make any difference to what will ricochet across the globe in the coming weeks and months. It comes down to crossing our fingers and toes and hoping that our nation does nothing too newsworthy so nobody knows we are here.

It is some small but immediate comfort that we are living in what might be the safest place on the globe, and I am delighted that we don't matter very much.

It's a little old world we live in, however, and I write this with trepidation that even today, as you read it, something very bad will have occurred to make this all seem very old hat.

Master 10, aided by good old Dubya's nightly declarations, seems to think that we are going to have war quite soon. He asked me whether his dad would have to go and fight. He asked me about the draft and conscription, and about conscientious objectors. He asked me how long wars last and then he screwed up his face in concentration while he worked out how long it was until he would have to go.

He told me why he thought we would get dragged into the war and what the Government should do next.

Then he climbed into his bed with his teddies and went to sleep with a head full of fire and death.

There have been a lot of God bless Americas sounding over the past week, and I would like to add God bless us all.

As I do so, though, I imagine the terrorists praying for their own blessing from their own God, and I wish there was something else to say.