Tears overwhelm Britain's stiff upper lip

With hundreds of its citizens killed and a history of close ties with the United States, last week's terrorist attack hit Britain hard. BRONWYN SELL reports on the mood in London and how it is changing.

An Englishman is crying. In a tent at London's Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, the man, in his 50s and wearing a sharp black suit, stares at a book of condolence.

After a long hesitation, he writes, elegantly: "Deepest sympathies" and signs with an illegible flourish. He wipes his eyes with his fingers, sniffs and moves outside, blinking.

He is a marketing executive on his lunch break. He knows people who know people who were in the World Trade Center towers when they collapsed. He seems embarrassed to have been noticed crying, and won't give his name.

"It doesn't matter what my name is. We're all feeling the same thing." Which is? "Disbelief. Five thousand people - that's an awful lot of people."

"God Bless America" is the vogue expression in the dozens of books lined up on white tablecloths. Most entries are variations on the same themes.

"Solidarity and sympathy." "To the people of New York and all America." "We share your pain." "We're all New Yorkers now."

The sympathy is tempered with pleas for peace. The British seem more reticent about going to war than Americans. "Revenge is not the answer." "Don't let any more innocent people die - 5000 is enough."

Outside the tent, Roosevelt, a dark imperious figure, is draped with the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. Below him a few dozen solemn people look at bunches of flowers, cards, candles and photos of the victims, laid out in military neatness across Grosvenor Square.

People have left baseball caps and teddy bears inside the tent. Someone has printed the lyrics to Frank Sinatra's New York, New York. Bizarrely, a soft toy of South Park's Kenny sits by the door. It's a jarring addition - in the series Kenny is killed in every episode, and the running gag is: "Oh my God, they killed Kenny, the bastards."

At the heavily policed gates to the monument a queue has formed. A bewildered woman in her 60s is having her bag searched for nail files.

To British people, accustomed to terrorist attacks from Irish dissident groups, albeit not on such a stupefying scale, this is the United States' loss of innocence.

The British are sympathetic. But despite the estimated British death toll nearing 300, the tragedy still seems to belong to the US. The attack happened mid-afternoon British time. Millions of people turned on televisions at work and at home after hearing about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center towers, and watched live as the buildings collapsed.

The Evening Standard newspaper hit the streets before it had grasped the scale of the attack. At a vendor's stand in Oxford St, a hoarding announced "US attack: hundreds feared dead". Above it was another hurriedly scrawled board announcing "US attack: thousands feared dead". The vendor was too busy selling papers to take down the first sign.

Canary Wharf, London's financial hub, was partially evacuated and planes were banned from flying over central London. It didn't seem much of a stretch to wonder if London would be next.

Some New Zealanders briefly considered going home. London felt different. People seemed dazed. Normal life and normal work seemed futile.

There was only one topic of conversation. In the days that followed, the US national anthem rang out of St Paul's Cathedral. The Queen wept. Millions stopped in the streets and at work to observe a three-minute, Europe-wide silence on the Friday. Stockbrokers broke down. Newspapers were snatched up as soon as they were stacked up. The Sun dropped its page 3 girl.

At the weekend even the most social football games observed a minute's silence. The Last Night of the Proms was toned down, and US compositions added to the playlist. Jocularity had been deemed inappropriate.

Union chiefs called off their campaign against public sector reforms to unite behind Tony Blair. The stories of the British dead filtered slowly through.

Pregnant Nottingham woman Kate Walsh, aged 29, had watched on television as a plane ploughed into the office of her husband Jim. British telecommunications engineer Edward Saiya was working on the top floor of the southern tower. He managed to phone his brother, Frank, when the first plane hit. Then he said, "I've got to go," and the line went dead.

The cordoned US embassy urged its citizens in Britain to maintain a low profile, vary routes and times for all required travel and treat mail and packages from unfamiliar sources with suspicion.

But it is not just the Americans who are vulnerable. Shortly after the attack, in South Shields in the northeast, graffiti appeared in a Muslim area: Avenge USA. Kill a Muslim. Now. Elsewhere, petrol bombs were thrown at worshipping Muslims, Afghans and Asians were beaten up and excrement was shoved through letterboxes at mosques.

"We are saddened, but not surprised," said Yousuf Bhailok, the general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain.

While George W. Bush initially seemed to stammer through the aftermath, Blair became a commanding figure, a model of rhetoric calling for calm. He shone as a statesman, holding crisis management press conferences outside 10 Downing St, dressed in a casual jacket, without a tie and with his shirt unbuttoned, looking as if he had just emerged from a war bunker.

The newspapers unanimously declared that the world would never be the same. But more than a week later, beneath the flags swaying from half mast, life in the streets of London feels very much the same as it did on September 10.

Temperatures are getting bitter and the onset of autumn is dominating conversation. People are again reading books on the tube and not devouring newspapers. They're watching EastEnders again, and not the television news. On Thursday, the day after Blair confirmed that Britain was at war alongside America, the Sun's page 3 girl returned.

We've seen the attack from all possible angles. There are no more survival stories. We're immune to the death toll increasing in a slow trickle. The crisis has become an interesting serialisation in the newspapers, although it will be a long time before local news comes anywhere near the front pages.

It seems shallow to compare the attack to the death of a single privileged Englishwoman in a Paris car tunnel in 1997. But the precedent for mass grief has been set. If grief can be measured in flowers, it would seem British people cared more for one person they felt they knew than 5000 they'd never heard of. You can't personalise that many.

Now, apparently, Britain is at war. What that means, no one really knows. Until war knocks right on our front doors, we're all once again absorbed in our own lives.

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