James Smythe - The Testimony

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

Everything looks different from street level, and that’s something that you forget when you’re up in the studio, talking about everything almost – almost – hypothetically. The people look sparse from the studio, and then you get down there, they’re still around, the panic making them run from their hotels and apartments. I’d almost forgotten that the city wasn’t just me and the crew for a while. Everybody exists in the microcosm of New York, isn’t that what they say? Every type of person? They were all there with me, and none of them had a clue what was happening, and they were all running the way that I wasn’t. I went toward the smoke, filming everything, the people running, the cracks in the road, and then I was there when the bomb blew in Trump Tower, and I managed to be there as it collapsed in on itself, this mass of tar-black glass and steel plunging forward. I got it all on digital, every single second: from the moment that it broke, to the moment that the dust threw itself up, to the moment that we were engulfed in it.

Katy Kasher, high school student, Orlando

I told Ally I wanted to give up on the planes, that there wasn’t anything going to be leaving any time soon. She already knew that, but she was hanging on for me. There was a man in the airport watching something on his phone, saying that there were bombs going off in NYC, and that more were expected, and that the government had launched missiles or something. It says that we should expect massive casualties, the guy said, they’re telling everybody to stay inside, get under doorframes if anything goes off near where you are. That made us worry; five minutes later he said that they were evacuating New York City, and I told Ally that we should leave. Alright, Ally said, we’ll go back to the flat, see what we can do, try and phone your mother again. We were halfway back along the road when she said, I’ve got an idea, and she took an exit, headed toward the freeway, the signs for England. Where are we going? I asked, and she said, Liverpool. What’s there? Boats, she said.

Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow

The roads to Inta were clogged, all the buses down, and the rail was gone, so I stole a car – which, I am not ashamed to say, was something that I learned to do as a youth, when it seemed like something that was cool to do. I stole one of those big ones with the show grip at the front, and when it was fitted it looked like some sort of tank. I stole it from a car lot. I didn’t know how far the petrol would get me, so I stole a few large bottles of that as well – another trick I picked up as a wayward youth, siphoning them off from the other cars with a hose – and kept them on the back seat. The roads were hellish all through Moscow, either with the people still leaving or just from their abandoned cars along the roads, so it was slow, but I made it eventually. The drive to Inta was horrific, because the snow hit as I got further north – this was after maybe a full day of driving – and I had to stop and rest, sleep. I found a garage that was shut in a village, but it had a vending machine, so I had potato chips, four bags, and drank soda, and then I slept in the car, parked next to the petrol pumps, under the roof, even though I had to leave the heating on to stop myself freezing. (That made me worry about the battery in the car, but it was that or freeze to death, so.) In fact, I got so hot that I woke up in the night sweating, dreaming about the people in the church. I didn’t go back to sleep, even though it was still dark. The snow made me worry that I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, but the tank attachment made driving through the snow easy. I knew that it would take me the rest of the day to drive home, so I got on with it.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

Piers and I got a Starbucks from some enterprisingly illustrious – or foolish, such are the blurred lines – young lady who had taken over a branch by herself, using her family as baristas. They didn’t run the tills, and cash went straight into pockets. Five pounds, she said when I went to pay, and I gave her a note. She didn’t even look up; straight into the apron pocket. Fair enough, I said. We sat in the park and drank them and Piers told me about himself, who he was, what he did; and I did the same, only I didn’t tell him about Dotty, that she had died. I didn’t want sympathy. We had a brief moment where we both wondered if the other didn’t know more about the situation – the bombings, the sickness – than we were letting on, he being a soldier, me being a politician. (Sounds like the fine beginnings of a musical, I joked.) But, of course, neither of us knew anything; why should we have been any different from the rest of the populace?

We walked back along the river, because Piers asked about Westminster, and I said that we should go and have a look. We walked for most of the afternoon, and I said something about how much I had been walking the past few days, back and forth, to and fro, and I said, It’s a miracle that I’m still as chubby as I am, and Piers said, completely off the cuff, that I wasn’t at all fat, told me not to be stupid, and I thought how absolutely implausible it was that there, then, I might actually meet somebody.

Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East

When we got to the site Simon flashed his pass, and after some arguing and fuss about having to get something from the far end of the building it still worked. It was empty, totally empty. That building is eerie when it’s empty. He took me to the House of Lords and we sat on the benches and laughed. If there’s nobody here, and there’s nobody in the Commons, who’s running this place? I asked, and Simon said, Well, I suppose we are. He was joking, but it took me a few seconds to get it.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

The man with the placard and I were in Central Park along with the rest of New York City, it seemed; the order had been given to evacuate Manhattan, and people were assembling in the park as if this were the world’s biggest fire safety point. Do you think that it’s the end of days? asked the man, and I was about to answer when we heard the snap. (It took me back to when Leonard and I had just married; we went on holiday to Greece, and we did walks, walked everywhere. I fell down a slope on the second-to-last day, landed funny, and heard the snap of a stick before I hit the bottom. Leonard raced down, asked me if I was alright, and I said that I was fine, and then I tried to stand and couldn’t. Don’t look! Leonard said, but it didn’t hurt, so I did, I looked, and my bone was right through the skin. That was the noise I heard, the same snap, but louder, coming from the direction of Manhattan, and I realized there and then that most everything would remind me of Leonard from that point onward, I suppose.) Run, the man with the sign said, We have to run, and then we saw the first of the buildings on the edge of the park fall, down by where the Apple Store used to be, the site of the very first attack we had days – weeks? months? it felt like – before. It began with a whimper, not a howl, as Leonard would have said; the building, I couldn’t even tell you what it was, some tower block of offices, but it collapsed in on itself, and the smoke began to roar down the streets like this was some awful movie. This wasn’t the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building; it was just a faceless office block, and it looked like it had been pulled out of the dirt and daintily tossed aside, toward the park. It happened so slowly. Run, the man said again, and we did. Everyone in the park did, or they just stood there, staring, but you have two choices in that situation, and my logic was, This could be life or death, and I wasn’t ready to join Leonard, not yet. We ran back to where my apartment was, because that was the only place that I could think to go.