I encountered my first nightingale on heathland near Compiègne, north of Paris and I’d never heard anything like it; it felt like its song spoke for and from my soul. I was birding with my then boyfriend and his friends, following mad twitching weekends and the ‘Where to Watch Birds in Britain’ guide, with a hectic road trip to France and ‘Where to Watch Birds in Europe’. A crazy whirlwind of a holiday, getting in as many birding spots as possible; daft company, random camping, fine weather (despite the Mistral blowing hot and relentless as we headed south) and good, basic French food and wine. In the years after, I saw and heard many more nightingales throughout southern Europe, though never sadly on British soil, their rich and fruity notes penetrating deep into the heart of me, taking me back to that time and that place and it always felt like they were singing my story.

The day the towers fell, I was back in England, working far from home for a small company making and hanging huge and extraordinary hand painted, ultra-violet décor for festivals, corporate events, parties and the like. We worked to tight budgets and tighter deadlines – the paint was often still drying as we began a rig. Frequently working through the night, I’d turn my hand to anything; I’d done my share of hard hats and high ladders as well as the paintbrush, but my main job would find me chained to the sewing machine, stitching together acres of cloth to be cut to shape and painted, or hemming the finished pieces with webbing and eyelets. 

I did little work that day. We were glued to the screen – watching in horror and disbelief as the scale and reality of it unfolded minute by minute, compulsive and beyond our small-town comprehension.

We must have been watching a news channel on the computer in the workshop – or was there a TV in there? I really can’t remember, but one of the team had burst in with the story, after hearing the first newsflashes on the car radio. Crowding round, we watched as the second tower was hit and it became clear that this was no accident… further reports came in by the hour of other planes, other damage, other deaths and we spent a numb day, a minute tremor in the seismic shock that rocked the world.

Back at the house that evening it continued – rolling and repeating film of the moments of impact, the explosions, the implosions, the collapses, the avalanches of dust and rubble and death, the running crowds, the falling man… We ate supper in a daze, unable to tear ourselves away from images that would sear themselves into our eyeballs – and into history.

Mid-evening, escaping what was beginning to feel uncomfortably like rubbernecking and on complete trauma overload, I headed to my borrowed bed, longing for the comfort of home, longing for solitude, longing to pull the covers over my exhausted eyes and shut out the sheer, deadly craziness of it all.

I was startled awake by the voice of my ex. I had left the radio on and the good old BBC in moments of national or global crisis, abandons its pre-ordained Radio 4 running order and plays benign, apolitical programmes to avoid charges of unwitting insensitivity, as well as to soothe and distract the troubled listener. I was long broken up from that birding boyfriend but here he was, in a change to the schedule, talking about Compiègne in a programme about The Nightingale. Something deep in my sleeping brain, some atavistic muscle memory, must have recognised and been woken by his tones. And he talked movingly about one of the friends with us back then, a friend who had died pointlessly young in a tragic swimming accident; he captured the spirit of place perfectly – the summer heat, the French landscape, his youth, male friendships bonded by shared passions – and how hearing the nightingale now reminds him of that time, that scrubby countryside and that lost friend who’d shared its voice.

I was erased.

At first I was pissed off, angry even – I wanted to ring him right there and then to challenge his version, correct his vision. But it was late and there were bigger things going off in the world at that moment, no doubt leading to heightened emotions all round, so I decided to sleep on it.

And I’m glad I didn’t rage at him that night, because with time and a correcting of my own vision, I found myself given a freedom that I didn’t expect. We all make choices about how we tell our stories. We can push to the back what no longer matters, emphasise what does; that night gave me back the nightingale, I can claim it as my own and choose who I share it with and how. It also helped cut the last binds of that relationship – if he could sideline me to tell a good story, I could do the same.

When I think of 9/11 now, despite the horrors of the towers and the global chaos and carnage that have tumbled down the years after it, on a personal level something shifted – I sloughed a skin leaving me temporarily raw and vulnerable but l also learnt a great lesson in the vagaries of truth, in storytelling and in letting go. 

So here’s to the nightingale… have you heard it? Does its liquid song run through you to your core like it does with me? Writing this, I find myself needing to hear it again, but given that it’s midwinter and I’m high on a Welsh hillside, for now I’ll have to make do with a recording, close my eyes and picture myself back in the hot and dusky half-light, in that parched Compiègne scrub; just me… and the nightingale.