'My daughters of destiny'

CALLING to mind her memories of the chaos after the two planes hit the World Trade Centre, Gillian Cruse can summon only one description - surreal. It had started as any normal day - with her and her husband making their way to work on the subway - and turned surreal by degrees.

First, there was the announcement that there would be no stop at the World Trade Centre that day, which was greeted with the customary annoyance of hard-bitten New Yorkers finding themselves inconvenienced.

Then came the scuffle as people expecting to be late for work pushed their way up the station steps. After that, the tension was heightened a notch as terrified shrieks came hurtling through the fume-clogged air. And finally, the commuters were faced with a sight that not even the most fantastical of Hollywood blockbusters could have prepared them for - the mighty Twin Towers in flames.

As Gillian, 32, from Durham, drifted among the shocked crowd at the foot of the World Trade Centre, she remembers being struck by the most incongruous sights. "So many people had cameras and were taking photographs," she says. "I remember seeing one young guy sitting on the steps and sketching the towers."

In the confusion before the emergency services arrived, Gillian's first thought was of getting to work, at the One World Financial Centre, across the street from the World Trade Centre. It took several dreamlike moments for the enormity of what had happened to start sinking in.

"I didn't understand why both towers were on fire," she says. "I asked someone on the street what had happened and they said a plane had hit. I thought someone had had an accident and because it wasn't my building, I was still trying to get to work. I got as far as I could and a policeman said I couldn't get to my building."

Had Gillian left home at her usual time, 15 minutes earlier, she would probably have been in the shopping mall beneath the World Trade Centre, where she usually spent time before work, when the planes hit. Instead, she thought, rather than grabbing a quick coffee on her way to her office, she and her husband Robert, who worked in another part of the city, could have breakfast together.

As she stood surrounded by chaos, she did not think of this stroke of good fortune, only of what she was going to do next. Fate intervened again, and she decided to make her way to her husband's work. It was when she was at a safe distance from the Twin Towers - which like everyone, she considered an everlasting symbol of power - that she heard them crashing down.

It took Gillian and Robert five hours to make their way back home to Queens. With the phone lines down, they were unable to contact their families, and it was only through Gillian's sister Kirsty Bowden's persistent phone calls that her family learned she was safe.

Gillian, who has lived in America for six years, remembers the days following September 11 as being characterised by sadness. "I was off work for the next couple of days while they found a new building and I was just hooked to the TV the whole time," she says. "It was just bizarre. When I went back to work, the whole city was in mass mourning. There were missing posters everywhere and I felt awful because you knew in your heart that these people weren't just missing."

As a result of September 11, and last year's anthrax scare, Gillian and Robert decided to move back to Long Island, where Robert's family is from. Gillian, who now teaches at a Montessori nursery school, says that even there the anniversary of the terrorist attacks was keenly felt. " Some of the kids were talking about it on the anniversary and everyone knows someone who was there," she says. "I went to a memorial service at my local church on September 11 and they read out the names of people in the parish who had died."

As if to signal the start of a new, happier chapter in Gillian's life, she recently discovered that she was pregnant. In another quirk of fate such as those which saved her life, she heard a short time afterwards that her sister was also expecting a baby. When charts were matched and calendars studied, it was discovered that Gillian and 29-year-old Kirsty, from Chester-le-Street, were due to give birth to their first children on exactly the same day - January 17, 2003.

The sisters had not so much as discussed the subject of having babies with each other, but Gillian says it seems fitting that they are sharing their pregnancies. "There's just the two of us and we are very close," she says. "Before I came out here, we were living together, and she's my closest confidante. We e-mail each other asking things like, 'How big are you now?', 'Are you being sick?', 'Are you preparing a nursery?', and 'I read this in a child care book, what do you think?' I doubt very much that the cousins will be born on the same day, but they will be very close in age. It's very important to me that they are close."

Although torn between her two daughters, the girls' mother Joan Sutherland, of Newton Hall, Durham, has decided to visit Gillian immediately after her baby is born, when she is likely to be most in need of support. This, Gillian makes clear, was not at her request, and she presents the image of one who having lived through one of the worst acts of terror in modern times, can easily cope with a tiny baby. She reasons: "I tend to think that if I was on the ground floor of the World Trade Centre, I would have probably got out anyway."

But beneath her tough exterior, Gillian's emotions surrounding September 11 are still raw, making her fearful of bringing a child into a world on the brink of war. "Afterwards, I felt very angry about the people who did that because of all the heartache and misery they caused," she says. "A year on, I hope all the problems are solved and that something like that doesn't happen again. Now I just want it to be over."