Anne Dixey was a perfectly normal working mother, a producer on Radio 4's PM
programme in London, when she was plunged, not entirely willingly, into a
new life as a mum and homemaker in American suburbia.
Worse, as Dixey arrived at her home in Montgomery County, Maryland, the
hijacked planes hit the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. She lost
contact with her partner and, later, two FBI men arrived to question
her.Then, in quick succession, there was an anthrax scare at a local post
office, and a sniper began shooting people on their lawns and at garages.
Dixey went to America in August 2001 with her two children and partner, Roland
Watson, the Times' Washington correspondent. She gave up her job, but
planned to freelance. Instead she ended up on the home front, mostly alone,
in an increasingly strange country in the aftermath of September 11.
When the planes hit, Dixey was with her two-year-old, Josie, and had just
taken her four-year-old, Amalie, for her first day at nursery. Suddenly, the
phones went down and Watson was 1,000 miles away in Florida. He drove for
two days to get back to Washington, filing reports from roadside motels,
behaviour that the FBI considered suspicious in the nervous climate.
At Dixey's house among the white clapboard and verandas of Chevy Chase,
Maryland, the Stars and Stripes began to bristle on lawns, and the talk was
of war and bioterrorism, instead of little league softball. Yet the
community was warm and welcoming; new neighbours arrived bearing fresh
raspberries - and frozen vodka and orange juice to calm nerves.
The neighbours soon became fast friends. “Yet it seemed a bad dream at
points,” says Dixey, now 43. “I was trying to get to know people, but I kept
thinking ‘this can't be normal'. It was so extreme, the constant fear of
what would happen next. Americans around me were hysterical: there was none
of that calm British getting on with it.”
Eventually, Dixey decided that her weird experiences merited writing a book,
The United States of Hysteria. “It's sort of a home movie through the white
picket fence, through the eyes of a foreigner. We do have this national
fascination with all things American - but I realised that we had no idea
about ordinary people's lives.”
On the surface, life was wonderful: picnics, bike rides, new friends, blue
skies, constant sunshine, “so perfect you know it couldn't be real”, says
Dixey. As a small, short-haired vegetarian “who wears too much black” she
knew that she was never going to fit right in.
After a tense first year, Dixey was just settling down, volunteering at
Josie's school, when a call came to say that five people had been shot by a
sniper in Montgomery County. Later a 13-year-old schoolboy was shot too. “I
felt the two worlds colliding: the safe, suburban bubble and the other
violent world of guns, drugs and gangs.” The Washington area is strangely
segregated. “It was shockingly unmulticultural for a city that was
two-thirds black.
“It is extraordinary that DC is the seat of government and black children are
regularly dying two miles from the White House. Yet no one pays any
attention. The American people deserve better.”
The sniper was eventually caught. “But in Britain, there would have been a
public inquiry about gun laws; in Maryland, a pro-gun Republican governor
was voted in over Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and he brought back the death
penalty for good measure.” Dixey points to the extraordinary statistics:
Washington, one city of 500,000 people, had 137 gunfire killings last year,
compared with 59 shot in the whole of England and Wales.
Dixey shrugs, now back in the family's flat in Shepherds Bush, London. “I made
some fantastic friends in Washington but I was shocked by the conservatism
with a small ‘c'. There was so much emphasis by parents on re-creating the
‘perfect' childhood they'd had. I'd expected it to be more civilised and
cultured, but there was limited conversation, politics, and the War on
Terror.” Even Washington's local sport, indulging in political gossip at
dinners and embassies, was out: “Politicians couldn't be seen to be partying
while the nation was in trauma.” Meanwhile, at home, Dixey was often faced
with the “supermoms”.
Flexible or part-time working just didn't seem possible. It was all or
nothing, there was no slack so these very intelligent, highly educated women
approached motherhood as though it was a career. In Washington you are what
you do. When you stop doing something, you become your partner's accessory.
“There were all these women who had been to Harvard and were better
qualified than their husbands, looking after their children, volunteering,
and they weren't recognised enough for that.”
Dixey is amazed by this in the country that first embraced feminism, or as
Betty Friedan wrote in 1963: “Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As
she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate
peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and
Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of
herself the silent question ‘Is this all?'”
It was not enough for Dixey, and she is happy to be back working in London. In
a strange run of ill-luck, Dixey and Watson returned to Britain just after
the 7/7 Tube bombings. “There was quite a different reaction here, less
hysterical. But I was still very glad to be home.” Shepherds Bush was dusty,
cramped, and polluted.
And much less friendly. “I'd never have met any of my London neighbours if
there hadn't been a gas leak in the street and everyone was moved into a
hotel round the corner. It was great fun. That's the only way we all got to
know one another. A street party would never have worked.”
BOOK EXTRACT: 'It's like being an extra in a psycho killer film'
Today, as well as an armed policeman, there is a police car with flashing
lights at the school entrance. More and more sirens go off in the distance.
“You used to think it was a fire or a car accident when you heard that,”
says one mother grimly. There has been a shooting in DC, someone just heard
on the radio. Could it be connected to previous shootings in the area? Or
just another drug-related crime on the wrong side of town, the kind that no
one used to take much notice of? “What did you do in school today?” I ask
Amalie on the way home, trying to keep things normal. “We did a poem about
how to dial 911 in an emergency,” she replied. “What else?” I ask. “We made
a puppet of a fire chief out of a paper bag. And we wrote a book called Blue
Land about a place where everything was blue.”
Police chiefs in Prince George's County, Montgomery County and Washington DC
have asked for Federal government help. A killer is still on the loose and
the world is watching. The radio says that schools in Montgomery County,
Prince George's County and Baltimore County are in lockdown. Afternoon
kindergarten is cancelled. Parents of children being picked up must have
photo ID. It is day seven and there have been nine shootings and six deaths
- in shop car parks, at petrol stations, a bus stop, and the school gates.
One victim was mowing a lawn. Just normal people going about their everyday
lives. The older kids have had to give up the coveted job of crossing patrol
for now.
Today, parent volunteers stand on the corner of every road on the route to
school, like a guard of honour. More parents than they needed have offered,
one of the dads says. Other volunteers will be helping in the classrooms,
providing extra distractions for restless kids. “I kept my kids at home
today,” Gail later confesses on the phone. “I can't stand it.” The next day,
a man is shot at a petrol station in Virginia. It is like being an extra in
a psycho killer film. Two days later, while the girls are safely locked in
school, I interview customers at petrol stations for a newspaper piece.
Flowers are at the spot where Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was killed while
vacuuming her van on a weekday morning.
Everyone is trying to be rational. “When your number is up, your number is
up,” the customers say. These are the brave ones, but even they are
crouching behind their cars and glancing over my head, looking for white
vans. No one wants to talk for long. As I chat to mechanics in a garage shop
down the road, pictures flash up on the TV of a new shooting at another
petrol station in Virginia. Another death. They shake their heads and get
back to work.
While our children hurl themselves around Leah's secluded back garden, she and
I discuss whether or not it is responsible to take your kids to the petrol
station. “What if you make them stay in the car and lie down?” I suggest. We
sit in silence for a moment, hardly believing that we are having this
conversation.
It is revealed that a tarot card was left at the scene of a shooting. It read:
“Dear Mr Policeman, I am God.” A woman was shot dead yesterday evening as
she loaded her car at a busy shopping centre in Northern Virginia. The
gunman (no one suggests a female) escaped again.
The park is deserted. Parents and carers park their cars and briskly take the
children to and from the nursery school door.
Sherri down the street shakes her head, glancing at the empty trampoline that
usually has children bouncing on it. “It's like living in Beirut for these
kids, locking them in,” she says. At first we keep it vague in front of the
kids. “I expect the teacher said you had to stay in for recess because there
was a storm coming.” But children talk. “Do you know why we are locked in at
school, Josie?” Amalie asks her sister. “Because there's a bad man who wants
to hurt kids.”
It can't be good for you, living like moles. But whose mental health is most
at risk, the adults or the children? A man survives a shooting outside a
diner in Virginia. The sniper leaves another “I am God” note. The letter
also says: “Your children are not safe anywhere or at any time.” There are
more tarot cards. He is clearly insane. Yet the combined might of several
police forces and the FBI has failed to catch him.
Now a bus driver is shot dead in Aspen Hill, Montgomery County. It is getting
closer again, eight miles away. It is day 21. Some police arrests quickly
turn out to be a false alarm - illegal immigrants trying to get money. They
have a footprint here and a tarot card there to go on. The police are trying
to talk to the killer. It feels like a dangerous game. At pick-up time, a
policeman in a “SWAT team” T-shirt races past the school entrance to his car
to catch the radio. Another, in plain clothes, stands at the door watching.
After school and nursery, we take it in turns for classmates to play at each
other's houses - at least then they see a different back garden or a
different living room. Now, no matter who comes, it is the same awful game.
The children pull down all the blinds, turn out the lights and lie on the
floor under the table in the dark. The Montgomery County Public Schools
website confirms that Code Blue security restrictions are continuing. There
will be no outdoor recess or physical education. All field trips, regardless
of destination, are cancelled. Schools will continue to keep exterior doors
locked and monitor visitors. There are tips for adults on how to cope with
cumulative stress.
The school has suggestions for “what children can do about terrorism”. These
include: “Make a fear box. Cut out pictures from newspapers and magazines
about what frightens them. Write down their fears and put them inside.” Or
“Put together a peaceful box. Ask kids to find toys, stuffed animals and
pictures that make them feel safe and peaceful and keep these items in the
box.” On the evening news, pictures suddenly flash up of the FBI digging up
a garden in Tacoma, Washington state, on the West coast. Later, an arrest
warrant is issued for a former soldier and an unnamed young man believed to
be with him. Police have also given a description of a blue Chevrolet
Caprice. Not a white van, then. Everyone is glued to the news, desperate for
an arrest. We wake up to hear that two men were arrested in a rural lay-by
in Maryland during the night. The sense of relief is overwhelming. Everyone
is smiling today, stopping to chat, savouring the chores of going to the
supermarket and filling up with petrol. The children are ecstatic, running
round outside like mad things, free at last.
©Anne Dixey 2008. Extracted from United States of Hysteria: An
Englishwoman's Journey through the Madness of America, published by
mondaybooks.com, £7.99. Available for £7.59 from Times BooksFirst, 0870
1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
