Excitement at the Library
Monday 07/23/2007 7:19 PM (In the United Kingdom: Tuesday 07/24/2007 12:19 AM)
I'm finally caught up and can post about today's excitement at the British Library (though officially, it's yesterday's excitement for me, since it's 12:20 am on Tuesday).
At about 12:30 in the afternoon, just as I was settling into my last chunk of research for the day and thinking that I might finish early, a woman's voice came over the intercom system telling us that there was an emergency situation and we needed to evacuate the building in an orderly fashion. Everyone in the reading room sort of looked at each other for a moment until she said, "This is not a drill. You must evacuate the building as calmly and quickly as possible." A few moments later, as we were closing down laptops and gathering power cords, the same voice explained that there was a fire across the street and that the police had ordered the evacuation.
We were led to a fire escape staircase and shuttled downstairs (we were three floors up). I was a little anxious but feeling better knowing that it was a fire and not a bomb, and that the fire wasn't actually in the library -- still unnerved, though, by how leisurely the folks in front of me were strolling down the stairs. I was actually hoping, then, that we would be allowed to go to the locker room to get our belongings before we left the building, but evidently they don't let you do that sort of thing in emergency situations. The staircase led to the outside of the library, and as we got closer to the door, we could smell the smoke.
Once I got outside, I saw that there were hundreds (maybe thousands, now that I think of it, but I'm trying not to exaggerate) of people in the streets who had been evacuated from the library and surrounding buildings. There were police all over ushering us into an alley between the library and the underground station a block or so away. At this point, my biggest concern was that I had no passport and no wallet and no idea when (or in worst case scenario, if) I would be able to get them back: I'd left them in my purse, which was in my locker, on the ground floor of the library. I did a quick inventory and learned that what I did have amounted to 52 pence (about one dollar), the keys to my B&B and temporarily useless locker, my laptop, my Milne research, and my trusty mechanical pencil. Word spread through the crowd that there'd been an explosion, but I wasn't sure that was true.
Hindsight tells me that what I should have done next was head to the B&B until later in the afternoon, just in case there had been an explosion and there were more to come. Instead, I sat down on a curb, turned on my laptop, found an unsecured wireless connection and sent a DON'T PANIC email to Mom, Dad, and Peter, on the off-chance that this was a big enough deal to make the US news. Had my mom woken up to news of an evacuation at the British Library, she probably would have gone berserk. After that, I hung around for a while, saw a lot of people walk toward the library, and then saw them head back toward me as the police taped off the sidewalk in front of it.
I found an empty chair outside a pub, even though I didn't have enough money to buy anything--it didn't seem to matter under the circumstances. After about 30 minutes, the woman sitting next to me left and one Tom Hewlett sat down:
He was as chatty as I remember my grandfather being (my dad's dad), and I learned that he's a mechanical engineer who had been reading up on how muscles work in the human hand. He also loves British literature and claimed he never got a chance to talk about it with anyone who knew anything about it. I explained that I was an Americanist, even though I was studying Milne, and he replied, "Well, they're bloody well all the same when you get right to it now, aren't they?" He bought me a beer and sufficiently distracted me from what was going on around us.
Before I left for this trip, Peter and I were talking about the possibility of encountering some sort of terrorist strike while I was here. He pointed out that England has had a lot more experience with that sort of thing than nearly any other European country, so at least I'd be in capable hands should something like that happen while I'm here. And though today wasn't even remotely close to a terrorist situation (as it turns out, there was an explosion, but it was a gas tank that blew in the fire), other people's nonchalance and Tom's downright jolly attitude and witty conversation seemed to prove Peter right.
Almost three hours after we were evacuated (and about 45 minutes after I met Tom), they opened up the side entrance to the library again. I went in to get my purse and camera and dropped off my laptop. I headed back to the pub to buy Tom a beer in return and snap a couple of pictures. The one at the top of this page is the sidewalk in front of the library, which was still closed by the police. And of course, the second one is of Tom, whom I'll probably never see again -- but on the off chance he actually visits this page (I gave him the address), maybe he'll finally believe me that poets and philosophers aren't the only ones who are remembered ... sometimes especially hospitable mechanical engineers are, too.
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