The day the world came to Gander

IF YOU’VE flown to America via the polar route, you may have spotted the town of Gander on the moving map that charts your plane’s progress. In all honesty, there’s not much to get excited about – 9,651 people, 4,000 homes, 500 hotel rooms, seven sets of traffic lights and the occasional stray moose in the road. But a musical that’s just opened in London’s West End paints a magical picture of Gander which led one theatre critic to write: “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll be a better person when you leave the theatre.”

When the Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11 in 2001, air travel across North America was disrupted. Hundreds of planes heading for cities in the United States were diverted to anywhere with a runway big enough to take them.

Thirty-eight big jets carrying a total of 7,000 passengers from 95 countries – plus several cats, dogs and a pair of chimpanzees en route to a zoo – were forced to land at Gander International Airport that fateful day and the musical Come From Away tells the uplifting story of how the people of Gander took them to their hearts.

Ingenuity ranked alongside compassion. The genial, if harassed, mayor commandeered the local ice rink to act as a giant fridge for fresh food and three meals a day were conjured up for the visitors, some of whom had to stay in Gander for up to four days.

Everyone in the town got busy and the local air traffic controllers cooked chilli. Spare clothes were found, makeshift beds were made up, people of all faiths and none prayed together during the dark hours of uncertainty.

People started offering rides, showers and telephone time and many emptied their linen closets to find sheets, towels, pillows and blankets. Stores donated toothbrushes, nappies and underwear and school bus drivers suspended a strike to help out.

When the time finally came to leave and continue their journeys, some of the “plane people”, as the locals called them, were bitterly upset. Some had fallen in love. Some wanted to stay. All had deep-rooted reasons to be eternally grateful to Gander for the warmth of its hospitality.

They had struck lucky in landing at the town which is located on the north-eastern shore of Lake Gander in Newfoundland. As an important refuelling stop for transatlantic airliners, the airport was once the largest in the world and in 2001 was still a preferred emergency landing point for aircraft with onboard medical or security issues.

During the Second World War, Gander became a strategic post for the Royal Air Force Air Ferry Command, with an estimated 20,000 American and Canadian-built fighters and bombers stopping there on their way to Europe.

To this day, most of the streets in Gander are named after famous aviators, including Alcock and Brown, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, Eddie Rickenbacker and Chuck Yeager.

In the traumatic hours after 9/11, however, no one cared much about the street names or Gander’s past role in aviation.

All the plane people wanted was security, safety and reassuring arms around them. Many of them were stranded for 30 hours, on planes that were kept on taxiways away from the airport terminal for fear of further terrorist attacks.

So it wasn’t until the day after 9/11 that most of them got their first taste of Gander’s hospitality and after having no contact with the outside world they slowly tried to come to terms with the events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania in which almost 3,000 people died.

Come From Away, the other description locals used for the plane people, is the brainchild of husband-and-wife-team David Hein and Irene Sankoff, Canadian musical-theatre-makers who were living in New York in 2001.

The musical began to take shape after they spent several weeks in Gander in 2011, attending a 10-year reunion of the “come from aways”.

The stories they heard and the deep bonds they witnessed inspired them and they spent hundreds of hours interviewing people before they boiled down all the conversations into a 100-minute production that features just 12 actors who speak many of the actual words from the interviews.

There was also a BBC radio play, The Day The Planes Came, and a TV movie before the musical opened in Canada to huge critical acclaim. “Everyone on stage is to some degree a composite of multiple people,” Hein said in a BBC interview. “In that way we wanted to represent everyone who had either helped people or were being helped on that day.

“We weren’t trying to write a 9/11 story, we often call it a ‘9/12’ story because it starts on the day after. We wanted to tell the story of what happened in Newfoundland. It’s not about the tragedy; it’s about how this small community responded to the tragedy.” One couple, Nick Marson and his future wife Diane, meet and fall in love – another separates.

Beverley Bass, American Airlines’ first female captain, is a central figure, as is Bonnie Harris, the animal carer who took charge of a menagerie of 19 – including a pregnant Bonobo chimpanzee.

The whole musical is suffused with Gander’s gentle idiosyncrasies and unique customs, Irish/Newfoundlander dialect and an eccentric indoctrination ceremony which involves kissing a cod. Plus a local rum called screech, which is the noise people make when they drink it.

It opens on the morning of 9/11 as Gander’s townsfolk including Claude Elliott the mayor, Oz Fudge the police constable and Beulah Davis the teacher, describe how they learned of the terrorist attacks. As the diverted planes land, they spring into action to feed, clothe and comfort the travellers.

Meanwhile the pilots, flight attendants and passengers are initially not allowed to leave the planes, forcing them to deal with confusing and conflicting information about what has happened.

Once they’re allowed off the planes and transferred to emergency shelters, the passengers and crew watch replays of the attacks on the news and learn the true reason why they were grounded.

He frightened and lonely passengers desperately try to contact their families and pray for their loved ones, while the townsfolk work through the night to help them in any way they can.

Pilot Bev Bass comments on how her once optimistic view of the world has suddenly changed.

Eventually, the passengers continue their journey but not before a Muslim chef, who offered to cook for them, is made to undergo a humiliating strip search before being allowed to board.

The musical’s finale is set 10 years later when the plane people return to Gander and celebrate the lifelong friendships they have forged. 

As the mayor puts it: “Tonight we honour what was lost, but we also commemorate what we found. We started off with 7,000 strangers, but we finished with 7,000 family members.”

Irene Sankoff admits she and Hein were worried the show would never make it to Broadway. “I remember the first performance in the States, just sinking in my seat, thinking ‘Whose idea was this?’,” she says. But their fears were ungrounded.

On Broadway, Newsweek said of the show: “It takes you to a place where you didn’t know you wanted to go, and makes you not want to leave.” From tragedy comes joy and inspiration.

comefromawaylondon.co.uk