For many of our Third Age generation there will have been a terrible sense of deja vu as those shocking pictures from New York appeared on our TV screens.

For those of us who lived through the blitz in the Second World War, the sight of piles of smouldering rubble and shattered buildings brought back scenes most of us had felt we would never again face.

The scale of the horror was so tremendous and so immediate, captured as it was by TV cameras even as it was unfolding, and it seems that many people thought it was a film of some sort. Things like that don't happen in the real world, do they?

It differed from the wartime raids only in the immensity of scale.

I cannot remember if there was ever a raid which brought such great loss of life at a single stroke.

They say that as you get older you forget the unpleasant things in your life and only remember the good things but I cannot believe that anyone who was close to the horrors of bombing raids could ever erase it from their memory.

The Second World War was much more a civilians' war than the first Great War of 1914-18. There were relatively few ordinary members of the public killed unless perhaps they were driving ambulances or fire engines. If you joined up as a soldier you knew what you were in for and faced it with incredible bravery.

In the Second World War the toll was almost equal with civilians in the front line for the first time. Terrible though the losses were, it was war and people were resigned to what faced them.

But the events in New York came out of a clear blue sky, at a time when a large part of the world was not at war with its neighbours. The unseen enemy took, at a single blow, a large number of the young people who were the future of America.

Not only of America but of many other nationalities who were working in the twin towers of Babel where many accents could be heard among the companies who worked there.

The bright young brains, the young mothers and fathers of the future - many of them showed unbelievable bravery as they stared death in the face, speaking to their loved ones and leaving messages of love to help them through the terrible fate they realised lay ahead.

As in war, there were great acts of courage and self-sacrifice and the messages which have been relayed over the air have been almost unbearably moving in their selflessness.

Much of this will find an echo in the minds of those of you who can remember the dark days of war. Some of you will have friends or relatives in the USA who may have been involved and are now missing, or who, by some miracle, avoided the meltdown of the proud buildings.

The younger generations who have not known a major war in their lifetime have suddenly been thrust into a situation which our generation had to learn to live with.

Judging from the way many of them have dealt with the deaths which came out of a clear horizon on a sunny day in September, they are worthy descendants of the heroes of those earlier generations.

Our age group can relate to their agonies and can share it in some small way.

New York will have to rebuild itself, a job which will take a long time, in material terms and in terms of the spirit of the battered city. We probably are not in a position to do anything very practical to help but we can certainly hold them in our thoughts and remember how people helped us through our losses all those years ago.