A SURVIVOR of the Dunblane shooting has broken her silence ahead of the 20th anniversary of the atrocity.
Amy Hutchison, then five years old and now a nursery teacher in the town, was shot in the leg in the firearms massacre, the deadliest in British history, when Thomas Hamilton went into the school on March 13, 1996, and opened fire, killing 16 children and one teacher.
In a forthcoming BBC documentary, Ms Hutchison recalls the moment Hamilton entered.
“We were skipping round the gym hall," she said. "I don’t remember the pain of being shot. I don’t remember the noises. I don’t remember sounds. I just remember my leg turning to jelly and falling to the floor and then dragging myself to the gym cupboard.”
Ms Hutchison was one of several children that teacher Eileen Harrild and supervisory assistant Mary Blake managed to gather into a cupboard.
“As I crawled into the gym cupboard I was very aware of the amount of blood everywhere, the crying and the pain that people were in," Ms Hutchison said.
"Obviously I was crying for my mum. I was very upset and the adults who were there in the PE cupboard were trying to keep us quiet because they wouldn’t have known if he was still alive in the gym hall or where he was going next.”
She still has scarring on one leg but said: "The doctors, at some point, had suggested to my mum that I might want skin grafts to cover it up, and my mum was worried that I might be self-conscious about them - you know, getting older and being a teenager and wearing skirts.
"To me it was not an option. These are my scars, they are on my body. It's my story and I'm not going to hide them."
Parents who lost children, among them, Isabel Wilson, whose daughter Mhairi was shot, and died in hospital, have also relived the day their lives changed forever.
She describes the pain of not having been with her child when she died. Today Wilson has built a new life away from Dunblane with her second husband, Guy. For her the pain has never left. “I feel bereft,” she said, in interview. “I have Guy, I have Catherine [her younger daughter] and we have a very happy life . . . I’m still being treated for depression, but I’m up and running. It has been really important for me that Dunblane does not continue to ruin my life or define me.”
Dunblane: Our Story is shown on Wednesday, March 9, at 9pm on BBC2 and BBC1 Scotland
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