A Town Called Tragedy Dunblane, Lockerbie, Omagh, Hungerford...What it's like to live in a town whose name is a byword for horror

DUNBLANE

Pamela Mackie, theatre director

I came to Dunblane after the shooting. It was the only thing I knew about the town. For a lot of people that is the case. There’s always that moment when you mention Dunblane and it’s the first thing they think about.

When I first moved here I avoided talking about it with people in the town. Because when you move into a community and you don’t know anybody, you don’t know who has been directly involved and who hasn’t. The only way you can deal with that is by not mentioning it until someone else does. But very quickly I started doing theatre at the Dunblane Centre and we obviously have trustees and staff and volunteers who were directly involved and I would take my lead from them.

I’ve lived in comparable towns – Dollar, Lenzie - none of them had the same sense of community as Dunblane has. There’s a real kind of protectiveness in the community, a willingness to work together. There are far more community groups, right the way up from babies and toddlers, than anywhere else I’ve been. There’s a very definite strong sense of identity.

In theatre shows we steer clear of sensitive subjects and if there are any references to guns we take them out. Because you never know who is sitting in the audience. You would be hard pushed to find a toy gun in Dunblane.

When you have young children, there’s that question of when you tell them. It’s really difficult. I’ve got four children, and my five year old son knows in basic terms why he isn’t allowed guns. But at that age they don’t necessarily have the ability to understand what happened. As an adult it’s a difficult thing to understand.

I remember the tenth anniversary we were all asked as parents to make our children aware in whatever capacity we felt was appropriate. I remember saying how on earth do you explain it to a six year old? There are engravings on the school windows that are always there, and when they ask about them is probably the time to tell them. My seven year old now knows that each of them belongs to one of the children.

I think it’s been reported in the past that Dunblane didn’t want to be known for this, and we don’t. It’s great now that when you mention Dunblane, people say Andy Murray. It’s so much more positive. But Dunblane will never not be associated with 1996.

Helen Lamb, poet

My family go back a long way in Dunblane. I was part of the first intake to the new Dunblane Primary School and my children were also pupils there. My daughter, then 17 years old, was a regular babysitter to one of the victims, Charlotte Dunn. Charlotte's parents, in the immediate aftermath and in the midst of their own grief, invited us to spend time with them. Charlotte's death will always be a source of sadness for my daughter but her parents' thoughtfulness did help her come to terms with some of it and I'll never forget their kindness, strength and dignity.

There is no doubt in my mind that it was an attack on the whole community. Thomas Hamilton wanted to punish us all. In the months after the shooting, the grief was so palpable it was as if the consistency of the air had changed and we were all wading through grief. For the first two or three years afterwards, I avoided telling folk where I lived. I was afraid I might get emotional. But I love this town and I'm proud of where I come from. So I do tell people where I come from now - and yes some folk do bring up the tragedy but they're pretty tactful.

I spent my early adult years in Glasgow but came back to Dunblane to raise my own children: because it was safe, because the schools were great. Because they'd have the freedom to roam and explore the countryside on our doorstep. These things have always been true and still are. The irony is that Dunblane is a very child-friendly place. I have grandchildren now and, when we're out and about together, they often comment on how kindly folk are towards kids.

I remember my younger son (14 at the time) telling me he was afraid to smile outside in case it offended someone. He felt guilty about being happy for a while. My daughter went through a phase of feeling nowhere was safe. Bad things could happen in quite random and unlikely settings. It takes a while to integrate your feelings about something so horrifying but in the end the only constructive response is to appreciate life that bit more. And I think they do.

Stewart Prodger, trustee of the Dunblane Centre

When I mention I live in Dunblane how people react usually depends on how old the person I'm speaking to is. The younger they are, the more likely they are to mention Andy or Judy Murray. Otherwise there's often a brief pause, and and you can see the brief unspoken "oh" of recognition forming, and an uncertainty of what to say next.

I am an incomer to Dunblane, who moved to the town a few years after 1996. But it's almost impossible not to be impacted in some way, especially if you've children who go to Dunblane Primary School. There are memorials, but they are discreet. Around the anniversary it feels a little quieter, slightly subdued. It's something which is part of the town's history, and always will be, but it's absolutely not what defines the place or the people.

Dunblane does feel connected to other communities which have suffered such atrocities. As a trustee of the Dunblane Centre I remember receiving a message from a group of bereaved parents in Sandy Hook, USA, a few months after they'd suffered a school shooting terrifyingly similar to Dunblane. Their question was stark: "How did your community recover from this, is there anything you can suggest, or relate which might help us get through these dark days?" An impossible question to answer simply, but some of those most directly affected in Dunblane went over and met with them, and did their best, as probably only people who've experienced a similar horror can.

'There's a bit of survivor's guilt. The bombing happened in my home town, but it didn't happen to me'

OMAGH

Cat Brogan, poet from Omagh

I wrote a poem, The Omagh-ah, when I first came to London. I remember writing it because, since coming to London when I was 18, I’d found people would ask, where are you from? And as soon as I would say Omagh, you would get this kind of look that I coined “the Omagh-ah look”. They would say “Ah”.

That uncomfortableness about how to approach the subject is totally understandable. You don’t know how much somebody has been affected by that disaster and how close it is to them. You don’t know if it’s going to be bringing up issues. I really felt that people wanted to ask more but they didn’t know how.

I’ve got a friend who was at university in Stirling. She met someone from Dunblane. When they found out where each other were from they both gave each other the solidarity look.

I was 11 when it happened and I remember it so well. We heard the bomb from my house.

There is a bit of survivor’s guilt to my poem. The bombing was something that happened in my town. But it didn’t happen to me directly.

When it happened people said this isn’t the kind of thing that happens in a place like this. And I think with Dunblane people felt that as well. Omagh is 20,000 people. It’s the end of the line, 70 miles from Belfast, you could barely get a mobile phone reception. It’s not known for anything other than the bombing. It’s not London, it’s not Paris, it’s not New York: if you say those names of those towns, you don’t think of 7/7, the Paris attacks or 9/11. They’re not the first things associated with those cities.

Not long ago I was at a Christmas party and a friend’s mum said to me, ‘Do your Omagh poem.’ And her son was there, and her son had been in the bomb and he was quite traumatised by it. His mum really pushed me to say it so I did. And it actually really upset her son. He said to me, 'Body parts in the street, are you going to write a rhyme about that?' And it just made me realise. I didn’t write that poem for Omagh people. Omagh people don’t need me to tell them what the bombing was like. They have their own story about it. I wrote it more for people in the outside world who were asking those questions.

'We still get a shiver of anxiety when we hear a police helicopter'

HUNGERFORD

Dr Hugh Pihlens, retired Hungerford GP

The links between Hungerford and Dunblane are quite striking. We weren’t that many years apart, and of course it was a very similar number of people who were killed: 16 at Hungerford, and 17 at Dunblane. Both of us are small towns with close-knit communities. I was a doctor here in the town so I was heavily involved on the day and afterwards. You see scenes that you think only happen in horror movies.

Of courses worse things than these happen in war time - though not as far as Dunblane and children are concerned – but this wasn’t war time, it was peace time, and in our case it was a lovely summer’s day. Families involved, I think never fully get over it. With time I think they learn to handle it. But you can’t ever really get over it, particularly if you’re living in the places where these things happened. There are triggers. One of the big triggers in the Hungerford episode was helicopters because we had the police helicopter hovering over the town for hours on that afternoon, and I think many people get a shiver and a tingle of anxiety, as you get a helicopter coming over, because it takes people back those 29 years.

But I’m not sure now, 29 years later, that new people coming to the town, particularly youngsters are so aware of the tragedy. Part of the healing process of these awful, awful traumas is that eventually people compartmentalise them. We’re now almost more than a generation, if you count 25 years as a generation, moved on.”

'People imagine the town will scream of devastation, that sadness will hang in the air'

LOCKERBIE

Amanda Kennedy, local reporter

I was born in 1994 – six years after Pan Am Flight 103 fell from the sky. I have no memories of the first time I found out about the disaster but I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t know about it. I wasn’t present on that horrific day - I wasn’t even born - so I’ll never know how desperately awful that day was or the following week, month or year for so many people, my family included.

I’ve only ever known life after the disaster – “after Lockerbie” - and while it serves as an important part of Lockerbie and the world’s history, people would be foolish to think Lockerbie is just a town that played home to terror and misfortune.

People ask on holidays where we’re from, and go quiet when we say Lockerbie and a sort of pity forms in their eyes. I’ll never truly know what people expect Lockerbie to be like. Maybe they expect a giant crater in the middle of the town where the plane fell?

I always think people imagine the town will scream of devastation, that sadness will hang in the air and that Lockerbie will display obvious marks of suffering. In all honesty Lockerbie just looks like a normal town. Yes we have memorials but we’re not just a tragedy town, we’re so much more.

Small Scottish towns with populations of 5000 are not often topics of global interest and few people from a town with such a small population could speak to people from Australia, America or France and say their home town’s name and it actually mean something to them.

As a Lockerbie girl, born and bred, Lockerbie isn’t just any old small town - it’s my home town and for that it will always be special to me and therefore like no other town.