Thirty years ago this coming week, Sarah and I were on a short break in the Lake District. We had been together for ten years, we were living in a beautiful place, our respective careers were fulfilling, the children, aged five and seven, were healthy and happy, and we had the luxury of a nanny with whom we had left them at home while we took time out.
It was a cold spell. The hilltops were snow-covered and down by the lakes it was sleeting. We dressed for the weather and walked during the daytime. Then, feeling cheerful and well exercised, we dined in the hotel in the evenings.
On the morning of 13 March, a Wednesday, we woke late and were eating breakfast in our hotel room with the television on, when the programme was interrupted by a news flash. It stated simply that reports were coming in of a shooting at a primary school in Perthshire.
For a dreadful period – I no longer remember how long: it might have been a few minutes, it might have been much more – we sat there dumbly and waited for more information. At that moment, two hundred miles away, our children were at a primary school in Perthshire.
Our relief when we heard the fateful word ‘Dunblane’ was beyond description, though only momentary as more details of the story began to emerge, and continued to do so over the coming hours.
Thomas Hamilton, a lone gunman, had walked into the school gymnasium carrying four legally-held handguns and opened fire, killing sixteen pupils, all but one of them aged under six. He had also killed one teacher, and injured a further fifteen children and adults. Then he had turned the gun on himself.
We went out and walked that day but we were struggling, as were people everywhere, to take in what had happened. At dinner that evening I started to have an unpleasant sinking feeling. My heart rate increased and I began to feel as if darkness was closing in around me, then suddenly the ground opened up beneath me and I was falling into an abyss of anxiety and despair. It came on me so powerfully and unexpectedly, and terrified me so much, that I could hardly speak.
I made it through the meal and by the end of the evening the feeling had begun to abate, but I was left in a state of high anxiety. I had no idea what had happened. For several days the anxiety persisted and with it a powerful sense of disconnection, as if all my feelings had shut down. For months after, I felt disjointed. It was like having been knocked off my axis. After that I was plagued from time to time by similar feelings, until eventually, a good while later, I sought help and embarked on a therapeutic journey which has continued intermittently throughout my life.
Triggers are complicated things and the triggering event may not always have any very obvious or logical connection to the original trauma. But I am as certain as I can be today that what happened that evening in the Lake District was that an echo of abandonment, stemming from my own experience of being sent to boarding school aged not quite eight, burst to the surface in response both to the fatal vulnerability of the Dunblane children, abandoned to the terrible madness of Thomas Hamilton, and to our abandonment of our own children at that moment, having left them behind at home, the oldest being almost exactly the same age as I was when I was sent to school.
Twenty years passed and in 2016 the anniversary was marked by services and programmes. Relatives, survivors, siblings and others closely involved reflected publicly on the dreadful events. I was struck by their dignity, composure and lack of bitterness: the eloquent head teacher who still felt guilty that it could have happened in his school; the softly-spoken father who had lost his only child three years after losing his wife to cancer; the beautiful young woman who would never know her elder sister.
I woke the morning after that twentieth anniversary with their voices still in my head, and it came to me that there was something I had never done, so overpowered by my own feelings had I been at the time. I bought some flowers and drove to Dunblane. It was a spellbinding day with long views of big hills lifting their snowy summits into an azure sky.
Dunblane cemetery is not an easy place to find, tucked away at the back of one of those sprawling residential developments where one can easily become lost in a maze of seemingly identical streets. When I got there the place was deserted, the only sign of life three magpies hopping about in the sunshine among the gravestones.
I made my way towards the memorial fountain and stopped in front of the two rows of graves that stand before it; the graves of twelve five-year-olds and one adult, Gwen Mayor, the 45-year-old teacher who died trying to protect her pupils.
I placed some of the flowers on the rim of the fountain, inscribed with the names of all seventeen who died, and some by Gwen Mayor’s grave. Then I stood there and shed tears. I thought: there is nothing in human experience that can make sense of something like this. I was there for perhaps fifteen minutes in all and saw no one. It felt lonely. I would have liked to be able to share my feelings with someone.
I won’t be able to do the same thing again next week because I am going to a wedding in India. But thirty years on I still feel a powerful connection with that terrible, inexplicable event. I feel the need to honour the memory of that day, those events, those tragically unlucky children and their heroic teacher. So today I write this for them, from my heart, in memoriam.
Within a year of the killings the UK government had enacted legislation banning handguns.
A Few Kind Words 