Dunblane, 25 years on: A memory that will never fade

That day is etched in the national memory. The worst ever mass shooting in Britain, it shook Scotland to its core. We have a long, dark history of bloody and tragic events, of battles, massacres and murders, but this felt different.

While any violent or unnatural death is dreadful, there was something in the sense of innocence defiled that left people reeling. Trust in the security – you might almost say the sanctity – of the classroom, where children should have been safe, was broken. An invisible line had been crossed. No-one sending their children to school since then has felt as secure as they did before that terrible day.

READ MORE ROSEMARY GORING: Welcome the new spring

For this to have taken place in what is regarded as a civilised and peaceful society remains shocking. There were high school killings in the US before, and many since the Dunblane atrocity, but for a country where people do not carry guns this murderous rampage, against the very young and defenceless, defied comprehension.

I was in a hospital bed, not far from the silent television screen, when the reports began. I could read the news ticker beneath scenes of parents running towards the school gates. My niece and nephew were in the school. I was later told that my nephew’s teacher, ushering her class to safety along a corridor whose windows overlooked the gym, had turned it into a game. She got them to crawl on their hands and knees, so they would not see what had happened.

The hours before parents learned if their children were among the victims were harrowing. Along with overwhelming relief on hearing your own family was safe, there was also irrational guilt. Thankfulness was muted, as those whose children had survived found themselves imagining what the bereaved must be going through.

Nobody who has not experienced a similar situation can begin to know what it must have felt like for the families of the murdered classmates and their teacher. Nevertheless, acres of news stories and comment, and hours of air time attempted to make sense of an incomprehensible barbaric act.

The word evil was routinely used. Probably the finest response, however, written in the immediate aftermath, was an understated and devastatingly honest piece by the Scotsman journalist Fordyce Maxwell. It was more than a decade since his 11-year-old daughter Susie had been murdered by the serial killer Robert Black. Fordyce’s wife Liz, hearing commentators talking of ‘coming to terms’ with the Dunblane events, said she would scream if they uttered that phrase one more time. “You never, ever come to terms with it,” she said.

Warning that “there is no comfort to be had”, Fordyce wrote that parents who have lost children “only at best learn to keep going in a world where even those of us who think we’re normal live on two planes – the cheerful, hard-working outward one, and the inner one where the pain is.”

Was the Dunblane massacre Scotland’s darkest hour? In our own times, it must surely come close. But grief is not competitive. One disaster cannot be tallied against another. Who among us would want to be on the winning side in that calculation.

A little over seven years before Dunblane, a PanAm plane exploded over Lockerbie, killing 270, 11 of them in the town where it fell. In 1996 it was only half a century since the end of the last war in which we came under direct bombardment, ending the lives of hundreds of innocent citizens. Before this, our past was blighted by bloodshed, from the killing grounds of Culloden to the trenches on the Somme. It doesn’t really bear thinking about. Yet with Dunblane we had no alternative but to think, and to feel.

In the 25 years since, the news has been dominated by wars and terrorism, in the West and in the Middle East, where the targeting of schools, hospitals, buses, offices and homes is commonplace. The sight of the dispossessed fleeing in thousands, making sea crossings to safety, when many drown, perhaps strike us more forcefully in the wake of Dunblane. The comforting notion we once held that terrible things happened far away, not here, was shattered on March 13, 1996. If any good came out of that awakening, it was greater compassion for the suffering of others, often on the other side of the world.

Dunblane itself has worked hard not to be defined by its loss. In the weeks following the attack, I heard a couple of London mothers saying that, if they lived there, they would move as soon as they could. It was the worst possible outlook, an affront to the nature of the town. Wisely, Dunblane residents took the opposite approach. Showing resilience, and a strong community bond, they refused to feed sensationalist coverage, and instead erected an invisible protective barrier around those who were suffering.

Inevitably its name has been added to the list of places indelibly linked to sorrow. On this roll call, Dunblane sits next to Aberfan. But it has refused to be flattened by its ordeal. Every springtime, as the anniversary approaches, snowdrops bloom by the school in memory of those who were lost.

READ MORE ROSEMARY GORING: Good luck, Prince Philip

For those at the heart of the tragedy, an anniversary is just one more date in a never-ending procession of time marked by absence. Fordyce offered one balm to bereaved parents: “All you can do is never forget how much joy a child gave you in the years they were with you.”

When Saturday arrives, they can be assured that our memory of that fateful morning will never fade.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Herald.