An end to my world

Published on Sunday 28 October 2007 01:19

DECEMBER 1988: LOCKERBIE

Before terrorists catapulted my home town into the world's headlines, it was a rural backwater whose only claim to historical importance was the fact that the battle of Dryfe Sands had been fought nearby in 1593. Percy Toplis, 'the Monocled Mutineer', was arrested by Lockerbie police in 1911, and ten years ago reporters were retracing the footsteps of Archibald Hall, 'the Monster Butler', who had lived in the area.

My home town used to throb during the Blackpool illuminations, when police had to timetable the hundreds of buses which poured through in non-stop procession. But after it was bypassed and motorway service stations sprouted, Lockerbie became a dormitory town.

Black Wednesday cancelled festive celebrations in my home town and generated the saddest Christmas in its long history. Since that horrible night I have ransacked dictionaries for words to describe the chaos I witnessed, but there are none. Church of Scotland minister James Annand came near the mark when he said: "What can we do but weep?"

I am one of several journalists who wept openly as they saw the carnage from the hapless Flight 103. To me it was personal: this town had brought me up. As houses blazed in Sherwood Crescent, I remembered stealing apples out of their gardens as a boy.

Twenty years ago I had bashed a golf ball around the course half a mile from my home. Now helicopters hovered over it, looking for corpses and debris.

My old school was turned into a communication centre, while the ice rink where I had done some of my courting became a mortuary.

I was the first journalist to reach the site where the jumbo's nose section had twisted out of the sky and landed in a field. I was too shocked to file copy anywhere: instead I thought of the days I had cycled past with a badminton racquet strapped to my back.

The next day, when the Prime Minister and the Duke of York flew into my home town, it was counting the misery and comforting those who had grief to share. Sixteen months previously, I had interviewed Davie Edwards, who was into his second kidney transplant and who had three Olympic medals (from the British Transplant Olympics) under his belt. On Thursday, December 22, the house where I had met Davie was no longer there. Fortunately, he had been mending a puncture in his garden shed and escaped unhurt. Fortunately, too, his wife and two sons had been out at the time.

One of my friends had been walking along Rosebank Crescent when he was blown into a garden by an explosion. "It was like a juggernaut flying through the sky," he told me. "It hit a house. It was like being part of a horror movie. When I came to, a body fell in front of me. It wore a Pan Am badge. I never want to see anything like it again, not even in a nightmare."

My town will take a long time to rebuild - physically and emotionally. At the moment it is like an occupation zone, where every other person is a stranger clutching a clipboard, a camera or a notebook. It is only when these people go that Lockerbie will be allowed to grieve.