After the horror

Published on Thursday 2 March 2006 02:23

IN A quiet suburban street, in a detached red brick house, a cardboard box sits wedged under the stairs. At least a dozen times each day an ordinary 15-year-old boy in baggy jeans and a Green Day T-shirt runs up and down the stairs, seemingly oblivious to the box and its contents. While Matthew Birnie has been told that the box is there, he has no interest in opening it; at least, not yet.

The street is in Dunblane and the box contains evidence of an atrocity. Under the lid are yellowing newspaper cuttings, videos of TV footage and transcripts of an inquiry by a Law Lord. It is the documentation of Scotland's most horrific crime, of which he was one of the victims. One of the most fortunate victims.

When Thomas Hamilton entered the gym of Dunblane Primary School at 9:35am on 13 March 1996 and began firing, a group of children, some wounded, were ushered into a store area by two teachers, Mary Blake and Eileen Harrild. Matthew Birnie was not part of that group; he and his fellow five-year-olds, dressed in shorts and T-shirts and ready for play, were trapped. Their teacher Gwen Mayor was shot dead at their feet. Hamilton then walked in a semi-circle firing into their midst. A total of 16 children were murdered. From their group only two survived; one of them was Matthew Birnie.

Three days after the shooting, from a bed in the paediatric ward of Stirling Royal Infirmary, Matthew, upon being asked if he knew what had happened, would reply, "I was shot. Everybody was shot."

As the tenth anniversary approached, his parents, Steve and Beverley Birnie, agreed to an interview with The Scotsman, to talk about their experience of that day in 1996, its traumatic effect on their family and the long, but steady, years of recovery. The couple's reason for speaking was simple. In the years since Dunblane other families have been scarred by tragedy, at home and abroad, and to them they offer a powerful message: evil can be overcome with hope and love.

This is their story.

The Birnie family, Steve, Beverley, Matthew and his little sister, Lauren, just two, had only moved to Dunblane from England eight months before that day in March. Steve worked for a pharmaceutical company. His wife, a practice nurse, had been initially reluctant to move north. Matthew, however, had settled happily into primary school, although for reassurance he liked either his mother or the family childminder to wait at the school gates until the bell rang.

On the morning of 13 March Beverley took Matthew to school as the childminder didn't drive and a late fall of spring snow had left the pavements slushy. "I didn't want her and Lauren to have to trudge back home afterwards, so I took Matthew but I started work at nine o'clock and I couldn't wait," explains Beverley, as she sits beside her husband in the family's living room. "At a quarter to nine I said to him, 'Mummy's got to go now.'

"Then Matthew said, 'No, Mummy don't leave me. Wait till I go in.'

"'No, darling, I can't I've got to be at work for nine o'clock. I'm going to be late as it is.'

"He had his friends with him, but I remember just turning round and he stood looking at me as if to say, 'I can't believe that you are leaving me.' That stayed with me for a long time, the guilt."

As his mother drove off to work, Matthew and the fellow pupils of class 1/13 changed into their gym gear and walked to morning assembly.

Forty minutes later, just before 9:30am, Hamilton, dressed in a dark jacket, black corduroy trousers and woolly hat, pulled up at the school in a white van. Carrying a bag containing assorted automatic handguns and rounds of ammunition, he entered the school by a door on the north-west side, next to the toilets and beside the gym.

It was more than an hour later, at roughly 10:45am, that Steve Birnie realised that something was very wrong. He had been driving with a colleague towards Kirkcaldy when he received a call on his mobile from another colleague.

"She just said, 'I've heard the tail end of a news bulletin, I don't know what it was about but I could swear it said something about a shooting at a school in Dunblane.'"

Steve phoned directory inquiries for the number of the local police station and was put straight through. "Later, other people said the lines were jammed; I was lucky. A police officer said she could not give many details but that 'there had been an incident at one of the schools'.

"She said to me, 'If you do have a child at school you should come back.'"

Steve was over an hour away from Dunblane and so called Beverley. She says, "I was thinking: OK. A shooting? Was it a farmer in a field with a gun? It just seemed a bizarre thing. Then I thought: what do I do? Do I finish my surgery? It finishes at 12:30pm - then do I go up?"

The situation seemed so surreal, so out of character for a small town in Scotland that, initially, neither parent felt a sense of panic. Beverley decided, however, to go immediately to the school to investigate and it was on the drive over that the full scope of the incident became clear.

"I was listening to the radio. It was Five Live and the presenter said, 'We have breaking news about this incident in Dunblane Primary School. There have been eight or nine fatalities and eight or nine injuries.' All of a sudden you are thinking: eight or nine fatalities? That's dead. You are no longer thinking of a farmer with his gun in his field. You're thinking: OH MY GOD."

It was at that point that Beverley began to calculate the odds. There were 600 pupils in the school; the odds that Matthew was involved were roughly three per cent. She began to think that she had never won the lottery or even won a raffle, surely she wouldn't now "win" and so lose her son?

At the school there was panic as hundreds of parents crowded round the gates, which were taped off and secured by police officers.

As Beverley recalled: "The police were blocking the road. They wouldn't let cars go up. Parents were running from every angle. Every parent of every child in the school that day would have been in the same situation. Thinking - what if it is my child? I got there and the police directed me into the garden of a house. I was standing there and this woman who was in front of me - I couldn't tell you to this day who she was - said: 'It's Mrs Mayor's class.' She was talking to her friend and I said, 'Excuse me, did you say Mrs Mayor's class?' Then she said, 'All I know is that Mrs Mayor's class are having to meet in the blue house opposite.'"

The police had obtained the co-operation of a local family who had agreed to gather all the parents in their home. "I went along to the blue house and walked past all these television cameras and photographers and I remember thinking, how did you all get here so quickly?" Beverley says.

Once inside she called her husband. "I told him to drive carefully, but that it was Matthew's class."

Her husband recalls, "I was working on the same odds as Beverley. When I heard it had been Matthew's class the odds changed and so did my driving. In that state you have a certain invulnerability. You take risks you wouldn't normally take. I remember going along the motorway at 120-plus with all the lights flashing."

It was around noon by the time Steve joined his wife in the house. Two and a half hours after the incident the police were still not in a position to confirm which child had lived and which had died. Beverley remembers the house as being quiet. "It was eerie. We were all sitting there or standing. People were on the stairs, in the hall, in the porch. You had couples holding hands. Mothers who knew each other were hugging, holding each other. One woman was hysterical because she knew her child was alive and in hospital but they wouldn't let her go to her. The owners, bless them, were asking if we wanted to have a cup of tea."

At 12:30pm a police officer came into the house and explained that everyone would be taken over to the school. Two mini-ambulance buses were used to take the parents the short distance to the school, where they were led into the staff room. There, once again, they waited. At 1:15pm the parents were divided into two groups, and the first set of parents were led out. "Most of us called first felt it was bad news," says Steve. They were wrong.

They were told the news of their son's survival at about 1:30pm. "We all went into this pokey room," Steve says. "I remember just being able to squeeze in. We were told: 'your kids are alive'. It was a relief knowing that he was alive, but you didn't know the injuries and you just wanted to be with him."

The families were then taken to another ambulance bus for the drive to Stirling Royal Infirmary. On the journey one mother began to hyperventilate so badly that Beverley and the local Catholic priest had to calm her down, persuading her to breathe into a paper bag.

At the Infirmary they had to wait once again, but Steve's familiarity with hospital reports meant he realised the news was grim: "You get quite good at reading documents upside down and while the staff were talking to the people in front I could see the admissions sheet and we could see that he was in ICU - the Intensive Care Unit."

"His name was misspelt," Beverley says. "You get used to it spelt: Burnie. When I saw he was in intensive care I turned to Steve and said, 'What if he has been shot in the head? What if they want his organs and he is just being kept alive for that?' I didn't know that in a criminal case they can't donate the organs."

"The brain was just working on that level," says Steve. "What you don't know you make up."

The couple estimate that it was between 2:30pm and 3pm that they were taken up to the Intensive Care Unit where they were met by Matthew's nurse.

"She said, 'Before I say anything: You're Bev, you're Steve, he's got a wee sister called Lauren and his favourite food is baked beans.' It was all we needed to know, for us to think, 'Thank God he is going to be OK,'" Beverley says. "That was brilliant. It alleviated a huge amount of pressure."

Matthew, they were told, was still in surgery, but that the surgeon would speak to them as soon as possible. At 3:30pm he arrived and said, "If I was a betting man - which I'm not - he's going to be OK." The surgeon explained that their son had been shot twice, the first was a straight flesh wound through the shoulder, the second, however, had gone in through the left side of the back, fractured a rib and exited the right side of the back. Had it not hit the rib it would have punched straight through his heart. It had also narrowly missed his spine.

"He was so lucky in so many respects. He could have been paralysed. He could have been dead, but instead he managed to get the best of both angles. It didn't hit a major organ. The reason they had opened him up was that they thought he had bled internally, but it had actually grazed the liver," says Steve.

In the months to come they would learn that Matthew, having been shot once, had tried to lie still among the bodies of his classmates, but had moved his leg, a slight twitch which was spotted by Hamilton, who returned to shoot him again.

Yet on that day thoughts of the perpetrator of the Dunblane massacre were, for the moment, washed aside by the wave of relief that broke when the couple finally saw their son.

"He was just this tiny five-year-old in an adult bed," says Beverley, who feels her nurse's training helped her cope. She noted the machinery to which he was attached. "Your professional head went on. OK. Right. That's a ventilator, that's a chest drain, you diagnosed everything. That's what made me cope."

That evening Beverley spent the night at the hospital, lying beside her son. She had already heard that their friends had lost their daughter. Yet the whole scope of the atrocity would not hit her until she read the following morning's newspapers. "I had a bed next to Matthew and I was just lying there, watching him, thinking thank God he is alive. The nurses said to me, 'Looking at you that's just what a new mother looks like when she's just given birth to her baby.' I was looking at my baby, born all over again."

• In Monday's Scotsman: Fear, survivor's guilt and the long road to recovery.