Dunblane: a personal reflection…

I wrote this piece in 2016, just before the 20th anniversary. I go back to it from time to time.

Snowdrops. When Spring comes, there shall be snowdrops. It is one of life’s certainties.

In our busy lives, we take these pretty little flowers for granted. They don’t last long before the earth takes them back, and time and the seasons move on.

For the people of Dunblane, and I am one, snowdrops have come to represent something else. An enduring, often painful memory of young lives lost. The teardrops of a community bound forever by tragedy.

This weekend, on the 13th March, 20 years will have passed since 16 young souls and their teacher, Gwen Mayor, were shot dead in their school gym. That was my gym, a happy place I can still see clearly in my mind’s eye. On one cold late-winter morning, everything changed.

A few weeks ago, one of my boys asked to see my old school, so I took him there. As he asked a hundred questions, I stood and stared at where that old gym used to be. In one of those moments, I was back there; I remember it vividly. Those were beautiful times. I was surrounded by people I still see and care about, each of us going about our young lives filled with the happiness and innocence of those primary school years in a small town.

Like many people from Dunblane, I’m sure, I’ve struggled with my emotions over the years. I still do. After all, I was not shot. I lost nobody close to me. Yes, I had friends whose loved ones were killed or hurt, but what right did I have to grieve? I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I can hardly speak about what happened without being overwhelmed by sadness.

It took me years to mention the name of the individual responsible. I won’t speak his name now. Not ever.

As each anniversary approaches, I see his face from time to time. Like many boys my age, I knew him. I went to his boys’ club — Dunblane Rovers. We met in the High School gym, and any vague sense that the club was a bit strange was always overcome by the youthful passion of boys who just wanted to play football.

A small group of Dads, concerned by the weird behaviour, decided to remove three or four of us from the club and I had to watch that man, consumed by his paranoia, argue with my father on the doorstep of our home. I’m sure he did the same with others.

I feel strongly that the people who carry out barbaric acts like the one in my hometown two decades ago do so precisely to live long in the memory of those places, haunting the generations which are left to pick up the pieces and are forever scarred, whether by the bullets or the memories.

In those sad days 20 years ago, the world’s media visited our town in huge numbers. I remember leaving the Cathedral after a memorial service and being shocked at the huge number of photographers and reporters standing behind barriers, watching solemnly and going about their jobs. Hundreds of sad faces staring back at us.

When the time came, and the funerals started, the media was quietly asked to leave the town and to let it bury its dead in private. By and large, that happened. It is to the enduring credit of the great institution of the press that it did so.

This week, when the world remembers the lost souls of Dunblane, I hope for one small thing. There is no reasonable justification for images of that wretched man to appear on our televisions or in our newspapers. The internet will be the internet of course; it is beyond policing. But, I like to think the traditional press — the mainstream media as it is increasingly characterised — still has boundaries.

So please, let the 20th anniversary be illustrated not by one evil man, but by those beautiful faces in the school photograph, pictures of our majestic Cathedral, or some of those special individuals who helped hold a community together in the aftermath of such a horrific event. Let us celebrate too this country’s changed relationship with guns (they are for killing people, and nothing else) and hope that common sense eventually prevails in other civilised parts of the world, particularly the United States.

For many years, around the anniversary of the shooting, I visited the cemetery where many of the dead lie in great peace. Little toy windmills adorned some of the graves and I can still hear the whirring noise they made, and feel the tears on my face.

I felt them again a few years ago, as I sat in a small bar in a village in Turkey and watched a boy from Dunblane win Wimbledon. For me, and doubtless for others at home, that win was about much more than tennis, however great Andy Murray’s sporting achievement. It felt like the changing of the seasons. Like when the snowdrops of Spring make way for the summer.