There have been few darker days in Scotland than when former Scout master Thomas Hamilton walked into the gym at Dunblane Primary School holding two guns, and shot a class of twenty-nine five- and six-year-olds, killing sixteen pupils and their teacher. The world’s press went into overdrive, but few were in a better position to write about the impact of a child’s death than Scotsman columnist Fordyce Maxwell, whose own daughter had been murdered fourteen years before.
Hundreds of thousands of words have now been written about Dunblane. Here are a few more. Not because I want to, but because nothing else will do, not hope for the future, but a bleak warning which I hope, perversely, will help. Writing it is difficult, reading it will bring little comfort to anyone, least of all the families of the murdered children.
So why write it? The slaughter has already been dealt with by journalists and columnists in almost every conceivable way, with Sunday’s coverage still to come. Most have dealt with it well, some wonderfully well, with only a few slipping into instant-emotion, instant-solution, noble rhetoric, mode…. But no matter how hard they try they are not on the receiving end. They and the bereaved families don’t know that it is now downhill for some time, for some perhaps for ever. It might be hard to believe after the events of this week, but the suffering has only started.
Instant religion, instant counselling, instant memorial funds, and turning the gym into a shrine won’t help. Within weeks the present apparent astonishing self-possession of some involved will disintegrate and they will then suffer even more than those who screamed and raged and cried immediately.
In the next few months the world will move on, stressed out counsellors will be debriefed by specialist debriefing counsellors and the bereaved will be left on their own. They will find that to hang on to their own sanity some of their best friends and relatives cannot talk about the murder. Some will cross the road to avoid them because they can’t face the emotion. Others will visit or stop to chat, but talk about anything and everything except the one subject bereaved parents want to talk about – their murdered child.
There will be bickering and muttering about any money raised or funds started. Remember the long aftermath of Aberfan. Even in the most close-knit community, a time comes, and much sooner than bereaved parents expect, when the most sympathetic have to get on with their own lives, handle their own problems and, in many cases, their own family agonies.
Some parents will avoid the school. Others will haunt it. They live in two worlds – one, where they know a child is dead, the second where they still expect her to come out of the school gate with a smile. Go to the school gate often enough and one day, one day, she’ll be there.
At home the crying and arguments and screaming fits will get worse. Other children in the family will be told they are lucky to be alive, followed by instant remorse. The most difficult thing to do will be to bring them up normally, trying not to spend too much on them, trying not to panic if they are five minutes late. Parents not blaming each other, but trying to destroy themselves by taking responsibility for a horror for which no one is to blame except the man who carried it out.
Already commentators are talking about ‘coming to terms’ with what happened. My wife Liz said yesterday: ‘If I hear coming to terms with one more time I’ll scream. You never, ever, come to terms with it.’ All you do for the rest of your life is keep on keeping on, one of the few things I can write with certainty since our daughter, Susie, was abducted and murdered at the age of 11. She would have been 25 this month.
I write because I must. For the Dunblane parents, facing the future will be worse than they now think possible. But if they accept that, they can begin to try to live with it. There is naught for anyone’s comfort in that warning, because there is no comfort to be had. Strictly speaking, for the bereaved it doesn’t matter what Thomas Hamilton was, or how he became like that, any more than it matters to us how Susie’s murderer, Robert Black, became the twisted pervert he is.
What matters is that a child is dead and that parents will never come to terms with it, 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.
All you can do is never forget how much joy a child gave you in the years they were with you. Or the satisfaction of helping their brothers and sisters grow and develop. Or the knowledge that the surviving children recover. And even forget.