My Lessons From Lockerbie

Would you rather burn to death, or drown? Charlotte Brooks asked as we sat cross-legged on the grass near the infant classrooms in May of 1988.

I twisted a sycamore seed that had helicoptered to the ground between my fingers.

I didn’t have an answer.

Not because this was too difficult a question for a six-year old. Imagining how you’d escape if you were trapped in a capsized ocean liner or survive an earthquake with more grace than Charlton Heston was what occupied the minds of most pre-teens in the eighties, thanks to all those 1970s disaster movies finally making it to TV syndication.

I didn’t have an answer because I wanted to know what Charlotte thought. I’m a recovering people-pleaser and back then, even when it came to a discussion of life or death situations, peer pressure had its way with me.

I remember staring out across the Solway Firth, a tidal stretch of water that bridged the tip of England and the rugged Scottish landscape on the other side. On a clear day it felt close enough to touch, if I just reached out far enough.

‘Drown, I think,’ I ventured.

‘I’d prefer to burn,’ Charlotte said, which surprised me.

Living so close to the firth, we had almost daily assemblies instructing us on how not to drown. In the school hall, which smelt always of warm semolina, we learnt how to survive if you got sucked into quicksand, how to alert the coastguard if someone was trapped by incoming tides, and we learned that playing on the salt marshes near Port Carlisle would mean certain death. I didn’t want to drown, in water, quagmire or quicksand, but I’d sort of got used to the idea that if I was going to die any time soon, that was probably how I’d go.

Growing up next to one of the most hazardous stretches of water in Britain, I was no stranger to the idea of the mortal coil. Even before my teacher’s friend fell over a stile on a walk through the fields, and cut his life short with his own shot gun. Before my babysitter got into a car with her boyfriend, who had been drinking, on Valentine’s Day. He drove the car into a local bus stop, killing his fifteen year-old girlfriend who had, just the week before, danced along to my Sinitta cassette around my parents’ living room.

But the deaths I knew of then were accidents born out of the human inability to judge the danger they were in. What I had yet to experience was death by human cruelty.

All that changed on the winter solstice, the longest night of 1988.

That afternoon, Sex Pistols front man, Johnny Rotten and his wife Nora Forster were having a heated argument in their London hotel room. Nora had taken too long to pack, they were going to miss their flight back to New York.

Meanwhile, Motown sensations The Four Tops were in a BBC TV studio trying to win over a Top of the Pops producer who wouldn’t let them record all of their material in one afternoon. Due to the schedule change, the group would miss the Pan Am plane they’d booked to carry them back across the Atlantic.

Actress Kim Cattrall had just finished dubbing a movie: The Return of the Musketeers, directed by Richard Lester. She was Christmas shopping in the West End. Time was running out to catch her flight back to America but she’d forgotten to buy her mother a teapot from Harrods. She decided to change her flight. There was another plane forty-five minutes later.

At 6.25pm, Flight 103 was given permission to leave the runway at London’s Heathrow Airport.

330 miles north, in the small cul-de-sac village of Glasson, Cumbria, the seven year-old version of me was settling down on the sofa with my mother to watch Des O’ Connor Tonight. When I recall this moment  now, I can only see red fairy lights on the Christmas tree in my peripheral vision even though I know from photographs I have seen that they were in fact a mix of red, blue and green. On-screen, Des welcomed viewers in his reassuringly smart tuxedo, complete with black bow tie.

Like most moments that precede unthinkable tragedy, everything was mundane to an almost painful degree.

At 7.01pm, Pan Am Flight 103 approached the south east corner of the Solway Firth. Seven miles from our house as the crow flies. At 7.02 the plane disappeared from radar screens and in an instant all contact with the cockpit was lost.

I knew something was wrong the moment the sound went off the TV. The TV was such a dominant presence in our 1980s living room that any disruption to service was serious business. We were a few years past the power cuts of 1984/85 caused by the Scargill / Thatcher battle over the mines. But living on the outer-rim of civilization, as we did, black outs were a regular feature and contingencies were second nature.

I prepared to make a dash for the white taper candles we kept in the kitchen drawer. But the familiar click of the lights going off never came. The image on the TV didn’t disappear into a void. Des O’ Connor was still on screen. His mouth was still moving but the sound was overpowered by a stern voiceover that apologised for the interruption before reporting that a Boeing 747 had fallen out of the sky and crashed in the Scottish town of Lockerbie, just over the  border, twenty-one miles from where we were sitting.

At the age of seven, I understood the words, but couldn’t visualise what such an event meant in physical terms. Given what I have read since, I can only be grateful my young imagination couldn’t quite grapple with something of that scale.

I remember my mother’s mouth hanging open. She darted into the passage to call my Dad who was working at a bingo hall he owned in Carlisle. He later told me how the whole bingo hall had heard the sirens from the emergency services storming out of the city and the worst they’d been able to imagine was that a train had been derailed.

The bodies of the 259 souls on board hit earth seconds apart, while the mangled corpse of the airplane: Clipper Maid of the Seas, left a 290 ton footprint on Scottish soil, bigger than any dinosaur track found in the Outer Hebrides. In addition to the 259 people who boarded the plane, eleven of the four thousand people living in the small town of Lockerbie were killed by segments of the descending fuselage.

The burning segments of the plane set the whole town alight. The fire brigade had much to do. But the lines of ambulances queued up along the A-road were static and silent. Nurses and doctors had rushed to the scene but nobody on board had survived. After the fact, it was reported that a farmer’s wife in one of the outlying fields discovered one of the flight attendants, still strapped into her airline seat. Somehow, she had survived the explosion on the plane, and the fall, and the impact but died before medical help arrived. Her’s was the last whisper of life aboard that craft.

Crowds of Americans flew to Carlisle that Christmas to identify the bodies of their loved ones, when they all should have been at home opening gifts and cards.

Over the months to follow, the Scottish police conducted a fingertip search across 810 square miles of countryside. It quickly became apparent that the crash was no accident. That somebody had placed a bomb inside a cassette player, inside a suitcase. That the suitcase was on board the flight at take-off, but the owner of the baggage wasn’t.

Most of the passengers were Americans travelling home for Christmas. Thirty-five of them were students from Syracuse University who had been studying abroad in England. Before September 11th, the Lockerbie air bombing was the most deadly terrorist attack on American civilians, and though a man was convicted, and served some time in prison, there is some doubt about whether or not he was the true culprit.

This investigative rabbit hole now leads only to a tangled web of international conspiracy involving names that have begun to fall out of consciousness. Names like Yvonne Fletcher and Terry Waite. There is no real knowing if the truth was ever unravelled.

All I can tell you is my own truth. The truth about why this event is scored deep in my mind, even though we were very much spared from anything other than second-hand grief.

The day after the bombing, my Dad told me that if the plane had exploded a minute earlier, it would have landed on our house. He also told me that if it had been in the air a minute longer, it would have missed the town of Lockerbie and landed in fields. Sparing eleven lives.

Being a self-involved seven year-old, it was my own near miss that stuck with me. And that fuelled the many nightmares in which I fell from the sky in a plane that had been blown apart, like all those poor, innocent people who we mourned, though we never knew them.

For years, I thought that was the lesson of the experience: how fragile life is, how close you can come to the end but for a few trifling details. It was only when I was researching this piece of writing so I might offer the reader something more than the hazy remembrances of a seven year-old that the real lesson emerged.

I heard it in the desperate cries of a woman called Jeannine Boulanger who was captured on film waiting at JFK airport for her daughter Nicole, one of the thirty-five Syracuse students. The footage depicts Jeannine’s worst fears being confirmed. That the flight that had gone down was the one her daughter had been travelling home on. In the footage, Jeannine drops to the floor and cries ‘my baby, my baby.’ It is the sound of desolation in the face of unspeakable cruelty.

And in my tiny, Cumbrian village I’d wound up toe-to-toe with that cruelty. And I’d learnt, though I didn’t know it for some time, that cruelty wasn’t something you could hide from. My father had moved us away from the hard catacombs of Middlesbrough so he could wrap us like dolls in cotton wool. We were more than 200 miles away from the IRA bombings taking place in London and Manchester. But that same cruelty had still landed on our doorstep. There was no tucking ourselves away or turning our back on it. Give cruelty one inch and it will take 270 lives, in an instant.

After all these years, I finally found an answer to Charlotte’s question that smacks of a crudeness only children who believe their end is on some far-off, unknown horizon, are capable of: would you rather  burn to death or drown?

I came closer than I’d like to both those ends before I hit double figures. But the how bothers me so much less now, than the why. More than anything, I want to avoid dying by some nameless enemy who doesn’t know my face, or care to. Who doesn’t know who I’m leaving behind or what my dreams are. More than anything, I’d rather not die by the hands of cruelty, nor would I wish anyone else to.

As sudden and unthinkable as it seemed at the time, the Lockerbie Bombing didn’t happen out of nowhere. Behind the downing of that air craft, there is a black smoke trail of racial superiority, discrimination and greed. And that’s why I’ve come to believe that staring down cruelty, wherever it manifests, is a responsibility for all of us, both in who we elect and what we allow. I believe it’s a responsibility for all of us not to let cruelty become our legacy.

Sources used to write this article:

What really happened on Flight 103
Lockerbie: Case Closed
The Lockerbie Bombing: The Search For Justice
Lockerbie: The Truth
Channel 3 News Pan Am 103
Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s
Kim Cattrall: My Defining Moment