SURMISE IN THE LOCKERBIE GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE

 

The unfriendly silence of innocent ghosts

Lockerbie's sad sacred sombre space

Lives, never wanting to be a headline,

Dead, staring at me photo to face

Sweet smiles, Satan's sovereign collateral 

The heart aching stretch to comprehend

Catharsis in the words of Dylan

"Death is not the end"

 

I'm praying for quiet and gentle

In our exits from skin and bone

No matter how our ending comes

May we be more than inscriptions in stone.

 

I remember where I was on December 21st 1988. We were just home from celebrating a friend's 21st birthday when the news was coming through about a plane crash in the south of Scotland. It wasn't long before we knew that it was a terrorist attack and that Pan Am Flight 103 had been blown out of the sky on route from Frankfurt to Detroit via London and New York. 243 passengers and 16 crew were blown out of the sky and as the debris landed 11 residents of Lockerbie were killed too.

Almost exactly 18 months later I was the back up driver for two friends, David Montgomery and David Baldock, who were cycling from John O'Groats to Lands' End. We spent a night in Lockerbie and the Russell family talked us through that nightmare night in their lives. The next morning, before the boys cycled off towards the English border, we stopped off at the Lockerbie Memorial Garden. 

It was a haunting place. The silence. The long list of names on the memorial stones. Even more hard hitting to my heart were the photographs of the victims. Children's faces and smiling teenagers looking me in the eye. The reality of the futile loss of life made a deep impact on me. They are back in my mind tonight as the world remembers.

I wrote this at the time, probably as I drove ahead of the Daves, seeking out places for lunch. Bob Dylan's album Down In The Groove, with Death Is Not the End on it, might have been playing in the car. It was raw of rhyme and I've fixed it all these decades later. The obvious realisation was that I could be a name on a memorial stone some day too. What was I going to make of my life in the meantime?