Try not to despair
For what the caterpillar calls the end of the world
The Master calls a butterfly.
-Inscription on a card left with flowers at the gates of Dunblane Primary School.
SOFT flurries of snow brushed the faces of small children as they carefully laid their flowers and soft toys on the concrete outside Dunblane Primary School gates yesterday. Before their parents led them away, the adults raised their eyes to focus disbelievingly on the school on the hill.
As recently as Tuesday morning, it had been their happy, well-run school, another layer of safety within a largely middle-class community where the wanted poster in the post office is for a dog and where even the graffiti on the railway bridge says Merry Christmas".
Now it represented a horror that few were either brave enough or foolhardy enough to analyse in detail. As Emily Bryce watched her 11 year-old daughter lay her flowers in a mundane entrance that a few days had turned into a place of pilgrimage, she pulled her coat around her against the bitterly cold wind and gazed into the middle distance:
"It's fitting that it is still winter and not spring. For a lot of families in Dunblane, spring is not going to come." Throughout Thursday and Friday. they came, arms around children clutching tributes of flowers or well-hugged teddies. And with the treasured offerings came the innocent, childish wishes, inscribed in painstakingly joined-up writing: "To give you something to cuddle in heaven."; "to my friends. I had great games with you. Bye Bye Victoria X X X X X"; "Brett, I did not know you for very long but I hope you are playing with the angels now."
Babies. Angels. Lambs. The words recurred over and over on the cards wishing them sweet dreams and courage for their parents. Fixed to the railings were 17 single red roses, each with a wish that they might "play forever". For five year-old Victoria Clydesdale, now lying in the mortuary, her young brothers had left flowers and a simple message: "Sorry for what happened."
All through the long, sombre days, the florists' vans stopped by with new tributes, some bearing nothing more than the name of the town or city from which they were sent including a few from Dublin mothers signed simply:
"A grieving family".
Big, professional arrangements and supermarket bunches jostled with little handfuls of snowdrops in jam jars wrapped in fancy paper. A few candles continued to burn brightly despite the falling snow. and nearby lay a distinctive red sweatshirt of Dunblane Primary. Later a Bible was laid there, inscribed by a class of small children. Eerily silent knots of older children and teenagers arrived together, each with an offering. eyes glazed and red-rimmed.
And all through the days could be heard little but the sound of sobbing, quiet, helpless sobbing.
As an old man laid his flowers at the gate, he fell to one knee in uncontrollable grief. For the people of Dunblane, like the caterpillar, the world does indeed appear to be ending, and only the most devout can see butterflies in this valley of tears.
In the churches, on the streets, in the new Tesco supermarket, reigned that same deathly hush, broken only by the sounds of grieving. And everywhere, loomed new hurdles for shattered hearts: the big, colourful poster for tomorrow's Mother's Day in a florist's filled with grieving customers; the swings outside a hotel; even the "parent and child" parking spaces outside Tescos.
The word "child" has taken on a new, aching poignancy in this of all places, a place that has never before been touched by the horrors of this unstable world, this prim, comfortable, middle-class town of green wellies and Land Rovers and pretty little teashops.
It is no cliche to say that everyone knows someone who has been affected: the check-out girl knows a teacher (still alive because she went to the toilet). The paperboy has lost his sister. A hotel owner's daughter-in-law was called on to help identify some of the victims.
On Thursday evening, at Mass in the Holy Family Church, a young, smartly-dressed couple with strong Irish connections, vacant-eyed and with a calm born of shock, leaned heavily on each other. They had lost a small son.
When the choir reached the chorus of their sweet, harmonised rendering of "Be Not Afraid" grief re-asserted itself and they, with the rest of the congregation, wept quietly. The hymn seemed poignantly apt for Thomas Hamilton's frightened little victims: "Aye". sighed a woman beside me, "you want those little ones back so bad, you want to turn the clock back just so you can tell them not to be afraid. Isn't that what you're always telling the little mites?" A local man gave the reading: "If you do not become as little children and Cork-born Canon Basil O'Sullivan, read the roll-call of the dead. He numbers several of the dead and injured (one of whom has an Irish father who commutes to Dublin) in his congregation.
After leading his four concelebrants and a packed church into other apt prayers - prayers for the grace to meet the pain, for the grace of acceptance, for the parents and families - he invited everyone into the parish hall later for a cup of tea and to talk - "It's better if you can talk" - and bade them welcome to the ecumenical service in the medieval cathedral last night.
Earlier he had replaced the purple Lenten altarcloths with red and gold; the lectern hanging with its stern injunction to repent was supplanted with the Christian message of hope: "I am the Resurrection and the Life."
It is difficult to imagine Dunblane at this time without its churches. Physically, the town is built around its beautiful gothic cathedral and spiritually, the people are devout, quiet and strong. While no one in Dunblane is sleeping, the churches have become places of refuge.
A father who rushed back from Glasgow on Tuesday, not knowing if his son was alive or dead, stayed up through the night with his wife, watching their child as he slept, still guilty at the surge of pure joy experienced when they found him safe, while grieving for bereaved friends. At 6 a.m., still awake, they made their way to the cathedral and found dozens of people there before them. On Thursday, what appeared to be an entire garden of white flowers was being delivered there while strong, warm women moved in to offer help or a shoulder to cry on to visitors in need of comfort. The muffled sobbing echoing around the soaring walls suggested that there were many.
As notices appeared in shop windows on Thursday announcing the availability of counselling services, and leaflets on how to cope with a major personal crisis were distributed, the shock of the initial brutal impact was starting to recede and people had begun to east around for answers. Many of the floral tributes at the school gates bore a single despairing word - "Why?" And the question was echoed over and over by locals.
By killing himself, Thomas, Hamilton has left the community without a focus for their anger; there was no man-hunt, no-one behind bars. Instead they are left, to seek reasons from the living. A message on a huge teddy bear back at the school looks for a ban on gun clubs, a reflection of local exasperation at firearms legislation. Some wondered whether those with gun licences should be allowed to keep them at home, suggesting instead that designated holding sites should be considered.
A taxi driver said angrily that if he was refused a taxi licence, police were under no obligation to give a reason. Yet Thomas Hamilton, though subject to investigation by four different Scottish police forces over many years, held a firearms licence for six weapons, including two automatic pistols.
Aberfan was negligence; Hungerford was random; Dunblane is the place where a killer deliberately targeted tiny children. There was, said doctors and police sources who saw the wounds and the positioning of the bodies, nothing random about this.
Other discussions centre on school security. Laura Aitchison, whose daughter, Laura, is in Primary 3, said: "I feel there should be more security, like intercoms to identify genuine parents." But the educational authorities are proud of their policy on schools as a community asset, open and accessible and many townspeople concede that a million intercoms would not have thwarted Thomas Hamilton in his ferocious vengefulness.
There is talk too of having the school demolished, or at least the gym. But the building, said the region's director of education, "is part of the tragic events and knocking the school down will not take that away." They will be taking the advice of psychologists and councillors.
Few, meanwhile, are prepared to look to the future. The wailing of mothers outside the school on Tuesday is still too fresh and raw in the memories of those who heard it to even think of how or when their town might start to recover.
The trauma has filtered down to the smallest children. One mother, Teresa Bonny, told how she had to break the news to her four-year-old daughter, Ashley, that her playmate, Megan, was among the dead. "They knew there was a bad man at the school from watching the TV. When I heard it was Megan I went and told her. She did not cry. She came back a few minutes later and asked if I was telling lies."
The funerals still lie ahead. The people of Dunblane will handle them with dignity; of that, the world may be sure. The same may not be said for small sections of the media who have abused the natural good manners of the townspeople. Photographers cynically, dropping empty film canisters into the flowers around the school appalled even fellow journalists at the scene.
And in one notorious incident, a female "fixer" for an American network swept into a hotel, shouting aggressively into her mobile phone: "What the fuck is this place called?", giving serious of fence to several people with connections to some of the dead children. The night before, a Dunblane man who had been selling local information had a pint thrown over him by other angry townspeople.
While Warner Home Video announced that it would be postponing the release of the controversial and violent Natural Born Killers - deeming it "inappropriate for the time being" - and Scotland prepared for visits from John Major, Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth, the people of Dunblane were resigning themselves to the sad fact that that their once-proud, sheltered town and their lives would never be the same again.
But Dunblane is still a lovely place, ventured a local woman. "WAS, WAS", responded a middle-aged businessman emphatically. "I work for a Birmingham-based company. Over and over I've told the Sassenachs `I live in Dunblane - near Stirling'. You'd expect them to remember that even though they're Sassenachs, but they never did. Then on Tuesday night, I had the managing director on the phone. On Wednesday morning I had, the chairman. They'll never forget where I live now. They'll never forget Dunblane."
