Hitting Back (5 page)

On Wednesday the 13th of March, 1996, Thomas Hamilton, 43, walked
into Dunblane Primary School with two 9mm Browning pistols and two
Smith and Wesson revolvers. He made his way to the gym where he fired
multiple shots at point-blank range at a first-year primary class and their
teacher, Gwen Mayor. He murdered sixteen children between five and six
years old and the teacher before turning one of the guns on himself and
committing suicide. It was the deadliest attack on children in the history
of the UK.

Jamie and I were at the school that day. Most people know that. I
have been asked about it in press conferences a few times and I've
always said that, because I was so young, I don't have any real
recollection of the day. That is true. I genuinely can't remember much
and it's not something I have ever wanted to go back and find about
because it's so uncomfortable.

It doesn't belong in my childhood at all. It seems randomly attached
to my history, but in a way that I can't describe. To me, Dunblane
was, and still is, one of the safest places in the world. Last Christmas
I said to Mum that I could imagine people there not bothering to lock
their front doors. That might seem strange when something so
terrible happened in the middle of the town while I was there, but
that is the way I have always felt. I don't want to dig deeper. I want
that sense of comfort to stay the same. I don't think something so
crazy and horrific should scar my feelings for my hometown. I think I
am lucky I don't remember.

JUDY MURRAY:
The boys have always said they were too young to
appreciate the enormity of what happened and I'm grateful for that. I
have never said much about it except that it was, unquestionably, the
worst day of my life. Everybody in the town would say the same thing.
We never forget it, but what gives me the most pride and comfort is
that Dunblane has not surrendered its spirit. It makes me proud that
Andy and Jamie have played a small part in that. When people talk
about Dunblane, they don't just think of the shootings, they might
also think: 'That's where the Murrays come from.'

We have moved on, but, of course, you never forget. Having spent
my childhood here and then come back in my twenties to raise the
boys, I still find it really hard to believe something like that happened
in what feels like a little village to me. It is such a quiet, lovely place
to live.

My mother and I ran a children's toy and clothing shop in the
middle of the town. That morning I was working in the shop with
another woman who often came in to help. The phone rang and my
colleague answered it. It was her daughter ringing to say she'd just
heard on the radio that there had been a shooting at Dunblane
Primary School and that a man with a gun was in the playground.

'Are you sure?' I said, when she told me. It seemed utterly beyond
belief. We were still trying to make sense of it when my mum came
flying through the door, shouting: 'Have you heard? Have you heard!
There's been a shooting up at the primary school.' I didn't hear any
more, I just picked up my car keys and ran out of the door. I don't
even remember saying anything to her.

I got in the car and drove off. Of course, lots of other people were
driving the same way at the same time. I can just remember slamming
on my horn and swearing at the top of my voice while shouting: GET
OUT OF THE WAY! GET OUT OF THE WAY! Eventually I had to
stop the car and pull over somewhere. You couldn't get near the
school for all the police vehicles and other cars that lined the road. I
ran towards the school gates. You couldn't get near those either.
There were dozens and dozens of other parents there, all barred
from entry and desperate to find out what was going on. No one
knew. There were rumours, whispers, but no one knew anything for
sure.

At last someone came and escorted the parents who had children
in the school to a small guest house on the same road. I remember
sitting there with a crowd of people and yet no one was saying
anything, everyone gripped by the same terrible fear. More people
came in, the room was filling up. We talked in whispers. I was sitting
opposite a woman who was a head teacher at a primary school in the
next town. Her son was one of Jamie's best pals and she said she had
heard a rumour that a primary one class was involved, but she didn't
know whether or not it was true. It was starting to get pretty
crowded and I budged up on my chair to share it with a girl I had
been at primary and secondary school with.

Eventually, someone came in and asked all the parents with
children in Mrs Mayor's class to please leave with them. There was a
part of me in that moment that almost collapsed in relief. But the next
second I was feeling so guilty because the woman I'd been sitting with
jumped up and cried: 'That's my daughter's class!' I stood up to go
with her because she was shaking terribly, but we were told that no
one could go except the parents of the children involved. It was
horrendous beyond words.

This had all taken hours and hours. The shootings happened at
9.30am and it was now way beyond lunchtime. It was taking ages to
organise the evacuation of the children in all the other classes. The
authorities needed to make sure they were kept away from the scene
of the gym and shielded from all the police cars and ambulances.

I was finally given the boys at 2.30pm. I was trying to stay calm but
I probably hugged them harder than they have ever been hugged in
their lives. I have to say the school did an unbelievable job because
they managed to get Andy and Jamie out to me together, despite
them being in different classes, and it was obvious that they had
absolutely no idea what had happened. They had simply been told
that a man with a gun had been found in the school. The teachers
had even managed to feed them lunch in their classrooms.

By that time, we had heard that the murderer was this guy Thomas
Hamilton who had run a Boys Club at the primary school and at
Dunblane High School for years. We were all aware who he was.
Andy and Jamie used to go to his club.

So I stopped the car on the way home and explained to them
what had happened. I didn't want them to find out from somebody
else. It was my job to tell them as gently and carefully as I could. To
this day Jamie never talks about it. He never asks any questions and
he never mentioned it again. But Andy said immediately: 'Why would
Mr Hamilton do a thing like that? Why wouldn't he just shoot
himself?' I have never forgotten him saying that. I said: 'I think he must
have just gone mad, Andy. Only a crazy person might do something
like that.'

For days after it happened the children were kept off school and
the town was eerily quiet. If you went out, even for a newspaper,
there were journalists waiting to stop you and ask questions: 'Did you
know so-and-so?' So we stayed home, watching everything we could
on television and still not being able to believe that it had happened
just down the road.

We'd all thought Dunblane was such a safe place. It was. It
is
. Yet
somewhere in our past is this terribly tragedy that doesn't fit in. At
the time, we just did our best to cope. The school was closed for
about a week and when the children finally went back, everything had
changed. Suddenly, you had to sign in and there were many changes
in terms of security. I can't remember now whether the gym had
already been knocked down, but it was eventually turned into a
memorial garden.

The extent of the teachers' ordeal soon became clear. Somebody
told me that the nursery teachers were asked to go in and identify
the bodies of the children who had been shot. Their own teacher had
been killed and many of those children didn't have names on their
gym kit. The only people who would know them, apart from the
parents, were those who had taught them the year before. Can you
imagine anything more terrible and more sad than that?

I still couldn't believe how – with all those children in the school
and with all that furore and upset going on – the teachers had
managed to keep the rest of the children in the classroom fed,
watered and completely unaware of the horror so close to them.
Those teachers saved the children from a million nightmares. Can you
imagine if they had seen something? It could have haunted them for
life. It was a heroic job the teachers did that day, and continued to do
by getting themselves back to work when it was over.

It went round in our minds for a long time afterwards. There had
always been question marks about Hamilton, but for all that he was
an oddball, I never, ever thought he was dangerous. It was only later
when you read things about his collection of guns, that he lived on his
own, ran the Boys Club . . . did you realise the problem was perhaps
there all along.

I'd given him a lift from the Boys club to the train station a few
times because he lived in Stirling and he didn't have a car of his own.
I had actually sat beside him and spoken to him. I didn't know him
well by any means. He was definitely odd and a loner, but we had no
idea that he had the potential to be a murderer.

I think the police had tried to investigate him over the years
because people had expressed concerns, but nobody had ever been
able to prove anything. I think there was an effort to stop him setting
up a boys club somewhere else but he took the case to the local
ombudsman and they overturned the ban. There was obviously a
major investigation later into the failings of the authorities. One
parent, little Sophie North's father, continues to fight an anti-gun
campaign. His story is so tragic because he lost his wife to cancer and
all he had was his beautiful little five-year-old daughter. Suddenly he'd
lost her too in a way you could never imagine.

You still see the parents of the some of the children who were
killed – down the street, at the golf club – trying to get on with their
lives. A few moved away. Not many. The rest of us can never imagine
what it must be like to lose a young child in such a way. It goes
unspoken now. I can't remember the last time I heard anyone talking
about it locally. That doesn't mean it will ever be forgotten.

ANDY:
I have always found it difficult to talk about Dunblane. It is not
something I want to look back on or think about in huge detail. Some
of my friends' brothers and sisters were killed. I have been asked
about it in press conferences from time to time, but it's hard to get
the words right. I can't remember much, but I don't want to sound as
though I am holding anything back. The trouble is I don't have
anything to hold back. I was too young to understand the magnitude
of it. But if I said that, people might think I didn't care.

I have only retained patchy impressions of that day, such as being
in a classroom singing songs. I don't remember which songs exactly,
but I do remember that the school headmaster had told us to go into
a classroom – not our usual classroom – because we'd been on our
way to the gym. That is a pretty devastating thought.

I know I asked my mum lots of questions about it afterwards. We
had eight or nine days off school and I obviously wanted to know why
it happened. The weirdest thing was that we knew the guy. He had
been in my mum's car. It's obviously weird to think you had a
murderer in your car, sitting next to your mum. That is probably
another reason why I don't want to look back at it. It is just so
uncomfortable to think that it was someone we knew from the Boys
Club. We used to go to the club and have fun. Then to find out he's
a murderer was something my brain couldn't cope with.

When you're eight years old and you go on an aeroplane, you
don't have any nerves or fear. You're not scared of anything. Once
you start to get older, you hear about plane crashes, then you
experience turbulence and you begin to feel fear because you understand
a little more about the way the world works. I never minded
flying at all, then after 9/11 I was pretty uncomfortable. It was the
same with the shootings. I was completely naïve and the reality just
went way over my head.

I understand now that the person who did it must have been mad,
but I've never wanted to find out the psychological reasons behind it.
Perhaps it's too close for comfort. I could have been one of those
children.

In the end, I think I decided it was just this freak thing. I think if I
had been fourteen or fifteen, it would have shocked me far more
deeply. Mentally, it would have scarred me. But I was so young, it just
didn't affect me like that.

When we went back to school, it was very different. We had to
use a buzzer to get into the school and key cards to go through
doors. I remember listening all the time to a song released to
commemorate those who were killed. I think it was 'Knock, Knock,
Knocking on Heaven's Door'. Quite a few kids in my school sang the
chorus.
^*
The money from the sale of the song went to a charity to
help rebuild the school.

^*
With Bob Dylan's consent, the song was re-recorded with a new verse written by
Dunblane musician Ted Christopher. The new version has the brothers and sisters
of those killed singing the chorus.

A lot of people say that everything happens for a reason but I can't
believe that. I don't know if what happened that day changed the way
I thought about religion. I think it's great to believe in stuff. I have no
problem with that. But I haven't looked into any particular religion, so
I wouldn't know which one to believe in. I've tried to understand
space and how the world works, but my head starts hurting after
twenty minutes. Quite a few of my friends are religious and that's
absolutely fine with me. I just wish people didn't fight.

I don't really think it was a belief that helped Jamie and me come
through it all. It was the way family, friends, teachers, everyone pulled
together. In some ways, it probably made the town much friendlier
and more polite because of the mutual compassion. It seemed to
make the place stronger.