firsthand accounts
Lockerbie: Our Story
Following on from my post last week about the dramatisation of the Lockerbie disaster, it seems only right to draw attention to the reality for families and friends.
This week BBC2 aired a programme called Lockerbie: Our Story, in which loved ones remember both the incident and the individual people who lost their lives in the UK’s worst terrorist attack. It’s profoundly moving.
The clips come from far and wide, reflecting the diversity of the passengers who occupied the seats on that ill-fated plane. A skeleton picture of the Pan Am 103 flight shows which seats the different people were allocated; bringing to life those innocent men, women and children walking down the aisle, stashing their cases, their Christmas gifts, into overhead lockers, strapping thermselves into those specific seats. And in between the stories that same eerie skeleton 747 is shown roaring into a dark sky unknowingly bound for disaster.
The interviews with parents, siblings, sons, daughters, girlfriends, friends, capture eloquently the devastation for those awaiting their loved ones for Christmas, seeing the 9 o’clock news, or phoning the airline for an update on timings only to be told, ‘That flight will not be landing …’ Even listening second-hand, the stunning horror is palpable. And the ongoing grief and loss since that fateful day over four decades ago is quietly but effectively conveyed, more in the brave acceptance than any overt display of emotion.
Though there is the occasional reference to the politics behind the catastrophe, and to the fact that numerous warnings were received by the authorities that this flight was the target for a terrorist attack, leading those in the know to transfer their tickets to other flights, the overwhelming thrust of the programme is how much the bereaved want their loved one’s memories not to be tainted or overwhelmed by the way they died. They were so much more than the event that killed therm. And those left behind deeply want good to prevail, not evil.