Encountering Lockerbie
(Lockerbie has existed since at least the days of Viking in the period around 900. The name (originally "Loc-hard's by") means Lockard Town in Old Norse.)
December 21, 1988. The 11 o’clock news. “a tiny black and white screen. Flames in the darkness. A town on fire. Sirens and hoses. The reporter with a microphone in the foreground trying to describe chaos.”
Then a voice on the phone. “Midnight. “Is this Tony Hawkins’ wife?” “No. This is his widow” It was a nervous young woman trying to be tactful. “I’m calling from Pan Am. We wanted to make certain before anyone called officially.” “Thank goodness I didn’t learn from official sources.”
“We’re providing flights for people to attend funerals, close family. If you want to go to Lockerbie, we are providing free flights to Lockerbie.”
“I can’t think of a place in the universe I’d rather not be than Lockerbie.”
Then another phone call, this time from another Pan Am widow on January 25, five days before a special Mass we had all been invited to at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on a designated Day of Prayer for the victims of the tragedy. Pat Simpson had gone to Lockerbie. She was there on January 6, the day I buried my husband.
“It was dark and cold and crowded. People came from all over Scotland to help. It was very organized…They flew us from London to Scotland and then provided a free bus service to take us to stay in towns nearby. There weren’t any rooms to be had in Lockerbie. A free bus service was arranged by the volunteers to take us back and forth each day. “ …
She said that the police had taken her to see the place where her husband’s body was found. She and her daughter walked around the pasture strewing flowers and sticking them into hedgerows and fence posts so the cows wouldn’t get them.
I imagined the two women, their arms cradling long stemmed flowers, moving in straight lines across a stone-walled, snow-filled pasture, slowly and gracefully removing a stalk at a time from their arms and carefully releasing each flower into the air, the flowers floating to the ground, dancers in slow motion….
And then in August, 1989, I went to Lockerbie with my 6 1/2 year old son, Alan. Though Pan Am continued to offer free flights to the British Isles, I just couldn’t walk onto a plane that carried the Pan Am logo, but I willingly accepted their First -class tickets good for three weeks and reservations at the Dryfesdale Hotel in Lockerbie…
Lockerbie was a stop like any other. A large white sign on the side of a grey stone wall announced our destination: ScotRail’s bright red logo, two birds flying in opposite directions one above the other, flew above three words in blue letters: Welcome to Lockerbie. Welcome to Coventry. Welcome to Dresden. Welcome to Guernica. Welcome to the site of the largest mass murder on British soil, the worst terrorist atrocity in aviation history, the headquarters of the biggest murder investigation in British history.”
Lockerbie was a neat study in browns, greys and brick red, with tall church and town hall towers. Eight months after the disaster, the shattered houses had been rebuilt. The crater -- where a wing smashed into Sherwood Crescent , leaving a scorched pit the shape of a ship’s keel, two streets long, destroying two houses, killing seven people -- had become a green oval lawn. We visited the Garden of Remembrance in the Dryfesdale Cemetery, In Memory of Those Who Lost Their Lives In The Lockerbie Air Disaster.
During this first of three times I visited Lockerbie with my son, I began to comprehend what the people of this market town had suffered, but it wasn’t until I saw “Small Acts of Love” by Frances Poet, at the Citizens theatre in Glasgow, in September 2025, that I was transported to the town itself, thirty seven years ago, on an ordinary December night, anticipating Christmas, before a plane fell from the sky like a meteor, setting Lockerbie on fire.
Lockerbie is the distorted mirror image of Brigadoon, another town in Scotland, a romantic creation, arising from the mists every one hundred years, tempting a dissatisfied American businessman to escape his meaningless existence, by falling in love with it and escaping his responsibilities by disappearing into the mists himself . Lockerbie re-emerges every year on the twenty first day of December to tear open our collective wounds and returns each of us to that ghastly night.
In the darkness of the Citizens Theatre in the center of the orchestra, I sat next to my 42 and a half year old son, each of us looking straight ahead at the stage, while our arms pressed tightly one against the other. Thirty seven years ago, we did not experience what happened in Lockerbie. This reenactment brought us as close as it could ever be possible to that reality.
Any American family and any Scottish family directly affected by Pan Am 103, was invited by the theater to attend a performance on the evening of September 20 as their guests. One Scottish young man, told me that though he wasn’t from Lockerbie, nor did he know anyone, it didn’t matter. Certainly every person in Scotland is, or should recognize they are connected. He wasn’t satisfied with what he had said, and returned after the play was finished, “What is that quotation from John Donne? No man is an island. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. Lockerbie tolls for each of us.”