Alone beside the well from which all tears are drawn

It was personified in the brave but quivering figure of George Robertson, a decent man always, now speaking for the community in which he lives, a man who had argued in his own home with Thomas Hamilton but who knew, in this age when personal freedom seems to be paramount, that nothing much could have been done in advance to thwart this mass murderer. It is the price we pay for an open society.

So far it has been superfluous to mention the name of Dunblane, that charming little town with its cathedral, its hydropathic hotel on the hill, and the splendour of its marvellous school for Servicemen’s children.

The only problem with Dunblane used to be its bottleneck of traffic, until they built a fine motorway which now by-passes the town and takes you streaking towards Perth.

But Dunblane will be by-passed no more. For the worst possible reasons it will take its place alongside Lockerbie as the town whose very name-plate sends a shudder down your spine.

Together they will even take their place alongside the assassination of President Kennedy for that rarity in human experience of remembering exactly where you were when first you heard the news.

On this dire day we sought the precise minute of evil and tried to pinpoint what we were doing. What were we doing five minutes earlier, when those children had a lifetime ahead of them? All then was normal. How could we know that hell was only minutes away?

We gathered in huddles, talked with disbelief and fell silent. Suddenly I remembered neighbours whose grandchildren lived near Dunblane. Frantic phone calls. Yes, they had dashed to be with their daughter and, yes, the children were in the school. But they were safe. I gathered that the boy saw the gunman passing his classroom on the way to the gym.

In a massacre like this we are ill-equipped to handle our emotions. In some ways the human psyche prefers a living murderer upon whom to vent its anger. For sure we all need an outlet for that uncontainable flood of feeling.

We need scapegoats. No matter what the nature of the tragedy, there must always be someone to blame. At the very least we need constructive grief – pursuing a campaign, seeking to change the law, as happened with American parents after Lockerbie when they took their case about aviation security to the White House and achieved results.

Yet, apart from some change in gun laws, the inescapable if unpalatable truth is that nothing, absolutely nothing, was likely to have prevented the massacre of Dunblane. If, for example, the police had gained a conviction on their suspicions about Thomas Hamilton, the certainty is that he would have been out of jail in due course, ranting all the more about society’s rejection, still hell-bent on evening the score.

As it was, not only were the police cautious in their deliberations but there were scores of people – no doubt some calling for action today – who actually signed petitions in support of Hamilton when he was refused permission to run his dubious boys’ clubs in public halls. We cannot have it all ways.

Yet people, in their natural desire to vent feeling, do expostulate in a manner which owes more to gesture than substance. Plainly, short of an armed guard on every school in the land – and what kind of an unnerving nonsense for children would that be? – there is no defence against a madman.

So we return our thoughts to Dunblane, afraid of our own subconscious reconstructions: Hamilton setting out from his home, a cheery wave to a neighbour, no doubt planning to go out in a blaze of suicidal drama.

There was once a faith to cushion us from the unbearable but, by and large, that has gone. Now we are on our own, seeking the hands of one another. Maybe this has changed us all a little, at least for a time. Yet before long the families will hear distant laughter on the wing of an April evening and wonder how that emotion can be stirred so soon.

The world will have turned its grief to a memory, leaving only the nearest and dearest to that increasing ache of loneliness. If and when they do find the heart to laugh again, it will take them to the brink of that well from which all tears are drawn, where the dividing line is hard to find.

The fact is that the antics of an evil creature have virtually ended all prospect of a happy life for hundreds of people. They will find a new level of existence of course. But the massacre is much more widespread than we know.