Lockerbie anniversary:'˜It was so much worse than we ever imagined'

Police gather evidence from the area surrounding the Borders town of Lockerbie, where Pan Am flight 103, a 747 Jumbo jet, crashed after a bomb exploded on board in December 1988.

The overriding memory that I have of Lockerbie is of a town that died. Like something in a science fiction film, the streets were empty, except for a few ashen-faced locals and a lot of reporters, standing on street corners, trying to get reception on new-fangled mobile telephones the size and weight of a brick.

But those memories originate in the days after the disaster. My memories of the night are different. I have not thought about them for years. But I remember everything clearly now.

It was just a few days before Christmas, and the office was quiet when Jim Johnston, a mild-mannered reporter, took that first phone call to say a plane had crashed.

We used to get crazy calls all the time. There was the time someone saw an alien spacecraft. Where? In the sky. And where are you? In the phonebox. And where is the phonebox? In the grounds of the hospital.

We checked everything out, but it was too early to get anything from the police press office. Then we got a second call from someone local to say not only had a plane crashed, but there had also been a huge explosion. I vividly remember us speculating that a light private plane must have hit a petrol station or something like that. We had no idea how wrong we were.

The duty news editor – I am pretty sure it was future Scotsman editor Jim Seaton – asked me to drive down to Lockerbie to find out exactly what was happening.

I never made it. Not that night anyway.

First of all, I needed a car. The Scotsman offices were on North Bridge in those days. I had to get keys for the garages in Calton Road, about 15 minutes walk away. I had to unlock the security gate, get the car out, return the garage keys to The Scotsman offices and then drive the 75 miles down through West Linton and Biggar, keeping in contact with the news desk, while being dependent on public telephones, the location of which were entirely unknown to me.

I managed to phone two or three times. News was filtering out – something much worse than we ever imagined had happened; not only had a plane crashed, but it was an airliner and it had come down right on top of the town. However, there was no talk of terrorism then.

Traffic was heavy. And then it stopped. Completely. The town was cordoned off. And I was not even anywhere near the roadblocks. It was late and I was still ten miles or so from Lockerbie. I was in the wrong place – neither in the town, nor in the office, where the story was being pieced together.

I was tired, not just physically tired, but emotionally tired. I had spearheaded coverage of the Piper Alpha disaster just a few months earlier – 167 dead. And I had a new baby son at home. And I was doing no good sitting in a traffic jam. Was there another road into Lockerbie? No, all blocked. Jim told me to come home. Maybe I agreed too readily.

Later I heard of another reporter, who gave up his car and tramped across the countryside towards the town. And as day began to break, he found himself stumbling through a field and the shapes around him began to take a more definite form. He was surrounded by the passengers of Pan Am Flight 103.

He never made it either.