THEN THE WORLD I KNEW ENDED
I was at home where I should have been safe...
does not think that helped: “It’s a different part of the country.
“We were all deeply traumatised but you couldn’t talk about it with anyone.
“I didn’t want to stand out and be a freak, I wanted to be invisible.
“So you internalise. I feel if we had stayed in Lockerbie I might have had a very different outlook.
“I wouldn’t have stood out in school as everybody was from Lockerbie. There was a lot more help on hand. Lots was done for the people in the town that we didn’t necessarily get, because we weren’t in the town anymore.
“I know from going back and talking to people that they don’t have the same reaction to the disaster that I have.
“They can talk about it in casual conversation, but that would make my stomach sink and I’d feel sick.
“It’s everyday for them because they continued living there.”
Although this December will mark 35 years since the attack, Helen still has nightmares. “Not every night, but fairly often.
“I might have strange dreams several nights on the trot. Sometimes I don’t know what I’ve dreamt – I just wake up in a cold sweat, terrified. I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I’ve been sobbing. Sometimes I have dreams when I’m about to be killed by a stranger.
“In the past few years I’ve dreamt I’m seeing an aircraft in the sky and it’s coming down a distance away and I’m going ‘Oh my God, that’s going to crash, we need to run’.
“People go, ‘no, it’s miles away’ and I say ‘You don’t understand how far the bits can go.’ This is to do with PTSD as well.”
SHE SAID part of her feared that a new drama about the outrage could be sensationalised. She said: “What happens to the people affected by it who are then retraumatised? I always worry these things won’t be very good.
“I worry they wouldn’t be able to capture the real feeling of the place and it may end up being overly sentimental, and possibly a bit ‘too American’.
“The story speaks for itself – it doesn’t need sensationalising.
“These programmes focus on the victims’ families, and yes, they’re the ones who came off worst as they lost loved ones – you don’t get over that. But there were more people destroyed by the disaster.
“You didn’t need to lose somebody you loved to be affected by it for the rest of your life.
“Talk to the farmers up in the fields who were carrying bodies – they’ll never get over that.
“Talk to the service people that were involved afterwards – and the people there on the ground when it happened.
“I was nine years old at home where I should have been safe – and the world I knew ended.”
But she said she recognised the significance of Lockerbie to the nation’s psyche.
She said: “I could choose not to watch this series, but you can’t get away from it being discussed.
“Anytime there’s a Lockerbie documentary I find it difficult. I usually record it and watch it when I can cope with it, on my own – it can be overwhelming.
“Selfishly I feel like it’s my private terror attack and I don’t really want it to be probed.
“That’s the conflict inside when any of these things happen. I think ‘leave it alone’, then another part of me is saying, ‘No don’t’.
“I don’t think the disaster should ever be forgotten because it was a colossal act of terrorism – the biggest terror attack on Britain.
“People need to remember this as it could easily happen again.”