Small Acts of Love: A note from Frances Poet

I believe in the importance of talking about our dead. 

I learnt this from my uncle who lost his only son, Richard Rosthorn, in a car crash just before his sixteenth birthday. I remember my uncle joining us for Christmas just weeks later. He watched me and my brother open our gifts on Christmas day but his grief didn’t close him off from us. It was open and generous. Richard’s life was to be celebrated, and we wouldn’t let the pain of his death force us to forget him. 

This was four years after my uncle visited Lockerbie as a journalist. He claims that he was the first reporter to arrive with a mobile phone. I remember him returning home that Christmas too; later than expected and with an air of something around him that I didn’t recognise. He didn’t talk to me about Lockerbie and all I knew of the incident was the terrifying story I’d heard on my dad’s radio about Steven Flannigan, the fourteen-year-old boy who lost his family and home when he stepped out to fix his sister’s bike. 

When Ricky Ross and I started the process of researching a project about the compassionate acts that emerged from the horror, I didn’t know how much of the process would involve getting to know people who died when I was nine years old. The stories shared revealed young people with great vitality, talent, glorious silliness, and wisdom above their years, as well as much-loved husbands and fathers whose loss would devastate families. I quickly realised that we couldn’t fictionalise this piece. We were never going to be able to name all two hundred and seventy people that died but we could introduce an audience to those we had come to know through their families. We had to name them, in order to memorialise them. 

This made things somewhat complicated. To put words into the mouths of real people and their lost loved ones would require a long and painstaking process of gaining consent, one with no guarantees that we would have a play we could present at the end. So it was with great trepidation that after three years of development, checking in with the contributors regularly, we finally sent them a draft to read. We prepared ourselves to lose at least one or two of our narrative strands but, to our great relief, every single contributor gave us their blessing. 

I noticed more reticence from the Lockerbie people, who share their painful stories very carefully, not because they want to but because they feel duty bound to do so. We were lucky to find Colin Dorrance when he was already becoming evangelical about the importance of sharing these stories. His ceaseless support has been invaluable. This journey began for him when his daughter, Claire (and later his son, Andrew) became a Lockerbie scholar at Syracuse University. I hadn’t had any direct contact with Claire before writing and sharing the script. Having studied Theatre Studies at Glasgow University, Claire dreamt she might one day have something performed on the Citizens Theatre stage but never imagined she would be portrayed as a character on it. Fortunately, she was happy with her portrayal though she found it hilariously inaccurate that she would ever go to her father for help packing her case.

Some of the Lockerbie contributors were justifiably guarded. Moira Shearer and Josephine Donaldson expressed concerns about scenes I had written, involving them, that didn’t reflect the truth of who they were with at the moment of the incident or had them talking to people they didn’t know in the aftermath. Liz Kungu, who was sharing her late-ex husband Moses’s experiences, as well as her own, was similarly unsure about the way I introduced her character. All three, quite rightly, wanted to be sure I was telling the story accurately. Liz’s lines were adjusted and Moira and Josephine were reassured that a cast of forty characters being played by fourteen actors was as vast as we could manage.

The fictionalising in this piece has all been about distilling the stories people told us into a form that could be shared. Only three of the named characters are invented; soldiers Kelly and Green and journalist, Angie. These characters were built from Ricky’s interview with Tom McBride, a young soldier from the Royal Highland Fusiliers and the many journalists we spoke to. Angie incorporates my uncle’s obsession with charging his hulking Panasonic C50 mobile phone, his misunderstanding of the scale of the disaster and his trip to Annan Library to discover the weight of a jumbo jet. Angie’s story also includes the puncture from bits of plane debris that Lorraine Kelly experienced on arrival into Lockerbie; the pub full of people sitting in eerie silence recounted by Alan Little; and local Lockerbie journalist, Willie Johnston’s awe at Alastair Stewart’s urging that they were writing “history” tonight. 

The most extraordinary elements within the piece are all true. The enduring bonds of friendship between these two communities were indeed forged in the finding of bodies or belongings. The Ciullas count the Connells as family. The Otenaseks keep in regular contact with Peter Giesecke and his wife. Colin’s experience of having his children represent their town as Lockerbie scholars opened him up to welcoming hundreds of visitors to Lockerbie, including Renee Boulanger who he sheltered with an umbrella in just the way his character describes. There was a Halloween wedding where many of the Pan Am 103 families gathered and felt they were able to laugh together for the first time. Father Keegans officiated at this wedding, and that of Kara Monetti Weipz, who went on to name her child after him in recognition of his friendship. And Anna Marie Miazga fell in love and had a beautiful partnership with the ambulance man who found her daughter’s body. 

When it comes to the acts of kindness shown by the people of Lockerbie and the resilience and courage of the American families who accepted these gifts with open hearts, no fictional embellishment has been required. I’m only glad I’ve been given this opportunity to share these stories and name some of the souls I’ve grown to care deeply about along the way. 

– Frances Poet