Jackie and Gilly Moffat are residents of Lockerbie, and at the time of the terrorist attack they had only recently moved out of their home in Sherwood Crescent. Jackie was one of the women who ended up working in the school kitchens to ensure that the first responders were kept well fed.

Her youngest daughter, Gilly, was nine years old at the time of the bombing and has suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ever since. 

Jackie and Gilly begin their story with describing the scene as they left their house following the fuselage crashing into a row of houses just a couple of hundred yards from their own front door.

The whole of Sherwood Crescent was filled with flames and smoke, and the local residents found themselves disorientated. 

Having only recently moved out of Sherwood Crescent themselves, Jackie and Gilly knew almost every resident on the street. One of Jackie’s uncles lived in the nearby village of Eaglesfield and couldn’t drive anywhere close to Lockerbie due to the amount of traffic jamming the roads. He walked five miles to see if his relatives had survived.

Jackie’s husband, Alistair, also had close relatives who lived in Sherwood Crescent.

The Moffat family felt a mixture of emotions when they realised that they could have quite easily been included in the list of people who had been killed. When they lived in Sherwood Crescent, Jackie and her husband had converted the attic space into a bedroom for their two children.

When they caught sight of their former home, they noticed that the entire roof—where their children’s bedroom had previously been—was missing.

All means of communication had been wiped out by the impact of the plane and debris crashing at multiple sites across the town. Many of Jackie’s close family members, including her dad, lived in New Zealand.

They were receiving inaccurate and confusing information 12,000 miles away, and they believed that Jackie and her family had been killed in the bombing.

On the morning of 22nd December, the family wanted to help in any way they could. Alistair owned a shop in the centre of Lockerbie, and opened up for anybody who needed essentials. Meanwhile, Jackie used her skills as a home economics teacher to make meals for all of the emergency responders who were working across the town and in the fields surrounding Lockerbie. 

The local secondary school was used as a command centre and first responders HQ, where police, firefighters, emergency workers and military personnel could have a well deserved rest and a warm meal. 

The community in Lockerbie wanted to support the rescue teams and the locals who had lost loved ones. Residents baked cakes, prepared hot drinks, provided warm clothing—anything that could help people to feel comforted in the midst of such a tragedy. 

This was an unprecedented situation, and nobody in Lockerbie had been prepared to deal with anything on this scale. Jackie and Gilly felt their was a lack of leadership, and the community took it upon themselves to do what they could.

Jackie knew all of those who had been killed on the ground in Lockerbie; and it transpired that Gilly would go on to marry a man whose relatives were two of those murdered.

As the weeks passed by, the worldwide media interest in the bombing had brought some unwelcome visitors to the town. Some members of the media had been extremely intrusive and acted in appalling ways towards the townsfolk.

There were also incidents of petty crime with thieves stealing from homes and buildings. 

Gilly vividly recalls feeling traumatised as a nine-year-old child who had witnessed something so horrific. In the months following the attack, she struggled at school and at home—suffering from crippling episodes of terror and flashbacks.

There was very little emotional support offered to those who had been affected by the attack. Jackie remembers being invited to just one facilitated meeting to help people manage their stress. 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is now a well recognised condition, and it is widely known that hundreds of people who were present in Lockerbie around the time of the bombing have suffered from mental health problems in some way.

Gilly in particular has suffered with long-term emotional stress and acknowledges that the bombing has had a detrimental impact on her life.

Both Gilly and Jackie now accept that their lives were changed forever because of what happened on December 21, 1988.