When the horror is down your street...

Written because of our situation here, but remembering also the Philpott fire trial whose jury returned a guilty verdict on the same day (2/4/13) as our village murder case.

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Life is going on as normal, ordinary lives behind ordinary front doors, and then all of a sudden life has changed – a tragic event, a missing person, a fire – pain; loss; panic; then the community pulls together. The police are all around, the media hovering in their wake – life in this place, in this street, will never be quite the same again.

Time passes, people adjust to what has happened and hold it with them whilst also getting on with life, because normal life must go on.  Then suddenly the tragedy invades again, an arrest, it was close to home, not stranger danger but death at the hands of those who should have loved.  Time goes on, arrest to charge and finally, finally to trial.

Information flows out from the court, is this really true? Can something like this really be happening in our place, in our street? Weeks of witnesses and lawyers in wigs, then 12 men and women gather to discern the truth.

Guilty! Condemned. An answer at last – this did happen. It happened here. It happened to people we knew, it was done by someone we know.  The media hover to close their stories, tie up the loose ends with a few quotable quotes. Is this the end of the beginning and the beginning of the future for our community?

And what of those who are left? Family living with both loss and treachery? Neighbours who will look out of windows at the reminder of what has happened. Onlookers whose own past horrors are stirred up by events and play and replay in their heads.

Yet in time the world will move on, the newspapers will be shredded, new headlines will move to the top of a Google search, the rhythm of community life will move on. In more time new curtains will hang at those windows, eventually it will just fall into an old story of people long ago.

But until then let us be gentle with the wounds, the healing scars, and memory of those whose lives were taken.