INCCCCC – BBC News

Later that night, the clear-up began. Fifteen vehicles were taken away for forensic examination. Seventy-eight bullet holes were found.

Mrs Pascoe, safe with her neighbours in a community centre, was playing cards with the children to distract them from the horror outside.

At about 02:00 she looked out of the window and saw the bodies from South View being collected and driven away.

Later, police told her they believed her life had been saved by the fact she'd kept her curtains drawn as she pottered about, doing her housework in her nightgown.

She was still wearing it, soaked now with Lisa Mildenhall's blood, when she was finally allowed back home.

In the ambulance on the way to hospital in Swindon, Ivor Jackson's heart had twice stopped beating.

He had lost lots of blood, had bullets in his head and chest, his lung had been shot through and his arm was barely attached to his body.

He needed numerous operations and still suffers, both physically and mentally.

His wife, who had a bullet in her spine, was not expected to walk again.

It's testament to her own strength of mind that she did.

"I just thought to myself, I'm a mother. I need to get better and I will walk again. I knew I had to be the strong one of the family, I knew Ivor wouldn't cope."

Even now Mr Jackson has not been back to South View. He cannot even pass the end of the road.

He can barely speak about his friend, George White.

"He was a good man. We were good friends," he says.

"Ill never forget what I saw that day, what happened to him, but I can't tell you.

"Nothing's been right since."

The Jacksons had loved their home on South View, with its large garden, and were in the process of buying it.

But, although the house was cleaned and modernised and made available for them, they could not bear to return.

The couple and their two grown-up sons now live in a two-bedroom council house a few streets away.

"After what happened, lots of people split up," says Ivor Jackson. "They couldnt cope. But we've stuck by each other."

The couple have been married for 60 years and celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary in January.

"We got a letter from the Queen," Mr Jackson adds. "My daughter arranged it."

The letter, complete with golden tassel, is still in its recorded delivery envelope and is kept in a basket in the Jacksons' kitchen.

They keep meaning to frame it and put it up on the wall.

Their younger son Trevor, who had been 18 in 1987, is being treated for PTSD while his older brother Peter, who was in the same year as Ryan at school, refuses to talk about that day.

If it comes up, he leaves the room or goes to sit in the greenhouse.

Trevor Jackson had first heard of the shootings when a colleague asked: "What's happened to your parents?"

He returned to South View to find bodies on the ground and was asked by police to identify them.

Then he and his brother Peter went into their home, released the dogs from the cupboard, and started to clean the blood and glass from their kitchen.

As the brothers were cleaning up, a reporter burst in. There was a police guard on the front door so he had sneaked through the garden and into the house through the back door.

Another reporter followed their sister home from the hospital.

I just broke down in tears."

Press intrusion is something the Jacksons continue to feel very strongly about. They usually hang up if a journalist approaches them and refuse to have their photograph taken in connection with the shooting.

Similarly the Whitings, for years, simply drew their curtains and refused to answer the door.

When, in March 1996 Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 schoolchildren and their teacher in the Stirling town of Dunblane, Trevor Wainwright decided to write to the Scottish police.

He explained who he was and his experience, and offered sympathy. Then he tore his heartfelt letter up.

"I just thought: 'They dont want outsiders. They'll do what we did. The help will come from within the community'.

"Writing the letter did me good, but I don't think it would have helped the people of Dunblane."

A few days after the murders, Mr Wainwright - who had carried out the routine checks for Ryan's firearms licence - was astonished to see the Today newspapers front page splash.

"PC Signs Own Fathers Death Warrant".

"I just broke down in tears," Mr Wainwright says.

"It hit at the heart of my professionalism, of everything I'd ever done for the town. I probably did three or four of these checks a week.

"It was just routine. Hungerford is a big shooting area, farmers and gun clubs and that sort of thing. I mean, there's no legitimate reason anyone would need to have a Kalashnikov - but it was legal.

"There was a picture of my dad, dead in a car with a blanket over him.

"And I kept thinking, if it was true that I'd signed my dad's death warrant, it meant I'd also signed all those other people's too. At the time, the idea crucified me.

"At the hospital, where my mum was, everyone who'd been shot had been put into the same ward. I was due to go and visit her, but I thought I couldn't.

"I thought: 'How the hell can I go and see her if they're all blaming me?'

"She told me to get my arse straight down there. No-one blamed me."

He says he was helped by a discovery made at the post-mortem examination - that his father had developed lung cancer.

"If he had the choice - to die from a horrible disease like that, or be shot, I know he'd choose the bullet. Every single time."

He is still haunted, he says, by the photograph of his father dead in his car. If there is a shooting elsewhere in the world, he braces himself for his phone to ring.

"As soon as there's been a shooting, some journalist will call.

"And I hear the arguments of the gun lobby, who want to preserve the right to bear arms, and I think: 'You should come here and see what guns did to Hungerford.'"

The Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988 was passed in the wake of the massacre. It banned the ownership of semi-automatic firearms and pump-action weapons and made registration mandatory for shotgun owners.

A Thames Valley Police report to the Home Office found that - given the limitations imposed by the remote location and the difficulties in radio and telephone communication - the force's response "went well".

The local police station had only two working phone lines that day and the police helicopter was being repaired, delaying its deployment.

Further delays were caused by the firearms squad being in training about 40 miles away.

The report also said the operation was hampered by press helicopters making so much noise it was difficult for police on the ground to hear or relay instructions.

Hungerford is a pretty canalside town famous for its antiques shops and upmarket boutiques.

Its inhabitants refer to the shooting as "The Tragedy", almost as if it were a natural disaster.

The names of the 16 people who were killed are listed on a stone set into the wall of the town's war memorial garden, with no mention of how they died.

The town had long been a tourist destination. After the murders, though, visitors were less satisfied by remaining in the attractive main street.

"The tourist buses would just park where they usually did and then people used to come up here on foot," Trevor Jackson says.

"They were looking for bullet holes and spent shell cases to collect. Whenever they asked me where it all happened I'd say it was down the A4. Sent them away."

The description of the shootings as a "tragedy" doesnt sit well with Mrs Jackson.

"It was a massacre," she says. "Theres no two ways about it.

"We cope by taking every day as it comes. It's difficult. Healthwise, we're struggling.

"Ivor has very limited mobility, and his lungs are damaged from the bullet. I still get dreadful pain in my back. Trevor can't move out to his own place.

"It hasn't got any easier. Were just waiting until life gets back to normal.

"It hasn't happened yet."

Originally posted here:

INCCCCC - BBC News