How does a town like Hungerford, tucked into the Berkshire hills, with its sleepy canal running through it and high street of tea shops and antique arcades, recover from that day in August 1987 when Michael Ryan ran amok with a semi-automatic gun, killing 16 and injuring many others? The memorial to those who died, not in the heart of the town but at the entrance to the football ground, just gives the date and their names (Ryan, who also killed himself, is not mentioned). No one wants Hungerford to be thought of as the place where that tragedy occurred, the first such mass killing in the UK.
‘You don’t need to know what the tragedy was?’ asked Alan Dein. His mission, in Aftermath on Radio 4 (produced by Melvin Rickarby), was to find out how people had carried on after the tragedy and what they learnt from it. ‘I’m not sure,’ said the vicar of the parish church, a newcomer to the town but still aware of his role in dealing with the aftermath, ‘that the crises in our lives need to always define us in a bad way.’
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