Girlfriend still feels guilt after Lockerbie crash
On 21st December 1988, Tim Burman, 24, boarded a plane to New York, where he was planning to meet his girlfriend. He never made it.Like the other 259 passengers on Pan Am 103, he was killed when the flight was blown up over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 11 more people on the ground.His girlfriend at the time, Rose Grant, who has remained close with his family decades later, still blamed herself.She said: "I think of Tim with love and gratitude, but also guilt. Because he was coming to see me. If he wasn't coming to see me, he wouldn't have been on the plane."
Tim Burman was born in Dunstable in 1964, and his sister Rachel Robertson described him as "the baby of the family".She recalled her brother's love for nature and being outside and said: "He was super smart, athletic, and his passion was the great outdoors. He climbed, he ran, he did road races."She added that a Scouts unit where he lived in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, launched a scheme every year "that enables someone else to follow the passions he has". "It's a bit of a family tradition now not to mourn death and loss but to remember birthdays and happy times instead," she said.The banker was sat in seat 38G on Pan Am 103. His ashes were now in Scotland, where his family lives.
Ms Grant, who has lived in Australia and America, still regularly visits her former boyfriend's family in the UK."I was welcomed into the family with absolute open arms in such difficult circumstances," she said.Speaking to BBC Three Counties Radio, she admitted she had never come to terms with the loss."You get on with your life, you do, you don't think you're going to initially, life has a funny way of pulling you back into the now," she said."But inside it's always been there."Although she has had three children since Mr Burman's death, she still speaks often of him with her family.She added: "My daughter has a picture of Tim on her fridge with all her other important photos... They do know about Tim."
Both women are included in a new documentary for BBC Scotland and BBC iPlayer called Lockerbie: Our Story.It follows a six-part drama commissioned by the BBC and Netflix called The Bombing of Pan Am 103."The family members of everybody on that plane are getting older with time," Ms Robertson said."In the not-too-distant future, who's going to be around to tell that story?"In the drama, Tim is played by Cameron Mullane, who coincidentally is the same age the banker was in 1988.The actor, making his television debut, is from Luton - a town between Dunstable, where Tim was born, and Harpenden, where he lived for a time.He said: "I feel very privileged to give that performance to Tim."To think that he's my age and his life was cut short is really quite sobering."
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