My Lockerbie campaigner father was so obsessed with his dead daughter. But he had a living one too... me: Sister of victim remembers life before terror attack that killed 270 - and how family life was forever changed by global interest in their story

On the wall opposite their parents' bed is a portrait of Cathy Swire's big sister Flora. For the majority of Cathy's life, it has been the first thing they see in the morning and the last thing they see at night.

It was painted soon after Flora's death, when she was just 23. Cathy, not yet 21, had been with Flora before she died, waving her off at Heathrow before she boarded a flight to New York to spend the Christmas of 1988 with her boyfriend.

The Pan Am Flight 103 plane exploded 38 minutes after take-off. A bomb in the hold killed all 259 on board, and a further 11 people on the ground in the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history, and Cathy describes the hell that rained down on her family as their own 'Hiroshima or Nagasaki'. You get the sense that the bomb might as well have exploded under Cathy's own feet. 'Flora and I were woven together anyway, but I do feel that when someone that close dies, you die with them,' she says.

She tells me that, 35 years on, she still sleeps with the cuddly toy that was her sister's last 'silly and childish' present to her, given before Flora boarded that flight. 'I miss the silliness more than anything,' Cathy says.

Flora's death was, and still is, the subject of a global focus. As we speak the cameras are rolling on a new drama series for Sky about the Lockerbie disaster.

Cathy Swire (pictured) had been with Flora before she died, waving her off at Heathrow before she boarded a flight to New York to spend the Christmas of 1988 with her boyfriend

The Pan Am Flight 103 plane exploded 38 minutes after take-off. A bomb in the hold killed all 259 on board, and a further 11 people on the ground in the Scottish town of Lockerbie. Pictured: A police officer walking near the nose of the Pan Am flight 103 in 1988

It is based on Cathy's father's account of their trauma. Colin Firth, who will play him, has been pictured striding around a debris-strewn set in Scotland.

Cathy will not be watching. 'That way lies madness,' she says, admitting that every time the images of that crumpled aeroplane are shown, 'it is like losing Flora all over again'.

Their father, retired GP Jim Swire, emerged as an early spokesman for all of those bereaved by the disaster. He has devoted the past 35 years to a very public campaign for justice, never accepting that the Libyan national Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who was jailed for the attack in 2001 and died in 2012, was the culprit.

The pursuit has taken him to the ends of the earth (almost literally, given that he famously held a secret meeting with Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi in the desert), and he is still looking, hence his continued courting of TV crews.

Dr Swire always thought the portrait of Flora — painted by her boyfriend's father, who was a professional artist — caught his eldest daughter's personality, and would often pose by it for photographs.

Yet Cathy is not so keen on it. She tells me it leaves her cold, and always has. It is such a distortion of the Flora she remembers that she finds it painful.

'It's a very idealised portrait of her, not quite how she looked. It's extremely mythical. She's wearing a long dress and carrying flowers. It could almost have been on a church mural.' She feels uncomfortable about all attempts to turn her adored sister into something she was not.

In truth, it goes further. She has never read her father's book — regarded as the definitive account of Flora's life and death — because the excerpts she did see 'presented a narrative about our family that was so far removed from our lived reality'.

Did she ever tell her parents she hated the image? 'Not for about 25 years, but I always felt it,' she says. How difficult it must be to have lived in a house where memories differ so much. Moreso, to be the living daughter in a house where the dead one has such a presence.

Cathy is a poet. She says the subject of where the dead end and the living begin is one that she has spent three decades trying to work out.

'It takes maybe a lot of experience to know how much the living matter,' she says. 'I don't mean to apportion blame, but I think that's what mourning is, really. It's a turning away from the living and entering the world of the dead. I had to sort of work out for myself that I was still alive.'

In the immediate aftermath, just as her father was finding his voice on a global platform, Cathy quite literally lost hers.

For a long time, she struggled to actually speak. 'I know now that it's a common result of trauma, akin to shellshock. It was common in World War II.'

Now she has found her voice. 

Flora's death was, and still is, the subject of a global focus. As we speak the cameras are rolling on a new drama series for Sky about the Lockerbie disaster. Pictured: Cathy's sister Flora 

Their father, retired GP Jim Swire (pictured), emerged as an early spokesman for all of those bereaved by the disaste

On the BBC Radio 4 show Ramblings two years ago, she talked to presenter Clare Balding about her first poetry collection, Soil, with its theme of how trauma is translated by landscape. She mentioned that her sister had died, 'but I never mentioned Lockerbie'. Now, though, she has written a book — part memoir, part poetry collection — that dares to go there.

Flame, Ash, Feather: A Dozen Eggs From Lockerbie is a slim volume which could be dismissed as sometimes whimsical musings on keeping chickens (her therapy, she agrees) but is also a howl of anguish, an account (albeit an often coded one) of navigating grief while living in a house 'bought with my sister's compensation money, paid for by the defunct Libyan government'.

'Blood money,' she calls it. 'I hold my hands up to that, and there was massive conflict about whether to accept it.'

There has been conflict, too, about whether to even do this interview, such is her abhorrence of her parents' 'public performance', which, she writes, 'I now understand as a kind of resistance to mourning'.

She suggests in the book that, while it was her sister's death that 'blew our family apart', her father's way of remembering and honouring her sister also caused her trauma. His public 'shouting', she says, took priority over her need to mourn quietly.

Today she says his relentless campaigning — with their home turned into his command centre — actually made her leave home.

'I lost not just my sister but my home. Some days I literally could not get up the drive because of the number of media vans there. We would have media people staying at the house.

'A few years after Flora died I went to Canada to do post-grad studies. I told my father that I was leaving the continent because I found the media exposure so difficult. There was a white rage from him, and he disappeared for an entire day.'

She did not have that conversation again. 'You didn't dare. There were huge amounts of fear, and this sense that it was my father's prerogative to continue his campaign, and to tell his story in exactly the way he wanted. It was up to the rest of us to accommodate that.'

Today she feels hurt that her needs were seemingly dismissed. 'I have two children now whom I love completely,' she says. 'If I lost one of them, I cannot imagine not minding much about the other.'

What would Flora make of her 'chicken book', as she calls it? 'I think it would make her laugh. But she would have understood the rage underneath.'

The Swire children (there is also a younger brother, William) grew up in Gloucestershire where Dr Swire was a GP. There was also a holiday home on the Isle of Skye, 'where my happiest memories are of playing castles on the beach with Flora'.

Today she says his relentless campaigning — with their home turned into his command centre — actually made her leave home. Pictured: A police car pictured nearby the plane 

The wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 after a bomb attack in-flight on December 21 1988

Flora was the more 'grounded' one, whereas she was 'the imaginative one, always up in the air'. Flora was opinionated, 'a real feminist', feisty and wonderfully creative. 'She could look at a dress and be able to make it,' Cathy says.

She talks of them as a single entity, 'woven together with our mother, who provided the emotional stability'. Cathy idolised her sister. 'I remember sneaking into her room and trying on her clothes,' she says.

Her tone changes when she talks of her father. 'He was quite absent in our childhoods.'

Physically or emotionally?

'Both. It was partly his own upbringing in the north of Scotland. He was sent away to school when he was six, which I think gave him a highly evolved sense of public duty but no sense of connectivity or holistic concern.'

Her book seems heavy on social commentary about the patriarchy. She says she spent years observing her chickens and noting how the aggressive cockerels would dominate. Cathy's own marriage was clearly unhappy and ended acrimoniously, but her parents' marriage, when she talks directly of it, is also depicted as troubled.

She declines to elaborate, perhaps aware that her family ties are already strained, but she challenges her father's account of them as the perfect family.

'There is a very big gap between what has been shown and what I have lived,' she says.

By 1988 Cathy was in her second year at Oxford, studying English, and Flora had finished her medical degree and embarked on neurology training in London, where she had a bedsit.

Flora's boyfriend Hart, a fellow medic, had returned to his native New York and she had promised to visit him for Christmas.

Flora had told Cathy she could have the keys to her bedsit in her absence, so she travelled to London. They spent the night before the flight sharing a bed, as they had often done in childhood.

The following evening they headed to Heathrow together. 'When you go over events like this afterwards, they slow down and there is this clarity, so I remember everything — going on the Tube, scanning the departure boards, fixating on the flight number to make sure you are in the right place. I even remember what sandwich I bought on the way home.'

Pictured: The aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing, people can be seen looking at the damage

Pictured: Flowers left at a memorial for the victims on the 30th anniversary in 2018

She let herself back into Flora's bedsit. 'This time she'd said I could borrow whatever clothes I liked. I remember walking into her room — I was meeting someone the next day — and thinking, 'Ooh, what shall I wear?'.'

The radio was on. She wasn't really listening ('I was probably contemplating my sandwich') but she halted at the announcement of a newsflash. 'Something about reports of a plane coming down in Scotland,' she recalls.

'Then they said the number of the flight.' There was a jolt of recognition. 'And I knew that things were never going to be the same again.' The following months, 'when my family was blown apart', were unthinkable. She relives the journey to Lockerbie, where her father identified Flora's body by a mole on her toe.

She recalls 'a whole line of grief counsellors, with their clipboards and their Biros'. She shudders.

'I don't want to dismiss that sort of thing, but I remember thinking, 'How would any of you know what it feels like?'.'

Each member of the family changed irrevocably. Her relationship with her mother was never the same again.

'I lost that emotional closeness. She was felled; too full of rage.' Did she lose her father, too?

'That assumes a level of intimacy that simply wasn't there,' she says. 'I never had that sort of relationship with my father, so I neither lost nor found him emotionally, but in practical terms, suddenly my sister wasn't there and yet my father was.' This was not a happy reversal.

Pictured: The scene of the Pan Am Boeing crash in Lockerbie - buildings can be seen on fire in the area

Crash investigators at the scene of the wreckage of the Boeing 747 on December 23, 1988

There is a line in her book where she accuses her father of using 'the energy of the event to reconnect with his (estranged) family', and her mother of using 'the storytelling opportunities to remake her marriage'. Yet she says she allowed her family to read her book before publication and gave them the right to a veto.

Her mum asked for an epilogue to be added, which says that putting feelings into print gives them a 'permanence they do not always deserve'.

Her father, to his credit, did come to her book launch.

What of the bigger picture — Jim Swire's arguably very brave pursuit of the truth? Does she not care whether the Libyans (or whoever) killed her sister?

'No, I absolutely don't. I could talk for hours about politics, the theatre-in-the-round, but what terrorism is is a complex web of causes and groups whose very conception is about confusion.

'We think that by finding the bad guy we will 'solve' it, but I think the relentless pursuit means you are just playing into the game.'

She says her father's latest obsession is about Iran's role in this 'complex web'.

She throws her hands up. 'First it's Libya, then it's Syria, now it's Iran. It looks very heroic and triumphant to be continually chasing the bad guy around the Middle East, but I think we really need to look at the gap between the power fantasies of those who control government and the real democratic interests of the West. I would give my life for this point.' As Dr Swire surely would for his.

In previous interviews, his wife acknowledged that his relentless pursuit of the truth caused deep anguish in the family, yet she ultimately supported him, once saying that he would have had a nervous breakdown if she had tried to stop him.

What of the collateral damage to his other daughter, though?

Cathy's hurt may have been laid bare in her book, but events since it was written have compounded it. Back we come to the subject of the Sky drama. She would never have watched any dramatisation, but says she thought that this one — the latest in a long line of Lockerbie 'productions' – 'would be another thing to just roll my eyes about'. Not so.

'I told my parents from the off that I did not want to be a part of it. I didn't want my story to be included, and I was promised that it would not be. But when it came to filming, I discovered my role had been cast and scripted. I know I have no control over my parents' narrative regarding Flora — nor would I expect to — but I should have control over my own life.'

Buildings on fire in Lockerbie after the wreckage, pieces of the plane can be seen strewn on the floor

The nose of the Pan Am Flight 103 wreckage in 1988

Horrified, she wrote to the production company. 'And they wrote back, very politely, but pointing out why I had no rights at all.

'Firstly, the information was already in the public domain — because my father had put it there. Also, because I was not the main subject of the drama. And finally because, as a published poet, I was not deemed a private person.'

She even tried to contact the actress who will play her, 'but I was passed back to the production company'.

Her parents clearly believe that Flora would want this drama made. Cathy disagrees. 'I have thought a lot about this, and I don't think Flora would want any of this. She certainly wouldn't want to be remembered because of the way she died. She wouldn't want this fetishisation of her death, because that's what it is.'

Yet there are many ways of mourning. Just outside Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, stands a six-acre wood of oak, ash, sweet chestnut and cherry. Viewed from the air, the trees form the letter 'F'.

Dr Swire planted this wood in memory of Flora — an epic undertaking which many find poignant. Cathy never goes. Like that painting, it leaves her cold.

'To me it is completely meaningless,' she says. 'It doesn't feel about her.' Is she suggesting it is about their father?

'As a poet I'm so aware of how much poetry is about men making their names by shouting about dead women,' she says. 'It is very easy to talk about people who are dead. It is very hard to care for the living.'