`I've told them that Emma is in heaven'

The men of God did their best. In a midnight television address, the Reverend Richard Holloway, primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, had tried to argue that the bloody massacre of 16 children in their school gym was not proof that human beings were alone in a Godless, "pitiless universe".

But as inconsolable parents finished identifying their children in a makeshift morgue at Dunblane Primary School, the Rev Maxwell Craig, a local minister, said Dunblane was going to bed "a town in tears".

Those who managed to sleep - and they were precious few - woke yesterday to a day even worse than the one before. In the 17th-century high street those who ventured out to test reality struggled to give the first day of the rest of their lives some meaning. Huddled in twos and threes against the cold, they discussed in whispers the children - 15 five-year-olds and one six-year-old - on the list of dead and the 14 others injured. Their shoulders were powdered with snow as they confirmed each other's worst fears. Yes it was that wee Mhairi, their wee Ross or "beautiful" Megan.

The town was deathly silent even after those shopkeepers who felt able to had opened. It was as if everyone was holding their breath while walking on tiptoe. "Why Dunblane?" was already yesterday's question. They had learned a terrible lesson all too quickly. Madmen do not confine themselves to American ghettos. They are just as likely to come calling in a picturesque Scottish town with an affluent middle-class population served by a golf course, riverside walks and a stunning cathedral. Those who settled here among the snow-covered hills to escape the dangers of the city know now that madness does not discriminate.

Keith Harding, local newsagent and leader of Stirling District Council, was in at 6.30am as usual but with a heavy heart. With the headlines screaming out from the shelves behind him he said he knew half-a-dozen of the kids in the school picture emblazoned on most front pages. They came in for sweeties on the way to school.

"It wasn't easy getting here," he said. "I did not want to face people or see these headlines." But life has to go on, he added, with absolutely no conviction.

Perhaps he wasn't the only one who dreaded the headlines. A lot of commuters had not turned up for the papers they read on their way to work in Stirling. One of his staff and a paperboy were missing. He could not reach them by phone and assumed they were connected to the murdered and injured children. "People who have been in don't want to talk," he said. "We're utterly shellshocked."

It is when he is trying to remember exactly how many of the dead children frequented his shop that his blank expression crumbles and he breaks down. By 9.30am, 24 hours after a local loner with an unhealthy interest in young boys and firearms began wreaking havoc on the town, the teddybears and flowers had begun to accumulate outside the school gates. Nora Docherty, school governor and mother of a primary one child lucky enough not to be in Miss Mayor's massacred class, stood shaking her head as parents, many accompanied by children, added their floral tributes. They arrived composed and left in tears.

"It's like we are trying to make it real," said Mrs Docherty, reading the cards of condolence. "And yet it isn't real. It can't be." Gerry McDermott, another parent governor, stood beside her, hands shoved in pockets. "It's desperate, desperate," he kept repeating.

Children are always special but in towns like Dunblane, they are the adhesive which binds the community, providing the foundations of a social network for parents who work out of town and knitting together the locals and the incomers.

For Judy Ballance, who runs a local nursery and knew many of the dead, yesterday meant another day in tears. Her eight-year-old daughter Laura curled up beside her on the sofa. Only two of her 17 little charges turned up for nursery today and so it was abandoned.

The previous day Mrs Ballance had watched anxiously as the police arrived and set up an incident room on her nursery premises. "We were told there was an incident at the school but never in your wildest dreams could you have imagined the reality."

After 20 years spent in Northern Ireland Mrs Ballance is no stranger to violence. But the Dunblane atrocity was different - it came from nowhere and had no context. It has, she says, removed all sense of certainty. There seems nothing in life that can now be relied upon. She has not slept a wink, she says, and she has no concentration. She begins several sentences only to trail off. "I haven't been warm since I heard the news. You just can't concentrate on anything. Your mind wanders. You go off at tangents.

"And when I switched on the breakfast news this morning there was the class picture with all the children's names rolling underneath. I just felt like it was one of my own...." She glances at the homemade Mother's Day card already adorning her mantlepiece and trails off once again in tears.

She has tried, she says, to keep her emotions in check for the sake of her own and other people's children. Laura's best friend's sister was one of the victims. "Laura has been worse today than yesterday. We had the waterworks when she got up this morning."

A few streets away, Beth McDermott gazes at her neighbours' house across the road. They lost their daughter Emma. On the floor her son Gerry, five, is playing Gameboy. He played with Emma the day before she died. "Emma's gone to heaven," he says. "She got shot and then the man shot himself, didn't he mummy?"

Mrs McDermott hugs her younger daughter tightly , and looks down at her son."You are just so grateful for what you have," she says. "I've told Gerry that Emma is in heaven and so are her playmates." Red-eyed and shaky, she has hardly slept. She keeps apologising for the state of her house. She is heartbroken for her friends across the road and for a host of other bereaved parents. She is also guilt-ridden.

"You spend half your time thinking thank God my child was born in March not February or he would have been in primary one.Then you think how awful it is to think that."

It is the manner of the deaths that is so awful, she says. What kind of end was it for the school's tiniest pupils, the new intake who are always the pets of teachers and older pupils alike? "An accident would have been different. But this man chased these children. They tried to get away. They tried to hide in a cupboard. You wonder how long it took. How scared were they. It keeps going through your mind. And the parents had to wait for four hours before they knew if their child was dead."

She has a friend with a little boy in one of primary one's other three classes. His class was to be next in the gym the day the gunman visited. The closeness of the call has robbed her parents and his grandparents of any confidence.

At MacAlpine's Family Bakery at the end of the High Street, the custom trickles in all day. Catherine Mercer, 65, has two grandsons at Dunblane Primary. The eldest is heartbroken at the death of Ms Mayor, his first and favourite teacher. "He's very, very quiet." If he is having trouble accepting events, so is his grandmother. "A customer came into the shop late morning and told me the news. I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now. You think it's a dream but it is a bloody reality."

The day had begun with some soul searching from George Robertson MP, who lives in Dunblane. He knew of parents' concerns about Thomas Hamilton, the man who shot the children of primary one. He wondered if he had done enough to prevent Hamilton exacting a terrible revenge on a population which withdrew its boys from his youth club after concerns about his practices.

One local father has already said it was he who was visited by police after he tackled Hamilton for "touching" his young son on his first night at the club. But there was little sign of widespread recrimination yesterday about the authorities' response to an oddball who became a mass murderer.

"Hindsight is all very well," said a woman in the MacAlpine bakers. "But how can you know these things? Who could have predicted it? You can't lock everyone up just for being odd. They couldn't prove he had broken the law.

Mr Robertson, whose three children went through the primary, knows many of the parents and grandparents who ran screaming to the school on Wednesday after hearing of an "incident" on the news. At news conferences since the mass killing he has had to fight hard to remain composed.

Both he and Michael Forsyth the local MP were acquainted with Hamilton, whom local teenagers regarded as a "perv". Mr Forsyth said yesterday that Hamilton was a "regular" at his surgery, and complained that he was being victimised by the town. Mr Forsyth had spoken to police about him.

But yesterday Hamilton's name was hardly mentioned on the street of Dunblane. While national newspapers dubbed him an "evil monster" few, if any, locals raged against him in the town. That may come later or it may be that the notion that only a madman - one beyond any concept of personal responsibility - could open fire on a classroom of five year olds is widespread. Whatever the reason, for now there is no room for anger only pain. The focus is entirely on the murdered children and on those to whom they will never return home.

"I've told my daughter he was a sick man," said one woman whose five year old daughter lost a friend in the shooting. "A sick man who did harm to children. I've told her her friend has gone to heaven but all her friends are with her."

The cathedral which dominates the town was open all day. And a few people did pick their way through the churchyard's ancient headstones to seek some comfort there in the silence. Ian MacIntosh, the cathedral's minister, was visiting families in their homes. Beneath the magnificent stained glass a couple in their thirties sat holding hands. Tears streamed down the man's face. A mother sat three rows further down with her primary aged daughter. The girl was looking up, asking questions. Her mother, who was in tears, kept shaking her head as if she had no answers. In the unadorned interior of this Presbyterian church you could almost taste the human pain and touch the anguish.