THERE was the usual gathering of parents exchanging school gate conversation and the noise of their small sons and daughters breaking into a run towards the playground as yesterday's nine o'clock start arrived.
Dunblane Primary is a good school. Happy pupils. Satisfied parents. Dedicated teachers. Yesterday it was business as usual. Ten year old Jamie Christie's P6 class began their Wednesday writing test. For the 29 pupils of Primary One, taught by Gwenne Mayor, there was a break from their reading and writing lessons.
They headed for the school gymnasium at the back of the low rise modern school building. Those in the hut classrooms dotted around the main building - built to take a growing school population - could look from their desks and see P1 enjoying their games.
There is less than 100 yards between the main fence and gates and the two entrances that take you inside Dunblane Primary. Once inside the main entrance, there is the school office staff working behind a glass partition. Between 9.20 and 9.25 a.m. 43 year old Thomas Hamilton passed through the school gates, walked towards the school office and walked unchallenged into the school corridors. He lived in Stirling.
As the pupils of Dunblane were eating their breakfast yesterday, Hamilton would have left his home.
Had anyone looked closely at him yesterday morning they would have spotted him carrying what looked like hi tech earmuffs. Few would have recognised them as ear protectors used to deaden the noise in gun-club galleries. Had Hamilton passed through the metal detectors now common in American schools, an alarm would have gone off.
But this was a quiet commuter town in central Scotland. There was no alarm to detect the four automatic handguns Hamilton was carrying.
Once inside the school, Hamilton turned sharp right and passed through the empty school dining area into the changing-room area and then burst through the doors off the gymnasium.
Inside the large hall were the 29 pupils of P1, the PE teacher Eileen Harrild and P1's own teacher, Gwenne Mahor.
At some point Hamilton must have stopped and with premeditation put the mufflers over his ears for protection.
What followed will remain in the minds of those who survived the massacre of the innocents of P1. The time was 9.30 a.m.
The first call to the police for help was just before 9.38 a.m. The police's own alert message said: "Man with gun running amok in Dunblane Primary School." The first officers arrived within six minutes of the call. Officers described how they were met by a "scene of carnage".
John McEwan (49), who coordinated the ambulance operation at the school, was one of the first to see the results of two or three minutes of carnage inside the gymnasium.
"It was like a scene out of a medieval hell torture chamber. The scene inside the school was utterly unbelievable.
"He must have chased the pupils all over the place, shooting at them till they fell."
"Even if he was an excellent shot there's no way he would have got them all if they had been sitting still." Gwenne Mayor died trying to protect the children in her care. Most of those who died suffered head wounds.
Mr McEwan added: "What will stick with me for a long time is the look of terror on the face of a five- year-old child who had a bullet hole through his arm and couldn't comprehend what had happened."
An ambulance man, a veteran of the horrors of the clean-up after the Lockerbie bombing, found Hamilton lying on the ground. There was no sympathy. "I saw the gunman lying there and a handgun by his side. For the first time in my life I had this overwhelming desire to mutilate that corpse. I know that sounds terrible. I had to really force myself not to kick him as I walked by."