When I remember Lorraine, I see a very helpful, homely and outgoing child, who loved hockey — she was on the school hockey team — and riding.

The recurring memory I have is of her throwing down her schoolbag in the afternoon and coming through to talk to me. I worked on the night shift at Nestle, and she wasn’t one to go on through to her room, she’d come in and say, ‘Will you make us a cup of tea and I’ll do the vegetables for you?’

She was a friend and a daughter, a good listener, while my other daughter, Denise, was more hyper, more emotional. Lorraine was a great girl to talk to and we were fairly close.

On the 15th, Lorraine had asked her sister to bring the money she earned from working in Denise’s cafe on the campsite, as she wanted to pick her own school shoes. It was a quarter to three when we were stopped by a traffic warden on the edge of town, and told there was a bomb scare.

My oldest daughter Denise went through Boots to get onto the main street to the Oxfam shop, but was directed back and told she couldn’t go into the main street. But why, if they could direct her away from Market Street, didn’t Lorraine get the information?

Afterwards, when I’d got home, my older son Gary and I were chatting with a neighbour when we heard the bomb. Our house was half a mile away and we saw the debris in the sky.

We were hoping she would have been OK. Gary and Denise went into town to check it out. We were still thinking positively, not dreaming Lorraine would be involved.

Standing talking to neighbours about it, we heard on their way out of town, they’d taken a youngster to hospital — and they were covered in blood. There was even a piece of shrapnel on the windscreen wiper on their car. My wife and I hopped into our car and drove to town. It was 3.25pm. We met the walking wounded in taxis that were ferrying them to and fro.

You couldn’t believe what you were seeing, people with their hands out in front of them, all bloodied.

I don’t think I feel angry, I feel let down, depressed and sickened. It gives you a bad feeling in the stomach, because it’s a situation that shouldn’t have happened, that wasn’t properly policed.

I am a great believer in law and order, yet I’m sitting here today, nearly on the tenth anniversary, crying. The system has worked in the wrong direction, it has let people off with murder. If people call it political murder, under the banner of terrorism, they seem to have more rights than the victim. But we’re in a democratic country, paying our dues and electing people to keep things right.

Before the bomb, we did things together as a family, and when I’d got time off from working nights, we’d often go out on bikes, along country roads. That came to a halt.

How can you justify it or call it a war, the slaughter of innocents for a ridiculous cause?

It still hits home, seeing my lassie lying there soaking wet because a pipe had burst in the street. She had a lot of shrapnel in her, and with a tissue from my pocket, I wiped a wee tear from the corner of her eye. That tissue remains in my bedroom.

It wasn’t an easy sight to look at and now all that’s left are photos and memories.

As told to Jane Hardy