The milkman was out on his rounds as usual at 5am, weaving his float through the crush of fire brigade, police and army vehicles.
Milk bottles were left in queues outside houses which looked as if they had just been hit by a hurricane. The smell of smoke and fuel hung in the air. The streets crunched under foot with the sound of fuselage fragments and masonry debris.
The baker, Mr Hunter Wilson, was busy making loaves for the emergency services and for media people who descended upon the town before dawn broke.
Police kept Sherwood Crescent, where the Pan Am jet came to rest, closed all day. They had worked through the night by arc lights to clear the crash site and managed to reopen the A74 by-pass round the town by 10am. Nearby stood the charred remains of several houses.
Debris from the aircraft was all over the town, from heavy twisted sections resembling modern sculptures to alloy fragments as small as 10 pence pieces. A foam rubber piece of seating flapped forlornly in a tree top.
In a fenced-off area in the heart of the town, Mr Ted Argo was checking for damage to the United Meat Packer's abattoir. He examined the still-smoking jet engines embedded in a six-foot crater. The engine cowling had come to earth 20 yards away in the back yard of Nether Hill Farm.
Above the abattoir on a gentle hill in Rose Bank Crescent, the side of a semi-detached house had been torn away; its contents spilled out among the aircraft's debris. Inside the house, furniture stood like stage scenery. A door was ajar, a wardrobe leaned against the surviving wall. A table lamp rested on a chest of drawers. A white sock appeared to be trapped in the broken roof joints, hanging from a body on the roof, covered with a tarpaulin.
Other bodies lay similarly covered in the crescent. Beneath the debris, police believed the bodies of 44 passengers were buried. The fallout was spread about the back gardens. A brown leather attaché case lay tangled in the remains of a shredded inflatable life-raft. Telegraph poles and hundreds of grey airline meal trays, their contents smeared across concrete tarmac, added to the chaos.
A single running shoe sat in a freshly dug garden. An unused life jacket, still neatly folded in its plastic sleeve, lay in a gutter. Other personal items were strewn around: a yellow baseball cap and a Louis Vuitton makeup bag
• The death toll was 270
