The bullet shattered the classroom window and Steven Hopper felt a sharp pain from the shard of glass just above his right eye. Along with the other children in his class at Dunblane primary school, he dived for the floor. Hopper recalls: “I remember thinking, why am I not crying?” Moments earlier, the 11-year-old boy had caught sight of a middle-aged man walking out of a side door of the school gym. First he noticed the man was wearing earmuffs, which looked strange. Then he noticed he was carrying a handgun.

The man was Thomas Hamilton, a former Scout master with a murderous grudge. In the gym he had shot dead 16 children from a primary-one class, as well as their teacher, Gwen Mayor. The scene in the hall was later described by a senior ambulanceman as like “a medieval hell torture chamber”.

Stepping out of the gym, Hamilton noticed the faces peering at him from the windows of Steven Hopper’s classroom, which was in a separate building about 40 yards away. “Then he aimed the gun at us and pulled the trigger,” recalls Hopper. “That’s when the glass came in.”

At least three gunshots took out the windows, then silence fell. As the children cowered on the floor among the broken glass and overturned chairs, they could only wait. Blood was beginning to trickle down Hopper’s face. “We had no idea where he was or what was going to happen.”

Memories and sensations from a decade ago are coming back to Hopper as he sits in a student cafe at Stirling University, nursing a bottle of water. Now 21, and still living with his parents in nearby Dunblane, he is a final-year BSc student studying for a degree in maths.

On March 13, 1996, he was a primary-seven pupil at Dunblane primary school. He knows full well that others have more cause than him to remember that day — the families of the bereaved, of course, and the dozen survivors from the primary-one class, now aged 15 or 16.

Yet Hopper is just one of many people in the Stirlingshire town who have had to come to terms, in their own way, with one of the most shocking days in modern Scottish history. They include pupils, parents, teachers, police officers and medics. Each has their own tale to tell, and this is one such story.

Hopper is a heavy-set young man who looks older than his years. He has clear blue eyes and wears the default student uniform of fleece, jeans and trainers. A keen cricketer, he also plays hockey and he prides himself on distinctive musical tastes — old-school rock bands such as Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. When he speaks he does so slowly and deliberately, without obvious emotion.

“Emotion” and “emotional” are words he uses a lot when describing the events of a decade ago. In the weeping of classmates as they lay on the floor, in the tearful reunions with parents outside the school gates, there was emotion aplenty on display that day and in the aftermath.

But no emotion was shown by Hopper, neither then nor now. “When I was on the floor of the classroom, the fact that some around me were crying was something I was aware of. What’s was going on? Why wasn’t this happening to me? What was wrong with me? “I was only a bit frightened. A lot of the others were showing emotion. A lot of them seemed to think this was it, they were going to die. Rather than lying there and crying and getting upset I was thinking about what was likely to happen. I was looking at ways to get out.”

Even when reunited with his relieved parents later in the day, and first becoming aware of the enormity of what had happened, Hopper’s only reaction was to ask about the killer. “I remember asking my dad if the police had got him. He told me the man had shot himself. That seemed fitting at the time.”

Hopper had not immediately recognised the man with the gun — but he had encountered him before. A year previously the boy and some friends had attended a football club run by Hamilton in the nearby Dunblane high school.

“There wasn’t anything that really alarmed me at the time, but looking back there was something strange about it. Quite often the boys would strip off their T-shirts and play bare-chested. For 10-year-olds that was maybe a bit strange. I just stopped going because I wasn’t enjoying it.”

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