"I cannae speak to you love, I can't," she said, clutching a handkerchief to her face. "It's all too close now. Usually I'm fine. Life does go on. But today has brought it all back: sad things just keep happening."

The 10th anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster - December 21 - is just eight days away. The shadow of the tragedy, in which 259 passengers died when a bomb exploded in the hold of Pan Am Flight 103 to New York at 30,000ft, and 11 perished in one street when the wreckage crashed down on their houses, is again hanging over the town.

It left the highest death toll in peacetime Britain; it was the worst terrorist atrocity in British aviation history; and it led to the biggest murder investigation in legal history.

Now the 3,700 people of Lockerbie are again preparing to be centre stage. But it is not with eager anticipation. "We know we can't avoid it - people from 21 countries died in that tragedy," said Joe Meechan, chairman of the Lockerbie district council. "But it brings it all back. For some people, it is still very painful."

However, with time, the pain has eased and, in the past 10 years, Lockerbie has returned to a kind of normality. "Sure, there are a few less shops open now but that's not the disaster, that's what's happening to rural communities all over Britain," Mr Meechan said. "But good things are happening, too. There is the best-kept garden contest, the arrangement where two students are selected from Lockerbie each year to attend Syracuse University and soon, we hope, a new sawmill that will bring more than 100 jobs.

"The people here get on with things. They move on. You can never forget that disaster. But it is no longer a subject of conversation in the town; except now, as people anticipate the arrival of the world's media."

For those involved, the memories of that fateful December night are burnt into the soul. It was 7.02pm, four days before Christmas, and everyone in Lockerbie can recall what they were doing. Ella Ramsden was in her kitchen making a cup of tea when her house in Rosebank Avenue imploded, devastated by bits of fuselage. There were bodies strewn across her back garden.

Maxwell Kerr, now 62, heard a rumbling and saw pictures tremble on his living room wall. He was at the front of his house; his face and arms were seared with the heat. Moments later pieces of fuselage smashed into his back garden, the shock waves cracking the walls and roof. As he walked up the street towards "the orange glow" that was Sherwood Crescent, he stumbled across plastic knives, forks, napkins and "the funny sort of wheatbread rolls they serve on aeroplanes".

The first policeman on the scene was Pc George Stobbs, whose strongest memory is of reaching Sherwood Crescent and being confronted with "a sea of flames. A gas pipe had burst and the pavements were alight, the hedges were blazing and all the guttering on the houses was pop, popping".

A fireman was standing with a hose, but there was no water, the mains damaged by more wreckage from the plane. Mr Stobbs walked as far as he could into the crescent before the heat forced him to turn back. But not before he had seen a "pool of glowing, moving molten metal" : a wrought-iron gate.

In that crescent, three families were obliterated; the Flannigans, the Henrys and the Somervilles. Today, the crescent is a restored picture of suburban tranquillity. Damaged houses have been rebuilt. Children play on the street.

Only residents know that the landscaped green and floral gardens at the curve of the crescent are a memorial where the houses of the dead families once stood. Outside the town, there are other pockets of remembrance, such as the stone memorial, containing a book of the dead and a visitors' book at Tundergarth fields, where the nose cone of the jumbo landed.

T 4 HE families of the American victims have visited, many of them annually since the tragedy. One message, dated only last month, for Amy Gallagher, whose body was never found, reads: "Dear Amy, we are here once again. . . you now have a niece named after you. How we wish you could be here to share the joy of this new baby. . . Mum and Dad".

Another, to victim Sarah Philip from her parents in Boston, says: "Returning every year for Sarah".

The memories have also led to unlikely friendships. At Minsca Farm, 10 miles from Sherwood Crescent, Margaret and Hugh Connell are in regular contact with a young New York woman, Michelle Ciulla, whose father died on the flight.

His body, still strapped into his seat, landed just 100 yards from the Connells' back door. "We referred to him as `our boy' and wondered whose family he had come from," Mrs Connell recalled. "I couldn't believe that I could shed so many tears for someone I had not known."

In September this year, Michelle visited the Connells, who have planted a fir tree on the site. "I sometimes say to them `I wish we'd never met'," Michelle said. "They know exactly what I mean. But there has been 10 years of healing in that moment of meeting."

George Stobbs believes that the healing began soon after the explosion: the rapid clearing of the debris and the bodies, sparing townsfolk the sight of victims, compressed, still strapped into their seats, half buried by the impact of the crash, in fields and valleys for miles around the town.

Most difficult for him, he said, was dealing with the rush of bereaved families from America who flooded to Lockerbie "expecting to find their loved ones, tidy, arms crossed, lying in coffins". There was no way of preparing them for the fact that it wasn't going to be - couldn't be - like that.

In the wake of the disaster, residents were desperate to help but, in the early days, were kept away while the police, the military and rescue services staged the clean-up. Mr Meechan remembers: "When the women were finally asked to bake, to feed the Servicemen and women, they were so relieved at having something to do that freezers had to be brought in to deal with the overcapacity." Others began washing the clothes of the bereaved.

"People felt as if they were being invasive. As if they were thieving from the dead. But every garment was laundered and sent back to the families of those victims. We think they appreciated it."

Mr Kerr also remembers that Christmas well. "At the time of the tragedy, all the Christmas lights were on, the cards and trees were up. The lights went out, of course, at the crash. But when Christmas Day arrived we packed up our trees, took our lights down, and our cards. No one felt like Christmas dinner."

Since then, Lockerbie has marked Christmas with only a small Christmas tree. This year, however, with the help of a public collection by the Let's Light Up Lockerbie campaign, the council has spent pounds 19,000 on lights to show the world that the town has moved on.

"The lights will create quite a contrast to that time when the lights went out," said Mr Meechan. "We hope that everybody will be happy with it."

Now, Mr Kerr says, the only unresolved question is justice.

"Most of us want the two Libyans to be tried in a Hague court. And we want them to serve their time in Scotland, where they caused all this pain," he said.

"It is important they are brought to justice. But it's also been important to get on with our lives. Through all this our community is stronger. And we live life to the full. Well, you have to, don't you? Because no one knows what could happen tomorrow."