OUR day started at about the time exactly 100 years ago children of Hartlepool were getting ready for school, kettles were being put on stoves and adults headed to work.

To read about the history of the bombardments, visit our First World War centenary website, thenortheastatwar.co.uk

For us, a simple memorial service at Heugh Gun Battery on the old, Headland part of town lasted about 45 minutes; about the same amount of time it took for over 100 children, adults and elderly to be blown up, crushed or buried alive in their own homes a century since .

The Bishop of Jarrow had reminded us in that service that similar atrocities happen today, ordinary people going about their business caught up in war not of their making.

But 100 years ago, targeting civilians like six-month-old Eleanor Necy and 86-year-old Catherine Marshall as war targets was shocking, a new war shock and awe tactic; even if the town had shipyards and a gun battery.

It wasn’t just civilians who died at the hands of the German and the military were remembered, representatives from all services present and in uniform.

Thomas Minks, 15, wearing his school uniform, was at the early memorial service to remember his own grandfather’s elder brother, a soldier also named Thomas Minks. Young Thomas explained his grand-uncle, a Durham Light Infantryman from Rowlands Gill, near Gateshead, was just 25 when he died in the defending Hartlepool.

Proudly carrying the ‘death penny’ awarded to families in memory of the fallen at the end of the war, the teenager had wise words: “This was a lesson for everyone that we have to hope for peace in the future.”

It was sentiment echoed by the town’s Mayor Stephen Akers-Belcher, and many others, in a later, much more elaborate commemoration to officially unveil a new monument to the 130 dead and 500 wounded.

Burying a time capsule for future generations of Hartlepudlians to open a 100 years hence the Mayor had these words: “We hope for peace and that Hartlepool, never, ever has a day like that again.”

The listening children of St Aidan’s Primary, some as young as five, would surely have understood their Mayor’s message. They had each planted a ceramic poppy, taken from the Tower of London, and planted it at the new memorial as each name of the 130 dead was called.

One of those names had been the former deputy headmaster at their own school, Darlington-born Theo Jones, who died just yards away as a well-tended plaque testifies and is often described as the first British soldier to be killed by the enemy on home soil for about 200 years. He was 29.

Survivors, often mentally scarred, were also commemorated. Their voices, hundreds of them, had been recorded by the BBC in the 1980s, as they told stories of scuttling to safety, life-long fears of being buried alive, on hearing thunder decades later.

Older children from Dyke House Secondary School had listened to them and, with professional poet Kate Fox, tried to give those voices telling tales of seeing parents and siblings lose their lives, new life in poetry. “Crackling voices through the static, transmit stories that must not die...”

Afterwards, Last Post sounded and impeccable minute’s silence maintained, many of the thousand or so who had come to remember milled around the monument. A guitarist sang Keep the Home Fires Burning at the nearby Heugh Battery Museum, almost to himself. One old man, with walking stick, came late and stood alone staring at the monument.

Presently, the great and the good slowly moved off to the Headland Borough Hall’s Tipperary Room for hot and entertainment.

This time it was leader of the council, Christopher Akers-Belcher, who spoke, telling of his emotion as 37 balloons, one of each of the town’s slaughtered children was released. And it was today’s children who once again tugged at the heart.

Primary school pupils sang songs they had written with town folk trio, The Young Uns, about real stories from the day. Some of the songs were fun, like the one about ‘Billy the brave butcher’s boy,’ who had bravely brought his cow for slaughter to West Hartlepool through the shelling and was found unperturbed eating a huge pork chop.

And there was the song about Mr Whitty, the manager of The Shades hotel who handed out glasses of brandy to shocked refugees.

Other songs were darker, telling of “shrieking shells, screams and yells” and of Joseph Dixon, the 12-year-old boy who lost three siblings and whose mother told him to run with his three-year-old brother. The boy was found three miles away, running on an injured leg. His mother, unexpectedly, survived.

There were more speeches from the grown-ups. TV historian John Grundy told of how the sea had always given the town its wealth and reason to exist, “so it’s ironic that the sea also brought those ships,” he said, referring to the Blucher, Seydlitz and Moltke which rained 1,150 shells on the town in just 45 minutes.

But it was the film images recently discovered by Mark Simmons, the man in charge of Hartlepool’s museums, at the Imperial War Museum, which haunts the memory. Bewildered people staring at the camera outside some of the 300 bombed out homes, like a news report from yesterday. It all stopped feeling like a worthy, slightly romanticised commemoration and felt real. Grand words in prose from grand adults no longer seemed enough.

A competition-winning poem by Anna Kroon, just 10,was read out. “Screams and cries, a child has died, our streets are full of dead.” Another by Riya Mighoskar, 15, said: “The sun has graced us with its presence, by falling from the sky, balls of fire latch onto buildings; on to people passing by.