After the Manchester attack, parents look for their children while a city pulls itself together again

The fiddler played a lament on Market Street and the bar at the Mr Thomas’ Chop House establishment a few hundred yards away was empty.

That public house is a place where they venerate Manchester’s reputation for defiance in the face of terrorism, with a framed image hanging on the wall beside the bar entitled “The Manchester Bomb – 15 June, 1996”. It captures the moment the IRA’s device exploded 21 years ago.

The essential difference between that Saturday summer morning and Monday’s sultry summer evening, of course, is the lives lost. The concept of a coded advance warning still existed in 1996 and that Manchester bomb killed no one. The sentiment is incalculably different when the local BBC radio station is breaking into its mid-morning discussion to relate how a local school, Runshaw College in Leyland, has just confirmed one of its pupils, Gina Callander, was among those whose lives were lost.

The sun was high in the Manchester sky by lunchtime and though that usually brings the office workers out onto cobbles and the steps of the Albert Memorial in the central Albert Square, there were few more than a group of Chinese tourists. “It feels wrong to smile and enjoy yourself. The sun makes it worse,” said Cheryl Manion, alone under the memorial’s canopy, having stopped in the stunned stillness which precedes the outpouring we are now grimly familiar with.

People were more polite than usual. No-one complained when the Arndale shopping centre was closed down in late morning, for unspecified security reasons. A small audience was rapt by the prayers led on a pavement by the Dean of Manchester Cathedral. His building was sealed off, within a wide police cordon, though it will be a focus of remembrance in days to come. They’ve weighed the terrors there in recent times. It’s 14 years since the life PC Stephen Oake, who came face to face with an al-Qa’eda terrorist at a flat in the Crumpsall district and was stabbed to death, was mourned within the packed cathedral’s walls.

“You pray from your heart for Olivia’s mum,” said Joan Trusome, at the pavement spot with her friend Alison Cavell after the clergyman spoke. If there was a focus for Manchester’s muffled state of anguish then it was Charlotte Campbell, heard on the radio by most of those gathered, whose daughter Olivia Campbell-Hardy had not returned from the concert.

Mrs Campbell appealed on social media for word of her daughter, clutching a framed photograph as she pleaded: “I’m worried sick. She’s in dark clothes, off the shoulder top, her hair is dark… please will somebody get hold of her; please, please just somebody…” The last Mrs Campbell had heard of Olivia was at 8.30pm on Monday – a text message to say she was having “an amazing time” and thanking her mother for allowing her to go. Olivia’s father had searched the streets of Manchester for her for much of the night while her mother rang around hospitals. Olivia’s phone was out of battery.

In the homes of those who had made it back, this mother’s plea represented a kind of a haunting. “Traumatised,” said one father, Jez, when asked how his daughter was. “Traumatised but ok thanks.”

It was a few miles east of the city centre, at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium, that the enormity was really present. The stadium was offered up as a centre for families, ten of whom had been told that loved ones had died, by mid-afternoon on Tuesday. “Mam and dad been sent to the etihad stadium so if anyone in Manchester sees Chloe or Liam please direct them to the ground, Thank you!” another relative asked on social media.

There were a million small gestures. Supermarket food supplies arrived at the stadium. Random taxi drivers were still offering lifts, long hours after the explosion. All of that was sustaining, yet it was very hard to put from mind a sense of how randomly and continually the veneer of daily city life can be ripped to pieces.

The police vans dotted around central Manchester seemed to be parked near places where, just like Manchester’s Arena, people generally gather in a mood of happy expectation – the Bridgewater Hall and also the Royal Exchange – rebuilt at a cost of £32m after it was severely damaged in the 1996 blast. But policing every inch of a modern city’s public space is impossible, of course. Central Manchester is festooned with posters promoting Sunday’s Great Manchester Run and Friday’s Great City Games athletics event. Security for both is now being reviewed.

It was clear from mid-afternoon that tonight’s Albert Square vigil will foster such solidarity that it will be remembered down the years, though no-one was pretending that it could be remotely adequate consolation. “If they can take the lives of children then you know there is no line that won’t be crossed and there can always be a next time,” said Mrs Trusome. “My kids are ten and 12. I tell them to stay safe. Tell me, how can they stay safe? What control can they possibly have over that?”