A FRIEND’S GREATEST GIFT
As they waited to pick up their children, the Manchester bomber killed Wendy – and left her best friend Caroline severely injured. Now, as this deeply moving interview reveals, Caroline is helping Wendy’s heartbroken daughter rebuild her life
Lee Davis just can’t sit still. The 16 year old is forever tidying things away, rearranging the countless bunches of flowers his family has received from well-wishers, and fussing over his mother Caroline, who is in considerable pain. Yesterday, he bought her a heart-shaped charm for her Pandora bracelet with the words ‘Best Mum’ engraved upon it. He says he wanted to ‘cheer her up — try to make things normal again’. But he can’t — not for her, or his girlfriend, Charlotte Fawell, who is 15.
For Charlotte’s mother Wendy was one of the 22 victims of suicide bomber Salman Abedi in an atrocity that has shocked the world.
She and Caroline were there in the foyer at Manchester Arena on May 22 to collect their children from Ariana grande’s concert before heading home to Otley in West Yorkshire. Miraculously, Caroline, who was just a few steps away from Wendy, 50, when the terrorist struck, survived.
‘We shouldn’t have even been there,’ Caroline tells me. ‘ We’d arranged to meet them at the other side of the arena when the concert ended, but Ben [her 12-year-old son who was also at the concert with Lee and Charlotte] wasn’t feeling well, so Lee called me.
‘I told him we’d get straight there and meet them at the door, but the foyer was busier than we thought it would be.
‘Wendy said: “We’d better split up so we don’t miss them. You go that way and I’ll go . . . ” but she didn’t get to finish the sentence.
‘The next thing I remember is waking up. It was like someone had given me a breath of fresh air because I remember going . . .’ she gulps deeply to demonstrate.
‘There was a ringing in my ears and my head felt like it had exploded. My arm really hurt. I remember trying to move it but I couldn’t. At that point I remember looking up.
‘There was just all this smoke. It was dark and I felt wet. A man was talking to me. He said: ‘Can you sit up? Are you OK?’
‘I didn’t have a clue what was going on. When I sat up, I could see people lying all over the floor. I couldn’t see anybody moving.
‘There was mess all over the floor — clothes, bits of shrapnel, bits of flesh, shoes, bags, coats and ash, just this black ash all over.
‘I remember screaming: “Wendy, where are you?” Over and over. “Wendy”. I knew she couldn’t be far away from where we were when we walked in because it had all happened so quickly.
‘From her saying: “We’d better split up . . . ” to me waking up felt like less than a minute.’ CAROLINE, 39, is in tears now. She cries easily, she says, and sleeps badly. ‘As soon as I wake up, it’s all there. I’m thinking about Wendy, about what’s happened. It doesn’t feel real.
‘ If Ben hadn’t been feeling poorly . . . if they’d stayed in there until the end . . . if we’d met them where we’d arranged . . . if . . .’
She stops. Overwhelmed. Caroline is driving herself half mad with ‘ifs’. She is on heavy doses of painkillers, including morphine, for a dislocated elbow, cuts to her head and right foot sustained in the blast.
But it is the sheer horror of everything she has witnessed that causes her the greatest pain — that, and the knowledge that nothing is, or ever will be, as it was before.
Her husband, Mark, has taken their youngest child, Aidan, to a football camp, so Lee is taking his responsibilities as her carer seriously today. He carefully puts a cushion behind her back to make her more comfortable.
He is a lovely young man who is studying for a sports diploma with the Leeds United Foundation. He says his tutors have been nothing but understanding since the terrible events.
He is trying to be strong, particularly for Charlotte, who is now living with her 27-year- old brother, Adam.
‘I still don’t think what’s happened has hit her,’ says Lee. ‘I don’t think it’s hit anyone fully. Obviously, we know Wendy’s not coming back now, but I don’t think anyone knows what to do.
‘They don’t know what to say. They don’t know what to think about anything really. It’s been just over two weeks but it doesn’t feel like that at all.
‘It’s as if it happened yesterday or this morning or right now. We wouldn’t believe Wendy was gone for days — I still can’t.
‘Last Friday, Charlotte went with Adam to see her in the morgue. right up until then, she had that bit of hope.
‘We knew there were still two people in the hospital that my mum was in who hadn’t been identified — they were alive but in a serious condition. We were holding out hope Wendy was lying unidentified somewhere.
‘When Charlotte got there she texted me. She said: “I’ve seen her.” I said: “Are you all right?” She texted back: “no. I still thought she was alive.” I said: “I know you did. We all did”.’
He falls silent. Frowns. What has happened is impossible for any of us to make sense of, less so a 16-year-old who is shouldering the sort of responsibilities that would test a man twice his age.
As his mother says, ‘he’s gone from being a 16-year- old kid to having to grow up really fast’.
‘This terrorist is a coward who’s ruined thousands of lives,’ adds Caroline, who is backing the Mail’s Mobiles for Manchester Appeal. It enables readers to donate their old mobile phones to raise funds, the bulk of which will go to the We Love Manchester emergency Fund for victims and the bereaved, and the rest to interfaith charities.
‘He has taken kids away from their parents. He’s taken parents away from their kids. He’s taken friends away from their friends.’
Caroline and Wendy were, she says, ‘like sisters’, even though they had met little more than two years ago. They forged an immediate bond.
Wendy, who at the time was going through an unpleasant divorce, was working at St Oswald Primary’s afterschool club, near her home in Otley. Since her death, colleagues and parents have paid tribute to her huge sense of compassion and kindness.
She was, by all accounts, ‘brilliant with children’. But it was her daughter, Charlotte, who was central to her world.
‘Her son Adam is 27, so he has his own life,’ says Caroline, who has vowed to be a ‘second mother’ to Charlotte.
‘We met when I started my job as a lunchtime organiser at the school and just hit it off. She was always here, or the kids were at her house. Monday night was usually our pamper night. She’d come here and do my hair.
‘She’d been seeing someone for the past few months and was happy with him, but her whole world revolved around Charlotte. She’d do anything for her. She’d put aside some money in a bank account so Charlotte could buy her first car when she was 18.’ RECALLING the hours leading up to the atrocity, Caroline says they were not particularly remarkable. In fact, they were not much different to the time they spent waiting for their children at a Justin Bieber concert a few months before.
It is partly this — the sheer ordinariness of that day — that makes the horror of what unfolded so extraordinarily hard to process.
‘When we got to Manchester, to the arena, we watched the kids go up the steps to the platform at the top, ready to go through the stadium doors,’ says Caroline. ‘Lee rang me and said: “You know what, Mum? I’m not excited — I’m buzzing.” They were jumping around — really giddy.
‘Wendy took the phone to speak to Charlotte. She said: “I love you. See you after.” ’ Caroline stops. Bites her lip.
‘We went for something to eat at the Slug and Lettuce, wandered around Harvey nichols, laughing at the price tags — who spends £165 on a scarf?
‘Then we went for a coffee to kill some more time. Then I got this text saying Ben was feeling ill.’
Which is where the ‘ifs’ begin. Lee asked his mother if she wanted them to leave immediately. She told him they were five minutes away, so they listened to another song before collecting their things.
‘There were these little girls at the side of us, messing around
putting their shoes on, which held us up,’ Lee says, taking up the story. ‘Mum rang and I said we were still inside, so she said she’d come up the steps to meet us.
‘I wish we’d left five minutes earlier when Mum said she was five chances minutes are away, we’d becausehave beenthe outside when it happened.
‘While we were trying to get past the girls, Ariana Grande went off and the lights came on. It was a mad rush for everyone to get out.
‘We got to the doors and just heard a massive bang. It didn’t sound like I thought a bomb would sound, and then the arena shook. We heard loads of screams.
‘All I could see was smoke and then the alarm went off. I thought the roof was collapsing or something so I threw Ben and Charlotteto the bottomout the doorof andthe we main ran big stairs. ‘They were both crying. I said: “It’s all right. Wait here. I’ll go back and find Mum.” I ran back up and got to the doors leading to where the train station was.’ He CONTINUES: ‘I shouted: “Mum” because I could see someone sitting up with a white top on. A policeman grabbed me. He said: “Don’t go in there.” I said: “I need to find my mum and her friend.”
‘All I could see were bits of all sorts — metal, smoke — alarms were going off. There were bodies everywhere. Blood. shoes. Black water and smoke.’ His phone rang. It was his mother. she was screaming in pain and crying for Wendy. ‘That’s when I spoke to a police officer who eventually got us to Mum after she managed to get outside. she was told to sit down on the steps and wait. They said someone would get to her when they could. ‘I knew she was in a lot of pain and she was covered in blood. At that point we didn’t know whether it was her blood. ‘I grabbed a blanket and some bottles of water from a paramedic to give to her, but my main thing was to try to find Wendy. ‘Charlotte wanted to help, but I said: “no, you stay here.” I’d already been in the arena and knew what kind of stuff was in there. I couldn’t put her through that — seeing that stuff and that smell. It was like no other smell I’d smelt before. I don’t know how to describe it. It was awful — burning and acid.
‘I asked Mum where Wendy had been. she said she wasn’t far from her when it happened, so I went to try to find her, but couldn’t.’
Lee returned three times to try to find Wendy until 2.30am when, once the most seriously injured had been seen, the walking wounded were ushered onto two double decker buses. Caroline and the children were taken to the Royal oldham Hospital.
‘The next 24 hours were chaos,’ says Lee. ‘We didn’t know if Wendy was alive or dead. Charlotte’s brother, Adam, came for her and took us to Manchester Royal Infirmary to see if she was there.
‘Then we were told we should go to the etihad stadium to wait for news, so we went there.’
They waited most of the day with others desperate to find missing relatives and loved ones.
‘ eventually, the head of the police came to speak to us. He told us “if your loved ones are still missing, there’s a 99 per cent chance they’re the ones who were closest to where it happened”.
‘everyone there burst into tears. I think that’s the first time Charlotte cried properly.’
The next few days are something of a blur. Lee remembers visiting his mother in hospital. Charlotte and her family were there, too. A police officer arrived to tell them they believed they’d found Wendy and to prepare for the worst.
officers went to her home to collect DnA samples [from personal belongings] for identification. Within ten hours they confirmed it was, as they feared, Wendy.
‘I still didn’t believe it,’ says Caroline. ‘I thought, until they’ve actually seen her — until Charlotte tells me she’s seen her with her eyes — I won’t believe it.’
Caroline had been home from hospital for 24 hours, after having her head stitched and arm and foot tended to, when Lee received a text from Charlotte confirming the body in the morgue was Wendy’s.
The teenager’s response was heartbreaking. ‘she said the one thing she was happy about was her Mum was all in one piece,’ says Lee.
‘If she’d been that close to the bomb maybe she’d have been missing an arm or a leg, but she wasn’t. It turned out she’d banged her head and died instantly.
‘At least it was quick, so she hadn’t suffered. Charlotte said she was as beautiful as she was when she said goodbye to her before we all went in.’ A TEARFUL Caroline adds: ‘ every time I shut my eyes, I see Wendy and me walking in, her in her black leggings and coloured top, us going our separate ways and then . . .
‘We were just ordinary people going about our business. she should be coming here on Monday as usual, doing my hair, having a giggle, not . . . ’ The sentence ends in a shake of her head. ‘Why?’
‘Mum, you can’t make sense of something like this,’ says Lee. ‘We’ve got to count ourselves lucky that Ben and Charlotte and I are still here. If those girls hadn’t been messing around with their shoes we’d have been out there with you. We’ve lost Wendy, but it could have been all of us.’
Which is, as this commendable young man acknowledges, a small mercy, but a mercy nonetheless.