Neglect has been going on for years ...council treated us like third-class citizens. We’re sick of being let down, we want justice
London. Aymen had fainted on the seventh floor. “By miracle, there was a fireman on that floor,” Bellal says.
His children have gone back to a school in mourning, having lost fellow pupils and friends like Firdaws Hashim.
“Firdaws’ family were one of the best you could meet,” Bellal says. “Her dad had just got his black cab badge, they were so happy, on the up.”
For five weeks after the fire Bellal and his whole family were in a small double hotel room. He says they were only given a family room after other residents and volunteers threatened to boycott a meeting with the council. They just want a home where they can feel safe. Bellal says the council thinks the £5,000 given to Grenfell families should be enough to solve their problems. “Can you replace the lock of each of my children’s hair that we kept?” he asks. “The first gold ring I bought my wife when I was 17? However much money you give me, you’ll never replace all that.” Bellal looks up exhausted from his coffee. “We had years of problems with Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation,” he says. “Just one example, our fire door was broken when the fire happened. My wife was having to barricade the door.” Despite not wanting to single out his own family from the community, Bellal has bravely agreed to address the Mirror’s Real Britain fringe event at the Labour conference in Brighton.
Recently, he spoke to Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the judge in charge of the already widely criticised inquiry.
“I said, ‘you’re the clever one, we’re the dumb ones who aren’t educated. But even we can see that this narrow restricted inquiry isn’t going to give us the answers’.”
Alongside Bellal in Brighton will be a young woman called Swarzy Macaly, a 24-year-old volunteer from East London.
Within hours of the fire she was helping lead a team of 200 people at Latymer Community Church, and a clip of her standing on a chair taking control of the chaos of public donations went viral.
“I’m small,” Swarzy, an English teacher and radio DJ, shrugs.
“I jumped on a chair to try to provide leadership since I hadn’t met anyone from the council or the authorities on the ground. It was a beautiful thing to see the community unite as one.”
Bellal and Swarzy got to know each other through the making of a documentary, On the Ground at Grenfell. Nendie Pinto-Duschinsky was
already making the film with local young people when the fire happened. So they turned their camera on the unfolding story. Reece Yerboah, a 23 year-old supermarket deputy manager and fashion designer, who lives opposite the tower, tells me he didn’t sleep for five days after the fire. “I just volunteered solidly,” he says, his voice still cracked by smoke.
“I had four friends in there. One family didn’t make it. I didn’t know how else to deal with it except help.”
Now forensic teams are due to start “wrapping” the building.
“Authorities are trying to cover up the building so they don’t have to look at it,” Reece says. “They want us out of sight, out of mind.”
Samiah Anderson, 21, a friend of artist Khadija Saye and others lost in the tower, says she realised that day “how disposable working-class people are. They don’t care about us at all.”
Bellal says the view from the tower was beautiful. “But my mum always worried about a fire,” he says.