In terrible times we find out who we truly are
Like many people who find themselves irrevocably drawn to London, I have a complex love-hate relationship with our paradoxical, teeming, cheek-by-jowl capital city.
It’s a dazzling, unfriendly, gilded, infuriating place, where wealth and squalor rub shoulders and anonymity is its loneliest curse and saving grace.
But as the acrid smoke clears over Grenfell Tower, that obscene smouldering charnel house where so many – some still uncounted, unnamed, unclaimed – lost their lives in a nightmarish blaze, London has earned another epithet: magnificent.
Yet again, the darkest of hours has been illuminated by a thousand shining acts of kindness. Yet again, Londoners have met tragedy with such an outpouring of generosity and love that emergency centres have been overwhelmed and have had to call a temporary halt to the flood of donated food and goods.
Our hearts may be broken but London’s compassion is far from fatigued. It is there, in the serried rows of shoes, stacks of clothes, blankets, toothpaste and nappies for the dispossessed and bereaved, whose loss is far deeper than four charred walls.
That compassion has seen the rich and famous – Adele, Jamie Oliver, Princes William and Harry – give money, support and help alongside shell-shocked community leaders and traumatised locals, who watched the flames take hold and listened helplessly as the pleas, prayers and girls’ piteous screams were replaced by a silence too terrible to convey.
That sight will be forever seared on our collective retina; that hellish sound can never be forgotten any more than the gut-wrenching last texts sent in the moments before death could ever be deleted from the city’s memory, the nation’s history.
So far this year, we have endured the atrocity at Manchester Arena, the blood shed on London’s bridges, the carnage in Borough Market, and now Grenfell Tower – yet our solidarity is unwavering.
“It is not the walls that make the city, but the people who live within them. The walls of London may be battered, but the spirit of the Londoner stands resolute and undismayed,” said King George VI during the Blitz.
And now, under very different circumstances, London is once again showing its mettle: the restaurateur who is cooking for the newly homeless, the hoteliers freeing up rooms, the woman who saw the despair, went home and brought back the entire contents of her wardrobe.
London does that to you. I came here from my adoptive home in Edinburgh in my early thirties to work for a couple of years. Three years, tops, I assured friends. I loved the can-do energy, the cosmopolitan élan. I hated the entitled swagger of the City boys and the blank-eyed rudeness of strangers.
“In London, the people you know are really lovely,” I told a friend. “The people you don’t are really horrible.”
I knew I didn’t belong, which was fine, because I had no desire to belong. A marriage, four house moves, 19 years and two children later, this sprawling, pulsating multicultural city has come to define me.
“I suppose I am a Londoner, whatever than means,” is my stock observation. Or rather it was.
For, with blinding clarity, I suddenly understand what it does mean. These are the worst of times and they have brought out the best in Londoners. And I am proud to belong.
Good Samaritans of every class, colour and creed have come in their droves to show the most incredible empathy, throwing open their arms and homes to those in extremis.
Even as the fire broke out, devout Muslim householders who were still awake at midnight for their Ramadan meal rushed to rouse their neighbours before they thought to flee.
So let us never again hear divisive talk of “them and us”. We are united in grief and in a determination to look after each other.
That desperate, stricken mother who took the horrendous decision to drop her 12-month-old baby from a ninth-floor window did so because she believed someone would catch him. And somehow in all the terror and chaos, a man stepped forward and did just that. The child was saved; of his mother there has been no word.
It’s impossible not to feel outrage, boundless fury at this catastrophic loss of life.
Investigations are already under way into the cause of a conflagration that anxious residents were assured could never happen. Was the recently added cladding highly flammable? Did the layout, the lack of centralised alarm, the absence of sprinklers play a specific role in this disaster? Or was the whole building a substandard death-trap waiting to happen? In which case, did these people perish simply because they were poor?
Occupants were told that in the event of a fire they should stay in their homes. Following that directive would have – and very probably has – resulted in incineration.
The death toll is rising as firefighters pick their way through the upper floors. What a terrible task they are undertaking on behalf of us all; in acknowledgement, they too have been recipients of Londoners’ sundry kindnesses, ranging from hot meals to wordless hugs.
This waking nightmare is not yet over. For survivors and those who have been robbed of family and friends, it will never end as they endure the flashbacks, the trauma, the guilt of the living as they mourn for the dead.
And what about those of us on the sidelines? We have held our children tighter, whispered fierce endearments, felt the “what-ifs” constricting our throats and the involuntary jolt of nausea as tormenting, tormented images rise unbidden.
Something unspeakable has taken place in our city. London is hurting. The vast majority of us may be bystanders, but we Londoners will never just stand by.