Britain mourns victims of Grenfell blaze
GREEN scarves, white roses: the community surrounding Grenfell Tower, the west London building ravaged by fire, united around shared symbols yesterday as they held poignant commemorations for the tragedy that killed 71 people a year ago.
Clutching flowers and placards bearing images of their lost loved ones, dozens of tearful survivors of Britain’s deadliest domestic fire since World War 2 joined stillgrieving relatives on an emotional walk through the area.
The procession – accompanied by a portable speaker playing a melancholic track on repeat – ended in the shadow of the burnt-out block just before 12.54am, the time the London Fire Brigade received the first call about a fire in the tower.
One by one, relatives announced the names of the deceased accompanied by a flurry from a bongo drum, before pinning their pictures at the “wall of truth” – a section of the fencing around the tower featuring messages and candles.
After a short trumpet blast and as light rain began to fall, the crowd assembled at the sombre site and marked a 72-second silence – in memory of each of the people who perished, along with a stillborn baby.
“I saw everything from the start of that night and I couldn’t sleep for three weeks,” recalled Farhiya Abdi, 42, a mother-of-two who was among the first to arrive at Grenfell from her nearby home as the fire spread.
“When I closed my eyes I would hear the screaming for help, see the children’s faces at the window again. I saw people jump to their death,” she said earlier in the evening, at a remembrance event on a closedoff nearby street.
Organisers unveiled banners and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans demanding justice, one of several such events taking place. Nearly everybody wore a green scarf – the adopted colour of the tragedy – while the tower was illuminated in green, as was Prime Minister Theresa May’s Downing Street office.
May told parliament on Wednesday that the “unimaginable tragedy remains at the forefront of our minds”.
In an interview with Grenfell Speaks, a social media news channel, she admitted that the immediate official response to the fire “wasn’t good enough . . . from the beginning”.
The fire started through a faulty fridge in the kitchen of a fourth-floor flat in the 24storey tower.