In ash-strewn streets, a sea of kindness . . . and breathtaking ts, a sea of kindness
Three things hit you the moment you reach the police barriers around the Grenfell Tower. First, it’s the smell. Next, it’s astonishment that anyone escaped this 24-storey firestorm, especially when you hear the stories of those who did — fleeing in their underwear, only to turn back and see neighbours trapped helplessly between smoke, flames and gravity.
But then, you also notice the vast mosaic of kindness spreading through these ash-strewn, smoky streets.
Were you able to look down from the smouldering summit of the Grenfell Tower, you would see every facet of our boisterous capital below; gritty council estates and £10 million Notting hill banker palazzos just a few hundred yards apart, with every part of the multicultural diaspora in between.
Yesterday, they were as one in their response. It is a well-worn cliché to talk about ‘Blitz spirit’. Yet here, in the city that endured the worst of the Blitz, with charred debris littering the roads after one of London’s worst disasters since World War II, that is exactly what I found.
here were schoolchildren, grand Kensington matriarchs, office workers and pensioners forming polite queues at a series of community focal points to donate bin-liners and carrier bags full of clothes, food and household essentials.
In the early morning, I found television prop man George Morris, 42, wheeling a trolley full of clothes, food and drink to Notting hill Methodist Church.
‘My boss will probably kill me, as a lot of this stuff is supposed to be at a film location in Catford,’ he said. ‘But the van’s stuck inside the police cordon, so I thought I’d bring all this here instead.’
Outside Latymer Community Church, an elderly gent in a Panama hat had set up a trestle table, offering water and drinks to anyone.
BYMid-afternoon, the community centres had been overwhelmed by this quiet, compassionate little army, by people like NhS administrator Becca John, 25, born and bred in the area and struggling down the street with three Sainsbury’s bags of clothes and toiletries.
‘a friend woke me at 3am and I haven’t slept since. I had to come,’ she explained.
Come teatime, the rugby Portobello Trust youth centre was having to turn away fresh donations, gratefully redirecting them to other reception points.
In the midst of it all, I met a team from Islamic relief, unloading a van full of food and clothes. From around the corner came a reassuringly familiar sight.
here was Khalsa aid, the Sikh disaster relief operation that brought so much comfort to the Somerset Levels during the dreadful floods of 2014.
‘We’ve only brought water for now, but the plan is to get our 24/7 breakfast operation up and running as soon as we can,’ explained Gobind Singh, 33, a graphics designer. his charity understands the importance of that great British tonic in times of trouble: a nice cup of tea.
By last night, sports halls and church centres had mattresses laid out for those who wished to stay close to their former home.
It was just as well, because many people had no intention of going anywhere until they had found out what had happened to their neighbours.
No amount of local generosity could temper the raw fury that previous concerns about fire safety appeared to have gone unheeded.
as well as tea, sympathy and fresh clothes, what these people wanted, above all, were some honest answers.
I met Michael Paramasivan staring up at the smoke still billowing out of the home from which he had escaped wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. he was now dressed in a stranger’s shirt and shorts plus a pair of flip flops.
Michael had been deeply touched by the public response, but remained appalled and baffled by events. There had been no fire alarm, he explained.
he was half-asleep at around 1.15am when a peculiar smell had catapulted him out of bed to check the electrics in his seventh-floor flat. Peering through the spyhole in the front door, he saw plumes of black smoke engulfing the hallway.
‘I thought: “I’m not hanging around.” I didn’t even look for my phone.’ he grabbed girlfriend hannah, 23, wrapped a dressing gown over stepdaughter Thea, five, and made a dash for it, ignoring the shouts from a fireman below, telling people to stay in their flats.
The Sedrati family, up on the eighth floor, will be forever grateful that daughter Sarah, 19, is a diligent student. had she not been doing some last-minute revision for her psychology exams, she might never have noticed a sickly, plasticky pong wafting through the family home and alerted her mother, hafida, 50, brother, aeneas, 14, and a neighbour. They all made a dash for it down the fire escape.
hafida’s abiding memories are screams from below and a fire officer shouting: ‘Go back and stay in your flat!’ hafida was having none of it.
‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’ she told me. She expressed her gratitude to whomever had
donated the clothes she was standing up in, to the person who had given her son a makeshift school uniform, to the neighbour who had taken him off to school in time for an important exam, and so on.
‘The children have lost everything — all their schoolwork,’ she sighed. ‘But my poor neighbour, she had just got both her children back home from university. And now, all of them are missing . . .’ Her words tailed off as the tears flowed.
Talking to eyewitness after eyewitness, it became clear how so many locals had played their parts. Residents of Silchester Road, which backs on to the Grenfell Tower, had been woken by the sound of George Clarke, presenter of Channel 4’s Amazing Spaces, standing in his garden and yelling up at the tower block: ‘Get out of the building!’
‘At first, I thought George was being burgled, until I looked out of the window and saw the flames,’ explained neighbour Tanya Thompson.
‘George was actually trying to let people in the tower know which direction the fire was coming from because they couldn’t see it.’ At first, Tanya, a specialist decorator, and disc jockey husband Piers could only stare helplessly at the faces pressed against windows of the tower block, the glass open only as far as the child-proof hinges would allow.
The same faces would disappear as the flames shot up the outside of the building. In those flats yet to be consumed by the inferno, Tanya saw terrified residents flashing torches and mobile phones in the frantic, forlorn hope of attracting the attention of rescuers.
Her worst recollection was that of a woman on the top floor. Rather than waving a torch, this desperate soul was waving a whole string of fairy lights.
Determined to do something — anything — Tanya went out into the street and bumped straight into a fellow mum from her children’s old primary school.
‘She just collapsed on me, saying her sister was up on the 16th floor. I hugged her and promised to look after her.’
Tanya steered her through streets full of fire crews and medics in search of a designated meeting point. ‘There were these firemen with black faces, their red sweatshirts drenched in sweat, who had obviously just come out and others going in.
‘Incredibly brave people. And then there was this family with young kids on the ground, all getting respirator treatment. It was terrible.’
Tanya eventually returned home to receive a 5.30am text from Kensington Aldridge Academy where her daughter, Agnes, is a pupil.
The school sits right underneath the tower and would not be opening. WHen
I arrived yesterday morning, the family were busy on their computers. Piers, who runs the local residents’ action group, was trying to piece together essential news for his neighbours. All had received police orders to prepare evacuation bags in case the tower started to show signs of imminent collapse.
Agnes was trying to find out what had happened to some of her school friends, particularly one who lived on the 17th floor of the Grenfell.
The Thompsons’ garden was strewn with clumps of mysterious black debris, which their neighbour, an architect, had identified as part of Grenfell’s now-infamous cladding. Great chunks of it sat on the children’s trampoline.
As we looked up at fresh flames breaking out here and there all over the building, we could feel the spray from the firefighters’ hoses flying back in our faces.
Amid all this mess, Tanya fished out something heartbreakingly human that had just floated down from the sky on to their terrace.
It was a charred page of homework, a student’s notes on something called ‘bilateral transfers’. It was unnamed and scorched all round the edges.
But it obviously belonged to a promising student because the teacher had written ‘ Good’ alongside a big red tick.
Tanya is looking after it. For nothing would make her happier than handing it back to its rightful owner.