How the miracle of Gorse Park showed the REAL heart of a nation
THE scene, say those who witnessed it, most closely resembled a war zone after a bombing raid. In the eerie quiet following the blast, dazed householders emerged from ruptured buildings onto a street awash with debris, the evening air thick with dust.
Some heard a woman shouting: ‘Please, get me out of here.’ Others were too shaken by the explosion to hear anything.
At the epicentre a family home in Gorse Park, Ayr, was reduced to rubble, its four occupants somewhere among it. Further out, front doors were blown off, car windscreens shattered, bonnets crushed. Bank statements and birthday cards from the seat of the blast blew through the streets – personal affairs scattered to the winds.
Confusion
It was 7.10pm on Monday. With an almighty boom, Gorse Park was in smithereens and every face was etched with fear and confusion.
It did not last for long. Fourteen hours after the suspected gas blast ripped through this unremarkable 1970s housing scheme an urgent message was posted by South Ayrshire Council on social media outlets. ‘We have everything we need,’ it said. ‘Please stop bringing donations now.’
It was 9.08am on Tuesday. The sun had barely risen on the devastation wrought at dusk in Ayr’s Kincaidston area the previous evening. Yet the overnight surge of a Scottish town’s community spirit had, by morning, proved to be quite overwhelming.
We lament the supposed loss of this precious societal resource often. From time to time in larger towns and cities there are grim finds in forgotten tenement flats – pensioners who died alone and wretchedly and lay undiscovered for weeks, sometimes even months.
Our sense of community is fading, we say. This would not have happened in the olden days.
Some worry, as I have, that community spirit is a casualty of the nation’s deepening political divisions, that the tribalism engendered by the central Scottish debate of the past decade has fractured friendships, created ‘them and us’ dynamics in neighbourhoods which, to borrow a phrase, are better together.
Others posit that neighbours are instinctively more circumspect now than in bygone days when friendships over garden walls were the social glue of suburban streets.
We are, perhaps, more averse to speaking our minds, fearful of offending in an age of unparalleled hypersensitivity.
It took a crisis of global proportions to bring loving thy neighbour back into fashion. Crises generally come with that fringe benefit: they bring us to our senses.
Across our land volunteers, friends and neighbours rallied round to support the vulnerable through the pandemic’s first terrifying months. It was especially heartening to witness in this country where entrenched differences have threatened to undermine our nobler, better selves.
Yet 2021 brought fears community spirit was again in recession. A survey by the think tank Demos found the ties that bind British communities were at ‘huge risk’ of being loosened.
Community
A quarter of the adults it spoke to had not experienced a hug in more than a year. Almost two-thirds had not made a new friend in six months and 44 per cent had not done so in a year.
‘These gains we’ve made in community relationships earlier in the pandemic are in danger of being lost,’ warned Demos chief executive Polly MacKenzie.
Reports of the overnight activities in the town of Ayr this week tell a rather different story – one which, amid much gloom in the news schedules, deserves celebration.
They record that, as darkness fell on the rubble left by the Gorse Park explosion, the brightest light guiding the efforts to restore order and bring comfort was provided by the townspeople themselves – pulling together, reaching out to their neighbours whether they knew them or not.
Some, unsurprisingly, are being hailed as heroes.
Delivery driver Alex Craig, 34, who lives nearby, ‘instinctively’ ran towards the biggest pile of wreckage in the seconds after the blast because it seemed the most obvious place for survivors to be.
He found 11-year-old Hudson Ferguson with a badly broken arm and singed pyjamas which, in some places, had burned into his skin. It was Mr Craig and his neighbours – not fire crews, which had yet to arrive – who dug him out.
And it was his brother in law who drove Hudson to hospital before the first ambulance was on the scene.
Another rescuer, Chris McNicol, 40, worked on ‘instinct’ too. ‘Adrenaline, trainers on and I’m away,’ he recalled.
After helping to dig out survivors he dusted himself down and went to his job at McDonald’s where he put in an eighthour shift.
Those who raced out of their homes to help are amazed any of the occupants of the flattened house survived the blast. In fact, William and Marion Ferguson and their boys, Harley, 16, and Hudson are all on the mend – and the lightning response by their heroic neighbours can only have improved their chances.
But then, the whole town was a fast response unit.
As police cordoned off the blast area to allow the emergency professionals to do their essential work, so ordinary townsfolk and villagers from miles around knuckled down to the tasks they saw as theirs – voluntary aid performed unhesitatingly in the name of compassion and community.
‘We have space,’ announced All Warriors Gym. ‘We can take at least 100 people, heating, showers, bathrooms and kitchen area to eat and Wifi.’
A man with a van took to social media: ‘Happy to help move suitcases etc free of charge if you have to be evacuated for the foreseeable,’ he said.
Staff at a beauty salon, Cloud 9, pitched in with an offer to drive anyone from the affected area anywhere they needed to go. No charge.
An Ayr café, Nanny Mary’s Desserts, stayed open all night to make supply runs to the school and a community centre, both of which were offering shelter. ‘Community is everything,’ said the café owners by way of explanation.
Eight miles away in the former mining village of Annbank, locals made a snap decision on the night of the blast to deliver all the presents they had amassed for this year’s Night Before Christmas drive to the displaced people of Kincaidston. The collection for people in their own community now begins afresh.
Shelter
At Queen Margaret Academy, which offered shelter to some of the 80 households displaced by the blast, so many people brought food, blankets, clothes and toys that staff did not know where to put them all.
Supermarkets, hotels and nurseries weighed in along with too many householders to count, all broadcasting their willingness to help.
Did anyone need childcare? Their pet looking after? Here if you need a cuppa and a chat. Putting the kettle on now.
There were times in the past year-and-a-half when social distancing felt like a metaphor for society itself – when the fear of infection was in danger of transforming into a fear of engaging.
We existed in ‘bubbles’ (a government term, not mine) and we were supposed to ensure that they remained impregnable.
This week brought horror and chaos to the streets of Ayr. But it also brought a glorious reminder that these bubbles are illusory; they are not who we are and represent nothing to which we aspire.
We are better together. And, on this occasion, I promise you, that is not a political point.