The GCSE pupil who still sat her exam
As Inês Alves awaits her GCSE results, she tells Flora Carr of Grenfell’s lasting impact
Inês Alves is impatient for tomorrow’s GCSE results. She’s hoping for “an A at least” in her favourite subject, chemistry, and she’s quietly optimistic. “I hope I did OK,” she says. “I did my revision notes a couple of months before, but I didn’t really get a chance to read through them – I had planned to look at them on the morning of the exam. But from what I remembered from lessons, I think I did OK.”
If anyone deserves a piece of good news this summer, it’s Inês.
It has been over two months since she and her family lost their home and all their worldly possessions in the Grenfell Tower fire on June 14.
The 16-year-old made headlines after she turned up to take her chemistry GCSE exam at 9am the next morning, wearing the same clothes in which she had escaped the still-raging inferno. In truth, the full extent of the previous night’s horror simply hadn’t hit her yet. “I was on two hours’ sleep and I had just witnessed my house burning down. But it hadn’t sunk in,” she says. “Occasionally it popped into my head, [but] I just tried to get distracted by the exam questions.” Only when she had finished the paper was she finally overwhelmed: “I just burst into tears.”
In the weeks that have followed, the impact of the fire has clearly taken its toll on Inês, and her parents are encouraging her to start counselling.
“I feel like if I keep everything bottled [up], at one point I’m just going to burst. It’s better to let things out one at a time,” she says. “I try to act strong in front of everyone, but then obviously I’ve had my moments.”
The devastation wreaked by the fire still “doesn’t feel real at all,” Inês says. The family are still staying in a hotel; sometimes, she admits, it feels as if they could all be on the strangest of holidays.
Sitting in a café, Inês scrolls through photos of the family’s flat in Grenfell Tower: her father and older brother lounging on the sofa, watching TV; her mother’s crucifixes on the wall (her parents emigrated from Portugal, and are strict Catholics).
She shows me a photo of her bedroom, which she had been decorating with intricate drawings of flowers with a Sharpie pen. “I never ended up finishing it.” Flicking through the images, all she has left of her lost home, she frequently slips into the present tense. Inês skips to a video she’s saved from Snapchat. It shows the now familiar sight of the tower in flames. “I don’t know if you can hear the screams,” she asks me. In the silence that follows, we can both hear the piercing cries emanating from the phone. Inês had gone to bed early on the night of the fire and set her alarm for 5am, ready for a last-minute cram. She was woken by her dad, Miguel, “barging into [her] room” at 1am, warning her and her older brother Tiago that there was a fire in the building, before waking up all their neighbours on the 13th floor. “I thought it was a small fire: no one would have expected it to go to the whole building, so I just grabbed my revision notes,” she says. Having pulled on jeans and a jumper over her pyjamas, she read through them downstairs, waiting for the flames to subside. Instead, they “just kept spreading and spreading through the cladding”.
Inês’s brother took her to a family friend’s flat in Bramley House, which overlooks Grenfell Tower. Sleep was impossible – “I kept hyperventilating and shaking. I could hear people scream, begging for help” – so she put on her headphones and read her notes.
By chance, Inês could see her home from the friend’s sitting room window: “I saw the fire reach my parents’ room, then my brother’s, then mine. Then all three windows in the sitting room had caught fire. So there was no hope.”
The family lost everything, including irreplaceable family keepsakes from the children’s christenings and holy communions. “We were very upset in the beginning about losing everything, but now we understand we’re never going to get it back, so we just have to live with that,” Inês says.
There was never any doubt in her mind about sitting her exam the next day: “I wasn’t going to wait around knowing my flat had already burnt down.” Inês headed to her school, Sacred Heart in Hammersmith, where her teachers “were already expecting me – or at least, they hoped that I would come in”.
When we meet, she takes me to the makeshift memorial that was set up in the shadow of the tower. Yellow ribbons are tied to railings; T-shirts, candles and teddy bears are laid out on the pavement; and everywhere, missing person posters are tacked to walls and lampposts. It’s the faces on these posters that keep Inês awake.
“When I’m falling asleep, sometimes [they] just come into my head. People that I’d recognise, that would always say ‘hi’ to me or smile at me.”
The memory of “people screaming for help” also keeps her awake. She remembers seeing people waving their T-shirts out of their windows and flicking their lights to attract attention.
“The next morning when I came back from my exam, it was completely black,” she says.
Inês’s father is a chauffeur, and her mother a housekeeper. Both instilled in her and her brother, who is studying physics at King’s College London, the importance of a good education, and are justifiably proud of her for completing her chemistry GCSE.
In the following days, she was forced to miss four further exams – she had lost the rest of her revision notes, and was battling understandable stress
– so some of the eight grades she will get tomorrow will be from her mock results. But it’s the A in chemistry she has pinned her hopes on, as she is eager to begin her A-level in the science, along with maths and economics, next month.
However well Inês and other students who lived in the tower do tomorrow, there is no doubt that the fire will cast a long shadow on their education and mental health.
When we walk past Grenfell Tower, she points out her old bedroom window. “I lived there since I was born,” she says. “Each and every floor was different and multicultural. It’s where I was brought up.
“It still hasn’t really hit me that I’m never going to be able to go home.”