I FOUND HOPE AMID TRAGEDY

RACHEL JOHNSON

IHEARD the helicopters during the early hours. Suspended in the sky above my house like deafening, insistent dragonflies. ‘Break-in,’ I thought to myself, shoved my wax earplugs in, and tried to sleep. By dawn the helicopters and sirens were so loud, it was like waking to a scene from Apocalypse Now. The hot air was heavy with an acrid tang that scorched the throat and made my eyes run even before I switched on the news.

‘We are now returning to the disaster that unfolded overnight in North Kensington, West London,’ a voice said and a jolt went through me.

A council tower block just 500 yards from my house had gone up in flames in a towering inferno. A baby had been hurled out of a ninth-floor window in a bid to save it. Desperate souls had jumped to their deaths. Dozens were in hospital, many hundreds evacuated, with a total of 58 people now dead, or missing, presumed dead.

The Grenfell Tower fire is now being called the worst preventable accident to strike this country in peacetime. And the disaster was on my doorstep.

It was impossible to take in. Impossible to do anything else but go there.

I’d taken my children to playdates at Grenfell Tower. I’d had coffee there. My son Oliver’s best friend Fin used to live there with his mum. I’ve just found their address in my Filofax: 26 Grenfell Tower, Grenfell Road, W11 1TG.

The boys kicked a ball around the grass pitch and car park that used to be at the foot of the block, before the council sold both off to make way for a spanking new Kensington Academy a couple of years ago.

But now their old home has gone up in flames – whoosh, like a nylon nightie – leaving it standing against the blue June sky like a grim Meccano coffin drawn in charcoal.

The past few days here have been a cross between a horror movie and the aftermath of a terrorist attack, followed by growing civil disturbance. Surreal.

On Tuesday, I was buying cherry tomatoes in a Turkish shop on Clarendon Road. Now the cheery neighbours in headscarves buying sweets for their children in the shop with me could be dead.

As I approached the tower, people stood in stunned clumps, hugging, holding up their phones. It was 8.30am and the tower was still burning – and a great, grey plume of toxic smoke blotted out the sun.

Instead of school-run traffic and uniformed children skipping along pavements playing with fidget spinners, all along the streets there were flashing, growling conga lines of fire engines, police cars, ambulances and Red Cross vans.

Police were manning cordons. Hundreds of firefighters sat slumped on the ground or napped in vans. Near a cordon, a man who’d been rescued only six hours before from his flat on the 16th floor was darting around like a dementor, shouting to whoever would listen: ‘I told them this would happen!’

On Friday, protesters stormed Kensington town hall and marched on Whitehall – I know there will be more to come out about the cheap cladding, lack of fire safety, sprinklers, and the repeated warnings of the residents’ action group to the Tenant Management Organisation (TMO). Heads will roll. The leader of the Conservative council is receiving unpleasant anonymous threats on his landline, and passions are running high.

PEOPLE are saying that this could be Theresa May’s Hurricane Katrina moment. For this was London’s 9/11. But on the first day, the second day, even for most of the third day, it was not about retribution, it was about contribution.

Within hours of the blaze, my neighbourhood became the world’s media souk. People poured in with donations. Volunteer teams formed. The council’s emergency plan kicked in – it managed to get children from a school that had been forced to close into other classes in time for the opening bell and exams. Helplines opened.

I watched in Walmer Road as London Mayor Sadiq Khan hopped out of a Range Rover, the first in a long line of politicians and notables from all sides to descend. The next time Khan came, though, someone threw a bottle at him.

Sadiq, then the PM on her doomed ‘private’ visit, then Jeremy Corbyn, Andrea Leadsom. The singers Adele and Lily Allen. Sadiq again, then the PM again, and on Friday, I went along to the Westway sports centre, where the survivors of the tower have been sleeping in the gym, and a whisper went round.

I stood behind a table neatly stacked with cans, packets of cereal and boxes of crisps, as a gleaming dark green Range Rover glided up to the entrance. The Queen. ‘She wants to meet the victims,’ an official told me. ‘She wants to talk to them.’

And then a tall young man in a suit. Prince William. We all stood to attention and the Queen came into the awed hush.

All the cliches apply. She spoke to people for what seemed like ages. She’s tiny. She’s above politics. Contained in this one small personage is the entire point of the monarchy. She was a walking symbol of national unity – yes, and ‘healing’ – in a bright blue coat and matching hat: almost an argument in herself for absolute monarchy, as she seems to be the only thing gluing the nation together right now.

Prince William saw a group of fitness instructors. ‘Hi guys,’ he said. He asked a volunteer to confirm if it was true that two girls had been rescued from the tower with only the clothes they stood up in, and still sat their chemistry GCSE the same day.

It wasn’t about retribution ...it was about contribution

It was. A few minutes after the surprise Royal party entered the screened-off gym, a bereaved woman started screaming. Away from the cameras, Prince William slipped across the beddingstrewn hall and held her in a long hug as she howled.

The Royal grandmother and grandson signed the book of condolence in biro. Her Majesty ends her name with a flourish, while her grandson, I noted, is a leftie.

When the Queen left, she spoke to a line of fire, ambulance and police officers outside and a huge crowd of photographers and onlookers burst into spontaneous applause.

Then a man held up a picture of lost children and started shouting. Her Majesty was whisked away. This is a tough crowd for anyone – even the Queen. The mood turned as fast as the wind.

At the memorial wall at Latimer Road Tube station, many of the messages are angry. ‘Kensington now has hope under Corbyn.’ ‘TMO terrorist criminals.’ ‘No to £400million refit of Buck House with public money.’ ‘I remember watching the film Titanic when I was younger and thinking: “Wow, I can’t believe they put poor people at the bottom of the ship without life jackets and lifeboats to save them.” This feels like the housing equivalent.’

It could well be. There is now an active criminal investigation. Thirty people are dead, and the death toll could run to three figures. There are huge questions to answer.

It was obvious to all the eyewitnesses that the fire hoses didn’t reach high enough, but there was also poor access to the block for the fire engines thanks to the new academy, and the glut of police cars early at the scene.

Adam Akeba lives in a council block opposite, and watched the fire all night from his balcony. ‘Only thing I can say about this is that fire brigade cannot reach anything over 13 floors,’ he said. He showed me a video he’d taken on his phone as evidence, with the awful sound of screams turned off.

‘By three o’clock in the morning, they can’t do nothing about the higher floors,’ he said. ‘They left them just to die.’

‘It’s down to the building,’ Kim Taylor-Smith, a local councillor, told me. ‘A design flaw in the spec.’

The recovery and identification of bodies will take months. This is going to be a long, hot summer for us in North Kensington, especially if agitators carry on hurling flame-throwers about ‘corporate manslaughter’ and accuse those in power of having ‘blood on their hands’ before anything is proved.

THINGS are kicking off, but this is a neighbourhood where the stucco terraces and communal gardens are plaited with council houses, church halls and community centres, which are still filled with volunteers, women in shorts or mini-dresses alongside others in burkas.

At St James’s Church, I found Doreen Anderson, a verger who had helped at my daughter’s christening. The church was so crammed with donations that we had to stand in a sort of canyon of cardboard boxes.

‘Everyone has been so nice, so generous, so loving,’ she told me. One resident went to the cashpoint and handed her a wad of £1,000.

I was in a relief centre and a survivor said: ‘What can I do to help? I’ve got nothing left to give, so please – I want to give my blood.’

So many things are seared into me as grief turns to anger.

The Queen’s harrowed expression as she left the Westway. The sight of Muslim families breaking the Ramadan fast, sitting at long red tablecloths in the street. A woman in tears singing Amazing Grace at a vigil. Above all, the blackened tower.

This was a tragedy that occurred in one of the poorest wards of the city in the richest borough in the country.

The tower block shadows mansions worth many millions, but here the poorest immigrants and the richest of the super-rich live cheek by jowl.

The past three days, I did not see a tale of two cities, but of one community. Where those who had everything scrambled to help those who had been left with nothing.

The community came together in anger as well as grief, but it still came together.

The Queen was a walking symbol of national unity