‘I can taste the smoke’
Mark Olden
My five-year-old son goes to school near Grenfell Tower. Nadia Choucair, his teaching assistant, was last seen waving a makeshift flag from her window on the 22nd floor. ‘I’ll remember her even if I’m 100,’ my son said. Nadia’s mother, her husband and their three daughters, Fatima, Zeinab and Mierna, are also dead or missing. So is Yaqub Hashim, a friendly six-year-old, who a few weeks ago I watched running around Grenfell Tower’s playground, with its superhero murals. He lived with his parents, older brother and sister, Firdaws, who was deputy head girl at the school before she left last year. Other families with children at the school were hospitalised. Some escaped the fire; others evacuated their nearby homes; others heard the screams or watched as flames engulfed the tower.
Last week the walls around the playground were plastered with pupils’ messages to Nadia and their lost friends, as well as photos of them visiting the Natural History Museum, at forest school, or simply playing. The resilience of the school’s staff in the face of such enormity has been extraordinary.
In October 1966, 116 children and 28 adults died when a coal waste heap crashed down a mountainside in Aberfan, south Wales. Half a century later, one survivor, Jeff Edwards, told the BBC that he had decided never to have children because he thought his DNA had been corrupted. ‘Your personality has changed to such a degree your traits, your make-up, your being has been so fundamentally altered you wouldn’t want to perpetuate it,’ he said. ‘One minute we were young innocent children of eight years of age who were looking forward to the holidays and then then at twenty past nine we were totally different people and would never be the same again.’
The official inquiry described the Aberfan disaster as ‘a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude … of failure to heed clear warnings, and a total lack of direction from above.’ The Grenfell Tower fire, too, was an entirely preventable, man-made catastrophe.
‘With a natural disaster, you know it’s nobody’s fault,’ Dr Shamender Talwar told me. He’s a psychologist, and a co-founder of the Unity of Faiths Foundation. ‘Here, the more that things come to light, people realise that those they rely on, their leaders, the people they pay their council tax to, aren’t there, and it increases the anger. With preventable disasters, there are a lot of “if onlys” … “If only they had listened to us.” The anger that stems from that grows when nobody is giving them answers.’
At 5.20 on the morning of the fire, Dr Talwar, who works with a number of children in North Kensington, received a call from a 14-year-old boy he knew, asking him to come to Grenfell Tower because his uncle’s home was on fire. He arrived to find ‘hundreds who needed support’.
‘I have never experienced that in my whole life,’ he said. ‘I can taste the smoke in my mouth even when I talk about it now … Firemen coming down distraught. Kids are losing their parents. Parents are losing their children. People looking for answers. Nobody in charge. I was trying to calm the anger, the anguish. It was complete mayhem.’
Talwar says that the end of Ramadan means Grenfell’s many Muslim survivors are likely to have entered a new phase of trauma. ‘During Ramadan your mind is set in a certain way. Now they will have time to reflect more and what’s happened will sink in.’
As well as the avoidable nature of the disaster, and the wretched official response to it, local anger has been intensified by the belief that the death toll far exceeds the current official count of 80. Until unambiguous amnesties are given to the undocumented migrants who lived in the tower, and to the people who illegally employed or illegally sublet flats to them, the true numbers can’t be known. A community activist told me that leaflets have been pushed through the letterboxes of some of the big houses a few minutes’ walk south of Grenfell, asking the occupants if any of their domestic workers are missing.
The anger which might have spilled into social disorder in the first days after the fire has so far been held back by restraining voices. Meanwhile, the survivors piece together the basic foundations of their lives – shelter, clothing, money. The long-term psychological consequences of their trauma will vary, but it’s important to know that whatever form it takes, it will be a normal response to an abnormal circumstance and shouldn’t be pathologised.
Comments
-
29 June 2017
at
4:03pm
IPFreely
says:
It's a long time since I felt so angry about such an event. I watched a report on Sky in which a high-rise in Paris went up in flames a few years ago for the same reasons; cladding that was flammable and fire brigades unable to combat the blaze because it spread so quickly. There are, or should be, housing safety standards that are there to protect the lives of the inhabitants of these blocks. Fire escapes, fire doors, sprinklers are a few of these items that ought to have been included in the construction plans. But there were none - no fire doors, no sprinklers and the images of that fire spreading upwards at an incredible rate will haunt the survivors for a very long time. The lives of over eighty people were lost, hundreds will live with the nightmare for many years, hundreds have lost everything that they possessed, Is there an address for us to use to offer assistance, furniture, cash to the survivors?
-
30 June 2017
at
3:06pm
Monteville
says:
@
IPFreely
Among others, an outstanding charity called Solidarity Sports works with vulnerable children and their families in Kensington and Chelsea. At least one of the families they had been working with was lost in the Grenfell Tower fire. Solidarity Sports would be an excellent source of information on how to offer appropriate assistance: see their website.
-
30 June 2017
at
3:08pm
Monteville
says:
@
IPFreely
The web site for Solidarity Sports is www.solidaritysports.org/
-
3 July 2017
at
12:54pm
Monteville
says:
@
Monteville
From the Solidarity Sports (Kensington and Chelsea) - see above - Facebook page:
-
30 June 2017
at
10:21am
kadinsky
says:
The PM mouths regret at 'the initial response' [ie, *my* initial response], praises the emergency services, and vows that everything will be done to bring those responsible to justice. A couple of weeks on, the ex-housing minister who sat on recommended new fire-safety regs for tower blocks continues, unquestioned, as her chief advisor; her MPs roar approval at the PM's refusal to lift the pay cap for emergency services; the judge who'll preside over the inquiry confides in advance that - however many years the inquiry may take - it won't even address most of the issues the survivors have been demanding it address. It's already time shut up and move on.
-
2 July 2017
at
6:32pm
semitone
says:
Mark I'm very sorry for your son and his classmates, your words moved me as much as anything I've read about this awful catastrophe, I hope you get all the support you need.
-
6 July 2017
at
5:34pm
Simon Wood
says:
I have hesitated to put this on here, but we have in Camberwell a childminder,
-
13 July 2017
at
5:46am
Monteville
says:
@
Simon Wood
It is too soon to demolish the building. The forensic investigation is still going on. There has been a proposal to cover the building, eventually, with tarpaulin. See: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/grenfell-tower-fire-tarpaulin-cover-idea-government-considering-a7838426.html
-
13 July 2017
at
2:27pm
Toby
says:
Is this the same tarpaulin used to cover up Hillsborough?
Read more"Over the past few weeks, we have been inundated with requests from proffesionals who work with children offering their services to us. This has led to disappointment with people not showing up.
"Please only apply to become a volunteer if you have the passion and desire to have a long-term positive impact on our children. One-off volunteering is not helpful.
"Please think carefully before you contact us and only do so if you are prepared to dedicate the time and effort needed to help our children."
the best loved and most respected and sought-after of a good bunch. She is called Fatima - we were told recently through the primary school that her brother, his wife and their three children all died in the fire. This brought it home.
I took a look at the building yesterday - it is grim. In a sane world, it would have been demolished by now, human remains or no. The locals will have to live with it for months and months.
The child minders and teaching assistants are the low-paid who prop up the capital with its dynamic economy. They are nearly always good sorts, too, it's that kind of job.