On the 14th
of every month since the Grenfell fire the community of North
Kensington have been holding a silent walk to show unity in the face
of tragedy and to ensure that the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, and those who loved them, aren’t forgotten. We do so easily forget.
The news moves on and something else takes our attention. We think
that someone else is ‘dealing with it’; the Inquiry has begun,
much money was raised and so surely the survivors have been rehoused
(they haven’t been and there is some question about where the money
has gone). But we would do well not to forget, because Grenfell was the worst fire disaster on our soil since the Blitz, and the
community around Grenfell isn’t going to go away until they see
justice done. They invite anyone of good heart to join with them,
knowing that they can’t do it alone. Community. Come Unity.
They say…
“As the months go
on, we grow stronger and stronger. This will not stop and we will
carry on being united by such tragic events. Please come and join us
on the 14th of every month and walk in silence to remember those who
are sadly no longer with us.
We can not fight this alone,
we are more powerful together.”
And so, on the day
that our nine days of
Novena prayers for Grenfell ended, my friend
Jennifer and I went to join the silent walk in community and
solidarity. This month the 14
th fell on a Saturday so
there was a real push to encourage people to come along. It is hard
to. I felt that we were intruding on people who have been so
brutalised by intrusion already, not just by uncaring bureaucracy
before the fire happened, and then by the fire itself, but also by
the large numbers of ‘
grief tourists’ who have gone to Grenfell
to take photographs and, even worse, ‘selfies’; so much so that
local residents have attached signs to the barriers surrounding the
tower asking them to stop. At the end of September a
Chinese tourguide was sent back to China and a driver suspended when they took a
coach full of Chinese tourists to Grenfell to take photographs of the
tower. I found it very hard to go there without feeling that I was
doing the same, especially as we got lost on the London Underground
on the way there, and again when we arrived at Latimer Road. And so
we had to keep stopping people and asking, “Do you know the way to
Grenfell Tower?” Only one person was obviously suspicious of our motives; a
young man who, when we asked, gave an exasperated sort of a smile, “Why
are you asking? Are you residents?” When we had explained he was lovely
but it can’t be easy living in the shadow of a tragedy that people
have made into a holiday destination before all of the dead are even
buried.
But it was in the
getting lost that, for me, the blessing and the kindness came. We
wandered for an hour, unable to find the walk (it was silent after
all) or Grenfell Tower. When we did ask someone it happened to be
someone who worked there as a security guard. He gave us directions.
We immediately went wrong in the dark. We explained to a teenager
that we were lost and he told us that we had gone in completely the
wrong direction and kindly took us across the road where we
could see the tower back the way that we’d come and he could give
us further directions. He didn’t have to do that. I thought that he
was an angel, but there were many angels around Grenfell that night.
And, even though we
were lost in the dark, I was glad that we weren’t there on a day
with sunshine and a blue sky. I can’t imagine how it must be to see
that blackened husk of a building in the light, day after day, how it
must be for a community of people to see the place where their
friends and loved ones died because no one cared quite enough to make
them safe. In the dark it was just a shape against the night; you couldn't see that it had burned, and even then every time I have seen a block of flats since I superimpose Grenfell onto it. And the dark did another thing. It let us see those leafy,
quiet little streets as they would have been that night. It is
Kensington, even if it is North Kensington, and, apart from the few
tower blocks and the maze of little estates, it feels as though
people who are well off live there or near by. A woman driving a new
looking Range Rover stopped for us so that we could cross the road.
That was kind but it made me feel just a little bit ill. And the
narrow, curving, streets that seem to all come back in on each other
until you don’t know where you are, are lined with parked cars.
Grenfell seems to be in the middle of all that. How would the fire
engines have gotten through?
And the other effect
of walking round and round in the dark, later finding that we were
circling both the silent walk and the tower, is that thinking of it
now I have the feeling that we were spiraling into sacred space, as
you do when you enter a Hindu temple, or our own stone circles, or
the caves that our ancestors would crawl in to leave hand prints in
the dark as a prayer. You aren’t meant to see the centre until you
have made your journey, paid your respects, earned it. It isn’t
supposed to be easy. This is a holy and hallowed place. The dead
awaiting justice are there and there are people on the street
weeping.
We had almost given
up when another angel appeared out of the dark, and we knew that she
was one because she was holding a sign with a pair of shiny red angel
wings pasted onto it, lit by fairy lights. And she was wearing
denim hot pants at, what some foolish people would say, was an unseemly age for such
clothing. Only angels do that. She saw my friend’s pink rose, brought from her South
London garden to leave as an offering, and asked whether we were on
the walk. We said no but we had been trying to find it. She told us that
her friends were on it and seemed to have hope that she could find
them. She scampered away at some speed, turning at one point to call,
“I only stopped you because you had the flower!”, and we tumbled
after her as best we could, despite our by then aching legs. At the
end of the next road she saw some policemen and it turned out that
they were blocking the junction because the silent walk was slowly
moving along it. We had been walking with them but one street along.
Our angel disappeared before I even had a chance to see her go, and
my friend and I joined the end of the walk for the last fifteen
minutes or so. The silence was full of meaning, speaking louder than
words ever could.
We made our way very
slowly in silence to the
Westway, an urban flyover carrying the A40
into London. On the way we passed memorial after memorial, names,
faces that I recognised from media reports; real enough before but
now so much more so. There were Bible verses written on the concrete,
“Blessed are those who mourn”, and, I think, verses from the
Quran, which I was sad not to be able to understand. There were candles burning
everywhere and, on a concrete pillar, the most beautiful and
intricate image of Mary in prayer. If Our Lady of Sorrows is needed
anywhere it is there. There seemed to be memorials along every fence,
every lamppost topped with a huge green heart with ‘Grenfell’
written in the centre. Signs of bent willow and paper; ‘Come
Unity’. We walked with people on crutches and in wheelchairs,
people carrying children, and all completely silent. In solidarity.
And then the
Westway. Under the flyover the community have created a wonder;
somewhere for the displaced of Grenfell to go, when the authorities
would have them scattered. On the huge concrete 'Wall of Truth', the ‘People’s
Public Inquest’; a place to gather evidence, write testimonies,
share what happened on that terrible night, piece it together.
We
gathered and we were thanked for being there. There was a
minute’s silence, and then a minute’s wild applause and cheering
for the lost. The sound was shocking and more moving than I can
explain. The sound got louder and louder in waves as we sent love and
respect to the dead. And then it was over and that was right. It was
the walking that was the prayer and the call for justice, the
silence and the waves of sound. There was nothing more to say, not
then.
The crowd began to
move away and then we saw the extent of what has been made; not just
a wall and a memorial but a home, or it felt like one to me; I saw the word ‘Phoenix’
written here and there, a community risen from the ashes of the fire, supporting one another.
There are wooden benches and comfy sofas, all made into intimate
little areas so that there can be sharing in, what might feel almost
like, the living rooms that the survivors of Grenfell once sat in in
their high tower. There is a book exchange, board games, people
feeding the homeless and refusing to accept money. It is a testament
to all that is good in humanity, what we can be, and what we can be
for each other, when everything falls down.
There must be justice for
the people of Grenfell and for their community. There are fears that
the Public Inquiry, which many feel isn’t truly independent from
the Government whose policies are implicated in creating the
conditions that allowed the Grenfell Fire to happen, will never
reveal the truth of what happened that night, or what led up to it.
That the rich and the powerful will win again, and that the poor, the
invisible, will lose...again. But what the people of the Grenfell community
perhaps can’t see yet is that, in their pheonix rising from the
ashes, in their keeping together what was torn apart, in their
refusing to stop caring and loving and seeing what’s real, in their
inviting in when they would have every reason to close down, build
walls, they have already won.
Silent walks to
honour the dead and the survivors of the Grenfell fire, to express
solidarity for their families and their community, and to continue
the fight for justice, will continue every 14th of the
month at 6.30pm. The walk gathers outside Notting Hill Methodist
Church at 240 Lancaster Road, London, W11 4AH. The community have
asked for as many people as possible to come and walk with them in
silence, because the silence will be heard. Alone, they will become
invisible. It is growing in numbers each month and I know that it
would mean a lot to them if that growth continued. Please do think
about joining them if you can. It matters. If you are unable to
be there on the night please think about holding your own silent
vigil, with others or alone, publicly or at home, and send photos and/or
messages to the Grenfell community on the Silent Walk Facebook page
at
https://www.facebook.com/Grenfell-Tower-Silent-Walk-122708985093572/
. It will show them, and the people responsible who need to know that
we won't forget, that we care.
No justice, no peace.
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