Grenfell 100 days on: 'We cry for each other'

The Alves family in the West Kensington Holiday Inn Express
The Alves family in the West Kensington Holiday Inn Express Credit: Heathcliff O'Malley

It is approaching 6pm and Miguel Alves returns from work to what currently passes for home. He takes off his suit jacket and kisses his wife twice on the cheek before embracing his daughter and son in turn.

It is a scene of touching domesticity, even if taking place in a cramped room in the West Kensington Holiday Inn Express. The Alves family have lived here for three months now, all their possessions destroyed by flames three miles away on the 13th floor of Grenfell Tower.

The charred remains of Grenfell Tower
The charred remains of Grenfell Tower Credit: PA

Today marks 100 days since Britain’s deadliest single blaze in a century, which has left hundreds homeless and around 80 dead. The exact number remains unknown as investigators continue to sift through the wreckage.

Earlier this week police said 60 victims have so far been formally identified, 11 of them children.

“I cry for those people a lot,” says Fatima, 47, sitting on the hotel bed and looking out at a window they have blocked with a sheet of cardboard to better enable them to sleep.

Fatima and her husband Miguel first moved to London from Portugal in 1992 to work as a housekeeper and butler in a townhouse in Marylebone’s Portland Place. By 2001 Miguel had become a chauffeur and the family managed to save enough to secure the flat under right to buy for £82,000.

Miguel and Fatima Alves in their younger days
Miguel and Fatima Alves in their younger days Credit: family collection

They loved entertaining in their home and Fatima shows me pictures on her phone of neighbours gathered around a table laid with an immaculate white cloth.

The Alves family were among the first of some 240 residents to flee the tower when the fire started shortly after 1am on June 14. It had been a night of celebration for the family with a cousin visiting from South Africa and a meal at a nearby Portuguese restaurant before returning to the flat for coffee.

After midnight Fatima and Miguel left to drive the cousin to a nearby hotel. Inês Alves, 16, had gone to bed early as she had GCSE exams in chemistry and history the following day. Tiago, 21, sat in his bedroom watching a science fiction series on Netflix. He had just started the second episode when he smelt something burning.  

Miguel and Fatima returned to the tower and took a lift back to the 13th floor, but it stopped first at the fourth floor (where the fire had broken out).

As the doors opened they noticed smoke drifting along the corridors. Fatima went to wait outside while Miguel ran up the stairs to wake his children and knocked on the door of every other neighbour who lived in the six flats on his floor.

“I thought they were going to kill me for waking them up because we didn’t think it was very serious,” he recalls. “Thank God I did.”

The Alves family on holiday
The Alves family on holiday Credit: family collection

Once evacuated, the family stayed with a friend whose flat overlooked the tower and watched from the balcony as it was engulfed by flames, and residents flashed torches and waved white sheets. “The people in the windows were screaming for help” remembers Fatima. “I knelt and prayed for their lives. That memory is my trauma.”

Her son Tiago, who is about to enter his second year of a physics degree at King’s College London, is now undergoing counselling for the trauma.

That morning, Inês went to do her exams, her white jumper streaked with ash. When she received her results in August she was featured on the front page of the Telegraph celebrating an A in chemistry, and a string of other top grades.

But that remarkable achievement obscures the traumatic reality they and so many other Grenfell families continue to endure. Most of all: the faces of the fallen.

Tiago remembers teaching Yahya Hashim, a 13-year-old from the 20th floor killed with his entire family, how to knot his tie in the Grenfell lift on the way to his first day at secondary school.

He also recalls Steve Power, a 63-year-old found dead on the 15th floor, giving him advice while out walking his dogs. “He always told me stay in school,” he says. “He said if I work hard I’d somewhere in life.”

After staying with friends the family were put up in a different London hotel before moving into the Holiday Inn at the end of June – where several other Grenfell residents are also currently living.

The hotel cost is met by Kensington and Chelsea Council who also provide the family with a weekly allowance for £300 each for food and transport. The family have also received an undisclosed amount from the funds raised for Grenfell victims. The latest figures available show of the £14.2m raised for victims of the fire, £8.3m has now been distributed.

But like many of the Grenfell families, the family have no idea when they will be provided with more permanent accommodation.

The fire took everything. All their clothes have been donated by family or charity. The Our Lady of Fatima statuettes which decorate the hotel room are gifts from friends.

Fatima, who attends church each Sunday with her family, recalls wistfully the photographs in leather-bound albums and the gold jewellery passed on to her from her grandmother and mother that have all been destroyed.

“I miss everything,” she says. “But a place to be together as a family is what I miss the most.”

The family are among the 15 leaseholders at Grenfell now negotiating with the council for new accommodation.

Tiago says so far they have been offered social housing with a cash lump sum for the lease. But the money would not be enough for them to afford to live in the borough and the prospect of returning to social housing feels “several step backwards” for a proudly upwardly mobile family.

“There is the trauma of the fire,” Tiago says. “And then there is the trauma that we’ve been here for three months and we are still not being treated the way we should from the council and government.”

The other residents of Grenfell continue to be a rock of support, as they have been since the immediate aftermath of the blaze when they first came together outside the memorial wall on Latymer Road plastered with photographs of the missing.

“When we first all met up after the fire we hugged each other like we were close friends,” says Fatima.  “We saw people crying for us and we cried for other people - just because we were alive.”

 

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