#hillborough

I'm not in Britain but was born in a Commonwealth country where the British news was important to us. Their triumph was our triumph. Their tragedy was our tragedy. 

In April 1989, news came through of the Hillsborough stadium disaster. 96 people lost their lives after over-crowding in part of the ground at an FA Cup semi-final match. This is one of a small number of man-made disasters that I remember well from my youth. The others were things like Chernobyl and the Space Shuttle Challenger and terrorist acts such as the Lockerbie bombing.

Compared to these other disasters, Hillsborough felt entirely avoidable and mundane: how do fans go to a football match and not come home alive? It could easily happen anywhere. Yet it doesn't.

As with many disasters, it's not necessarily anything big that sets events in motion that cause the loss of life. Instead it's lots of little things.

Large crowds of ticket-holders still outside the ground at kickoff, anxious to see the game. A gate opened to help relieve pressure of the crowd. A door that is the quickest access to the terraces is left open. An inexperienced police commander in charge on the day. Stadiums with high fences between sections and the playing field to reduce problems with violence. The poor and out-dated design of the stadium.

Without all of these factors happening together this disaster would not have happened. Disasters do happen though. We plan in order to avoid them, we learn from them when they do and we try to ensure that they don't happen in future.

Instead, in this case, the police concocted a story where they were blameless and the crush was caused by unruly, drunken fans. This is shameful and even worse is that the process has taken twenty seven years to reach its current point. Twenty seven years!

It is not uncommon for police to mould a story to suit their own ends. This behaviour doesn't help anyone. But in addition to the police there were many, many other issues on that day. 

Today we remember the 96 fans who died and the 766 others who were injured in what has become known as the Hillsborough Disaster.

The deaths occurred in 1989 at an FA Cup Semi-Final at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, between Liverpool and Nottingham Forrest Football Clubs. As the kick-off approached there was a bottleneck with Liverpool supporters queuing to get in. The Police opened an exit gate but instead of curing the problem it created an even bigger problem inside the ground which resulted in serious overcrowding in the enclosures and to the fans being crushed to death. When questioned by the FA Chairman, the Chief Inspector accused the supporters of rushing the gate.

On the 20th anniversary of the disaster, government minister Andy Burnham called for the police, ambulance and all other public agencies to release documents that had not been made available to Lord Justice Taylor at the original inquiry. This led to the formation of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, which in September 2012 concluded that no Liverpool fans were responsible for the deaths, and that attempts had been made by the authorities to conceal what happened, including the alteration by police of 116 statements relating to the disaster.

From being a tiny little girl, I’ve always loved football. It might be growing up in a city that lives and breathes Red or Blue, or it might be something from deep within my genetic make-up, I don't know.

Eitherway, I loved it. I grew up with my Mum and my Nan, neither of whom were particularly fussed about the footy. They followed it (it’s impossible not to in Liverpool) by watching the final scores and reading the papers, and were pleased when we won, but it didn’t really go much further than that.

I felt it differently. I felt it. Really. I wanted to watch every second of it, I wanted to scream and shout like those people in the ground. When I was about 5 or 6 I remember watching the old Match of the Day and Grandstand shows, waiting for the football to come on (in the good old days it was on ‘normal’ telly, and you didn’t need to pay extra for it).

As I grew up, I mixed more and more with the boys, because they loved football too. I was a Red, I was born a few miles away from Anfield, and I just understood that red was 'me'. My extended family were split, blue and red, so they both vied for my affections. Red won every time.

I loved to play and watch and as soon as I was old enough to go out on the bus on my own - about 13 or 14 - I trotted off to Anfield, which was a few miles away, and a 20 minute or so bus ride from where we lived then and me and my mate Kev entered those hallowed gates.

It was amazing, immense, noisy, scary, exciting, everything I dreamed it would be. I walked in through the turnstiles and stood on the Kop, so excited and happy to be there. Kev was laughing because he’d been before and I hadn’t. But I didn’t care. I was living the dream! Being about 5ft, I stood at the front with the other kids and the old fellas. Someone warned me not to put my programme rolled up in my pocket because someone might wee in it for a laugh, but thankfully, that never happened.

After that first week, I kept going. Sometimes with Kev, sometimes alone. I became a recognised face with the old guys who stood near the front with their pipes and their programmes. My grandad died before I was born and I suppose these guys became my surrogates. We used to talk team selection and tactics, and despite my long hair and girlish demeanour (although I tried to hide it with my team colours, it didn’t really work, I was too ‘girly’.) But still, they accepted me as one of them. I lived and breathed football and tried to learn all I could about my team so I could prove I wasn’t one of those silly girls who went to oggle the footballers.

So by the time 1989 rolled around, I’d been attending for about a year and had become a bit of a regular. I went when I could and was learning all the time. I didn’t go to away matches, I wasn’t allowed back then, so it was with a little disappointment, but a HUGE amount of expectation that I looked forward to the FA Cup final which would take place at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground in Hillsborough. Liverpool had made it through to the semis and were facing Nottingham Forrest there.

The exodus started early in the morning and as I headed up my friend‘s house, just past Anfield, I could see the buses and coaches filling up with fans, I waved to a few I knew and watched loads of others heading into town to make their own way via train to Sheffield. It was a huge day for us and I was excited because I knew we had a strong team and we could make it all the way to the final and would probably win the cup. I was confident, the sun was shining, it had all the hallmarks of a perfect spring day.

What I didn’t know at that point was how that day would see events that would devastate my city and her people.

Lunchtime rolled around and walking through Anfield with my friend we saw houses decked out with red and white buntings, the huge posters that our local daily paper, the 'Liverpool Echo' had given away with their Friday night edition plastered windows and doors and there was red and white everywhere.

We went to my friend’s house for lunch, listened to some music, gossiped, argued about where we would watch the match - she was a blue so wasn’t that bothered, Everton were playing too that day in the other semi, so we figured we’d go and find a local pub where we knew the landlord who would let us in to watch the match if we didn’t drink alcohol.

On the way to the pub we stopped off at a newsagent a road or two down from my friend’s house. She was waiting for the woman to come and serve her with ciggies (she said they were for her Mum but her Mum didn't smoke) and I picked up a can of coke and a chocolate bar. The two women who worked in the newsagent were really taking their time serving us and my friend made some sarcastic comment about whatever they were looking at on the telly being really interesting because they weren’t doing their job, which caused them to look distastefully towards us.

We looked at the screen to see what they could see and my heart leapt into my mouth.

I couldn't figure out what was happening at first, not really. On the little portable TV I could see Liverpool fans being squashed up against a fence, some screaming, some crying, some, most frighteningly of all, doing absolutely nothing.

I dropped the chocolate bar I was holding and my mouth fell open in both shock and bewilderment. My friend and I exchanged horrified glances, and I leaned heavily on the counter as my entire body started to shake and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. We didn't know what was happening, we had no clue. All we could see was the supporters spilling onto the pitch and we knew that something was terribly, terribly wrong. The commentator was saying that the police thought it was a pitch invasion but it was so clear to anyone with a brain that it wasn't, it was people being crushed, people screaming, people desperately trying to get out, people dying. We stood in the shop for what seemed like an eternity - I couldn't tell you just how long we were there, but we saw the horror and we felt the pain. I still shiver when I think about it, just writing this now I've got goose bumps that remind me just how awful that day was, and how it changed my life completely.

We watched the scene unfolding, finally the police got the message and saw that people from the terraces above were pulling people up to stop them getting crushed. The footballers got involved. People were carried out on advertising hoardings used as makeshift stretchers because there was no other way of getting them to the one single ambulance that was allowed onto the pitch. It was horrific, and now the reporters started to tell us there were people dead. 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, the toll kept rising and rising. It was turning into horrific and devastating day for Liverpool.

We eventually found our feet and left the shop, heading towards Kev‘s mum‘s house. We knew all our friends would meet there and we could talk to them about what had happened. On the way, we started to panic about people we knew who had gone to the match that morning. We knew girls from school who'd been teasing me because they had tickets to go and I didn't - were they amongst the injured, the dying, the dead? What about the people we'd seen happily boarding coaches and buses that morning? Amazingly this hadn't even occurred to us before, I guess we must have been in shock or something because when we did think about it we both burst into tears, big fat tears of fear and shock that rolled down our faces as we rushed towards the flat.

***

At the time of Hillsborough, just before the 1980s slipped into the 1990s, we lived in a very different world. We didn’t have mobile phones and constant contact with everyone – some people didn’t have landlines, and even if you did, you had to be in the house to receive a phone call. When we found out about our friends who were there, there was nothing we could do, but wait.

We waited, we waited and we waited some more. We were helpless. We heard that their parents had rung the hospitals in Sheffield and the police stations and they said that the public phone lines were overloaded with people trying to tell their families that they were safe and that they should sit tight, wait by the phone and call back in a few hours if they hadn’t heard from their kids by the time they should have been home.

The initial good news was that they weren’t in any of the hospitals that they had taken the injured people to. The bad news was they might have been in the makeshift morgue. We felt absolutely useless. We ventured into the flat without even thinking about it and made and drank endless cups of tea.

One by one they came back. Eventually we heard they were all home. The relief was palpable.

But we were lucky. Hundreds of people never made it back home that night. Almost a hundred never made it back at all.

I spent the week after Hillsborough in a kind of bubble. Sunday morning I sat outside in the garden reading through the Sunday papers - well, what I used to call the Sunday papers - the News of the World, the Mirror and the People, and I couldn't tear my eyes away from the faces of those poor people, pushed up against the perimeter fences, blue paint from the metal grids on their faces. I barely even felt the cold, despite it being April 16, and probably not even 10 degrees outside. It was still too beautiful a day to be following such horror. I scoured the pages for faces I knew - some of the people that I knew from school, or through our extended circle of friends would have been there at the Sheffield Wednesday ground. I spotted someone I thought I knew in the paper who looked like a friend of mine but I couldn’t be sure. Was it him in front of me in the newspaper being carried unconscious, possibly dead - on a stretcher to somewhere? They didn’t have a phone and it was too far to travel to his house to find out, so we just had to wait. I turned the page and there was a boy from the comprehensive school that twinned our girls’ school in full colour being carried away from the scene. He was paralysed from the crush and the report said he was now in a hospital bed in Sheffield. (he went on to make a full recovery)

Anyway, I put the paper down and sat in our little back garden. The shock finally hit me and for the first time in my fourteen years, I cried for a reason. I let it all go and burst into hot, angry tears. Once I started, I couldn’t stop and I cried for what felt like the hundredth time that weekend, and of course it wasn’t to be the last. I was still in tears later that night as I watched the news reports and saw the faces of those who had lost their beloved partners, relatives, children and friends. Cathedral services were taking place and Church bells rang out across the City offering prayers for the injured and the dead, and their families. The next couple of hours passed me by in a blur. How many other people did we know that were affected?

Monday in school was so strange. It was like we'd all taken Valium or something - we were walking around in a sort of daze - not knowing what to do or say. Some of our friends weren't there and we didn't know if they were just off poorly, or if they'd been involved. No-one wanted to ask. We had a special assembly, but no names were mentioned. It turned out that some of them had been at the match; others were at home with injured family members. One girl's pregnant Sister-In-Law hadn't turned up until late on Sunday, having been knocked unconscious when she fell over and spent the night AWOL somewhere in Sheffield. Luckily, both she and her baby were unhurt and the entire party returned home in one piece.

In our English Language class we were asked to write a poem that we could put up on the classroom walls in honour of the people who had died - although at that point we still didn't really know how many there was, just that it was not far short of 100. We saw the Sun newspaper and its sickening headlines – our first real exposure to the negative power of the media and the lies they will tell to sell newspapers - people set fire to it and ripped it up, disgusted at how the victims of a terrible, terrible disaster could end up being vilified rather than pitied because an editor wanted to sell more papers. The Sun is still taboo in Liverpool - 22 years after the Hillsborough tragedy you can't give it away - Liverpudlians have long memories and bear even longer grudges.

The rest of that week followed in pretty much the same ways. We saw the news reports that showed Anfield turning into a shrine full of flowers and we decided that we'd make something to show our respect to those who had lost their lives. A girl in my class and I wrote a poem and stuck it on the wall and the class decided that we should use it as a tribute - it meant the world to me and I just didn't feel worthy, or like it was good enough. But I was delighted too, so happy that I had connected in some way with the general feeling all around us. In art class we did that thing that you only ever do in school - scrunch up coloured tissue paper into tiny balls and stick it onto a huge piece of card to make a picture. We made a Liverpool FC and Everton FC crest together and it took hours and hours of painstakingly slow progress before we took a step back to look at what we'd done. And it looked fantastic. We then made another square with red, blue and white - the Liverpool and Everton colours - around the edges, and I wrote the poem through the middle in my amateurish calligraphy hand. It didn’t really matter how it looked, it was the sentiment that was important, and even so, it looked great to us.

By Thursday, everyone we knew was present and accounted for and a group of us arranged to take our tributes to Anfield after school. We jumped a taxi outside our school on West Derby road and the 7 of us (Yep, seven!!) squeezed into the taxi, 2 of us lying on the floor so that we could all fit in. The taxi driver wouldn't take us at first then he saw the flowers, the poem, the tissue-paper crest - and he let us in. He didn't even charge us. 4 miles or so later we arrived at Anfield and the sight in front of me took my breath away. I'll never forget the smell of the flowers as we approached, the silence in that massive, massive ground, usually so full of noise. The funereal feeling was intense - the poignant sight of all those scarves from different teams hanging over the goal posts and the gates in a rainbow of colours; and flowers, just so many flowers. 20 years later I can’t walk past a flower shop without the smell reminding me of Anfield during those dark days. It catches my breath every time.

We walked in slowly, and filed around the ground, placing our tributes on the pitch – they disappeared almost immediately into the sea of flowers and pictures and scarves and poems, mingling with the outpourings of grief and support. We walked the edge of the pitch in single file all of us lost in our own thoughts - some crying, some quiet, some not really there with us - thoughts miles away, lost in a memory of a loved one who'd been lost a few days before. Above all there was a feeling of togetherness, of bonding, of support for one another - a feeling of such intensity that I've never experienced before or since. Bad things happen all the time – but this was my City, my team, my people so this one hit home and it hit bloody hard.

Things took a long while to settle down after the tragedy – and although it’s a cliché, things never would be the same ever again. Every day there were funerals and as a mark of respect Liverpool players attended as many as they could - despite what they were going through themselves. Over the next few weeks, the frequency of the funerals lessened. The news reports calmed down and ever so slowly, we began to heal. But we will never forget.

We all knew someone who had been affected by this awful tragedy - whether they were there themselves and would bear the mental scars forever, or they knew or had lost someone who had been there.

The entire city stood Red and Blue together, shoulder to shoulder, bearing the burden between the people. The support of the Everton fans was amazing – football is not a game in Liverpool, it’s a way of life, a religion - and what many people don’t realise is that just as many Evertonians lost people that day as did Liverpudlians. Families in Liverpool are usually made up of red and blue, not just one or the other. I’ll never forget the connection that was forged between us and the way we helped each through those dark, dark days that followed Hillsborough.

22 years later the pain is still there, fresh as ever - even for those of us who didn't lose anyone we knew – We still lost 96 of our own. We still take flowers to Anfield on 15th April, we still cry, we still remember. We remember that on that awful day nearly 800 people were injured, 300 were taken to hospital and 94 souls were lost.

We remember holding our heads in sorrow when we heard that a 14 year old boy had become the 95th victim, dying in hospital, days after the event from his injuries. We remember hoping and praying that Tony Bland, the 18 year old who fell into a coma after being crushed, would recover completely. He didn't make it, and never regained consciousness. He became the first person in English legal history that was allowed to die by withdrawal of the treatment that was prolonging his life. We remember the day he died, 4 years after the disaster, at the age of 22 and we remember how a City wept for another lost son and the 96th victim of the Hillsborough tragedy.

But finally, and most importantly, we remember each and every one of you. You are not a number, you are our brothers and sisters, and you will never, ever be forgotten. Whenever we sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” we are singing it for you. And we know you are singing and walking with us.