Hillsborough

Dear Thomas

I found myself rooting through my old newspaper cuttings last night.
The wind, rattling around the windows of our old house had awakened me, I couldn't get back to sleep and it was a sudden compulsion.
Double wrapped in thick dressing gown and duvet, I found the large A3 envelope marked 'Halifax Courier', pulled out the crinkled broadsheet pages and lay them across the floor.
It was just after 2am. Hours earlier news bulletins and social media chatter had turned the clock back to 1989, to Hillsborough. And in the dark hours, well, I can't explain but I wanted to go back there too.
So I sat, perusing my work. My words.
And I looked at them and I thought, how awkward, how inadequate.
I think about you Thomas, and the peacefulness of your passing - and I think of the families of the Hillsborough victims, and wonder, how can they bare it, even now?
I remember watching the 'pitch invasion' on TV.  Mere background noise until the urgency of the commentator's voice filtered through.
I remember driving on the M1 and hearing the radio recount 'a number of serious injuries'.
I recall looking for smoke on the horizon as I approached Sheffield. Smoke? I can't account for that other than to suggest my brain was preoccupied with memories of the last football tragedy - the fire at Valley Parade.
All along the journey the radio updated the numbers. Injuries turned to deaths. 1,2,5,9,10, 15, onwards and upwards as the miles passed.
Remember Thomas there was no Twitter, Facebook, no internet, just the radio, so it was still mightily unclear as I hurridly double-parked the car and made my way to the ground..
On the way I saw a man sitting on the kerb, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. Wretched. I can't remember what colours he was wearing.
'What happened,' I asked. And sat down next to him.
I wonder sometimes how he is now. He had watched the events unfold, as if in slow motion, he said. He had watched people die. That's what he kept saying.
And I felt such a weight of responsibility, not just to tell his story properly, but to look after him too.
Of course any journo will tell you of the wall that comes up when you're on a story, particularly a tragic one. A bit like it does with the police and the fire service, I imagine.
And so I got about my business of interviews, press conferences. In  truth still having no real idea of the weight of the loss.
Then, the next day, back in the newsroom, I saw the pictures.
Hundreds of them. And they just kept coming.
And I see some of them now in my mind's eye. They will always be there, I think.
I couldn't look at them - but I couldn't look away. Many of them were simply unuseable, too appalling, too intimate, for surely death is a private thing even when the world is watching.
I can't recount them here, the detail of them, because it feels like the worst kind of intrusion into privacy - and I remain impressed by the restraint of editors who, in those coming days, did not print them. Some did, of course. Did a mother spot her loved one dying on page 1?
I got to know a number of local people who had been at the match, including Dave and Bob L. I had interviewed them and they invited me to accompany them to a memorial service at Anfield the following week.
We went together by bus and queued and trudged along with thousands of others, in silence, to get into the ground.
Following Diana's death we have got used to the 'carpet of flowers' tribute but here, in Anfield, it was a first, for me at least.
The green of the pitch obliterated.
And I made my way to the kop and, with my two friends, joined in the service and sang 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.
And when we stopped singing the thousands of people still queuing outside, out of sync with us inside the ground, hit the yearning crescendo of the song - and it was eerie and intensely moving and it was as if we were suddenly cocooned. All of us. In that massive stadium.
And as the minute's silence began a baby started crying - and it started raining.
And in a sublime moment all that could be heard in that absolute human silence when the baby quietened was the gentle pattering of rain on the plastic wrapping paper of the flowers on the pitch.
On the bus home, afterwards, interviews done, piece written (in my head at least), I realised, for the first time, the privileges and responsibilities that go with the job.
It's strange looking back on those cuttings now. Faded, yellowed, torn.
Yet the memories are suddenly far fiercer than they have ever been.
I hope that the chap I'd found on the kerb is ok. I hope Bob and Dave L are too.
And I pray the relatives of the dead will one day find peace.
It makes me feel that I was lucky Thomas, because you left us so gently.
xxx