In Ed Daffarn’s flat stands a pot of feathers from sparrow hawks, owls, falcons, even a kookaburra. Over the past seven years he has added to it, plume after plume, steadily replacing a collection that turned to ashes when Grenfell Tower went up in flames.
Daffarn, an avid birdwatcher who had predicted disaster on a blog eight months before the fire, only just escaped from his 16th-floor flat by groping his way through thick smoke. His feathers were among a lifetime’s possessions – cricket gear, mementoes of his late parents – reduced to ash in the tragedy that claimed 72 lives.
Now, as the Grenfell Tower public inquiry prepares to publish its final report on the causes of the June 2017 fire, his collection is starting to look healthy again. He sits in his living room, binoculars poised on the table overlooking a communal garden that is visited by owls. But nothing can be the same.
Daffarn, 62, is just one member of a large community that has spent years struggling to rebuild lives while confronting a torrent of shocking revelations from the 400 days of inquiry evidence. In person or via the inquiry’s YouTube channel, Daffarn sat through almost all of it – even when abroad on holiday – well over 1,000 hours of evidence.
“I’m beginning to kind of see a future without Grenfell as being that all-consuming centre of everything, which it was for years and years,” he said. But there can be no “moving on”.
It is just “trying to kind of find other things that you can put around that trauma – trauma for those in the tower, trauma for those on the estate, trauma for the local community, trauma for myself”.
A lot rests on the 1,700-page inquiry report to be published on Wednesday for the approximately 600 survivors, bereaved and local people who were granted formal core participant status. Daffarn, a keen reader, hopes the inquiry chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, a former appeal court judge, finds relatable human language that reaches to what he sees as the heart of the matter – why so many people took decisions that placed profit above human safety. But even more, he hopes it arms the community with the truth of what happened – from David Cameron’s ministers slashing red tape to the conduct of the combustible cladding system manufacturers, Arconic, Celotex and Kingspan, in bringing potentially dangerous products to market.
He reeled off the questions: “What was the role of the government deregulation? What was the implication of Arconic knowing that this product could kill 60 to 70 people? What were the implications of Kingspan and Celotex seemingly gaming the system in order to be able to get their product on buildings over 18 metres?”
Then there are verdicts awaited on the Kensington and Chelsea tenant management organisation landlord body “failing us on health and safety and treating us like third-class citizens, and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea not scrutinising the TMO and failing in their primary duty of keeping the people safe”.
The hope is that with copper-bottomed answers anyone found guilty can be brought to justice and the bereaved and survivors empowered to demand reforms from government. Findings of fact should also remove any excuse for the Metropolitan police not to proceed with criminal prosecutions and create a lasting legacy for the lives lost, which is “anyone making any decisions always needs to put people before profit”.
Daffarn has been a consistent presence campaigning on behalf of the Grenfell community, and for vindication of his own pre-fire complaints to the landlord. But behind closed doors he, and many other people affected by Grenfell, describe more personal struggles.
Shah Aghlani was on the phone to his mother, Sakina Afrasehabi, when she died, aged 65, in her 18th-floor flat alongside her sister Fatima, who was visiting. He told the inquiry: “I heard every last breath my mother and auntie took.”
Talking to the Guardian before the inquiry report was published, he said he had been scarred by the trauma “like a tattoo on your mind”. After waking, he spends the first half hour of each day trying to calm his anxiety.
“My mother, and that image of her sitting tight for the fire brigade to rescue her, and being on the phone; this is on my mind all the time,” he said. “This is the sort of thing that no amount of psychotherapists, psychiatrists or medication can help.
“It’s just like being possessed by a spirit that shows itself in different circumstances. When you go through that sort of experience, not only do you become intolerant, impatient, nervous, not being able to concentrate, losing your memory, it affects you in so many layers, in different ways.”
When he goes driving or for a walk with his family, it sometimes “doesn’t go ahead as normal”. He often expects people to accommodate him because of what has happened, but “I realise seven years on, I can’t expect this of people. I’m afraid the weakness and the pain is still there and is still doing its destruction.
“My children – I don’t know when, when was the last time I actually sat down to watch a movie and laugh with them?”
He described how it was hard for him to enjoy simple pleasures such as going to a restaurant for his daughter’s birthday.
Aghlani campaigns for better safety systems for disabled people and fears, from experience with his own family, that public authorities still do not respond properly to their needs.
For him, too many of the witnesses to the inquiry seemed to be covering up their actions. “What was missing was the human side,” he said. An exception was the testimony of John Hoban, the Kensington and Chelsea building control officer who sobbed when cross-examined and explained how he was overwhelmed by his workload of up to 130 projects at a time after spending cuts caused by austerity.
“That’s where I could come to terms with the fact that I don’t want this person behind bars,” Aghlani said. “He has probably suffered enough in his conscience.”
But he wants others prosecuted. “They lied and did everything in the book to get away from it,” he said.
“And I don’t believe they are sorry for what they have done. If they were sorry they would have changed the way they were doing things after. The spirit of Grenfell still lives and that is what angers me. I want that spirit purged. I want to kill that spirit.”
It is a common demand from the bereaved. Earlier this week, Sandra Ruiz, whose 12-year-old niece Jessica Urbano Ramirez died in the fire, said simply: “People who have made decisions putting profit above people’s safety need to be behind bars.”
Trauma emerges in unpredictable ways. Daffarn says that for him and others, one consequence has been an “inability to bond with any form of accommodation”.
“I’ve been here for well over two and a half years,” he said of his new council flat. “I’ve still got a cardboard box and a bit of wood in the hallway as a table. If I left here tomorrow, I would barely even remember that I’ve been here.” He only recently installed lampshades and hung some pictures.
He didn’t just lose his home in a passive sense. Rather, he says, it was “a violent attack on our community”. A new hobby of playing golf provides a small measure of relief.
“All of the people that I play with don’t mention Grenfell,” he said. “We just talk about superficial sporting events around the world. Have a little moan about the golf club, complain about high handicaps. It’s really, genuinely helped me.”
The struggle to finding ways to thrive and grow during the long wait for justice is a common theme.
Tiago Alves was a promising 20-year-old physics undergraduate at Imperial College London when the fire struck the tower, killing young people he grew up with, such as Yasin El-Wahabi, one of five in his family to perish. Alves and his family escaped the flames, but not the trauma. He has given the past seven years to campaigning for justice and a parallel personal battle to hold on to his academic potential.
“I completely lost any interest in what I was doing,” he said. His grades slipped. “Mental health was a massive factor – around exam season when it was quite high stress, quite high anxiety, I would have episodes because of all the trauma that I’ve had.”
The disaster had deep roots for Alves. Since the age of 10 he had been helping his father, who came to the UK from Portugal, write emails to the TMO landlord about difficulties.
“The emails and documentation of what happened back then proves that what we were saying [about problems with the council landlord] wasn’t just this exaggerated version of events, he said. “This is a culture that exists all over the country, this idea that people who live on estates are second-class citizens. I hope [the inquiry] opens the book to … reconsidering everything that relates to this perception.”
Keeping his academic career alive has been part of Alves’s efforts to defy that stereotype. He completed not only his degree, but a master’s and is now working on a PhD in high energy physics at Imperial. He is based at Cern beneath the Swiss-French countryside, home of the Large Hadron Collider, and is preparing a big experiment to take place later this decade in South Dakota.
He views his career as a partial rebuke to people such as the former Conservative minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, who suggested in 2019 that Grenfell residents lacked “common sense” for following fire brigade instructions to stay put instead of evacuating immediately. He later apologised.
“I found [it] absolutely abhorrent when he said that,” Alves says. “It drives me forward to prove that we are a very intelligent community. We are people who’ve had to adapt time and time again to everything that’s been thrown at us. And hopefully by me doing this, I’m proving to him that he was wrong when said those words.”
