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It was then that I caught the eye of a policeman just the other side of the fence. It was an unmistakable, meaningful moment: because for four or five seconds, across the heads of scores of people, we looked each other in the eye.
I lost him when I mouthed the words, "Help us." He smiled to himself and shook his head at me, and walked on, a little uncertainly.
At that point I thought: "We've been left to die." Many people already had. People bigger than me, smaller than me, and smarter than me were gone. Now it was my turn. Fifty seconds, my brain was telling me: you've got 50 seconds left. I don't know where the figure came from, but there wasn't a moment of doubt in my mind: just a calm, orderly voice telling me to hurry up and take in the final minute of my life. As the seconds ticked down to 45, 40, 35, my lungs began to falter. I screwed up every ounce of strength left in my body - to lever myself into the air, climb on to someone's shoulders, escape. But as I heaved and strained, my body wouldn't move an inch. Those pressed tight around me were heavy, some were unconscious; others were gibbering, trying to black out what was happening.
I counted down to 20 seconds, and then at 15, or 14, I gave up. At 10 seconds, nine, eight, I floated away for a moment, briefly euphoric. Then I settled into my body, opened my mouth towards the sky and sucked what I could out of it. And then I closed my eyes. Five seconds later, they opened. The sky was still blue. And the police had finally opened the gate in the fence and were swearing at us. And I had survived.
The people on the Leppings Lane who didn't survive were daughters, husbands, sisters, sons. The oldest victim was 67, the youngest a 10-year-old boy, the cousin of a then eight-year-old Steven Gerrard. Many of them died standing up, of traumatic asphyxia. Others, in their last moments, were borne across the pitch on advertising hoardings, towards ambulances that never came. Some of the dead had lost their footing in the crush and had been trampled. Others, unfortunate to be leaning against the crush barriers, were killed by a weight on their chest equivalent to a small car.
In his interim report, Lord Justice Taylor concluded that the main cause of the disaster was overcrowding, and that the main reason was "a failure of police control". As the police neglected to manage the build-up of fans on the streets outside the Leppings Lane stand, the senior officer, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, ordered a large concertina gate leading into the ground to be opened. More than 2,000 people moved through the gate and into the Leppings Lane terrace, straight for the two packed central pens behind the goal: no one thought to direct them to the two outer pens, which were lightly populated. Swept along a narrow tunnel by a growing swell from behind, the fans ploughed into pens 3 and 4, unaware that their fellow supporters were being ground into the barriers, the fence, and each other.
Lord Justice Taylor stated of the senior officers on duty that "neither their handling of problems on the day nor their account of it in evidence showed the qualities of leadership to be expected of their rank". To this day, no one has ever been successfully prosecuted for the deaths of 96 people at Hillsborough.
Written by Professor Phil Scraton, Hillsborough: The Truth is recognised as the definitive analysis of the disaster, and all that followed. Commenting on the updated edition, Scraton says: "Twenty years on, many bereaved families and survivors are remarkably resilient. Yet beneath the surface lies unimaginable grief, compounded by an overwhelming sense of injustice. Brought together by an avoidable tragedy, they were treated appallingly on the day, then betrayed by a flawed investigation, inadequate inquests and a criminal justice system that protected the authorities. All police statements were reviewed and, in many cases, altered by a team of senior officers. Anger is understandably directed towards those responsible, those who made deceitful allegations against fans, and those who perpetuate the myth of hooliganism."
That the very act of surviving a major tragedy changes people's lives and personalities is obvious. But to what extent is not. Family and friends who knew me then and now will tell me I'm the same person. I think they're right, a few psychological bumps and bruises aside.
After escaping through the gate in that fence, I carried two people across a football pitch to a gym that had become a mortuary. One was barely alive when, along with six or seven other fans, I picked him up off the grass and laid him on an advertising hoarding. By the time we had run the length of the left wing, he was dead. We went back for another: there was a row of bodies by the goal-line. Help yourself, the police seemed to be saying. We kicked another board over, but as it lay flat on the ground a policeman walked over and stood on it. "You can't just vandalise the stadium," he said. So we picked up this lad by his arms and legs. As we ran his big, heavy body along, bumping his head on the grass in the vain hope of reviving him, I gazed down at the little ring of blue marks now swelling round his belly, like a baby's footprints.
We stopped in the corner of the pitch, at a bottleneck by the football club's gym. People were waiting for orders, ambulances, oxygen. There were dozens of fans there, holding the injured and the dead - on boards, by the arms and legs, in their arms. I stood there looking up for my brother, wondering how he was dealing with this. As we entered the gymnasium, there were medics going to work on people; policemen and fans with their heads in their hands, priests administering the last rites. The man we were holding now was dead when we picked him up, but I found it hard to let go of his hand. Eventually his body, coated in a gelatinous sweat, slipped from my grasp and on to the shiny floor.
A few bumps and bruises? The truth is that I will never know if the person I am today, nearing middle age, was the man I was always likely to be - the result of my genes, my schooling, my childhood friendships - or whether I am the reconstructed remains of that traumatised teenager. This leaves me something of a mystery to myself - a problem common among survivors. Peter Carney has never discovered who saved his life in pen 3. "Between passing out and being found lying out the back, I can't find any footage or witnesses to confirm what I think went on," he says. "This has been part of my struggle for my sanity, to find the people who carried me out."
It would take a psychologist to unlock parts of my mind that have been numb for 20 years, and some that I have surrendered. If in a sense I have come from Hillsborough, I am not prepared to go back. What I have long suspected is that, emotionally, the clock stopped at 19. Since holding death at arm's length I've held the advancing years there, too. I was a mature teenager, but I haven't grown up since at the same pace as my friends. I haven't had kids. I won't let my own youth go just yet. I will turn 40 next year, but to most people I seem to be around 30.
It wasn't until many years later that I realised I'd suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. It lasted for four years. I cried a lot, and randomly. I felt cold and angry, and empty. I'd never felt like this before. At times I felt overjoyed to be alive. The next day, I might wake up feeling half-dead. I woke up one day on the kitchen floor, after blacking out. (Get up, make a cup of tea, don't tell Mum and Dad.) I drank heavily, but socially, and verbally abused police officers in the street, and I spent two nights cooling off in a police cell, in the early 90s, for my troubles. (Still haven't told Mum and Dad.)
Then, strangely, one day it was over. Since then, since my mid-20s, I have never begrudged Hillsborough its place in my life. If I had lost someone that day then I would feel differently. But it is such an integral part of my life, and I have to live with who I am.
Perhaps the most important thing Hillsborough taught me is honesty. There is so much about 15 April 1989 that is wrong, and false, and dishonest, that survivors cling to what they know to be true. Lord Justice Taylor described the Liverpool fans' reaction at Hillsborough as "magnificent". But to experience something so terrible, to be accused of thieving and pissing on police officers when you were in the process of trying to save lives, or comforting people in their final moments, is an insult so deep in the psyche that honesty becomes the key not just to remembering but to anything that really matters in life. And it's honesty that allows me to look other survivors in the eye and know that we did what we could.
Some of this will be news to my friends and my family reading this. And to my girlfriend, too, who was my girlfriend that day. But then, there are many secrets to a disaster - not to surviving one, but to living with one. Today, 20 years on, thousands of people still bear the scars of Hillsborough - some more visibly than I do, others inevitably less so.
So what is it like to lose your son in a disaster watched by millions on television? What was it like to be the only ambulance attendant to reach the chaos of the Leppings Lane end? What was it like to be one of the players on the pitch? Few of the surviving victims of Hillsborough have been heard outside of a courtroom in Sheffield in 1990. Below, some of them tell us how that beautiful spring day changed their lives for ever.
The ambulance man: Tony Edwards
The only professional ambulance attendant to reach the Leppings Lane, Tony left the ambulance service in 1995 now lives on the Isle of Bute
We were at the Northern General when we got a 3-9 call to an incident. They told us there was a fatality, but when we got to the ground there were ambulances from everywhere, even Derbyshire. As we pulled up a policeman came to my window and said: "You can't go on the pitch, they're still fighting." A senior ambulance officer came to the door, and it was him who put the horns on. We said: "The policeman says they're fighting - we can't go on." And he said: "I don't give a f**k who's told you you can't go on. You get on that pitch and you don't stop until you get to the end."
As we went along, the police were starting to form a wall across the pitch. We went through them and then saw people running towards us. As we got to the goal there was an absolute sea of people. I'll never forget the sound ... it was like a large swimming pool; there was screaming and shouting, it was deafening. People were banging on the side of the ambulance, shouting "Help!" and "Over here!" I didn't have a clue what was going on. We'd been told there was one fatality, that was it. We had these walkie-talkie radios and we tried to see if there was anyone I could report to, but the radios were useless. I was being pulled in different directions, people were shouting for oxygen, all sorts of demands. And I thought: "I can't help everybody." I was looking back up the pitch for other ambulances, but nobody was coming.
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