I lived in Grenfell Tower on the 17th floor. It was my first permanent property in 10 years. Everything was temporary before that. I never felt comfortable sleeping in my room. I never thought of a fire, but the silver cladding on the building just reminded me of the Twin Towers. In the night, I used to wake up sometimes just thinking something would happen, and have that panic inside of me.
There was a family on my floor: a mum, dad, sister and two brothers. None of them made it out. The older brother had moved out a few months before because he got married, so it’s just him now. No brothers, no sister, no mum, no dad.
In the week after the fire, we were put in a single hotel room for the four of us for one week. I had to fight to get out of that. I went down to Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council offices on the Friday to complain, and was told to wait until Monday and they would sort it out, which I refused to do. Luckily, I had a good key worker that was able to fight our corner and get us a hotel that had two interconnected double rooms.
We were there for just under six months. There was no kitchen and we didn’t even have a microwave inside the room. It was a pretty expensive hotel, so you’d have some people in there that had money. It just didn’t feel right to be sitting down with people who were on their holidays. We never ate dinner at the hotel, because the food that they cooked wasn’t food that the kids were used to eating. And I had to go to my mum’s house every day after school just so the kids could do their homework.
There are people that are still in hotels. The council told us in November that we could choose a temporary property as long as it’s within a certain price bracket. I chose about 15 properties. Six weeks went by and nothing had happened.