A couple have described how they guided distraught children to safety after the terrorist attack in Manchester, shielding them from horrific scenes and helping to reunite them with their parents.
Chloe Nayman and her partner, Andy Andrews, had been at the Ariana Grande show in Manchester Arena with their two daughters when the bomb went off, causing chaos. As they scrambled to leave they realised how many children had lost their parents and friends.
Nayman, 28, from Middlesbrough, said: “We tried our best to get out without getting crushed and children were running around with no parents. They were looking for someone to help them. Me and Andy tried … to [take] as many with us as possible, to get them out of the doors because there [were] so many people … crashing into each other.”
Once outside she said children and adults were wandering in a daze and everyone was terrified there would be further attacks. “We tried to move fast as we were worried another bomb would go off. As we were running up the road I noticed there were two girls [who] had no parents with them and one looked like she was having a panic attack.”
Nayman encouraged the girls, who were stepsisters, to come with her. “I told them that if they came with us we’d make sure they found their parents,” she said. “One of the girls was very quiet but the other one was distraught, god love her. She was hysterical and thinking her mum was dead.”
The couple made their way to their hotel. Once inside, Andrews kept running back into the street to gather up other victims of the attack. “The hotel staff were amazing, telling us to get as many off the streets and in as possible … There were so many people there from the stadium, giving covers and food and doing anything to help.”
She said that they drew the curtains of the hotel because they were worried about another attack.
Nayman said that at first she and the other adults tried to lighten the mood by talking to the children and phoning their parents. But as more badly injured people began to arrive from the arena some of the youngsters became hysterical.
“One woman was covered, neck down, in blood and asking for her daughter,” said Nayman. “Her husband was running around in circles screaming: ‘Masie, where are you?’ Another woman fell on the floor and said: ‘My eight-year-old dead, what will I do?’”
Fearing the impact this would have on the already distressed children, Nayman took her daughters and the stepsisters upstairs where she gave them chocolate and sweets. Eventually many of the youngsters who had not yet been reunited with their parents managed to get some sleep. Nayman got through to the stepsisters’ family, who came and collected them in the early morning.
The hotel was so impressed by the couple’s actions that they gave them a full refund and wrote them a letter of thanks. Nayman said the hotel had been “amazing”.
The story was one among many about acts of kindness and charity in the aftermath of the attacks.
The Manchester Evening Post has has raised £1.13m for victims of the attack. Another fundraiser, Edmund Hall, set up a page to raise money to buy a drink for the emergency services and so far donations have reached £11,095. Hall said: “I woke up and heard the news and thought about the staff coming off shift and thought about how I would buy them a drink if I met them in the pub. I also thought how going home alone to an empty flat would be unbearable after seeing the things they’d seen.”
Food and clothes have been delivered to local hospitals. Calum Knight, 26, from Manchester is part of a group of friends who have been collecting supplies from businesses for families at bedsides of injured loved ones. Knight said some people needed clothes because they were waiting with family members and lived too far away to go home. “A lot of people [at the concert] don’t live in Manchester and have been visiting from Leeds, Liverpool and even Poland. They cannot leave their families to get a change of clothes or leave the hospital.
“The children’s wards at the moment are in dire need of clothes – five stores in Manchester have donated and I am getting more today. Asda [has] donated a lot of stuff, we have trolleys [full].” He said some adults who had been there since the attack still had blood on their clothes.
The horrific attack has touched people far beyond Manchester. An independent toy shop, Giddy Goat Toys, in Manchester said it had received a call from New South Wales, Australia, asking to donate a toy on behalf of them to the children’s hospital. “It was 3am where he was. We were really touched,” a post on the shop’s Facebook page read.
