A girl who escaped the inferno at the Grenfell Tower went on to do her chemistry exam the same morning, after reading her revision notes while sitting by the burning building.
Ines Alves, a pupil at Sacred Heart school in Hammersmith, managed to deal with the trauma of losing her home and all her possessions to sit the exam at 9am, as the fire still raged in the block. She and her brother escaped their 13th-floor flat after her father noticed the fire in its early stages when he returned home with his wife after dinner with friends and raised the alarm.
Despite the adversity she faced, Ines, 16, said of her chemistry paper: “I don’t think I did too badly.”
Ines and her family stayed with friends on Wednesday night, she and her brother with one family, her mother and father with another, while they waited for the council to arrange longer-term accommodation.
“I just arrived when the fire started,” said Miguel, her father. “I was in the lift, I pressed 13, and somebody pressed four.” When the doors opened at the fourth floor, where the fire had started, smoke billowed into the lift, Miguel said.
“I just came out of the lift because I didn’t know what was going on, and I went up by the staircase to wake up my son and daughter.”
Tiago, Ines’s brother, 20, said he was up watching Netflix when his father came into the house to warn them, while his sister had gone to bed early ahead of her exam. “I picked up my phone, my keys and my wallet, which is what I had on me at the time,” he said. “Me and my sister ran down the stairs. My dad stayed upstairs and he was knocking on the neighbours’ doors.”
Their mother was outside on the ground, where firefighters told her to pass a message to the rest of them to stay in their flats; “But because my mum had my dad’s phone, she didn’t have any way to tell us,” Tiago said.
The family watched together from outside as the fire spread. Ines said: “I never thought it would escalate to the whole building … I had my revision notes so I was like, ‘I may as well just sit down and read through my notes.’”
She slept for a few hours at a friend’s house before going to school at just after 8am for her exam. “Everything was already burned, so there was really nothing to worry about,” she said, despite admitting she was devastated about losing everything. “It was at the back of my mind, but I managed to do the exam. There were a few questions where I didn’t know the answer, so I thought about the fire, but I managed to complete the test.”
Having looked up pupils’ addresses on the school’s database, her teachers already knew when Ines arrived that she had been affected. She said they had supported her with food, clothing and travel expenses and given her special dispensation over her other exams.
