It was almost 11pm when the night editor rang. I was about to get into bed and ignored it, thinking that, if it was important enough, he would ring back. Two minutes later, another call. Something was going on at Manchester Arena: could I check it out? I put my clothes back on and drove the 10 minutes into town.
Six ambulances passed me on Deansgate, sirens wailing, heading towards the concert venue. A police helicopter circled overhead. Outside Zara a group of lads from Sheffield had just run from the Ariana Grande concert. They were in retro running gear: towelling headbands, vests and tiny shorts. One of the group was sobbing into the shop window. They had seen people covered in blood, they said. Teenage girls scurried past, clutching big pink balloons that had been released in the concert’s finale, shortly before they heard an enormous bang.
On New Cathedral Street, armed officers suddenly appeared by Marks & Spencer, faces covered, body armour pressed up against doorways, shouting for us all to leave. I took a picture, uploaded it to Twitter and wondered what the hell I was doing standing there. Was I about to get caught up in a marauding terror attack? I remembered what had happened in Oslo in July 2011 and Paris in November 2015: first the bomb, then the gunfire. I wanted to report, but I didn’t want to die. I legged it towards the Arndale shopping centre.
We weren’t sure what we were dealing with for the first hour. The Greater Manchester police press office was not answering the phone and there were so many conflicting reports. The former Coronation Street actor Julie Hesmondhalgh had claimed on Twitter that it was just one of those pink balloons popping that kickstarted the panic. Her daughter was there, she said. (She later deleted the tweet).
One 18-year-old from Newcastle thought there had been a shooting, and sent me videos he took while running from the arena. Another teenager could only babble about finding himself next to Ariana Grande’s mum in the ensuing panic. Then a photo started doing the rounds of Grande covered in blood. (It later emerged the picture was old, from when the singer was in Scream Queens, a US comedy horror series).
It was shortly after midnight that I got a text from London warning me that they had heard up to 20 people were dead: an underestimate of two, it turned out, three if you include the suicide bomber. I texted back: “Oh God.” I phoned my colleague Frances Perraudin, who had been out with friends, and was positioned on the other side of the arena. She stayed put, interviewing concertgoers while I went to the nearest hospital.
By dawn, our team had swelled to six: Steven Morris, our south-west correspondent, had driven through the night and joined Nazia Parveen and Josh Halliday from the Manchester office, as well as Jamie Grierson, who had got the train from London. Chris Thomond, the Guardian photographer, had not been to bed. Sean Smith, a veteran of many wars, soon pitched up with his camera.
The next 20 hours were a blur of press conferences, door knocks, appeals and frantic lead chasing, as the name of the bomber leaked via the US intelligence services. Parveen obtained one of the first photographs of Salman Abedi, while Morris interviewed an imam at Didsbury mosque, who told of how Abedi had looked at him “with hate” after he delivered an anti-terrorism sermon.
It was Tuesday evening before it all caught up with me. I was in Albert Square, scene of so many football celebrations, festivals and protests. Thousands of people were crammed on to the cobbles, spilling over into the adjoining streets. A line of politicians trooped on to the stage and I prepared myself for their speeches. But they stayed silent – Andy Burnham, Jeremy Corbyn, Amber Rudd and Tim Farron said not one word. Instead, the Mancunian poet Tony Walsh delivered an ode to my adopted city. This Is the Place has nods to Greater Manchester’s many claims to fame: inventing the first computer, building the first railway station, Co-ops, suffragettes, Rolls-Royce. But it was one line that has buzzed around my head in the sleep-deprived days and nights that followed: “If you’re looking for history, then yeah, we’ve a wealth, but the Manchester way is to make it yourself.” This week will go down in history for the response to the attack as much as the attack itself.
In the four years I have lived here as the Guardian’s north of England editor, what I have noticed above all is the Mancunian ability to make the best of a bad situation. The choir that belted out show tunes on a tram after two gay men were beaten up for singing the theme from Wicked on the Metrolink from Bury. The 24-hour party people who turned a stand-off between police and a prisoner on the roof at Strangeways into a rave. Now, among the lake of flowers outside the McDonald’s in St Ann’s Square we have signs saying: “Isis can’t scare us – we’re Mancs.” And a whole generation of Mancunians now have a worker bee, the civic symbol of this city of grafters, tattooed on their skin.
But we must also come to terms with the fact that a young man raised on our streets, educated in our schools, decided to pack a rucksack full of explosives and blow himself up at a pop concert filled with teenage girls in our city. That is something no amount of Mancunian spirit can overcome.
