Beinazir Lasharie finished watching a film at around 1am on 14 June and was getting ready to go to bed when she heard shouting outside her flat in Testerton Walk, one of the three low-rise blocks that stand at the foot of Grenfell Tower, on the Lancaster West estate, west London. Lasharie had lived there since 1983, when she was three. She remembered playing on the swings outside, seeing the 24-storey block rise above her every time she put her head back. “It was the first thing I saw every day when I left my home – and when I came home, it’s the last thing I saw,” she said.
The estate was often noisy at night, but this didn’t sound like a party. She looked out to see what was going on and saw the reflections of flames on people’s faces, lighting up and going dark. In the walkway outside her flat, she met a woman who lived on the 11th floor of Grenfell Tower. She was with her three children. They had escaped soon after the fire began, reportedly on the fourth floor. “I hugged her and said, ‘I’m glad you’re safe,’ and then I stood there with everybody else, looking up, feeling helpless,” Lasharie told me.
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