The boy – Fletcher – discovered soon enough how boundlessly and profoundly life-affecting the afternoon would prove to be. His afternoon intersected with that of Preston, who was in an ambulance on his way to St Luke's hospital to be treated for burns when a 12-year-old was bundled aboard, concerned only at the moment to know "how did Leeds United get on" that day. That certainly changed when Martin Fletcher told his story. So do the sounds of some of those 150 people present, packing the little theatre's benches to capacity, needing to leave the dark space and take a moment to recover themselves. The unheroic obstinacy of the woman who refused to leave without her handbag "because my teeth are in it." Some laughs puncture the rapt silence of the 75 minutes at Bradford's Alhambra theatre studio. And so, too, is the black tragicomedy which can exist at the boundaries. The men with no hair feeling the searing pain first supporters entering hospital with their hands melted to their heads by the asphalt which has leaked from the stadium roof a fan's trilby hat igniting. The scriptwriters' hours of interviews with those caught up in the horror are distilled into the narratives of three survivors, and the casual horrors of what befell football supporters that day are all in there. The play, entitled simply The 56, does not seek to make melodrama out of that 11 May afternoon at Valley Parade, when fans arrived to celebrate Bradford's promotion from the Football League's division 3. And so it has been that while Liverpool supporters' refusal to accept the received narrative of Hillsborough – the stadium disaster 40 miles north across Yorkshire in which 96 died – has made it a source of anger and liberation at the heart of the national consciousness, Bradford became the forgotten tragedy. The play reflects that it had been "the Yorkshire way" not to make a fuss, to bear a loss and move on. This is the kind of understated remembrance we have seen in Bradford these past few months, at the onset of another significant anniversary of the 1985 fire which tore across the local football club's old wooden main stand, reducing it to a collapsing inferno in a mere four minutes and claiming 56 lives. ![]() ![]() The children were still nestled under the warden's thick overcoat when they discovered them. ![]() He and the children all perished, along with the boys' father. She was Hazel Greenwood – the mother whose children, 13-year-old Felix and 11-year-old Rupert, had been ushered away from the flames of the stadium fire all those years ago by a traffic warden, seeking to shelter them under his tunic. And only after she had gone – vanished into the kind of warm Bradford Saturday night on which wives, children, parents and friends first learned that they were the bereaved, 30 years ago next week – did the significance of her gratitude become clear. Thank you for telling this," said the woman, who was perhaps 60 or so, to one of the young people whose stage play, based on football's Bradford disaster, had just concluded on the small theatre space behind her.
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