![]() ![]() “I lost my best person ever in my life,” he says. Omar could see him until the flames engulfed the flat. Omar phoned Mohammed once he’d got out of the burning building: where was he? Still in the flat on the 14th floor. And Omar, who got out of Syria four years ago with his younger brother, Mohammed, and out of Grenfell but this time his brother didn’t make it with him. And Paul, who did manage to get out but now has nightmares about it. Then there’s Ligaya, who came to work in Britain from the Philippines in the 70s, and whose niece has come over looking for answers. Yasim’s family originally came from Morocco. Yasim, loved by everyone, who wasn’t home at the time but went in to try to get his family out. ![]() ![]() Jessica, the proud Latina 12-year-old whose friends still message her. Yates starts his search at the memorial before digging to find out a little about those people. I remember some of the names – Yasim and Jessica, certainly – that feature in Reggie Yates: Searching for Grenfell’s Lost Souls (BBC Two). I was at the Grenfell memorial wall the other day, with my little boy, looking at the messages, pictures and flowers. At time of filming Lofthouse is 94, while Ellis is 100, the same age as the RAF. Today, Ellis and Lofthouse are thoroughly enjoying themselves flirting with the McGregor boys, even though the latter says she would have preferred it if it was Martin Shaw. Mary Ellis and Joy Lofthouse were pilots with the Air Transport Auxiliary, delivering thousands of planes to frontline units in the second world war, an early breakthrough for equality even if it was born of necessity. And David Morgan, who was involved in a real dogfight in the Falklands and talks with scary poignancy about shooting down two Argentinian planes and how that has affected him since.Īnd it’s not just men. Brilliant old chaps such as Geoffrey Wellum, who fought in the Battle of Britain, one of the actual few (so very few, now) to whom so much is owed. Yes, thankfully, it is not just about Ewan and Colin having pretend dogfights in Spitfires, Messerschmitts and Typhoons, it is about the men who did it for real. “We all knew there’d be nothing to come back to,” says Martin Withers, who used to fly these beautiful planes. Not that there would have been anything there if they did get back. Many of the men who flew them carried pistols, not to use against the enemy but to save themselves from a slower, more painful death by burning.Īnother gruesome detail later in the show is that the pilots of the cold war Vulcan bombers wore eyepatches, so that if they were blinded by the nuclear bomb they had just dropped on the Soviet Union, they had another eye to fly back with. The problem with the BE2 was that the Fokkers were much faster and had machine guns, so the BE2s tended to come back down to earth in flames. He sees them, too – the Fokkers – surprising him from behind as he tootles along enjoying the view. The BE2 does at least give Ewan the opportunity to say Fokker. ![]()
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