in response to a story in Sheffield Star, April 16th, 2009

I don’t do empathy willingly but there was something in the story that cut me right up. The writer, whoever he was, told of a micro moment in his life. How a woman he had never met before and would probably never meet again, offered him her telephone. He did not use the words trancelike, but his writing evoked such emotion that its state was obvious. His story, in the Sheffield Star of April 16th, 2009, told of the woman, who reminded him so much of his own mum, across the Pennines, who would have heard the news that day. How Liverpool football fans had been crushed against riot prevention fencing and had been injured or died for their passion.

The house he was ushered into reminded him of his own, even the cardigan the woman wore was reminiscent of that worn by his mum when she pegged out the washing in the cold. His language was not that of a writer, but its earthiness was all the better for it. It was real, unlike the often detached reporting of an experienced journalist. A journalist would have written a helicopter passenger view of the unfolding tragedy; from the air and remote. His bird’s eye view would have unfolded a perspective very different from the one this guy wrote about. This football fan had gone along to the FA Cup semi-final between his home team of Liverpool with rivals Nottingham Forest from a ‘ground up’ angle. He had been there, in the crowd, witnessed the unfolding disaster, the tardiness of the police to react, who themselves had been conditioned to view pitch invasions as hostile, fights as part of the ‘game’ and had been slow in their realisation that this pitch invasion was different. These were not hooligans, but ordinary people, regular fans, trying to escape the suffocating crush of too many too quickly herded in to the cattle pen terraces, to the death of 96 people and injury of hundreds more.

I knew, as I read this man’s story, that had I been the woman whose telephone he used, I would have done the same. Football may not be my life, but I have children and loved ones. It was not difficult to flip the camera round and be the mum at home, listening to the match; feeling helpless, knowing it was my lad and his mates who had set off for Sheffield that morning with their spirits as high as the scarves that trailed from the back windows of the car. Not many people had mobile phones in 1989 and calling home took longer, the wait slower. I could have been the mum waiting in agony for the call that said, ‘Mum, it’s me, we’re alright.’ I certainly would have been the Sheffield mother in the cardigan, pulling that young lad into my house so he could call home.

Maybe you don’t have to ‘do’ empathy. Sometimes it ‘does’ you because we have all been there, seen stuff and needed a bit of a helping hand along the way, even from strangers. And if it helps someone else along the way, then so be it.