One Wednesday In Sheffield...

...it was, of course, a Saturday on which the Hillsborough slaughter occurred. Its twentieth anniversary falls, now, on a Wednesday. Sheffield Wednesday it is today.

If I were to say how well that day is remembered in this house it might seem almost crass, for who knowing it then could forget it now? I take it though for a strong personal as well as a public memory, for it was the only occasion on which I believe I was struck with a psychic knowing and a terrible foreboding.

H and I had chosen the day for a jaunt to Jodrell Bank. You know it of course the site, among others, of the great radio telescope that in the words of the place itself 'probes the depths of space, a symbol of our wish to understand the universe in which we live.'

A longish stone's throw across the Pennines is Jodrell Bank from Sheffield, but what is that to a device that measures distance in time not space? What quite H and I were doing there is not recalled. Did either of us significantly take such an interest in astrophysics? Not as such would both say then and now.

It was, from the outset, a 'black dog' day. One uses that Churchillian short-hand not to indicate personal despondency, but rather a deep sense of worldly gloom. Something was not right, one just knew it.

Jodrell Bank offers many attractions to its visitors, not the least of which is a small yet fulsome planetarium with regular shows for the viewing public. H and I attended one such show twenty years ago this day. The time was 3.00 o'clock in the afternoon.

As the lights dimmed into the blackness of a re-created primordial universe my sense of gloom became that of utter and unfathomable horror. A stern effort, indeed, was needed not to run screaming from the place.

At that same moment there were real screams being heard at Hillsborough from people who could not run because they were trapped, and ninety-six people for whom there would be no more screaming, or running, or cheering, or loving, or life itself.

We drove home, H and I, after the show. That is I drove, and I should not have for I could barely control myself let alone the car. The horror did not subside as I assumed it must but ever grew in intensity. The world was wrong, I absolutely knew it to be so.

We arrived to the house by early evening and at once on went the television to catch the football scores. Desperate faces to be seen in the studio and on the, by now almost deserted, terraces at Hillsborough. What could that be one at first only casually wondered?

The following hours there was nothing to do other than to absorb the unfolding news of the terrible events of that deadly day.

Only later did I begin to reflect on the precise timing of the thing. The Ninth Hour, the hour of Calvary. Was their moment of dying a cause of my own horror? Did their last screams penetrate my heart and soul? It matters not to anyone but myself, but I believed it to be so then and twenty years on I believe it still.