Do you know the first time I knew
I was not safe because of my class,
Because of the accident of my birth,
My factory-working parents?
I was thirteen, in 1966, World Cup year.
And a great pile of dirt
Slid down a hillside in Aberfan, South Wales
And killed children and adults in a school.
I wasn’t ready to be angry.
I was too young for that.
I wasn’t ready to be angry.
That would come later.
Do you know when I realised
I was ready to be angry?
It was when a chemical plant
Blew up in Flixborough. 28 dead. I was twenty-one.
I was ready to be angry then.
I was old enough to walk a picket line.
I was angry enough to push a police horse back
At Lewisham when fascists marched.
Do you know when I realised
They even made our leisure time deadly?
It was in 1985 when Bradford City burnedAnd fifty-six people burned with it.
And did we learn? Did we fuck.
They went on treating us like shit,
Our class watching our sport
And the shit came home to roost at Hillsborough.
Do you know how long it took to understandThe arithmetic of class?
It took meTwenty-one years, the time it takesTo make a man, an angry man.
Here is the arithmetic:
Aberfan, 116 children,
28 adults, Flixborough, 28 souls,
Bradford, 56 beautiful lives,
Hillsborough 96 unforgotten dead.
So here is what I want to know,
Now I get the mathematics of class
,At the Grenfell Tower,
In London Town, when will we know
The number, the calculus of grief?”
Alan Gibbons
