The policewoman assigned to the grieving Fletchers gets goosebumps when she looks back to 30 years ago. She was an unofficial family liaison officer, working 15-hour days despite not having a minute of bereavement training
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One day this week, Janice Lloyd showed me into the conservatory at her house a couple of miles north-west of Bradford and, before we had started to talk properly, she leaned forward in her seat and held out her arms to show how the goosebumps came up every time her mind went back to what she had seen.
Janice was a policewoman on duty in Pontefract on the night of 11 May 1985 when the call came through that there had been a fire at Bradford City’s ground and they needed help from outside the area. She was 19 and it seems almost inconceivable in today’s world that it was left to a teenager, barely out of school, to handle the hellish process of identifying the bodies. The rules were clearly different back then and Janice just blows out her cheeks at what she and another young constable, Clive Morgan, had to see. The girl from Pudsey had to grow up “overnight”. She can remember how busy and chaotic it was at Bradford Central police station, yet also how eerily silent it was. “This awful, deathly silence.” More than once, there are parts of our conversation when she stops to collect her breath.
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from Sport | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1GYZKIT
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