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*Hillsborough memorial service: Follow updates from Anfield from 2.45pm today

AS THE crowd packed together even more tightly, teenager Frank Connolly began to sink farther down into the pile of people, desperately clinging to life.

But within seconds he found hope and help.

“I felt something underneath my feet and was able to push myself half-way back up again, and with another push I was back again with my face up, still gasping for breath.

“Unfortunately, the thing that enabled me to push myself back up was one of the unlucky ones who couldn’t survive . . .”

The memories of a 15-year-old football fan, written down just four months after the fateful event, are as vivid as ever.

The boy is now a 39-year-old father-of-four but he remembers that day, April 15, 1989, as “if it was yesterday”, helped by the pored-over pages of thoughts and recollections scribbled down with his Biro.

“There was a day when I read them all the time,” he says. “Over the years I look at them less and less, but I need to know where they are and that they’re there.”

As a boy, Liverpool fan Frank struggled to cope with the fear and feelings with which his fight for life at Hillsborough left him.

Angry and confused, he suffered outbursts of temper: “Not with people, my bedroom walls took the brunt of it,” he smiles.

It was a social worker assigned to help him in the aftermath of the tragedy who encouraged the former Cardinal Heenan pupil to write down what had happened – “He even went out and bought me the paper and pens” – and now Frank, from south Liverpool, feels the time is right to share the thoughts of the boy he was.

“Maybe there are people like myself who went through what I went through,” he says.

“Often people are frightened to bring up the subject, to speak to people about it, but you have to talk.

“It’s like a build-up of pressure that has to be released.

“People say time is a healer, and obviously this is a long time in the past, but it’s never going to go away.

“I have just put it in a place where I can now move on, and manage it.

“It’s almost 25 years later and I have managed to learn to lock the memories away safely,” he says, touching his head, “bringing them out when I need to, like now.

“But every time I do, it feels like the first time. I can hear the sounds and the noise, I can remember the smell.”

His experience is written word for word in the “diary” of that 15-year-old boy from Kensington.

It was Liverpool fan Frank’s first semi-final and his first away game.

For weeks before he had talked about nothing else but going to the match with three friends, Graham and Bernie, with whom he had tickets for the B Section of the Leppings Lane terrace, and Mark (who had a ticket for the stands), and they were keen to get there early.

Queues had already formed and Frank and his friends joined the back of the shortest one, going through the turnstile right next to the “blue sliding doors that were to be the centre of this disaster”.

Frank wrote: “Immediately in front of the turnstiles was the tunnel. Looking down I could see the pitch and the opposite end where the Forest supporters were.

“We walked down the tunnel and onto the terrace but it was already packed full and the whole crowd at the back was swaying backwards and forwards but it was all fun. No-one was getting hurt but it was a bit scary. I could see that the front of the terrace was almost empty. People seemed to be avoiding it for some reason.The whole atmosphere was electric and everyone was singing and shouting and we three were joining in . . .

“We decided it would be safer down the front behind the fence so we made our way down. When we got to the front, we had plenty of space.”

* ECHO comment: Hillsborough campaigners – you are doing the 96 proud

But the fun and the freedom were short-lived. After the players had left the pitch after a warm-up, the terrace began to fill up.

“I was turned away from the pitch by the force of a sudden gush and was turned to the left. I wasn’t too scared at first because I thought it would ease off after a few minutes but it didn’t – it got worse and worse. I remember looking at the electric clock as the impact occurred and it read 2:56. I was terrified but I didn’t seem to panic until later on.”

Frank recalls fans asking the police officer outside the fence to open the safety gate and let them out, but he walked away and left them.

He says now: “It was only after a minute or so, we realised that it was very serious.”

He wrote: “I couldn’t move at all except my head and the air was getting pushed out of me so I was no longer breathing normally, I was just gasping for every little breath.

“It was now that I realised I wasn’t going to get out myself. I had already accepted that I would die and was just waiting for it to happen. All around me was screams and people were just standing there crushed with their eyes closed . . . They were being kept up by the force of the crush.

“I was no longer standing on my feet. I was off the floor but it seemed like I was on the floor because it was so still. There was no movement at all except for the lads who were stepping on everyone in an effort to get themselves out. I had my head held up with my face facing upwards because that was the only way I could get any air at all. If my head had been the other way I would have been smothered between people’s shoulders and backs.

“I tried desperately to stay awake because I knew that if I lost consciousness there was a possibility I would slip to the floor and be buried beneath everyone. Suddenly a huge hand was spread across my face and was pushing me down . . . It took a huge effort to shake my head and knock the hand off. If he had pushed any longer, I am sure I would have gone down below everyone. It was like I was drowning and trying to stay afloat . . . It was so hot.”

* Message of thanks from Anne Williams who is too ill to attend Hillsborough memorial service

Recalling now the moment he felt he was going to lose his life, he says: “I was dying. It was very peaceful. After the initial fear, there comes a point where you accept it, and I accepted it.

“But the survival instinct kicks in, to stay alive.

“It would have been easy to have given up, because of the seeming inevitability of it all, and the pain.

“There was a point where I felt I was going, because the pain had gone and the sounds seemed miles away. It was like I was letting go, but I made a deliberate decision that I wasn’t going to give up.

“In a flash, the pain and the noise came back and I realised I was still fighting.”

* Liverpool remembers the 96 ahead of 24th Hillsborough anniversary (VIDEO/GALLERIES)

Then, in his writings, he remembered: “Suddenly the whole thing seemed to ease off and I could move my arms but I still couldn’t breathe properly and I couldn’t feel my chest. I was numb. People just seemed to drop. I turned in an effort to free myself but I couldn’t walk. The whole of my legs, up to my waist were still trapped and covered by bodies that just lay there piled high . . .”

Frank eventually managed to free himself and, although he spent a night in hospital, during which time he learned his parents had visited the morgue to identify what they believed to be their boy, he says: “I was largely unscathed, physically at least.

“I felt a lot of shame, and guilt that I had survived and others didn’t. There was a lot of anger and frustration, especially in the immediate aftermath. It played over and over in my head and I couldn’t turn it off.

“It was like I needed a tap to release the pressure.

“Writing it down wasn’t hard because it was still so fresh, so raw; and it was helpful, cathartic for me to get everything out.”

Hillsborough, says Frank, has shaped the man he is: “It’s part of me. That day has made me who I am today.

“But I also feel like this is a new life. The 15-year-old person who went to Hillsborough didn’t come out the other side, and I feel a sense of loss for him and there are times when I long to go back to being him.

“I was a normal lad who lived for football and Liverpool. Instantly I fell out of love with the game. But something like this changes you so permanently and so fully.

“I was a talented artist and wanted to go to university to study architecture, but I lost interest after Hillsborough.

“I’m more serious now – I sometimes feel I need to lighten up – and I’m more cautious about every situation. If there is a family day out arranged, for instance to Alton Towers, I can’t see just the good side, I see what could happen, what could go wrong. It has spoiled things for me in life because I realise how it can all be gone in a flash.

“And I am very over-protective of my family.”

* Read Hillsborough: A survivor's story by Damian Kavanagh here

But Frank DOES realise, too, how lucky he was to survive and feels for those, and their families, who didn’t.

“I am so lucky to have Kirsty, my wife, who is so understanding and so fantastic; I would be completely lost without her.

“She is my rock and the person I rely on.

“There are two ways I could have gone. I could have let Hillsborough totally ruin my life, or I could get on with my life as normally as I possibly could. I got a second chance that so many others didn’t, so I was, and am, determined to make the most of that – and I certainly owe it to those who lost their lives.

“I have four children, Rebekah, who’s 18; Jack, nine; Harry, five, and two-year-old Frankie, and they are four of the most amazing people. And when I look back and think I should have done more with my life, with the chance I was given, I look at them, and Kirsty, and realise that they are my success, and there is no greater achievement than that.

“My second chance allowed me to have my amazing family and I will always be grateful for that, and for them.”

*Archive of coverage on the Hillsborough disaster and fight for justice - click here

*Hillsborough - the long road to justice: the story so far (TIMELINE)

*Hillsborough disaster: How the Liverpool ECHO reported the tragedy