On the night of the fire, the Gomes family had been out for dinner, but had been asleep for several hours when they were woken up by Helen Gebremeskel and her daughter Lulya, 12, who lived across the corridor in Flat 186.

Helen and Lulya had already tried to get out of the building and had met the El Wahabis from flat 182 on the way.

By the time they knocked on the Gomeses' door, it was between 01:30 and 02:00. “[Helen] was panicking a little bit. I closed the door to stop the smoke. It was already thick, black smoke,” says Marcio.

These two families - the Gomes family of four with Helen, her daughter, Lulya, and two dogs - spent the next two terrifying hours waiting as smoke started to fill the flat. Marcio filled the bath with water and ran the shower. With all the windows open, the two families stayed low to the ground to try to keep beneath the smoke.

All of the adults had conversations with the emergency services and were told to stay put, that firefighters would come to rescue them.

They had friends outside the tower who were watching the building burn and were calling them to say they must get out, including Miguel and Fatima Alves who lived on the 13th floor. They’re also from Portugal and Miguel and Marcio play football together every week.

Once the Alves family had escaped from the building, they began to call Marcio to tell him he must get his family out. Tension grew as the fire spread and people became trapped by dense smoke, especially those residents on the top floors of the tower.

“I’m very religious and I kneeled down and I begged our lady of Fatima to protect them, to protect everybody in the building, but especially them because they are Portuguese and we knew them," says Fatima Alves.

Helen was increasingly anxious.

“At one point I think I asked one of my friends, ‘Can we speak to the fire people or the police you know?’ And she let me talk to them and we asked them, ‘What shall we do?’ And they say to us, ‘Someone is going to come and take you out,’” says Helen.

“That's what they say to us from two to three o'clock. So we've been waiting and waiting and waiting. And then we call again and we asked them. And they said, ‘No, stay in, do not come out. Don't come out, don't come out.’”

So the Gomes family and the Gebremeskels waited.

At about 03:30, Marcio and Andreia’s bedroom caught fire.

“My room is on fire. Just like that. My curtains are on fire. My Moses basket is on fire. All that side of the window is on fire,” says Marcio. “I looked at them and I said, ‘We have to go now. There’s no turning back. It’s now or never.’”

Marcio tied wet tea towels around everyone's faces, wrapped wet sheets around them and gave specific instructions about the order in which they should leave. They began the descent in the pitch black, gagging as they attempted to get down 21 floors of smoke-filled stairs.

They found themselves treading on the dead and the dying - other Grenfell residents who, like them, had tried to get out of the building before passing out on the stairs.

“We were just going, just going and going, because if we don’t keep going, we’re going to die,” says Helen.