an early interview with the council’s John Beale,
Director of Education.
After, as I was coming down the steps
of his offices,
a car pulled up at the kerb –
one of the paper’s photographers,
Mel Parry, only eighteen back then,
been to the station for the morning call.
MEL winds down his window.
MEL
There’s been a couple of incidents –
a domestic fire in Dowlais,
or an outhouse collapsed at the school in Aberfan.
Which do you think?
SAM
Fires are common enough,
let’s try the school.
Sounds a bit different.
So I got in, and Mel drove on.
MEL
We were approaching Merthyr Vale
when we saw the cars in the mist.
A chain of headlights,
blue and red stitched
with police, an ambulance.
All coming towards us,
away from Aberfan.
I watched them pass,
become a river of red in our mirror.
SAM
‘Something serious has happened,’
I said to Mel.
He gave a nod, no more,
and like that, against the headlight flow
and our own tyres’ hiss, we drove on,
in silence, into that mist.
GWYNETH LEWIS is in the Mayor’s office.
GWYNETH
I’d been Mayor’s secretary
since March of ’66.
I’d got in early that morning.
We’d lit the fire
and the switchboard girl
had been in to turn her handle.
All was normal.
Then, suddenly, the men were leaving.
They’d been told, you see, to go to Aberfan.
The offices emptied, to a man.
Just the women left.
No one could tell us why.
We didn’t know what to do.
But then the ambulances
started streaking through town,
and we knew.
Within the hour
we’d gone from staffing the office
to a crisis HQ.
MANSEL
It must have been around 9.30,
as we reached Dowlais Top,
when out of the mist
we saw a road block.
I pulled up.
A POLICE OFFICER approaches the car.
OFFICER
Which way you going?
MANSEL
Brecon Road, in Merthyr.
Which is when he said.
A disaster.
That’s what he called it, even then.
Of course, we thought it was the pit.
All my father’s side is from Aberfan,
and always been miners too.
And my wife’s family,
they ran a shop in the village.
The officer was about to signal us on,
when he saw the sticker
above my bumper – B.M.S.A.
OFFICER
Are you a doctor?
MANSEL
A student. Final year.
OFFICER
But you’re medical?
We could use your help if so.
All the other doctors, see? They’re up
at St Tydfil’s for the casualties,
or in Merthyr Central.
MANSEL
Of course. Anything I can do.
And that was it. They waved us through.
DAVE is out on the street, crowds running past him.
DAVE
I followed the crowd running down my street,
turned at the Mack and couldn’t believe it.
They’re making a film – that’s all I could think.
The apex of the roofs, you see,
they were, well, all sitting on rubble.
Everything else had gone.
And then, as I looked, that rubble wept.
The Cardiff to Merthyr main,
burst by the slipping tip.
It just kept on coming,
turning windows to waterfalls
but thick and black, not like water at all.
Most of the crowd carried on to Pantglas,
but I and some others, we stayed where we were.
There was a boy, see? Who we’d found,
an older lad, been walking to school
when the debris came down.
We didn’t have tools,
but we still got to him just in time.
Seconds later and the place he’d been caught
was boiling with slurry and grime.
The boy pulled out is WILL DAVIES.
SAM is faced with the full horror of the landslide.
SAM
It looked like the Somme.
That’s what I thought
when we came round the corner.
A mountain of slurry with men all over,
like ants, and all of them digging
with their fingers, their hands.
I had my notebook, my pen,
but I couldn’t take them out.
So instead, I climbed up on to it,
that mass of underground waste,
and joined a chain
passing back buckets of slurry.
It was only after a bit that I noticed –
it was still moving.
The whole dark body of it,
a slow buckle and seep
like a small coal muscle
hard but supple, flexing under our feet.
More people were coming all the time,
with shovels, picks, spades.
I saw firemen further up
pulling out a man in pyjamas.
In one of the classrooms
a dram was stuck,
that’s what someone said,
and animals too, from the farm on the hill –
sheep, a cow, all dead.
MANSEL is at the site of the school.
MANSEL
It sounds odd to say it now
but what it resembled, that scene,
was like something from the gold rush –
like one of those old photos
where every man has staked out his pitch,
to prospect for wealth.
Except these men
were digging for something else
and for something more precious too –
their little ones.
Their sons, daughters, nephews, nieces
still stuck in that school.
I walked on into it all,
the slurry like dark cement,
asked if I could help.
But there was no one to treat,
that’s what the local GP said.
At least, not yet, not from under the rubble.
Soon enough though, those diggers
were getting into trouble.
Most had never worked so hard in their life,
so began collapsing with pains in their chests.
I did my best to see them right,
treated sprains, cuts – but it wasn’t enough.
How could it be, in that landscape of pain?
With that great black tongue
lolling out of the mist,
and just there, nearby, the mothers
holding each other, knee-deep in the grit,
looking on at what that slipping tip had done.
Among the mothers are
MYFANWY, IRENE, BETTY, CATRIN
all waiting around the school gates.
DAVE
Soon enough, every able man was
working to clear it.
Some children had been pulled out alive,
but everyone knew, we didn’t have much time.
I heard lorries and turned to see
the miners, up from the colliery.
Hundreds of them, jumping off before
those lorries had stopped
and diving straight in to attack that slip,
that pile of waste they’d once dug from the pit.
A chant of miners’ names runs under the rest of his speech.
God did they work. And organised us too.
Had teams digging trenches,
others making corrugate chutes.
Every now and then a cry would go up
and to a man, we’d all still and listen.
Machines would stop –
breaths were held –
until the source of the sound was found
and then a fury of digging again.
Johnny Howler
Eddie Dixie
George Aberdare
Will Bumble
Dai Gold Watch
Jones Merthyr Vale
Cocker Nash
Dai Stonedust
Bill Bird’s Eye
Until around eleven.
When for the first time that day
hundreds of us listened,
leant on our shovels, straining every sense,
only to
