And I didn’t. I mean,
that’s where it was hardest I suppose.
Where the space left by Tomos
was most felt, most known.
I won’t lie, I went off the rails for a bit.
Lots of us did. And not just the kids.
Studies were done, proved what we knew.
That depression here was higher,
especially among the women, and drinking too.
Hardly a surprise. I mean,
I’ve had my own daughter since,
so I know. Is there anything more alive
than an eight-, nine-year-old child? No.
So imagine losing all that life at once,
all that talk and song and dance and fight.
Enough to put any place out for the count.
There’s one woman I know
still waiting for her girl to come home.
Sits there, every day, watching out the window.
But we got back up, didn’t we? That’s for sure.
As a village, and on our own.
Me? I took up at JJ’s, became a mechanic,
and married Barbara too.
I don’t know, we’d always been keen on each other
and even though my brother died
while her sister survived, well, we’d both still lost,
in a way. Maybe that drew us closer, I like to think so.
I still think of my friends every week.
The ones I was with when that slurry
came down the street. The ones who ran
the other way, and just because of that …
I think of my brother too, of course.
What type of man he’d have been.
If he’d had kids, in their faces,
how much of him or me we’d have seen.
But you’ve got to move on haven’t you?
Lots happened since then.
Barbara and I are grandparents now!
And our Rhian’s doing well.
She’s got the salon in here, see?
In the squash court. Had an outside wall –
could never get any speed on the ball,
so they offered it to her, and she went for it.
SIMONE is standing at the school entrance,
overseeing latecomers.
SIMONE
They’ve had some tough decades
these south Wales valleys.
Forty per cent unemployment
and lots of working poor.
So for me, it’s about opening the world
to these kids. And their eyes.
Letting them see what they could do,
who they could be.
Because you can only aspire
to what you can imagine, or see.
All that though, the teaching,
running a school,
that comes easily enough to me.
But then there’s other stuff
that’s harder to negotiate.
Each year, for example,
we mark the disaster’s date.
And we should too. But it’s difficult,
sometimes, to know exactly what to do.
Some want to talk, to remember,
others, stay quiet, forget.
And here, well, they’re just kids,
same age as those who died.
So yes, we teach it, but gently,
as part of the general history.
It’s still so close to home for them –
the communal grave in the cemetery,
the plaques on the walls in the centre,
and for some, still there, still alive
in their grandparents’ memories.
RHIAN is working in Serenity Salon.
MYFANWY, now eighty, is waiting for her treatment.
RHIAN
Aberfan, it’s known isn’t it?
Anywhere you go, you say the name
and people are like ‘Oh’, nodding,
thinking of the disaster.
But that’s not the whole story.
I mean, if it was, they must think
we’re a miserable place,
sitting round crying, long in the face.
But that’s not true.
Take the Young Wives Club.
I know it grew from what happened,
but then it grew beyond it too – I’d say that’s fair?
Buses to London, theatre trips,
that’s mostly what they do,
from what the ladies tell me in this chair.
MYFANWY
And laughing. Might sound strange but it’s true,
and partly why the group was formed.
We felt guilty, see, whether your child
had survived or died,
to be seen laughing in the street or having fun.
But we were human. And hurting terribly,
all of us, which is why it was so vital
to have somewhere we could go
to laugh, cry, have a recital
or just talk, get on a bus and go out,
to forget and remember, together.
It became a way we could offer too,
contribute I mean, in the community.
Meals on wheels, we started those.
Donkey derbies for charity,
entertained the old people,
held keep fit classes – very popular, those –
twenty, thirty of us, all in leotards
doing aerobics in the hall.
And from early on we organised speakers –
on literature, history – and trips as well,
to London on the train,
coming back at three in the morning,
Stratford upon Avon for the R.S.C.
Oh we’ve been getting some great deals lately!
Went to the opera recently, in Cardiff,
saw Madam Butterfly, and Falstaff!
DAN, now sixty, is sitting in his home.
DAN
How to talk about it.
That’s been a struggle from the very start.
When something like that happens
a village, a person, they’re bound to go dark.
They did their best, they really did.
Psychologists offered to the community,
educational and clinical.
But all that, those processes,
they were still in their infancy.
And sometimes, well, right then, straight after,
isn’t when you need them.
I remember, for example,
the one appointed to me, he’d say
don’t think about bad things,
like what happened,
but happy things, like your birthday.
My birthday! How could he have known?
There was no worse thing.
I’d been looking forward to mine,
Twenty, thirty friends at a party.
But then when the date came
there were only three, four of us about,
and that’s when it really sunk in.
My friends, they’d been wiped out.
When the hospital sent me home
playing outside was frowned upon.
I suffered from guilt, bed wetting,
lack of concentration.
So yes, how do you talk about that?
Can you blame anyone
for wanting to shut the world out
and just carry on?
There was, at least, a public conversation.
The funerals first, of course,
a kind of communal speech of grief –
the grave like a trench,
the hearses, the crowds, the flowers.
Even the coffins, allowed home again
the evening before,
so mothers and fathers across Aberfan
might say goodnight, blow a kiss,
close the door on sleep once more.
Then there were the inquests, the tribunal.
Another public conversation
and necessary, I’m sure,
though many found it hard
to settle with its conclusion.
No one prosecuted, no one sacked
nor forced to resign – and with the N.C.B.
claiming no knowledge or sign
of a spring under the tip.
After generations had swum in it.
Corporate manslaughter,
that’s what it amounted to.
‘Not wickedness but ignorance, ineptitude
and a failure of communication’
that’s what the final report claimed,
and that the N.C.B. carried the blame
for a lack of regulation.
But perhaps if good were to come
it was always going to come
from another direction.
From inside, not out.
Here, that meant the forming of groups,
how we’ve always, in every generation,
had our best conversation –
Not alone, but as one.
DAI, now eighty-five,
