MORNING SERIAL

PUREST black, these tips loomed over our homes in defiance of gravity and of common sense. And they were everywhere. The tip that eventually collapsed and sent hundreds of thousands of tons of semi-liquid slurry careering into Aberfan was called Pantglas No. 7. And Pantglas was just a small part of Aberfan, Aberfan just one of hundreds of villages in the shadow of similar slag heaps, right across the South Wales coalfield.

But the fact that the two villages existed at all was by reason of the colliery. The villages existed because of the coal, and the coal fed them and fuelled them and kept them. Despite the coming of new factories to the valley in the 1950s and 1960s, at least one man in every family was, or at least had once been, a miner, and the miners’ wages still underpinned the local economy. For most people the degradation of the environment was a necessary evil, the price of coal and the price of the jobs that were the foundation stones of every house, chapel, shop and pub for miles around.

At that time at least one coal fire still blazed in every house at all times of the day aside from the warmest days of summer. On windless days the coal smoke of a couple of thousand chimneys would hang in the still air and could be tasted like a hint of acid at the back of your throat. The effluent of coal washing turned the River Taff black, and choked almost all life from it.

The drive to extract coal meant its waste was amassed around us and was channelled through our waterways, and that the air we breathed was filled by the products of its burning. Yet it was also the reason for everything I knew being as it was. The reason all the people I knew, all the people I loved, were there at all.

The colliery itself sat at the heart of everything. Never truly quiet at any time of day or night, it clanked, rumbled, hissed and whistled. The steam hooter sounded at change of shift and steam shunting engines fussed endlessly over getting the coal wagons organised for the trip to Barry docks.