MORNING SERIAL

AT the top of its winding towers, its two pairs of winding wheels turned perpetually, day after day, year after year, with a deep whirring sound; the weight-driven pulleys of the villages’ clockwork heart. At night the floodlights of the pit yard threw light across the ceiling of my bedroom at the back of our house. Aberfan was never completely dark, and never silent. Once, on a family holiday to Cardiganshire, in a rented cottage deep in the countryside, I found I could not sleep, so disconcerted was I by the quiet and the deep darkness of the fields and woods round about us. It seemed like a place without a heartbeat. At least none that I could then hear.

So this was the place I was born into: a pit village. Like all pit villages, it was characterised by the culture that the miners themselves had created; warm, supportive, egalitarian. There was a respect for education, for skills and hard work. To name someone ‘a good worker’ was the highest form of praise. The social activism of the miners and the fruits of a thousand of their incremental victories, alongside the work of the churches and chapels, formed the warp and weft of the community’s fabric. The mighty National Union of Mineworkers was always working in the background, not on planning the next strike as some newspapers would have their readers believe, but as a legal and financial adviser to families and pensioners, a patron of sports and social clubs, a refuge for the victimised; even as a travel agent, should you fancy a jaunt to the seaside.

Of course, this was never any kind of utopia. There were enmities, jealousies and worse. The respect for education was undermined by a belief that many were not fitted for it, at least beyond school leaving age. And there were always some who never subscribed to the way the miners might seek to order things. This was a real place and not some working class Eden, and it was peopled by real human beings, with all their faults and frailties.

But there was an ethos, made in those villages and particular to them, an ethos of trust and connectedness between people, forged under pressure, that would be honoured, always.