MORNING SERIAL
THIS was something I only recognised and understood through its absence – when I left Aberfan at the age of eighteen to study at Edinburgh University, and was transplanted to a strange city, hundreds of miles away. When this happened I became suddenly disorientated by the seeming absence of shared assumptions about how community, society, ought to be. I felt like someone who makes to climb a staircase in the dark, only to stumble over a missing step, with a sudden nauseating lurch. I was disorientated too by the change in topography. Suddenly in a city with grand vistas that drew the eye toward the sea, or to distant hills, I realised that the valley I grew up in may well have been scarred by industry but it was also a natural shelter from the wider world, its mountains forming an embrace around the mind; protective, but enclosing too. Leaving the smothering warmth of that affectionate embrace was to be the hardest part of growing up.
After the disaster, Aberfan was still a pit village, no more or less than all the others. But there were differences too. In face of that unspeakable horror, it instinctively used its strengths to fight back. A close community grew closer. An organised community amplified and multiplied its organisations. The instinct for mutual support kicked in. But there were gaps, gaps that some would fall through. After all, how could a community that dealt with communal threats by communal means stand up to individual grief? How could any organisation, no matter how sensitive and well meaning, step in and give any answer to the boundless loss of a unique and irreplaceable child?
Today we might have called in experts in bereavement, psychologists perhaps, and counsellors. But in 1966, such things were not so well understood.
So Aberfan in the aftermath of disaster became different. A community so strong in its connectedness was nevertheless undermined by the aching grief of parents, siblings, families and loved ones. The grief gnawed away at happiness, at peace of mind, at health, at hope.