MORNING SERIAL

I GREW up in this aftermath. After 21st October 1966, Aberfan was all about aftermath. The disaster was ever-present, like a vibration in the air, like that sense of unease when a dark shape flits about in the corner of your eye, like a spider scuttling along a skirting board.

This, then, was the atmosphere around us all in my pre-school years. The day of the disaster itself had carved itself into my memory at an age so tender I had no right to remember anything of it at all and the aftermath of that day permeated all the stages of my growing up. Just as my horizons broadened gradually, day by day as I grew, so an understanding of what that day had meant revealed itself in stages, piece by poignant piece. The two things could not be separated.

To grow up in Aberfan at that time was to grow up with a shadow cast over all, mostly unacknowledged, but its presence felt through hushed adult conversation, overheard and partly understood; through the television and newspapers and their coverage of each anniversary of the day, through the gradual realisation that kindly adults you knew by name were also bereaved parents, and had suffered things far beyond anything your childish experience could prepare you to understand.

In those years before school, our home in Cottrell Street was the centre of my very restricted world. My parents were able to afford the £150 to buy the house because Dad’s savings of £100 had been supplemented by the enormous windfall of £50 that Mam had won at bingo.

A mid terraced, threebedroom house just like all the others in the street. At first Mam, Dad, Anne, Allyson and I (Gareth had not yet been born when we first moved in and I was still the baby) had to share the house with a sitting tenant. An elderly lady by the name of Mrs Miles, she occupied the downstairs front room and I remember very little about her except that she terrified me. I can picture her now only as an unsmiling figure in a severe black dress.