MORNING SERIAL
THERE was always someone awake on the pit yard. Always someone alert. If anything went wrong while we slept, they would know and they would put it right. As it vibrated with energy, the mine’s reassuring night light never failed. Our house, and all the houses in the tangled ribbons of the streets around, seemed watched over, always, as we settled for the night.
During that winter of 1966 we children were kept close. Each morning, my oldest sister Anne set off for the grammar school in Quakers Yard, three miles away by train and so far away and unknowable to me that I paid the idea of it no mind. Dad went off to work at the Hoover factory in Pentrebach. He was an engineer. Good work in a community that respected skills and qualifications. Mam, while we children were young, had her hands full at home, though she would later graft her way to a career in nursing once we were old enough for Nana (my father’s mother) to mind us.
For Allyson there was no school for what seemed like a long time. Not until some prefabricated buildings were thrown together in another part of the village, and the survivors of Pantglas School restarted their lessons. One day a picture of Allyson speaking with the Queen appeared in all the newspapers. In the picture, my sister looks dazed and perplexed, far from comfortable. She has her best coat on. Mam made a cutting from the newspaper and put it away, without remarking on it, as if it were something that could not be made sense of just then but might have meaning sometime, for someone.
Around this time the clean-up operation began in earnest around Pantglas School and Moy Road, where several houses had been flattened by the landslide. Mechanical diggers worked all day and through floodlit nights. For a while the industrial clatter and illuminated night sky rivalled the activity of the pithead itself. Tens of thousands of tons of slurry had to be moved. Endless convoys of lorries rolled in and out of the village all day long, diesel engines thrumming and barking. Slowly the worst of the debris in the immediate area of the school and what had been Moy Road was cleared.