MORNING SERIAL

THE moment passed, but the sense of peace and happiness remained, and while we still lay on the ground alongside each other, staring into blueness, I reached out and held my father’s hand, and the skylark’s song filled the sky. If I were to conjure the sound of perfect happiness, it would be the song of that little bird. I said nothing about my momentary episode of feeling beyond the world and of the world at the same instant, in fact neither I nor my father said anything at all. There were no words, just the blue of the sky, the weight of my body on the earth and the birdsong.

As the years have passed, the significance of that day, the day I walked along the mountain top with my father, has only become magnified for me. It is my fondest memory of him. He had shown me the wideness of the world and just how beautiful it could be. He had shown me how to properly listen to a skylark’s song. And almost certainly without knowing it, he had shown me peace of mind.

Many years later, when I was in my forties, and had been representing my home community as a full time politician for some while, my father succumbed to cancer.

Not long before he died I fought an election campaign. We hired the old library in Aberfan as a venue to stuff envelopes with my election address, and party members came from all over the constituency to volunteer their help. I had been out canvassing door-to-door and joined them part-way through the job. I went about the trestle tables saying hello to everyone and thanking them for their help.

Someone said hello. He was old and frail and wore a cap pulled down as to be almost covering his eyes. I did not recognise him. I said hello in return.

It was only after the word had left my lips that I saw it was my father.

In the two or three days since I had last seen him, his face had so changed, become so gaunt, that for a moment, and with that cap, I had not known him. When I realised, the moment swallowed me whole.

The wretchedness of it.