MORNING SERIAL

EPILOGUE AFTER the disaster, each individual, each family in the village, had their own path to tread, their own inheritance from that day in October 1966. For some there was raw heartbreak; for some anxiety; for some depression; for some all of these things. But so far as it is possible for a community as a whole to respond with compassion and courage to such a blow, then Aberfan and Merthyr Vale did so. Despite all the horror of that October day, I can testify that the village was a warm and wonderful place in which to grow up.

Twenty years on from the disaster, the sibling villages had another blow to bear, however. Something that would change forever the very manner of place that they were.

Like the rest of the South Wales coalfield, the collective trauma of the miners’ strike of 1984-5 showed these strong, decent communities at their very best, and I saw the truest nature of their obstreperous, mighty heart.

But the strike was lost, of course. The miners marched back to work behind their lodge banner, and Merthyr Vale Colliery finally closed in 1989. Suddenly, Aberfan was no longer a pit village. The original, first cause for there being a village called Aberfan at all had ceased to be. In retrospect I see that I had been of the final generation to grow up with the lived experience of the South Wales coalfield all about me. Its life lived day to day, through which values like solidarity and sacrifice were not mere words but vivid reality, had its last great outpouring before I had reached my twenty-first birthday.

The social and economic consequences of losing the strike, for the whole of the coalfield, were calamitous. The communities of the Valleys, Aberfan included, are still living with the effects.