MORNING SERIAL

I DEMOLISHED a hot dog awash with greasy onions and watched as the older boys crashed the dodgem cars together with as much violence as they could muster by way of impressing girls.

As I was still young, I was rounded up after an hour or so to head back home, and gradually the fair was left to the teenagers and their flirting. On the way home I tackled some candy floss which melted into little ruby droplets in my mouth and on my lips as I buried my face in the pink, wispy, sticky fluff.

Back at home, while the bass notes of the music and the soprano screech of girls on the waltzer still sounded out, loud enough to penetrate our closed windows, Mam installed my goldfish in an old, water-filled sweetie jar. Dad tackled the coconut with a hammer and a six-inch nail, knocking in holes so each of us could sample the thin milk inside. It tasted soapy, and disappointing somehow – I don’t know what I was expecting. Dad then broke the shell by whacking it on the back doorstep and we scraped the flesh from the inside surface with our teeth.

On waking next morning, I found my goldfish floating belly up in the sweetie jar, stone dead. Allyson said she wasn’t surprised because she knew for certain Gareth had come downstairs in the middle of the night and peed in the water. He denied this vigorously. Whatever the truth of it, I was a little relieved, since I couldn’t see the point of goldfish, and wasn’t relishing the thought of looking after one. Now, if it had been a puppy, that would have been different. Within three days the fairground was packed and gone. And that particular and unique crowd of children that it had made was scattered, never to be reassembled.

In the years immediately following the disaster, Aberfan and Merthyr Vale became even closer communities than they had been before, if that were possible. They also became even more active and even better organised. A plethora of committees, church groups, youth clubs, sports clubs and social groups were set up, all interconnected and involving most local people in some way or another.