Over the decades, the villagers of Aberfan have found many different ways to remember. For some it is comforting to gather together in public and they will attend Friday’s anniversary ceremonies alongside family and friends. Others prefer to stay indoors and mourn the loved ones they lost, at home, in private.
A number cannot ever bear to be in the Welsh village on 21 October and leave Aberfan every autumn. The fact that it is the 50th anniversary this time makes no difference.
“They just can’t stand to be here on the day,” said Jeff Edwards, who was the last of the children pulled alive from Pantglas junior school after thousands of tonnes of slurry, coal waste and tailings slipped from an unstable tip on the mountain above the village and engulfed the classrooms. “People grieve in different ways. That’s right and natural.”
At 9.15am on Friday it will be exactly half a century since the disaster – in October 1966 – claimed the lives of 144 people, 116 of whom were children aged between three months and 14 years. A minute’s silence will be observed in Wales, across the UK and in pockets around the globe.
For people such as Edwards the memories of that terrible day remain horribly vivid. Aged eight, he had just picked a Tintin book from the library and walked back to his desk when he heard a rumbling sound. The teacher thought it was thunder. The next thing he remembers is waking up and hearing shouts and screams. For two hours he was pinned next to a dead girl from his class, her head next to his face. “You don’t forget something like that,” he said. “Not ever.”
Edwards was speaking on Thursday in the Aberfan memorial garden, rectangles of manicured lawn laid out to represent the footprint of the school, the main path standing in for the corridor. He can point to the precise spot where he lay next to the girl.
Another survivor, Bernard Thomas, stopped by to talk to Edwards. He was nine and in the classroom next to Edwards when the black, wet, avalanche struck. “We heard this horrible roar and then found ourselves drowning in this muck,” he said. “I’d have died if I was sitting three inches across from where I was,” he said. “That’s the difference between life and death – such small distances.”
The pair remembered later being sent to a “mental hospital” where electrodes were fixed to their skulls to try to measure their psychological damage. Thomas said he had suffered with bouts of depression over the years. Both men seemed to joke about some of the incidents but as they did so their eyes welled with tears.
As Edwards and Thomas talked, a party of children from Afon Taf high school arrived to pay their respects. The pupils bowed their heads as Afon Taf’s deputy head teacher, Emma Clarke, read out the names of all the children who died. It took a while.
The events that have been organised this week have been nicely judged – poignant, telling, but not extravagant. On Thursday night a service of remembrance was to be conducted at St David’s church in Merthyr, featuring a reading of the poem Aberfan by the writer T Llew Jones, who had seen parallels between the disaster and the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
On Friday a royal visitor will arrive to take part in a service at the cemetery, with its rows of bright white memorials to the children that can be seen from miles away, and plant a tree in the memorial garden.
Over recent weeks and months artists have tried to find ways of marking the anniversary; poems have been written, musical works created. Still, one of the most effective reminders of the tragedy may be the original newspaper articles from the weekly Merthyr Express on display at the Smyrna chapel in Aberfan. The yellowing pages show how quickly horror and sadness turned to anger. A report on one of the first inquests reminds you that someone stood up and branded the National Coal Board, which had responsibility for the spoil heap, “murderers”.
The 50th anniversary is different. It has prompted some to tell their stories for the first time.
Karen Thomas, who was a pupil at Pantglas, has only now revealed how she puts flowers on the grave of the dinner lady Nansi Williams, who used her own body to protect the children she could reach, sacrificing her life.
Yvonne Price, one of the first police officers at the scene, finally described how her small stature meant she climbed through a window into the school and spent the day helping to get victims out.
The half-century mark has caused commentators to think again about the disaster and aftermath. The BBC newsreader and journalist Huw Edwards has been widely praised for his well-aimed criticism of the NCB and its chair at the time, Lord Alf Robens, who died in 1999.
Edwards argued that the lessons of Aberfan were still of profound relevance today because they touched “on issues of public accountability, responsibility, competence and transparency”.
Back at the memorial garden Jeff Edwards, who went on to lead Merthyr council, agreed it was important to remember Aberfan not just because of the personal tragedies but because of the lessons about society it revealed. “Good things came out of the disaster,” he said, “such as more care over health and safety and more thought about corporate responsibility. In these days, when public expenditure is being cut, it’s worth remembering what happens when corners are cut.”
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