The bare facts of what came to be known as the Aberfan Disaster are well-known. On 21st October 1966, a coal tip subsided following a bout of heavy rain and in a few minutes thousands of tons of colliery waste fell on Pant-glas School and surrounding houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults. For Huw Lewis, the momentous events that day form his earliest memories. He watches ‘through the open front door from behind my mother’s skirts’ as the acrid black slurry oozes past. At first trickling along the gutter, ‘sounding playful like a stream’, then ‘swirling and lustrous black’ as it laps at his feet and surges down the street. To Hear the Skylark’s Song is Lewis’s personal account of the impact of the disaster on his close-knit mining village. It is also a moving childhood memoir that bears witness to a community’s grief, courage and – ultimately – resilience. On that day, Huw Lewis is ‘just shy of three years old’ – too young to have been at Pant-glas School. Lewis makes no claims to be an authoritative voice. Instead, gently, reflectively, he offers up his own personal ‘collection of fragments of memory’ as part of a ‘mosaic’ of individual memories. Nor does this book make any claim to being a survivor’s testimony: ‘I am not a survivor of Aberfan, nor am I one of the bereaved. I would not ever presume to speak for them.’ His family are among the ‘lucky’ ones, he tells us; he, his brother and sister and both his parents survived that day. Yet as this touching account unfolds, a picture of pain silently endured begins to emerge: ‘My sister Allyson, aged seven, leaves for school as usual that morning, but she is back again within a half hour. She tells our mother that her best friend is dead. This is all she says, or will ever say, about that day.’His sister’s refusal to talk about her loss is one of myriad ways the community tries to ‘cope’ with the trauma – ways which range from rage to religion, from angry activism to agoraphobia; each one as individual as the people themselves. His father, rushing off to help, armed with only his garden spade and fishing boots, as ill-equipped practically as he is psychologically to deal with the unimaginable scenes he is about to witness. By contemporary standards, it is astonishing to learn that all this was endured without any form of counselling or psychological support. The community is also left to endure, without any protection, those unscrupulous elements of the media who circle the village, hunting for tragic ‘human interest’ stories. On her way home from school, Lewis’s sister is cornered by a photographer who coaxes her to ‘look sad’ for the camera. Perhaps most shocking of all is the joint betrayal by the Labour government of the time and the (government-owned) National Coal Board, who together refused to pay for the remaining tips to be cleared. Later, following high-profile community protest, the NCB eventually agreed to pay, but only on the condition that £150,000 of the total £350,000 cost of clearance is taken from the Aberfan Disaster Relief Fund. Despite this, the adult Lewis represents the constituency of Merthyr and Rhymney – including Aberfan – as a Labour member of the Welsh Assembly Government. His proudest political achievement, he tells us, is winning government compensation for the money it took from the Disaster Fund. Although he grew up in the shadow of the disaster, Lewis describes a childhood that refuses to be defined by it. With a child’s eye, he fondly recalls the pleasurable minutiae of his boyhood: playing outside with friends, knocking on friendly neighbours’ doors for orange squash and custard creams, the conspiratorial butcher supplying boys with bags of innards to scare the girls, and – most importantly – the sweetshop with its cornucopia of black jacks, sherbet fountains, fruit salads, Spanish gold and other thrilling exotica. In other, happier circumstances, this richly textured memoir would have stood in its own right as an evocative, nostalgic account of a Valleys’ childhood of its time. Lewis’s parents work hard to shield their three children from the trauma, just as the community as a whole strives to give their precious surviving children a happy, secure childhood. The fact that they appear to have generally succeeded is a remarkable testament to their strength. But children, always more perceptive than adults realise, are gifted observers. As Lewis grows older, he begins to notice how adult conversations would ‘switch to whispers’ with ‘sotto voce queries about how so-and-so was “coping”’ – a word he hears repeated over and over. No amount of toys and treats, Christmas parties and outings to Barry Island can completely cover up the all-pervasive grief: ‘To grow up in Aberfan at that time was to grow up with a shadow cast over all, mostly unacknowledged, but its presence felt through hushed adult conversation, overheard and partly understood […] through the gradual realisation that kindly adults you knew […] had suffered things far beyond anything your childish experience could prepare you to understand.’The eponymous skylark’s song – which Lewis hears as he lies with his father on a hill above the village – becomes a symbol, not just of the strength of community and its power to heal, but of spiritual regeneration. For Lewis it represents the power of the individual and the community as a whole to ascend, like the skylark, and find consolation through a unity with something greater – nature, God or simply a ‘spirit.’ Less than two decades later, as the Thatcher government closed down coalmines all over Britain, Aberfan endured another major blow in the loss of its mining industry. Today, the village still looks to the future with uncertainty. Lewis, sounding a note of optimism, declares that, ‘Aberfan, and its people, remain.’ If ever a community deserves to survive, then surely it has to be this one.
