Aberfan

Browser lacks capabilities required to play.

Upgrade or switch to another browser.

Loading…

<<set $passages to ["A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z","A1","A2","A3","A4","A5","B1"]>>\ <<set $uniqueCount to $passages.length>>\ <<set $passages to $passages.concat(["K","L","M","N","Q","T","U"]).shuffle()>>\ <<set $_minGap to 5>>\ <<set $_repeats to ["K","L","M","N","Q","T","U"]>>\ <<for $_r to 0; $_r lt $_repeats.length; $_r++>>\ <<set $_rp to $_repeats[$_r]>>\ <<set $_pos1 to $passages.indexOf($_rp)>>\ <<set $_pos2 to $passages.lastIndexOf($_rp)>>\ <<if Math.abs($_pos2 - $_pos1) lt $_minGap>>\ <<set $_singletons to ["A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","O","P","R","S","V","W","X","Y","Z","A1","A2","A3","A4","A5","B1"]>>\ <<set $_swapped to false>>\ <<for $_s to 0; $_s lt $passages.length and not $_swapped; $_s++>>\ <<if $_singletons.includes($passages[$_s]) and Math.abs($_s - $_pos1) gte $_minGap>>\ <<set $_tmp to $passages[$_pos2]>>\ <<set $passages[$_pos2] to $passages[$_s]>>\ <<set $passages[$_s] to $_tmp>>\ <<set $_swapped to true>>\ <</if>>\ <</for>>\ <</if>>\ <</for>>\ <<set $index to 0>>\ <<set $Witnessed to []>>\ \ <div class="passage-title">Aberfan</div> <div class="passage-subtitle">21 October 1966</div> \ <div class="present-layer">\ The morning rose heavy with mist. That is what they will write, after. The journalists, the tribunals, the people who come to explain it. You cannot explain it. It has lived inside you, since that Friday, since the sound you heard that you cannot name, though you have been trying to name it ever since. ---- It is November now. The tips are still on the hill. Tip number 5 smoulders. Only the top of Tip no 7 remains. </div> [[Visit Aberfan|Next Scene]]

<<set $_aSeries to ["A1","A2","A3","A4","A5"]>>\ <<set $_lastSeen to ($Witnessed.length gt 0) ? $Witnessed[$Witnessed.length - 1] : "">>\ <<set $_uniqueSeen to $Witnessed.toUnique().length>>\ <<if $index gte $passages.length>>\ <<goto "B2">>\ <</if>>\ <<if $_aSeries.includes($passages[$index]) and ($_aSeries.includes($_lastSeen) or $_uniqueSeen lt 10)>>\ <<set $_safeIndex to $index>>\ <<set $_swapDone to false>>\ <<for $_i to 1; $_i lt $passages.length and not $_swapDone; $_i++>>\ <<set $_candidate to $passages[($_safeIndex + $_i) % $passages.length]>>\ <<if not $_aSeries.includes($_candidate) and not $Witnessed.includes($_candidate)>>\ <<set $_swap to $passages[$index]>>\ <<set $passages[$index] to $_candidate>>\ <<set $passages[($_safeIndex + $_i) % $passages.length] to $_swap>>\ <<set $_swapDone to true>>\ <</if>>\ <</for>>\ <</if>>\ <<if $passages[$index] is undefined>>\ <<goto "B2">>\ <<else>>\ <<goto $passages[$index]>>\ <</if>>

<div class="passage-title">The street</div> <div class="present-layer"> She goes out because the house will not let her stay. Three weeks now She has learned this: the house holds the shape of him. The dent in the chair cushion. The book left face down on the arm of the sofa … she cannot move it, cannot close it, though she does not know the page. The boots by the back door that will not be worn again, that she polishes on Saturdays because she does not know what else to do on a Saturday morning. The street is easier. The street has been walked before and will be walked again because it doesn't belong to him the way the house does. She pulls her coat and walks out into November, the valley grey above the rooftops, the tip still visible from the corner if she does not look away in time. She looks away in time. Mrs Williams nods from her step. They have run out of things to say to each other. They nod. It is enough. It is more than enough. It is a whole language now, this village, built of nods and silences and the precise geography of which streets you can walk and which you cannot. <div class="memory-intrusion"> <span class="shoe-drop">A child's shoe in the gutter.</span> Black. Small. The buckle still done up. It comes with her anyway. </div> The school road. She cannot walk the school road. She turns left. </div> <<run shimmerIntrusion(1200)>> <<if $Witnessed.includes("K")>> [[The smell of coal dust finds her here.|H]] <<else>> [[Something catches at the corner of her eye.|H]] <</if>> <figure class="image-figure"> <img class="passage-image" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Moy_Road_opposite_the_Aberfan_Memorial_-_geograph.org.uk_-_7821207.jpg" alt="Aberfan Road terraced houses"> <figcaption class="image-caption">Moy Road opposite the Aberfan Memorial by DS Pugh, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons</figcaption> </figure> <<set $Witnessed.push("A")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">The tip</div>\ <div class="present-layer">\ They have not moved it. She stands at the top of Moy Road and looks up at the hill. There is a wound in the hillside where Tip Seven was. Not a gap...a wound...still weeping. The top still stands, half of what it was, and below it the hollow where the mass tore itself free. The scar, the place where the men on the tipping gang stood at twenty past seven in the morning and watched the depression in the tip start to rise. Slowly at first. Then at faster and faster still until it became a wave. The track the slurry made down the hill is still visible. A dark seam through the November grass, five hundred metres from the scar to Aberfan Road. From here she can see the whole length of it. She has never stood here before and looked at the whole of it. She does not know why she has come today. They came and put sandbags at the top to divert the spring. Engineers with clipboards. The National Coal Board sent a man to explain about water tables and drainage and measures that were being taken. She had stood at the back of the meeting and not said a word. Around her the men said angry, necessary words that needed saying. She did not trust what would come out if she opened her mouth. The tip is still there. Half of it. The wound of it. And above the wound, higher up the mountain... conical, patient, intact. Tip Four and Tip Five. The NCB says they are safe. She has heard that an expert told the inquiry that the smouldering Tip Five stands at a 'very low factor of safety'. Tip Five is still has been burning for years. Some mornings from the village you can see a thin seam of smoke at the top of the hill. The village has always known this. No one has ever explained it to them. Three tips above the village. One tore itself open. Two still stand. She looks at the wound in the hill for a long time. Then she turns and walks back down. </div> <figure class="image-figure"> <img class="passage-image" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Aberfan_and_old_coal_tips_-_geograph.org.uk_-_673825.jpg" alt="Aberfan and old coal tips on the hillside"> <figcaption class="image-caption">Aberfan and the coal tips … Tudor Williams, (CC BY-SA 2.0)</figcaption> </figure> <<set $Witnessed.push("B")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">The school site</div> <div class="present-layer">\ They have cleared it now. This is what cleared looks like: a rectangle of mud. Squared at the edges where the walls were. The ghost of a corridor in the way the ground compresses differently there, where a hundred children walked every morning and hung up their coats and answered their names. At the far end, where the junior classrooms were, the mud is still darker. It came through the walls. It filled the rooms in seconds. The children who survived said they remembered the dark … not the noise, the dark, sudden and total, the lights gone, the windows gone, the walls folding in. Then the weight of it. A hundred and seven thousand cubic metres pressing itself into a classroom. November weeds at the margins. A railing to keep people back, though there is nothing to keep them back from. There is nothing here. That is the thing about cleared. Cleared means nothing is here. And nothing being here is its own kind of unbearable. She stands at the railing. A man she does not know is also standing there. His cap in his hands, wringing it like a dish cloth. He does not look at her. She does not look at him. They stand there together for a long time, not looking at each other. Then he puts his cap back on. Nods once … the nod that is the whole language of this village now … and walks away. She stays. There were voices under the rubble until eleven in the morning. After eleven o'clock there was silence. The mud is dark. Almost black. Almost the colour of what came down the hill. </div> <div class="memory-intrusion"> <span class="shoe-drop">A child's shoe in the gutter.</span> <p>Black. Small. The buckle still done up.</p> </div> <<run shimmerIntrusion(1200)>> <<set $Witnessed.push("C")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">The inquest</div> <div class="present-layer"> The death certificates are being issued at the fish and chip shop. She heard it. That can't be true. Someone saw disbelief on her face and told her again. There was a note on the chapel door, redirecting them. The fish and chip shop on the corner. She imagines the smell of vinegar. She imagines the man behind the counter, the certificates in a folder on the shelf between the salt and the newspaper for wrapping. She had not collected it yet. Hers. She knows she will have to. At the inquest on the twenty-fourth, a man who had lost his wife and two sons … two sons … had called out when the names were read. She was in the room when he called out. She will not repeat what he called out because it was true and because true things said out loud in rooms can shatter something in you that does not mend. The inquiry is coming. Lord Justice Davies, they say. It will take months. There will be findings. There will be language … measured, judicial, careful language … placed over the top of the twenty-first of October the way you place a cloth over something you cannot look at. She knows what she knows. She knows it was the last day before half-term. She knows that the headmistress had told the children they would sing again before they went home, to wish them a good holiday. She knows what song it was. She hears it 'All things bright and beautiful'. Children's voices. </div> <div class="newspaper-fan"> <div class="newspaper-block"> <div class="paper-name">Western Mail … 22 October 1966</div> <div class="headline-xl">83 killed, 60 still lost</div> <div class="headline-sm">Tip disaster engulfs Pantglas school</div> <div class="dateline">Aberfan, Merthyr Tydfil</div> </div> <div class="newspaper-block"> <div class="paper-name">The Times … 22 October 1966</div> <div class="headline-xl">200 feared dead after slag buries school</div> <div class="dateline">South Wales</div> </div> <div class="newspaper-block"> <div class="paper-name">South Wales Echo … 24 October 1966</div> <div class="headline-lg">Toll now 143; 49 are still sought</div> <div class="headline-sm">Mayor stops tip safety questions</div> </div> </div> <div class="newspaper-fan-spacer"></div> <<set $Witnessed.push("D")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">The cameras</div>\ \ <div class="present-layer">\ The Sunday papers had called it The Sorrow and the Anger. Then the next Sunday it was The Anger and the Agony. Then the Sunday after that the question: Why Were the Warnings Ignored? She had read them all. She keeps reading them, though she cannot explain why, there is nothing in them she does not already know better than any journalist from London. She reads them because the village is being turned into language and she needs to see what language it is becoming. The television people were here for a week. She had turned away from a camera once and a young man with a notepad had called after her, gentle enough, saying he understood, saying it must be very hard. She had kept walking. It was not his fault. He was twenty-three, perhaps. He had been sent here to witness, which is a thing the village did not ask for and cannot refuse. The world wanted to watch. She does not blame the world for watching. She watched too, on the small screen in her sister's front room in Cardiff, the week after, the footage she had already lived inside from the other direction. She watched herself not knowing she was being watched. The man from the National Coal Board had said it was an Act of God. The papers did not let that stand. </div> <<if $Witnessed.includes("N")>> [[She passes the chapel. The door is closed.|J]] <<else>> [[Something in the gutter outside the newsagent stops her.|J]] <</if>> <div class="newspaper-fan"> <div class="newspaper-block"> <div class="paper-name">The People … Sunday 23 October 1966</div> <div class="headline-xl">The sorrow and the anger</div> </div> <div class="newspaper-block"> <div class="paper-name">Sunday Mirror … 23 October 1966</div> <div class="headline-xl">Why were the warnings ignored?</div> </div> <div class="newspaper-block"> <div class="paper-name">Daily Express … 24 October 1966</div> <div class="headline-lg">Warnings locked away in a safe</div> </div> <div class="newspaper-block"> <div class="paper-name">The Daily Telegraph … 26 October 1966</div> <div class="headline-lg">There will be no whitewash, pledges judge</div> </div> </div> <div class="newspaper-fan-spacer"></div> <<set $Witnessed.push("E")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">The burial</div>\ \ <div class="present-layer">\ The service lasted fifteen minutes. She has measured this since, trying to find something that takes exactly fifteen minutes, trying to make it real, to hold it in her hand and understand. A walk to the top of the street and back. Boiling potatoes. The interval at the school concert, the last concert, the one in July … the last July … when the children sang in the hall and the parents sat on chairs brought from the classrooms and afterwards there were sandwiches and squash and nobody wanted to leave. Fifteen minutes for eighty-one children and one adult. There were two trenches. Eighty feet long each. She had known this but she had not understood it until she stood on the hillside and saw the scale of what two eighty-foot trenches means, cut into Welsh earth in October, what that requires of the men who dug them, what it requires of a family watching the small white coffin of their child lowered in. Ten thousand people came. She was one of them. She cannot tell you much about standing there. Her body was upright. Her eyes were open. The hymn went through her the way cold air goes through a coat. Nothing can thy power withstand. None can pluck them from thy hand. She has thought about those words since. About what it means to sing them over eighty-one children who were plucked at nine fifteen on a Friday morning in October. Who were sitting at their desks. Who were opening their maths books. Who were being children in a classroom in Aberfan, which they had every right to be, which they should have been for years more yet. The fifteen minutes ended. She had not known, before the twenty-seventh of October 1966, that white arches were a thing. That there was a grammar for this kind of grief. A visual language designed for rows of children's graves. A thing that someone had thought of and made and she has had to learn to see. She knows it now. </div> <figure class="image-figure"> <img class="passage-image" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Aberfan_Cemetery_3377910_20634800_geograph.jpg" alt="White arched graves at Aberfan cemetery, Bryntaf"> <figcaption class="image-caption">Stephen McKay / Aberfan Cemetery(CC BY-SA 2.0)</figcaption> </figure> <<set $Witnessed.push("F")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">The street again</div>\ <div class="present-layer"> She comes back along Moy Road in the early afternoon and the street is the same street. The street doesn't change. The terraced houses are the same, the front steps the same, the lamp post on the corner with the paint coming off at the bottom is the same. The valley is the same valley. The river the same river. The hill the same hill. Only everything is different. She cannot resolve it into language yet. Things that are the same and different. Same stones, different air. Same doors, different weight when you push them open and walk inside. Same neighbours, same nods, same language of not-speaking, but every one of them carrying the same thing she is carrying, the specific gravity of it, this village with its new knowledge. One hundred and sixteen children. \ \ <div class="memory-intrusion">\ <span class="shoe-drop">A child's shoe in the gutter.</span> <p>Black. Small. The buckle still done up.</p> </div>\ <<run shimmerIntrusion(1200)>>\ She has learned she can say the number. She has made herself learn this. One hundred and sixteen. Twenty-eight adults. Some days she says it out loud, alone in the kitchen, over the washing up. Not as rehearsal. Just to keep it real, to not let it go abstract, to not let it become a number in a newspaper on a shelf in a stranger's house somewhere outside Wales. She stops at her front door. The boots are still by the back door. She has not moved them. She goes inside. </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("G")>>\ <<set $index to $index + 1>>\ <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="threshold-layer">\ The smell is ordinary. It has always been here. Coal dust and the dark damp of the valley, The smell that means home means Wales means this place means... Calon Lân sung from the chapel. <hr class="section-break"> You are seven years old and it is morning. </div> <<set $Witnessed to $Witnessed.concat(["K"])>> <<set $Witnessed.push("H")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="threshold-layer">\ Thin. Distant. Carried on the valley air. All things bright and beautiful … <hr class="section-break"> You are standing in the assembly hall. </div> <<set $Witnessed to $Witnessed.concat(["L"])>> <<set $Witnessed.push("I")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">The river</div>\ \ <div class="present-layer">\ She walks down to the Taff. She does not usually walk this far but today the street is wrong and the houses are wrong and she needs to be somewhere that is not a street and not a house. The river is still the river. It was here before the colliery. It will be here after. She stands on the bank and watches the water move. The River Taff runs brown after rain. It has always run brown. When she was a child she thought this was the colour rivers were. She was grown before she understood it was the coal, the run-off from the tips, the water carrying the mountain down with it a little at a time. Everything in this valley carries the mountain down with it, one way or another. She stands there for a while. The water moves. She turns and walks home. Passes the Chapel's closed door, imagines she can hear Cwm Rhondda. Guide us oh thou Great Redeemer. </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("J")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<<if $Witnessed.filter(w => w === "K").length gt 1>> <div class="faded-memory"> You are still lining them up. You will always be lining them up. That is where you live now … at the door to the yard with your register, the children filing past you one by one in the cold October morning. Gareth. Susan. Robert. Lynda. Thomas. You know the whole roll. You say it in the night sometimes. Not as grief, exactly … or not only. As keeping. As the one thing left that you can do. You can say their names. You can keep doing that. </div> <<else>> <div class="memory-layer"> You are lining them up. Friday morning. Last day before half-term. You stand at the door to the yard with your register and call them in by name and they come in by name … each one … and file past you into the corridor, cold from the walk across the yard, smelling of breakfasts and outside and October. You know their names the way you know your own name. Better. You have been saying their names longer this morning than you have been saying your own. Gareth Evans. Susan Price. Robert Meredith. Lynda Davies. Thomas Howell. Janet Williams. David Hughes. Margaret Jones. You go back inside. The headmistress has said they will sing before they go home this afternoon. Something to look forward to over half-term. She said it smiling. The children liked this … singing at the end instead of the beginning, a treat, the weekend ahead of them, their mothers waiting. The maths lesson begins. Gareth Evans goes to the board. You write 47 × 13 because it is the kind of sum that looks harder than it is and you like the moment when they see that it isn't. It is nine thirteen in the morning. It will always be nine thirteen in the morning. </div> <</if>> <<set $Witnessed to $Witnessed.concat(["K"])>> <<set $Witnessed.push("K")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<<if $Witnessed.filter(w => w === "L").length gt 1>>\ <div class="faded-memory">\ You have been back to the sound many times. Like thunder, like a train, like a wave, like nothing on earth. You tried each word. None of them are right. It is its own thing. It does not have a name in any language you know. You know what came after. You do not go back into what came after. You have been in it enough. </div> <<else>> <div class="memory-layer"> A low sound, a long way off. You were at your desk. Gareth Evans was at the board, chalk in hand, working the sum. Nine thirteen. Nine fourteen. The sound came from above. Not from the sky … from the hill. Like thunder but from the wrong direction. It lasted perhaps three seconds. Then it was longer than three seconds. Then it was growing. You remember looking at the window. The hillside visible above the rooftops. The ordinary hillside on an ordinary Friday, the glass between you and the world. Then the glass was not there. Then the wall was not there. Then there was no light. No sound that was separate from the sound. No up or down. The cold of it … you had not expected the cold. A hundred and seven thousand cubic metres of slurry and it was cold, the cold of the mountain, of underground water that had been sitting inside the tip for years building pressure, had nowhere left to go. It chose here. Your classroom. Nine fifteen in the morning. You came back to yourself in the corridor. The corridor was full of black. Beneath the settling weight, beneath the groan of what remained of the roof, you could hear a child's voice. One child, somewhere inside it, calling out. You moved toward the voice. </div> <</if>> <<set $Witnessed to $Witnessed.concat(["L"])>> <<set $Witnessed.push("L")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<<if $Witnessed.filter(w => w === "M").length gt 1>>\ <div class="faded-memory">\ You stood in the queue. You are still standing in the queue. That is the truth of it. You have never left it. After eleven o'clock there were no more living children to reach the front for. You have always known this. You are still waiting anyway. </div> <<else>> <div class="memory-layer"> You are in the queue outside the school. It is raining, lightly. No one speaks about the rain. The queue is parents. All of them. You know some, know others only to nod to, do not know some at all … people from the edges of the village, the houses up the hill. A woman in her apron. A man in his pit clothes, boots caked, who must have come straight up from the cage when he heard. Another man whose face you cannot read, whose stillness is a kind of terrible discipline. You are all waiting for the same thing. You understand what waiting means here: they have found a child alive, here is the child, here is your child. Every person in this queue is waiting for that sentence and it is the same sentence for every one of them. The miners from Merthyr Vale came straight from underground. You saw them running up the street, their hands black. They did not queue. They went in. They knew how to dig in confined spaces under unstable material. Later you will think about what it cost them to go in. What they found in there. What they carried out. There were voices inside until eleven o'clock. At nine there were many voices. At ten there were fewer. At eleven the last voice stopped. After that the queue was a different kind of queue. The waiting was a different kind of waiting. The sentence you were all waiting for had been said to some and not said to the rest, and the rest of you went on standing there because there was nowhere else to be, because the queue was the last place your child had been alive in the world, because leaving the queue meant something you were not ready to mean. It is still raining, lightly. No one speaks about the rain. </div> <</if>> <<set $Witnessed to $Witnessed.concat(["M"])>> <<set $Witnessed.push("M")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<<if $Witnessed.filter(w => w === "N").length gt 1>>\ <div class="faded-memory">\ You have been in the chapel. The children were laid in rows. The tidiness of it. Someone spent the night making them tidy. You have thought about those hands … the hands that worked through the night in the chapel to bring each child as close as possible to peace. You do not know whose hands they were. You think about them anyway. You named yours. You went home. </div> <<else>> <div class="memory-layer"> They had taken the children to Capel Aberfan. You had been inside it for christenings, for weddings, for the ordinary funerals of old people. You knew the smell: old wood, stone, the particular cold that Welsh chapels hold that does not leave even in summer. The way sound moves in there. The quality of silence after singing. They were laid in rows. This is what you remember: the rows. The smallness of them. The care that had been taken … someone spent the night, many people spent the night, each child attended to, each one composed as carefully as could be composed. The children had been in the slurry for hours. Some longer. The hands that cleaned them and dressed them and arranged them in rows in the chapel had worked from the afternoon of the twenty-first into the small hours of the twenty-second of October 1966. No one will ever fully account for that night's work. No one will ever know all of what those hands did. You walked along the rows. Third row. There. You said the name. Quietly … the way you said it on school mornings, gently, at the edge of sleep, so as not to frighten them into the day. That specific tenderness. The one kept for mornings. You said it to a child who had no more mornings. You stood there for as long as you stood there. Outside on the chapel door someone had pinned a note: death certificates to be issued at the fish and chip shop on the corner. You read the note. You stood in front of it reading it. Then you walked home. </div> <</if>> <<set $Witnessed to $Witnessed.concat(["N"])>> <<set $Witnessed.push("N")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">Aberfan</div> <div class="present-layer"> <<set $memoriesSeen to $Witnessed.filter((v, i, a) => a.indexOf(v) === i).length>> She makes a cup of tea. This is what you do. This is the thing there is to do. Kettle, cup, the familiar moves of it, the steam, the smell of the tea, her mother's pot with the chip in the spout that she will never replace now. She sits at the kitchen table. The valley is quiet in the afternoons. The shift has not turned yet. The birds sing, it's the ordinary life of the hillside continuing. She drinks her tea. Outside, the boots are still by the back door. She polished them on Saturday. She will polish them again next Saturday. She does not know yet that she will polish them every Saturday for the next three years, and then not polish them, and that not polishing them will be a different kind of grief, smaller, more bearable and somehow worse. She does not know any of the nexts yet. She is not sure that there will be nexts. She is here, in November, in the kitchen, with her tea. The valley holds. The hill holds. The village holds, in the way that things that have been broken can hold … not despite the fracture but because of it, the way a mended bone is hardest at the break. One hundred and sixteen children. Twenty-eight adults. The names are known. She finishes her tea. </div> <hr class="section-break"> <div class="witness-count"> <<if $memoriesSeen lte 1>> There is more here, if you go back. <<elseif $memoriesSeen eq 2>> You have carried two memories. There are others in the village. <<elseif $memoriesSeen eq 3>> You have carried three memories. One more waits. <<else>> You have carried all of it. You may carry it again. It will be different. <</if>> </div> <hr class="section-break"> [[Begin again|Start]]

<div class="passage-title">The man from the Board</div>\ <div class="present-layer">\ He came in November. A man from the National Coal Board. A suit. A briefcase. He sat at the table in the community hall and explained what had happened in the language of water tables and geological formations and the particular behaviour of tailings under conditions of saturation. She sat in the third row and listened. He used the word unprecedented. He used the phrase natural phenomenon. He said that no one could have foreseen. He said this carefully and without meeting anyone's eyes and when a man in the second row said that the council had written to the Board in 1963 … the year before her child started school, the year her child was learning to read, the year someone at the Board had received a letter headed Danger from coal slurry at the rear of Pantglas School and filed it … the man from the Board said that that was a matter for the tribunal. Everything was a matter for the tribunal. Lord Justice Davies. Seventy-six days of evidence. A report. Language placed over the top of the twenty-first of October 1966 like a cloth over something you cannot look at directly. She knows what they will find. The village knows what they will find. The finding is not the difficulty. The difficulty is that the finding will not bring them back. The difficulty is that the men responsible for the letter in the drawer are still employed by the National Coal Board, still drawing their salaries, still making decisions about tips on hillsides above other villages with other schools in them. She walked home. She polished the boots by the back door. This is what she does on Saturdays. </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("O")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">The children who are left</div>\ <div class="present-layer">\ There are children still in this village. She knows this. The ones who were sick that Friday, who had already passed the school when the slurry came, who were in the secondary school, who were dug out in the first half hour. She knows them by sight. She has always known them by sight. She cannot look at them. This is the thing none of the parents who lost children can say to each other but all of them know: the sight of a living child in this village is its own kind of pain. Not the children's fault. Nothing the children have done. Just the fact of them … the fact that they are here and moving through the streets and growing, and hers is not. The surviving children have stopped playing outside. She has heard this from three different people. They stopped because the parents who lost children cannot bear to see them, and the children know this without being told, and so they have taken themselves indoors, made themselves quiet, made themselves as close to invisible as a living child can make itself. A whole generation learning to move softly through a village that is grieving for another generation. She passes the secondary school playground. Mid-afternoon, a school day, and it is empty. Not a single child. She walks on quickly. She does not look back. </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("P")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<<if $Witnessed.filter(w => w === "Q").length gt 1>>\ <div class="faded-memory">\ You were at the sink. Your hands in the water. The radio. A Friday morning in October. You heard it. You stood there with your hands in the water and you did not know what you had heard and then Mrs Davies knocked on the door and you looked at her face and you knew. </div> <<else>> <div class="memory-layer"> You were at the sink. The breakfast things. Your hands in the water, the radio on the windowsill. A Friday in October. Half-term starting at the weekend. You had been thinking about whether to take the bus to Merthyr. Ordinary thinking. The thinking of a woman washing up after breakfast while her child is at school. You heard it. From the kitchen, through the window, from the direction of the hill … a sound with no name. You stood there with your hands still in the water. The radio was still talking. The sound outside had stopped and the radio was still talking and you stood there and did not move. You silenced the radio mid-verse..<i>.'Reach out, I'll be there.'</i>. Then Mrs Davies was at the door. Her housecoat still on. She had come straight across the street. You looked at her face. You already knew. Before she said a word you already knew. You knew from the sound. You knew from the direction the sound had come from. You knew from the way the morning had gone absolutely still around you and your hands were in the washing-up water and the water was going cold. You took your hands out. You did not dry them. You went to find your coat. </div> <</if>> <<set $Witnessed to $Witnessed.concat(["Q"])>> <<set $Witnessed.push("Q")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="threshold-layer">\ A clock. Found in the slurry on Moy Road. The hands stopped at 9:13. <hr class="section-break"> Every clock in the path of what came down the hill stopped at the same moment. The clocks in the school. The clocks in the eighteen houses. The watches on the wrists of the twenty-eight adults. 9:13 on the morning of Friday 21 October 1966. <hr class="section-break"> The clock was later placed in a museum. A small round clock with a white face and black hands and a crack across the glass. People stand in front of it. They look at the hands. Time stands still. </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("R")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<div class="passage-title">That night</div>\ <div class="present-layer">\ She doesn't remember all of that night. She remembers: The light did not go dark the way it usually goes dark. The afternoon was already over before it finished, the way October is in the valley, the light failing early between the hills. And then the night came and it was the same darkness but heavier. As though the darkness had weight now that it had not had that morning. The colliery hooter had sounded at twenty past nine. She had heard it from the queue. She had never heard it sound for a disaster before. It had always meant shift change, the ordinary rhythm of the working day. Now she knew what it meant when it sounded at that time on a Friday morning. She would always know now. The village had been full of people all day. Rescue workers, volunteers, journalists with cameras, army, men she had never seen and would never see again. All of them moving through the streets of Aberfan with purpose. The village did not belong to itself that day. That night, they left. The village went quiet. Not the ordinary quiet … not the quiet of a place where people are indoors and asleep. A different quiet. The quiet of a place that has been broken and does not know yet what it is now, what shape the days will take. She sat in the kitchen. The boots were by the back door. She had not polished them yet. She would polish them on Saturday. She did not know, that night, that she would polish them every Saturday for years. That they would become the shape of a Saturday morning. That the boots would become the way she keeps time. She sat in the kitchen for a long time. Outside, the hill was dark. The tips were on the hill. </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("S")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<<if $Witnessed.filter(w => w === "T").length gt 1>>\ <div class="faded-memory">\ The miners came straight from underground. Their hands were already black. They went in without waiting. They knew how to work in confined spaces under unstable material. Someone said afterward: the hardest thing was not the digging. The hardest thing was when a man found his own child. You have always thought about that. </div> <<else>> <div class="memory-layer"> The miners came up from the pit and they ran. You saw them from the queue. Pit clothes, the black that does not fully wash off, that becomes part of the skin after years underground. They ran up the street. They did not wait for instructions or look for who was in charge. They went in. They knew something the rescue workers from outside the valley did not know: how to read unstable material, how to move through confined space, how to dig in the dark without bringing more down on top of what was buried. They had spent their lives learning this in the seams below Aberfan. Now they used it above ground, in the ruins of Pantglas, in the classrooms full of slurry. The last child brought out alive was Jeff Edwards. Eight years old. A fireman had seen a tuft of blond hair in the rubble. Used a hatchet to free him from beneath his desk. Passed him along a chain of hands. Eleven o'clock. After that, the digging continued. It continued for a week. A hundred and seven thousand cubic metres had come down the hill. The slurry was dense and consistent and went deep. There were still a hundred and forty-four people inside it who needed to be brought out and carried to the chapel and returned to their families. The last body was recovered on 28 October. The miners' hands were black the whole time. </div> <</if>> <<set $Witnessed to $Witnessed.concat(["T"])>> <<set $Witnessed.push("T")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

<<if $Witnessed.filter(w => w === "U").length gt 1>>\ <div class="faded-memory">\ The milk round. He doesn't whistle. He tries to be quiet, not clink the bottles. The Williams house don't have the extra pint anymore. <<else>> The milk round The bottles knock softly against each other in the crate as he lifts it from the float. Glass on glass. A sound he does not hear anymore, not really, except when one breaks and then it is different, sharp, wrong. He knows this street without looking. Number by number. Two pints here, one there. The Williams house has started taking an extra on Fridays. He does not know why. He does not ask. The air is damp in the way it has been all week. Not rain, not quite, but the kind that settles into things. Into coats. Into the wood of the doorframes. Into the ground. He sets the bottles down on the step. He straightens up and listens, not because there is anything to listen for, but because this is the pause between houses, the moment where the morning holds itself still. Then he lifts the crate again and walks on. <</if>> <<set $Witnessed.push("U")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

The post The letters are already sorted when he sets out. He does not need to check them again but he does, out of habit more than necessity. Names he knows. Hands he recognises in the writing. The different weights of envelopes. Bills. Circulars. One with a foreign stamp, blue and red at the edge, that will be turned over in someone’s hands before it is opened. <<if $Witnessed.includesAny(["N"])>> Some of these will not be opened. Not by the people they are addressed to. The names on the envelopes … he knows so many of these names … and there will be a morning, not this morning but soon, when he will sort the same street and know which doors not to knock. He does not know this yet. <</if>> The bag sits heavy against his hip. He walks Moy Road the way he walks it every morning. Same pace. Same rhythm. The same doors opening and closing ahead of him, people going about what they have to do before the day begins properly. A woman nods to him from a step. He nods back. There is a smell in the air he cannot place. Not smoke. Not exactly. <<if $Witnessed.includesAny(["L"])>> He will know, later, what that smell was. The underground water inside Tip Seven, the particular cold of it, the way it moved when it finally moved. He has no word for it now. He will have no word for it then either. It will just be the smell that was there before. <</if>> He thinks it is the weather. He goes on. <<set $Witnessed.push("V")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

On the way to school He is late but he always is. The strap of his satchel has twisted and he stops to fix it, pulling it straight where it has folded in on itself. The buckle on his shoe is still done up from yesterday. He has not undone it. It saves time in the morning but he has to scoot the first few steps and Mam will scold that the back's broken down. There are others ahead of him on the road. He can see them between the houses, turning the corner towards the school. Someone has dropped something in the gutter. He doesn't look at it properly. <<if $Witnessed.includesAny(["A", "C", "G"])>> It's a dark shape in the wet. Small. He looks away.<<else>> It's a dark shape in the wet.<</if>> <<if $Witnessed.includesAny(["L"])>> He runs the last few steps to catch up. The bell has not gone yet. He will make it. He is running towards the school and the bell has not gone yet and he will make it and he does not know, he cannot know, he is ten years old on a Friday morning and he is running and he does not know. <<else>> He runs the last few steps to catch up. The bell has not gone yet. <</if>> <<set $Witnessed.push("Y")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

In the kitchen The water has gone lukewarm. She notices this only when she puts her hands back into the bowl and finds it has changed. Not cold yet, but no longer what it was. The plates stacked beside her, the last of the breakfast things. She has been standing here longer than she meant to. The window is open a fraction. Enough to let the air in. Enough to hear the street without seeing it. A door closing somewhere. A voice calling a name she cannot quite make out. <<if $Witnessed.includesAny(["K"])>> She almost catches it … the name … the way you almost catch a name being called across a yard, the syllables familiar but not resolved. She does not lean to hear better. There is no reason to lean. <</if>> She dries one plate and sets it in the rack. There is a moment where everything holds still. The water, the air, the sound outside. <<if $Witnessed.includesAny(["L"])>> This is the moment. This still water, this open window, this ordinary Friday. She is inside it. Cold. Everyone is. <</if>> She lifts her hands out of the bowl. She does not dry them. <<set $Witnessed.push("W")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

The yard He had noticed the ground before. Noticed it the way you notice yet to be named. The softness underfoot where it should have held. The way water stood where it had not stood before. He had said something, once, not even a complaint, just a remark passed between one thing and another. It has been wet all week. They stand now where they always stand, looking up at the tip because it is there to be looked at, because it has always been there. There is a sound he cannot place. He thinks, for a second, that it is coming from somewhere else. <<set $Witnessed.push("Z")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

The classroom The register is open on the desk. Names already called, ticks in the margin. A few still to come in, breathless, slipping into their seats with that half-apology that is not quite an apology. She turns a page. “Take out your maths books.” Chairs scrape. The sound is ordinary, the same as every day, a room settling into itself. A pencil drops somewhere and is retrieved. <<if $Witnessed.includesAny(["K"])>> She writes the date on the board. Gareth Evans goes to stand beside her, chalk in his hand, waiting for the sum. <<else>> She writes the date on the board. <</if>> There is a noise then. Not loud. Not at first. Something felt more than heard, a shift in the air, the way a room changes when a door opens somewhere else in the building. <<if $Witnessed.includesAny(["L"])>> You know what this noise is. You know what comes in the next three seconds, and the second three seconds, and what will come after the seconds stop being countable. She does not know. She is still in the last moment of not knowing, chalk in her hand, the date on the board, the children’s faces turning. <</if>> She pauses, chalk in her hand. <<set $Witnessed.push("X")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

The hearing room is cold. On one side, the polished mahogany of the National Coal Board. On the other, the heavy wool coats of the bereaved. <div class="duel-container"> <div class="ncb-side"> <h3>The Board's DEFENCE</h3> <div class="ncb-quote"> "The event was a 'natural phenomenon'…a combination of geological factors and water springs that no engineer could have predicted. It was, in legal terms, an Act of God." </div> </div> <div class="people-side"> <h3>The Village Witness</h3> <div class="people-quote"> "God didn’t put the tip there; you did. Those springs weren't 'unknown'…they were on the maps in 1890. We told you the mountain was moving in '63, and you told us the mine would close if we kept talking." </div> </div> </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("A1")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

The Chairman of the Board leans into the microphone. He speaks of administrative layers and technical blind spots. <div class="duel-container"> <div class="ncb-side"> <h3>The Board's DEFENCE</h3> <div class="ncb-quote"> "Our officials were like 'moles being asked about the habits of birds.' They were administrative staff, not experts in soil mechanics. They cannot be held responsible for lacking specialized knowledge." </div> </div> <div class="people-side"> <h3>The Village Witness</h3> <div class="people-quote"> "You aren't moles; you’re men who ignored the mail. The warnings weren't 'lost'…they were filed. You sat in London while the slurry turned to soup above our classrooms. You didn't lack knowledge; you lacked the courage to look up." </div> </div> </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("A2")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

The legal team suggests that the 76-day inquiry is the only way to establish truth. The village knows a different clock. <div class="duel-container"> <div class="ncb-side"> <h3>The Board's DEFENCE</h3> <div class="ncb-quote"> "Liability is a matter for the Tribunal. Any admission of guilt at this stage is premature. We must wait for the measured, judicial process to conclude." </div> </div> <div class="people-side"> <h3>The Village Witness</h3> <div class="people-quote"> "The Tribunal takes seventy-six days. The funeral took one. While you argue over 'geological formations,' we are polishing the shoes of children who will never wear them again. Your silence isn't 'judicial'…it's a second burial." </div> </div> </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("A3")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

Even as the inquiry ends, a new battle begins over the cost of safety. <div class="duel-container"> <div class="ncb-side"> <h3>The Board's DEFENCE</h3> <div class="ncb-quote"> "The removal of the remaining tips is a massive project. It is only logical that the Disaster Fund…given the generous public donations…contribute £150,000 toward the village's safety." </div> </div> <div class="people-side"> <h3>The Village Witness</h3> <div class="people-quote"> "You killed the children, and now you want the parents to pay for the cleanup? That money was given by the world to help us survive, not to pay the Board's bills. You are robbing the grieving to hide the evidence of your own neglect." </div> </div> </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("A4")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

In the quiet offices of the Board, a figure is calculated. In the kitchens of Aberfan, the figure is received. <div class="duel-container"> <div class="ncb-side"> <h3>The Board's Offer</h3> <div class="ncb-quote"> "The Board acknowledges the profound loss. As a gesture of sympathy and to cover immediate expenses, we offer a standard sum of £500 per child. This is a generous amount, consistent with current bereavement payouts." </div> </div> <div class="people-side"> <h3>The Village Witness</h3> <div class="people-quote"> "Five hundred pounds? You think that is the price of a son? You spent more on the concrete for the tip than you offered for the life of the boy buried under it. Keep your 'generosity'…we want justice, not blood money." </div> </div> </div> <<set $Witnessed.push("A5")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

Aberfan disaster (1966) Aberfan disaster, 21 October 1966. Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. Aberfan Disaster Tribunal (1967) Report of the Tribunal Appointed to Inquire into the Disaster at Aberfan on October 21st, 1966. London: HMSO. National Coal Board (1966–1967) Statements and evidence relating to the Aberfan disaster. London. Sunday Mirror (1966) ‘Why were the warnings ignored?’, 23 October. Daily Express (1966) ‘Warnings locked away in a safe’, 24 October. The Daily Telegraph (1966) ‘There will be no whitewash, pledges judge’, 26 October. Survivor and witness accounts (1966) Eyewitness testimonies from Aberfan community and rescuers. [[Begin|Start]]

[[BIBLIOGRAPHY|Bibliography]]

In Pantglas Secondary Modern School , next to the Primary School, Eric Jenkins hears the noise. He knows. He rushes from his desk and will spend the next ten hours digging in the slurry, pulling living and dead from the black swamp that so reluctantly gives up its victims. He will return home, speechless, and soak in the bath for an hour. He will never speak of it. [[The ripples spread across the valleys|B2]]

The ripples spread. Eric’s son spoke of it sixty years later. He recalled that he had been at his new school, Cyfarthfa Castle Grammar, for just seven weeks. It was Friday, 21st October, and half-term began the following day. That afternoon he had PE. By lunchtime, rumours were beginning to circulate that something terrible had happened in Aberfan, only a few miles away. No one seemed to know exactly what, but the mood shifted. Then, during the lesson, it became real. One of the boys, he still remembers his name, was told that his father had been killed. For a twelve-year-old, it became real and plunged him into a long and bewildering afternoon. They were given no real information, only fragments and silences. At the end of the day, around half past three, his grandfather appeared on the school terrace. He had walked from his home in Twynyrodyn, two miles or more, simply to tell him that his own father was safe. He could have telephoned, perhaps, but that wasn’t how things were done then. He remembers the relief, remembers him standing there. <<set $Witnessed.push("B1")>> <<set $index to $index + 1>> <<if $Witnessed.toUnique().length lt $uniqueCount>>[[Continue|Next Scene]]<<else>>[[Reflect|The End]]<</if>>

This is a true story. It will take a different route every time you read it. If you are presented with the same passage more than once its content will change. The names have largely been changed with the exception of Eric Jenkins. His son provided the content of that passage and felt that his father, now deceased, would want his name mentioned. [[The day begins|Start]]