A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys

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A Day Like Today: Memoirs - John  Humphrys


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without trace for no apparent reason. An everyday event, perhaps, but this was local telly and ‘man disappears’ was news. So I was sent off to interview his wife. She was a nurse – clearly in great distress – and she greeted me warmly, sat me down with a cup of tea and talked at length about her fears for what might have happened to her beloved husband. She shed a quiet tear and my heart bled for her. Some months later he turned up. The police found him underneath the patio on which I had been sitting taking tea with the loving wife who buried him there after she had murdered him.

      On that terrible morning I had turned up as usual just after nine in the TWW newsroom, and I wandered over to the Telex machine that was always clattering away spewing out endless, useless information. One relatively small story had caught my news editor’s eye. It reported that there had been a tip slide at Aberfan in the Merthyr Valley.

      There was nothing particularly unusual in that. It often happened. The waste tips above the old collieries were notoriously unstable and shamefully neglected. They were slipping and sliding all over the valleys. Sometimes a slide would take the occasional miners’ cottage with it, but mostly they just made a mess of the road and the land beneath. This time it seemed it might be a little more serious than that.

      I knew Aberfan well from my years on the Merthyr Express. My closest friend on the paper lived there and I often stayed with him after we had drunk too much beer in his local. So I knew that there was a primary school below the tip and at that time in the morning it would have been full of children. But there was nothing in the PA report to suggest that it had been affected or that this was anything more than the usual minor slippage. Even so, nothing else of any news value was going on in South Wales that morning, so I suggested I might as well drive up the valley to take a look. It was only twenty-five miles away from Cardiff and if I thought the story was big enough to merit sending a film crew I could always phone in and ask for one.

      Just after 9.15 a group of workmen had been sent to the top of the big tip that loomed above Aberfan, grey, black and ugly. There had been some worrying signs that it was sinking more than usual. A deep depression had formed within the tip like the crater in a volcano. As the men watched, the waste rose into the depression, formed itself into a lethal tidal wave of slurry and rolled down the hillside, gathering speed and height until it was thirty feet high and destroying everything in its path. From that moment the name of Aberfan has been synonymous with tragedy beyond comprehension.

      It crushed part of the school and some tiny houses alongside like a ton of concrete dropping on a matchbox. And what that foul mixture of black waste did not flatten it filled – classrooms choked with the stuff until the building was covered and the school became a tomb. The moment the terrible news reached them, hundreds of miners had abandoned the coalface at the colliery which had created that monstrous tip and raced to the surface. And there they were when I arrived, their faces still black – save for the streaks of white from the sweat and the tears as they dug and prayed and wept. Most of them were digging for their own children.

      I watched through the hours and days that followed as the tiny coffins mounted up in the little chapel. There is nothing so poignant as the sight of a child’s coffin. By the end of it there were 116 of them. One hundred and sixteen dead children and twenty-eight adults.

      When the miners finally stopped digging they went home to weep, to mourn, to relive the nightmare. To cherish the children who were spared. And later to show their anger at the criminal stupidity and venality of the officials and politicians who had allowed it to happen.

      I was twenty-three when Aberfan happened. I have been back many times over the years and talked to the dwindling handful of bereaved parents and to the few children in the school who survived the disaster. And every time I wonder how they were able to recover from their grief and the nightmare of that terrible morning. But ‘recover’ is the wrong word. As so many have told me, you don’t get over it … you just have to live with it. What is the alternative? To that, there is no answer.

      What we owe the people of Aberfan

      Today, 20 October 2016


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