Lewis To Hear the Skylark's Song

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-912109-87-6
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

'A thoughtful and passionate memoir, moving and respectful' Tessa Hadley Huw Lewis was born in Merthyr in 1964. His father an engineer at the Hoover factory, his mother first a housewife then a nurse. He has two older sisters and a younger brother, they were all brought up in the village of Aberfan in south Wales. To Hear the Skylark's Song is a memoir about how Aberfan survived and eventually thrived after the terrible disaster of the 21st of October 1966, when Pantglas school took the full force of thousands of tons of colliery waste and a community lost a generation of children. It is a story about how people held a community together and created a space for each other to thrive. It is also a wonderfully thoughtful and insightful story of what it was like to grow up in a Valley's community in the 70s: a thriving place of people, shops, clubs, chapel concerts, coal mines, interwoven with gossip and stories and, of course, the annual bus trip to Barry Island. Aberfan found a way to carry on, and Huw vividly brings to life how the sense of community provided strength and comfort in the shadow of a lifetime-long grief. A community that continues to innovate and inspire.

Huw Lewis taught at Afon Taf High School before being elected to the Welsh Assembly. He represented the constituency of Merthyr and Rhymney and held several posts in Welsh Government.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lewis, Huw

Leseproben

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The Taff Valley narrows as the river runs down from Merthyr. By the time the river has flowed five miles, and reached the sibling villages of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale, the valley floor can be crossed in a five-minute walk, and the mountain sides rise steep on either side. The closeness of each mountain narrows the sky and restricts any direct sunlight that might reach the villages; the shadow of one mountain delaying the dawn, and the shadow of the other hastening the sunset.

Today this valley is verdant and looks unspoiled, even though in reality barely a square foot of it has not been turned over, tunnelled into or had coal waste heaped upon it. It is a man-made landscape, softened now by nature. In my childhood this landscape looked different. It smelled different. It even sounded different.

Like all the valleys in this part of the South Wales coalfield, the Taff Valley runs roughly north to south. It is capped in the north by the town of Merthyr Tydfil and terminates in the south with the village of Quakers Yard; barely more than a dozen miles from top to bottom. The lie of the land has always dictated the shape of anything that man has wanted to build here, and the villages of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale are no exception. When the Merthyr Vale Colliery was first sunk in 1869, the Victorian engineers were forced to divert the river in order to reclaim enough level ground to establish a pit head. In those days a colliery of that sort of scale might employ more than two thousand men, and there was an urgent need to provide housing for the new workforce and their families. Houses were thrown up quickly, in the cheapest and easiest way possible. This is why the two villages have the ‘linear’ shape so common in South Wales, with long terraces of houses following the contours of the ground, spooling out from the pit, and aligned roughly north to south. Those streets that connect them, running east to west, tend to be short and on a steep – sometimes very steep – gradient.

The housing was cheaply made and of poor quality. With the exception of some larger homes used by the families of managers (or perhaps the clergy) they sit, in general, on shallow foundations. Some were even built with proper brickwork or stonework featuring only at the front of the building, the rear walls being literally ‘thrown together’ by pouring a mixture of concrete and rubble between wooden boards.

These pit villages are not places like the towns of Breconshire to the north, or those of the Vale of Glamorgan to the south, settlements which evolved by slow accretion over many generations, all with their ancient place names and Norman churches, their local squirearchies and a mention in the Domesday Book. These pit villages were places that emerged fully formed, like mushrooms, almost overnight (indeed, there is a part of Merthyr colloquially referred to, to this day, as ‘Mushroom Town’ for this very reason). Houses, pubs, churches and chapels were all planned in from the very start, and all of them paid rent to the mine owner. Constructed in haste and on the shallowest of foundations, these were places always on the edge of anyone’s consideration, save for those who lived here.

The two new villages drew new people, sometimes from elsewhere in the coalfield, since some experienced miners would be needed, but also from further afield. People came to Aberfan and Merthyr Vale from all over rural Wales, from the west of England, from Ireland and even Spain and Italy. Both my mother and my father were born in Merthyr Vale, but into families of such incomers. The Pierces, my mother’s family, had their roots in the slate quarrying communities of north Wales. The Lewises, on my father’s side, had mixed Welsh and Irish heritage.

Iron was still produced in Merthyr in those early days, and coal and iron together formed the economic base for everything that happened in the valley. Connected first by canal and then by rail with the ports of Cardiff and Barry so that these resources could be exported, great wealth began to flow out of the area. And not much of it ever flowed back.

By the time I was born, nearly a century after the sinking of the pit, the valley I was to come to know so intimately in childhood had its hillsides piled high with coal slag, the waste product of a hundred years of toil by hundreds of thousands of men deep down in the narrow coal seams reached from the pithead of Merthyr Vale Colliery. The tips were shaped either conically, like black volcanoes, or were laid out in broad strips, following the contours of the mountain sides, just as the houses did. They were heaped up, endlessly, by a system of conveyor belts and ‘drams’ that ran from the colliery, clanking and rumbling around the villages all day long. Some of the volcano shapes were impossibly steep and piled so high that their tops rivalled in altitude the natural mountains on whose sides they had been dumped.

Coal had originally been extracted here to feed the ironworks at Cyfarthfa and Dowlais, after the area had been deforested and the supply of charcoal had been exhausted, and new technology came along that allowed the smelting of iron using coke. The steam coal extracted at Merthyr Vale fuelled thousands of steam engines as they drove the industrial revolution. It powered the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy through the decades of Empire and for the duration of two world wars. By the 1960s it was being fed into power stations and was still being used for domestic heating in almost every home. All this while, day by day, the tips had grown larger and their summits higher.

All coal mining areas across the world have produced such tips but the South Wales coalfield is unusual, geologically, because it is also mountainous with next to no flat ground available for dumping. If you look today at old photographs of the mountainsides as they used to be, it seems ludicrous that anyone could have thought such a situation either sustainable or safe, with ribbons of terraced houses, shops, hospitals and schools dwarfed by the monstrous tonnages heaped up on steep slopes, right above them. Purest black, these tips loomed over our homes in defiance of gravity and of common sense. And they were everywhere. The tip that eventually collapsed and sent hundreds of thousands of tons of semi-liquid slurry careering into Aberfan was called Pantglas No. 7. And Pantglas was just a small part of Aberfan, Aberfan just one of hundreds of villages in the shadow of similar slag heaps, right across the South Wales coalfield.

But the fact that the two villages existed at all was by reason of the colliery. The villages existed because of the coal, and the coal fed them and fuelled them and kept them. Despite the coming of new factories to the valley in the 1950s and 1960s, at least one man in every family was, or at least had once been, a miner, and the miners’ wages still underpinned the local economy. For most people the degradation of the environment was a necessary evil, the price of coal and the price of the jobs that were the foundation stones of every house, chapel, shop and pub for miles around.

At that time at least one coal fire still blazed in every house at all times of the day aside from the warmest days of summer. On windless days the coal smoke of a couple of thousand chimneys would hang in the still air and could be tasted like a hint of acid at the back of your throat. The effluent of coal washing turned the River Taff black, and choked almost all life from it.

The drive to extract coal meant its waste was amassed around us and was channelled through our waterways, and that the air we breathed was filled by the products of its burning. Yet it was also the reason for everything I knew being as it was. The reason all the people I knew, all the people I loved, were there at all.

The colliery itself sat at the heart of everything. Never truly quiet at any time of day or night, it clanked, rumbled, hissed and whistled. The steam hooter sounded at change of shift and steam shunting engines fussed endlessly over getting the coal wagons organised for the trip to Barry docks. At the top of its winding towers, its two pairs of winding wheels turned perpetually, day after day, year after year, with a deep whirring sound; the weight-driven pulleys of the villages’ clockwork heart. At night the floodlights of the pit yard threw light across the ceiling of my bedroom at the back of our house. Aberfan was never completely dark, and never silent. Once, on a family holiday to Cardiganshire, in a rented cottage deep in the countryside, I found I could not sleep, so disconcerted was I by the quiet and the deep darkness of the fields and woods round about us. It seemed like a place without a heartbeat. At least none that I could then hear.

So this was the place I was born into: a pit village. Like all pit villages, it was characterised by the culture that the miners themselves had created; warm, supportive, egalitarian. There was a respect for education, for skills and hard work. To name someone ‘a good worker’ was the highest form of praise. The social activism of the miners and the fruits of a thousand of their incremental victories, alongside the work of the churches and chapels, formed the warp and weft of the community’s fabric. The mighty National Union of Mineworkers was always working in the background, not on planning the next strike as some newspapers would have their readers believe, but as a legal and financial adviser to families and pensioners, a patron of sports and social clubs, a refuge for the victimised; even as a travel agent, should...