October 21st. 1966 was a day of horror that took an nation to a dark place, that's the day that is remembered as the Aberfan tragedy. It was a cold damp morning that started as countless other October mornings had begun, but is now etched into the consciousness of the mining communities and beyond. A day that took the lives of 116 children and 28 adults, from one small village in Wales.
A tip of coal mine slurry dumped on the side of a mountain, and on top of a stream and it grew and grew. On that fateful wet October morning, just after the kids had entered school, it started its unstoppable rush down the mountainside, fast and furious, like an unstoppable runaway locomotive. It encompassed cottages on the way down, before coming to a halt as it swamped and encased the junior school and all those inside.
Mining communities are well accustomed to tragedy, but what marks this one out is the fact that it mindlessly terminated the lives of 116 children, all innocent victims of a nation's greed for cheap coal.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
The phrase is one of the most enduring and quoted of modern literature, an almost proverbial reference to the archaic and bygone.
It is the opening line of LP Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between, an eerie story set 50 years on from a tumultuous experience of an adolescent boy; an experience so devastating it propelled him prematurely into adulthood and ruined the rest of his life.
The story of what happened in the south Wales mining village of Aberfan is a devastating one which dealt a similar fate to the children who survived it.
It too is a story for which Hartley’s opening line could not be more pertinent.
It is exactly 50 years since tragedy swooped down on Aberfan killing 116 children and 28 adults.
Revisiting the "obscenity" of 21 October 1966, and its aftermath is a stark reminder of the incongruities of the past.
Health and safety, counselling, accountability, litigation, compensation – at times met with derision – are the tenets of our modern day.
Aberfan is an upsetting reminder of perhaps why and how much our society changed so much in little over a generation.
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