I Can't Stay Long

by Laurie Lee

  Its heart was the coal-pit, and its environment like the others – the debris of a slowly exhausting industry: a disused canal, some decaying rail-tracks, a river black as the Styx, a general coating of grime over roofs and gardens, and the hills above blistered with a century of slag-heaps.

  Such villages learned to accept a twilight world where most of the menfolk worked down the pits. Many died early, with their lungs full of coal-dust, and the life was traditionally grim and perilous. Disaster, in fact, was about the only news that ever came out of the valleys – the sudden explosion underground, miners entombed alive, or the silent death in the dark from gas. Wales and the world were long hardened to such news. But not to what happened in Aberfan …

  A colliery sends to the surface more waste than coal, and a mining village has to learn to live with it. It must be put somewhere or the mine would close, and it’s too expensive to carry it far. So the tips grow everywhere, straddling the hillsides, nudging the houses like black-furred beasts. Almost everyone, from time to time, has seen danger in them, but mostly they are endured as a fact of life.

  On the mountain above Aberfan there were seven such tips. The evening sun sank early behind them. To some of the younger generation they had always been there, as though dumped by the hand of God. They could be seen from the school windows, immediately below them, rising like black pyramids in the western sky. But they were not as solid as they looked; it was known that several had moved in the past, inching ominously down the mountain.

  What was not known however was that the newest tip, number 7, was a killer with a rotten heart. It had been begun in Easter 1958, and was built on a mountain spring, most treacherous of all foundations. Gradually, over the years, the fatal seeping of water was turning Tip 7 into a mountain of moving muck.

  Then one morning, out of the mist, the unthinkable happened, and the tip came down on the village. The children of Pantglas Junior School had just arrived in their classrooms and were right in the path of it. They were the first to be hit by the wave of stupifying filth which instantly smothered more than a hundred of them.

  The catastrophe was not only the worst in Wales but an event of such wanton and indifferent cruelty it seemed to put to shame both man and God …

  The tragedy of Aberfan was one of inertia – of a danger which grew slowly for all to see, but which almost no one took steps to prevent. Now that the worst has happened, the process of healing also seems infected by the inertia of public authority and private grief – a dullness of shock and apathy which freezes the power of action.

  Even today, a year later, the visitor needn’t search hard for reminders; the stain of what happened is still nakedly visible. One sees the ineffectual little bulldozers, high on the mountain, patting and smoothing the remains of the tip. The black trail down the hillside left behind by the avalanche – a series of gigantic descending waves – is now covered by the fresh false innocence of grass which doesn’t conceal its revolting power.

  Where the waves broke on the village remains a terrible void, and little has been done to soften its horror. Sheered-off houses, broken walls and polluted back-gardens, a heap of smashed and rusty cars; these form a rim of wreckage around a central wilderness – the site where the school once stood.

  Immediately after the disaster, in a kind of frenzy of outrage, all that was left of the school-buildings was savagely bulldozed. It seems to have been the last attempt to obliterate the pain. The scene of the tragedy today, where a hundred and sixteen children died, is just a sloping area of squalid rubbish, a trodden waste – lying derelict in the rain.

  Someone, over the months, has aimlessly tried to enclose it with a few old railings and bits of broken wire. The barrier is ineffective and almost obscene and only stresses the desolation. Walk across the site and the ground itself seems stifled, choked and littered with trash – old shoes, stockings, lengths of iron piping, lemonade cartons, rags. Fragments of the school itself still lie embedded in the rubbish – chunks of green-painted classroom wall – all gummed together by the congealed slime of the tip and reeking sourly of sulphurous ash.

  Even more poignant relics lie in a corner of the buried playground, piled haphazardly against a wall – some miniature desks and chairs, evocative as a dead child’s clothes, infant-sized, still showing the shape of their bodies. Among the rubble there also lie crumpled little song-books, sodden and smeared with slime, the words of some bed-time song still visible on the pages surrounded by drawings of sleeping elves.

  Across the road from the school, and facing up the mountain, stands a row of abandoned houses. This must once have been a trim little working-class terrace, staidly Victorian but specially Welsh, with lace-curtained windows, potted plants in the hall, and a piano in every parlour – until the wave of slag broke against it, smashed in the doors and windows, and squeezed through the rooms like toothpaste.

  Something has been done to clear them, but not very much. They stand like broken and blackened teeth. Doors sag, windows gape, revealing the devastation within – a crushed piano, some half-smothered furniture. You can step in from the street and walk round the forsaken rooms which still emit an aura of suffocation and panic – floors scattered with letters, coat-hangers on the stairs, a jar of pickles on the kitchen table. The sense of catastrophe and desertion, resembling the choked ruins of Pompeii, hangs in the air like volcanic dust.

  But the raw, naked, inexplicable scar on the village remains the site of the school itself – that festering waste of sombre silence from which no one can take their eyes. Why, one wonders, after all this time, has it not been cleared or decently covered? It seems that the people of Aberfan are made powerless by it, spellbound, unable to move. The ground is so seared with memory it has become a kind of no-man’s-land, a negative limbo paralysing the will, something poisoned, sterile and permanently damned, on which nothing can be planted, nothing built.

  The aftertaste of the macabre which still affects the village is strengthened further by its attraction for sightseers. The streets of Aberfan are narrow, and not built for traffic, so the bulldozed site of the Junior School itself has become the most convenient carpark for tourists. Almost any fine afternoon you will see them arrive, parents and children with cameras and balloons, clambering over the ruins and up and down the railway embankment eating ice-creams and photographing each other.

  I remember young lovers arm-in-arm wandering around the devastated waste; a green-suited blonde posing against a slag-heap; another in shorts hitching a ride on a bulldozer; an elegant old lady poking at pieces of rubble.

  They had come, they had seen it – the shock of Aberfan for an outing, to take home with their snaps and seaweed. Visitors from America, Canada and Australia, too, tip-toeing carefully with large round eyes. With a certain eagerness also exclaiming, ‘My, wasn’t it just terrible?’ Approaching a miner with a hushed enquiry. ‘Excuse me, please,’ – pointing down – ‘but are they still under there? …’ ‘What was it like – were you here that day?’

  Most of the villagers seem in no way distressed by this, visitors are a comfort rather than an intrusion. The stories begin again for each newcomer, recited in a kind of dream … Yet the trippers, scrambling over the slag in their bright holiday clothes, are on the whole not a lovely sight. As one old miner exclaimed, ‘Why don’t they bring their buckets and spades? There’s plenty of dirt for them to dig.’

  But some of the Welsh visitors, one notices – those from the neighbouring coal-valleys – are subtly different from any of the others. They come in silent families, without questions or cameras, but bringing their children too – walking them quickly over the ruins and holding on to their arms, feeling their living flesh …

  Aberfan cemetery lies up on the mountain, in the shadow of the distant tips. Above the traditional huddle of colliers’ tombstones, studded with slate-grey urns and angels, stretches the clean grassy bank, visible from all over the valley, where most of the children are buried. They lie side by side in
two long lines of graves, each child marked with a painted cross. The pretty names shine clearly, black on white, delicate against the wood; Lynn, Carol, Gareth, Islwyn … most of them aged between seven and ten. Beneath the long rows of crosses, the mounds of red Welsh earth are deeply quilted in flowers, heavy-headed chrysanthemums, roses, daisies that are constantly changed and renewed.

  Here and there among the blooms one sees the little groping symbols of identity – a plastic jet-plane, a china rabbit … At the foot of one of the graves a miniature oil-lamp burns steadily. Another has a football fashioned from lilies. Others are decorated with little verses, resigned or otherwise, enamelled on pages of marble: ‘God came one day to gather flowers. He came our way and gathered ours.’ ‘A day of memory sad to recall; Without farewell she left us all.’ (Or, even more blankly: ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus.’) Here, more than anywhere, one feels the loss kept alive, the sense of brutal confrontation, the statistics laid out in these long flowered rows continuously freshened, swept and attended.

  It is a hard climb from the village, but many of the mothers make it each day. There is little else of importance for them to do. Here they are nearest to their ghosts, and to each other – the only ones they don’t have to explain to. They bring their bunches of fresh flowers, and water in lemonade bottles, and busy themselves almost domestically among the graves, chattering to each other and admiring one another’s arrangements, fussing and giving advice.

  In the evening the fathers arrive, carrying shears and sacking, kneel down and begin clipping the grass – each to his own small plot, his wife sitting nearby, the narrow grave with its cross between them. It is a mute routine, a dry-eyed companionship of grief, for the time being their only anchor.

  There was a grave marked ‘Sandra’ with a young woman standing beside it, listless, as though waiting for someone. She had a thin worn face and dark feverish eyes. Her dress was damp from kneeling on the grass.

  ‘We were lucky,’ she said. ‘Some were just arms and legs. Our Sandra hadn’t a blemish on her. Just a little pink spot up on her forehead, here. There were others much worse than us.’

  Her husband joined us, scrambling up through the tombstones – a muscular young man freshly scrubbed from the pit. She gave him her empty lemonade bottle and he stuck it in his pocket and together they looked at the grave a moment. He was proud of the cross, which had been carved by a cousin and was more ornate than any of the others. ‘It stands out,’ he said. ‘I dare say you noticed. I dotted in the words meself.’

  A grey wall of rain began to roll up the valley, slowly covering the pits below. ‘Run, man!’ cried the husband, slapping his wife lightly on the behind. ‘Get off home or you’ll catch yer death.’

  The wife slipped away quietly, and the rain presently stopped. The flowers on the graves began to steam with scent. The miner raked up some grass; then we walked back to the village along the bank of the old canal.

  ‘We were lucky,’ he said. ‘We’ve still got the boy. He’s thirteen. But it’s worse for the missus. I took her away for a bit but she can’t get over it. She’s still bad. She lived for our Sandra.’

  We went for a drink, passing the site of the school. ‘That’s our Sandie’s place,’ he muttered. Then over beer in the pub he talked for two hours, his half-closed eyes on the ceiling, his voice a steady staccato, searching, remembering, going doggedly back to the beginning.

  ‘They called me from the pit about ten. I saw the missus in the street. Somebody was giving her a cup of tea. “Where’s the boy?” I said. “The boy’s all right,” she said. “Where’s the girl?” “The girl’s in there.” “Don’t you worry,” I said, “we’ll get her out.” But I didn’t like the look of it – digging was hopeless … I gave it till eleven o’clock. After all, we’re miners, we can judge about slurry. At eleven o’clock I knew. They said there’s no more you can do. I went off home. Somebody said, “Would you like a cup of tea?” “I’m not fussy,” I said. Somebody put a fag in my mouth. It was all over – I just stopped thinking … Then somebody came in and said, “We’ve got her. Would you like to come down and identify her?” So I said “O.K.” and got up … I went to the chapel mortuary. She hadn’t a mark on her. She was just as her mother had sent her to school …

  ‘Of course, we could have lost the boy too. He was on his way up Moy Road when he saw the houses falling towards him. He ran off home; and I couldn’t get a word out of him for months. He had to go to the psychiatrist … Just wouldn’t talk about it, and wouldn’t mention his sister either. And the two of ’em worshipped each other. They was always together; slept in the same room, holding hands … He used to hide when we went to the grave …

  ‘Then one night – about four months later it was – we was round at our brother’s place. The boy went outside to the lavatory, and I heard him call “Dad!” “Ay, what is it boy?” I said. “Come out here,” he said. “Sure,” I said, “what’s the matter?” It was a beautiful frosty night. He said, “Look at that star up there – that’s our Sandie, Dad.” “Sure,” I said, “that’s our little Sandie …”

  ‘The boy’s all right now, and I’m going to see he’s all right. He’s interested in machines and science. He comes to me and says, “Dad, there’s a super Hawker down in the shop.” I says, “How much?” He says, “Only £1.” I says, “Here you are then, son.” His granny says, “Why don’t you let him wait till Saturday?” I says, “If I had £100 in my pocket I’d give it to him. He can have anything he wants …” And I’ll make damn sure he never goes down the pit. He’s not going to grow up daft like me …

  ‘Ay, ay, but our Sandie … Sometimes I’m lying with the missus and she turns to me and says, “Why?” “Why our girl?” she says … I think that meself – but what in God’s name can I say?’

  The hotel where I stayed was the only one in the village. The ashtray by the bedside was a child’s china boot. I shared my meals with a local bachelor, temporarily unhoused, who enjoyed the detachment of the completely deaf.

  ‘Summer’s nearly gone,’ he’d say, over his evening chops. ‘Another week – we shan’t sweat after that … They say there’s a splendid lot of hazel-nuts up the mountain this year – of course, there’s not the children, you know.’

  Downstairs in the bar the miners came and went, treating their dogs to little bowls of beer. Or remained arguing in corners with their backs to the television which flickered madly with its sound turned off. On the day of the disaster the hotel had been a rescue centre, and was something of a headquarters of memory still. The landslide had come to a halt just outside the door, and the bar-room windows still looked on chaos.

  Dai, the proprietor, was a jumpy young man, rhetorical, wracked with nerves. On the night I arrived he’d just thrown out a party of tourists, and his dark eyes were damp with fury.

  ‘Asking if I’d sell ’em souvenirs – what do they think we are? I don’t trade on the price of the dead. “Beat it!” I told ’em. “There’s plenty of souvenirs out there. Help yourself. Genuine Aberfan muck!” ’

  Late that night, after a few drinks, it all seemed to hit him again, and he’d lean over the counter with his thick voice trembling.

  ‘You don’t get used to it, you know. Look round this bar and I’ll tell you … A cross section, the lot of ’em. That one by the dartboard – lost his seven-year-old daughter. The one under the window – he was at work at the time – lost his wife and his widowed mother. All of ’em quiet enough now, but I remember us crying in this bar, crying and clinging together. And some of my best friends up the road: young Glyn – kaput – his wife and his sister Doris … What do they expect us to be then – idealists or what? Sometimes I still go down on my knees and weep …’

  His voice rose hot and loud, but no one in the bar took any notice. No doubt they were used to the young man’s emotion. So he put a record on the gramophone and turned up the amplifier, flooding the room with Handel’s Messiah. There were complaints, but he ignored them. ‘I always play
that when I’m angry. I haven’t time to read bloody books.’

  After a few days in Aberfan one begins to notice the less obvious gaps – the school outfitters with the price of its clothes marked down, or the lines of washing in back-gardens hanging with every kind of garment except for those aged between seven and ten. Here and there, though rarely, like the precious leaves of new growth, one sees a line of freshly laundered napkins; or the prams of the newborn appearing with an air of Cadillac luxury, glittering with chromium and canopies of lace. But the silence in so many of the houses is the silence of life taken from it, the coldness of a fire withdrawn. Fathers at work down the pits can somehow account for themselves, but the bereaved mothers seem to have no purpose.

  Meanwhile in the midst of all this, like orchids among the slag-heaps, one comes across occasional groups of the children who lived. Prettily dressed and beribboned, riding expensive pedal-cars and bicycles, they are an élite, the aristocrats of survival – pampered, cherished, their lives nervously guarded, and also coveted by those who mourn. By luck, chance, and by no choice of their own, they are part of the unhealed scar-tissue of Aberfan. They have the run of the fish-and-chip shops, are loaded with toys and treats, and are invited away for free holidays. Perhaps more than anywhere else in guilt-ridden, sweet-bribing Britain, noted for its neglect of children, they have become the ice-cream-and-chocolate-coated symbols of our conscience, something we wish to placate at last.

  It is understandable and right that they should be given the best – they had little enough before. Unhappily the bereaved can’t help feeling their loss twice bitter when faced by these rewards of survival. ‘Isn’t it enough that they lived?’ they often ask. ‘What more do their parents want? …’ The presence of the children who were spared adds to the tragic problem of Aberfan, as does the weight of world-wide goodwill they carry. What kind of future will they have if they remain in the village? Will they be nothing but the ghosts of those who died? And will they ever feel the need to forgive their good fortune – or even to forgive themselves?