by Owen Sheers
The Green Hollow
Owen Sheers
For Aberfan
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Part I
Children
Part II
Rescuers
Part III
Survivors
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
PART I
Children
As if all the eyes
Aberfan, South Wales, 21 October 1966.
116 children turn in their beds.
A nine-year-old boy, TOMOS DAVIES, opens his curtains.
TOMOS
The journeys will be starting soon.
You can’t see them down here in the street
but once they’re up and running
their sound’s all through the village –
last thing I hear before going to sleep,
and first thing too just after I wake.
Or when we’re playing down the river
or in school on a break.
Rumble they do, and clang.
Metal wheels on metal tracks.
Drams they call them too,
carrying the spoil and the shale
from down by the pit,
across the black bridge
and all the way up to the top of the tip.
Number seven,
that’s the one they’re going to now.
Even if you were there though,
on the mountain I mean,
you’d still only hear them,
wouldn’t see them, not til the cranes at least.
Not with this fog like a cloud in the street.
It’s dark but I can still tell it’s thick.
The way the streetlights blur out
and how I can’t see the ridge.
If I could, that would be darker again,
like ink spilt on ink.
And above it, just, the moon,
a harvest one in a week or two.
His older brother WILL stirs under his covers.
Will says they’ll be putting a man on it soon.
He means the Americans, but I don’t know.
I think the Russians might get there first.
They’re launching Luna 12 tomorrow.
Dad told me about it, showed me a picture.
Like a spinning top it is with spikes all over.
Putting it into orbit, if they can.
That’s what Dad said –
‘Like a moon for a moon, but made by man.’
DAI DAVIES ascends in a cage from deep in the mine.
A chant of miners’ nicknames grows under his speech.
With each name uttered a new voice is added.
DAI
Mad about science my Tomos,
always following them rockets.
Which is fine by me.
Better by far he’s looking up there
to the darkness of space,
than down to the blackness
of this bloody place.
Danny Cold Blood
Dilwyn Hook and Eye
Will One Song
Georgie Pub
Dai Fat
Dai Sweat
Bob Bad Luck
Ianto Aye Aye
Willy Want
Jack the Black
When DAI speaks again his voice is older, remembering.
DAI
What still haunts me the most
is how it was staring us in the face.
Not just the thing itself
but even the word – Tip.
Pit, turned inside out, wrong way round,
which is how it was, of course.
I was the one meant to be in danger.
It was miners who died for coal,
hundreds each year.
Us in that daytime night,
not our children aboveground
learning in the light.
Tommy Tin Hat
Tommy Duck Egg
Tommy Dunkirk
Colin Sooty
Totty Watkins
Blondie Morgan
Dickie Bach
Dickie Drunk
The colliery hooter sounds.
TOMOS
That’s the pit,
sounding the end of the safety shift.
Dai Shake Hands
Will Bumble
Dai Lot of Kids
The sound of an engine.
And that’s the bus,
Merthyr Col. on its side
getting ready to give
the next lot a ride.
Slogger Carpenter
Jeff Jaffa
Euchin Cute
Bomper Jackson
DAI strips off his helmet, lamp, belt.
DAI
Never see daylight, not in winter,
not less you’re carried out
on a stretcher.
TOMOS
That’s what my dad says.
He’s down there, see?
But coming up now.
He’ll wash, change,
DAI is in the showers, washing off the coal dust.
DAI
and if it’s been hot,
screw my vest into my Tommy box.
TOMOS
Then he’ll catch the bus back
to have breakfast together.
DAI dries himself, gets dressed.
DAI
It’s important, isn’t it?
To eat round the table as one.
Otherwise what’s the point
of having fathers, a mother, sons?
MYFANWY DAVIES is in her kitchen.
MYFANWY
Might get to eat three times today.
Together I mean. Half-term, so short hours isn’t it?
So yeah, Tom’ll be home long before tea.
TOMOS upstairs, is getting dressed.
TOMOS
And then tomorrow, a whole week off.
I can’t wait.
I’m playing piano at a wedding first thing,
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
for our neighbours, Sheryl and Colin.
Then, hopefully,
I’ll be in time for the films down at Bugs.
Cartoons, then Riders of Death Valley.
Then Will said he’d take me to the game –
the Martyrs, not Wales versus Scotland –
playing down in Penydarren.
They beat Ramsgate last week, three–nil,
with Dudley Price at six.
WILL, ecstatic at a match.
WILL
‘A bloody angel on that ball!’
TOMOS
That’s what Will said when he scored.
‘Thank god,’ a man said behind,
‘he didn’t go to Barry Town after all.’
At the other end of the village another set of curtains opens.
ANNE JONES, aged nine, looks out of her bedroom window.
She watches JACK-THE-MILK doing his deliveries.
When she speaks it is with the voice of a 60-year-old woman.
ANNE
I still feel guilty about it.
Silly, I know, but I do.
Because I can remember so clearly,
thinking that morning
as Jack did his rounds in the van,
how nothing new or nothing exciting
ever happened in Aberfan.
Lots going on but always the same,
or for someone else, not me.
That’s how it felt.
Busy in the street, the fields,
the pit, but never moving.
Mind you, I was only nine,
so maybe tha
t’s it.
And we lived at the top end,
which was poorer.
But I wanted to be like my sister,
older – to listen to the juke box
down Emanuelli’s café,
with the boys from Bedlinog
straight-backed on their motorbikes
winking through the window
to take me away.
I wanted something to change
for life to go faster, for me and the village.
But now? – now I just wish
I’d somehow slowed time
not made it go quicker.
Stopped it even,
and with it, that slippage.
IRENE JONES, ANNE’s mother, calls up the stairs.
IRENE
Barbara!
You out the bathroom yet?
Get in there Anne, if she is!
Half an hour to get yourself set.
ANNE turns from the window,
her voice a nine-year-old girl’s.
ANNE
Last day of school today,
then half-term!
If it’s fine tomorrow
I might go help on the farm.
Or play up the mountain,
or tag, or hide and seek
up the old canal bank.
But that’s tomorrow.
Should think of today.
That’s what Mam would say.
Still a morning of school.
Maths, English, then break.
Might play French skipping
if Beth brings her rope.
BARBARA, ANNE’s older sister,
enters the bedroom, humming a pop song.
The sound of JACK-THE-MILK delivering
can be heard as ANNE goes into the bathroom.
ANNE
That’s Jack-the-Milk, going door to door.
He’ll have already been out for an hour,
maybe more.
We usually pass him on the way up to school,
still delivering all down Moy Road,
with Bryntaf and Aberfan Mawr
still to go.
ANNE closes the door and looks in the mirror.
ANNE
Jack.
No father should witness what he saw.
Can’t help but ask why, can you?
Why his girl, not me?
Why at that moment,
when so many couldn’t,
he had to see?
JACK-THE-MILK, out on the street, waves to a neighbour.
DAI is on the colliery bus.
DAI
Like the valley’s still asleep
when the mist’s down this deep.
But it isn’t – never really quiet this village.
One shift coming up, another going down.
Farmers on the hill out for their stock,
mothers stoking the grates,
kids getting ready, trying not to be late.
MYFANWY DAVIES is lighting her fire.
MYFANWY
Then shop deliveries soon.
Busy place, see?
Which is good, of course.
God knows, others have got it worse.
We’ve still got the mine for one.
And the factories:
ICM, Lines Toys, GKN,
Hoover of course –
So yeah, plenty going round to pay the rent.
DAI gets off the colliery bus.
DAI
Boys from here, I tell you,
they got it better than their fathers,
walking straight out of school into steady employment.
EDNA, a farmer, is out on the hill above the village.
EDNA
Wasn’t always like this, of course.
Summer grazing, that’s what
brought the first people here.
Good land, sheltered spot,
fed by six streams at least.
It’s all still here, in a way,
in the names, the streets.
Hafod Tanglwys –
the summer place of Tanglwys.
Bryn Golau – hill of light.
Pantglas – the green hollow,
and still is I suppose,
though with kids now not grass.
And Aberfan, of course –
the mouth of the Fan,
the biggest of those streams
feeding the Taff.
MYFANWY prepares breakfast,
the sound of her boys dressing above her.
MYFANWY
Was the steam coal what changed all that.
And John Nixon.
He’s still here too, other side of the Taff.
Nixonville it’s called,
though far as I can see whole place is that man’s.
I mean, was him who started the pit,
and the pit what made Aberfan.
DAI approaches his home.
DAI
From up north he was. Newcastle way.
Saw Merthyr coal burned on the Thames one day,
and couldn’t believe it.
No smoke in the coal – never seen that before.
So he came down here looking for more.
Went to Mrs Thomas he did, up at the Graig.
There she was, sitting in her hut
at the mouth of the shaft,
a basket by her head for the cash,
girls sorting by hand outside.
150 tonnes a day she was selling.
But no more.
That’s what she told Nixon.
Reckoned she’d taken too much already
out from under the valley’s floor.
MYFANWY
But Nixon? Well, he was modern,
didn’t understand the words ‘Too much’.
JOHN PHILLIPS, a crane driver, stands on the summit of
tip number seven, high and isolated in the morning mist.
JOHN
So he sunk his own – the deepest so far –
then worked his way south, from Navigation
to Deep Duffryn, to here, Merthyr Vale.
He’d proved it, see?
That 10 hours of fire from Aberdare
was worth 12 at least from the Tyne.
DAI
By the time I left school
there seemed no question. The war was over
and my father, well, he was suffering from dust.
So I went down – twenty years next month.
Mrs Thomas would turn, I bet,
to think we’re still digging it out.
DAI reaches his home.
Above him, TOMOS waves from his window.
DAI
Generations down that pit.
Not my boys though.
I’m working down there, so they won’t.
Will’s heading for an apprentice at JJ’s garage
and well, according to some he’s got a chance in the ring.
And Tomos bach, he’s good with his hands too,
in a different way. Only nine,
but plays piano with both of them.
DAI enters his house. MYFANWY takes his coat.
MYFANWY
And now look at us.
Shops, if you could see them in this mist,
from one end of the village to the other.
Shopkeepers begin opening their stores, putting out stock.
You watch, any minute now
those awnings’ll start coming down,
like a high street flotilla.
With each shop mentioned a chorus of voices grows.
MYFANWY & CHORUS
Post office,
tailor’s,
the Aberfan,
the Mack.
The co-op,
Maypoles,
Barbara’s Boutique.
Shoe shop,
the jeweller’s,
A man turns in his bed.
MYFANWY
Georgie the barber’s.
AN
NE comes back into her bedroom.
ANNE
One of the dinner ladies knew my mam!
I mean, when she was little and in Pantglas too.
They’re not like the teachers, see,
They’re softer, will hold a hand.
And they know everyone, not just the child,
but their Tad Cu, their Nan, the whole family.
IRENE is preparing breakfast downstairs.
IRENE
She’s right, they do.
Which is good, isn’t it?
I mean, to know your daughter’s in a place
where they know more than just her face.
Not like down Cardiff
where you’re just one in a queue.
On your own. No belongings,
no names behind you.
She looks out the kitchen window to the back garden
where her husband, GWYN JONES is pruning his roses.
IRENE
Take my Gwyn. ‘Gwyn the rose’
they call him round here.
Famous for his flowers.
Someone knocks at least once a week,
thumb in their button hole
after a five-leaf.
Gives him a pride, to be known like that.
Had an accident, see? Down the pit.
Works in Hoover’s now.
He’s had his fair share, fair play –
so those roses, well,
they add to him don’t they?
GWYN looks up from his rose bushes.
When he speaks his voice is that of a man in his nineties.
GWYN
I stopped growing them after.
Or least, let them go wild,
stopped cutting them back.
Didn’t seem right.
And flowers, well,
they changed for me too.
Whenever I saw them,
in a window, a vase,
I’d see the cemetery slope again,
