A Deep Longing

Chapter 1

Huw smiled as he looked down towards the Cardiff Road from his favourite spot on the hillside above Merthyr Vale. He gazed across the wooded hillside with its rowan, sycamore, ash and oak trees and the many others that he couldn’t put a name to. Along the tops of the valleys, he could see the great heaps of coal spoil, known locally as ’slag tips’ — the legacy of the coal mining that had given the valleys their livelihood for over two hundred years. They were ugly, black, intimidating and menacing.

A frown crossed his face; Huw knew there was something wrong about what he was seeing, or rather, not seeing, and he was puzzled. Normally he would expect to see the road between Merthyr Tydfil and Cardiff carrying a continuous stream of cars, buses and lorries. Today, however, the road and the village below were strangely empty. He could see that the villages of Aberfan to the north and Treharris to the south were both almost deserted. He was unaware that this Saturday afternoon would go down in British history, or at least in English history, as one of the nation’s greatest sporting achievements. It was Saturday, July 30, 1966, and England was playing West Germany at Wembley in the football World Cup final.

He realised suddenly why the road was so empty, although he could not have cared less. The World Cup Final was of no interest to Huw and he couldn’t understand why any Welshman would prefer football over rugby union, especially since England and Germany were foreign teams competing in a sport with little Welsh heritage. He was proud of his Welsh identity and culture, which had a place in its heart only for the oval ball, not the round one.

The tranquillity of the afternoon was perfect for Huw who preferred solitude to being part of a crowd. Here he could mull over the many issues that were competing for attention in his mind. His Mam often described Huw as’14, going on 24, because he demonstrated a maturity and approach to life far beyond his years. In physical appearance, he was certainly average for his age in height, and possibly he was a little underweight, but his brown twinkling eyes and striking features gave him an attractiveness that drew others to him. He had a dark complexion, thankfully free from the ravages of teenage acne. Girls liked his wavy black hair which he wore long before it became fashionable. Quiet, kind and shy, he had already lived through more traumatic experiences than most other lads of his age. On several occasions in his early childhood, severe asthma attacks had caused Huw to be rushed to hospital for emergency treatment. Fortunately, he proved the doctors wrong when they prophesied that he would not live beyond his infancy, and he grew out of that phase of his life. Those experiences and the horrific ones yet to come contributed to his maturity and his adult approach to life.

Although likeable, Huw did not respond well to friendly approaches. He was happiest with his own company, finding friendships and relationships confusing. He found it difficult to know how much to give of himself in a friendship. After getting his fingers burned on more than one previous occasion overstepping some unwritten line, he decided he was safer with his own company, despite his inner emptiness. On those occasions that had gone badly wrong, he had welcomed a warm initial camaraderie, but the friends had backed off when they felt smothered by his attempts to develop the relationships by too frequent contact or by becoming too serious in the things they discussed.

Where did this need to be close to someone come from? He knew something was missing in his life but it always eluded his search. He was determined that he would take the opportunity during these early days of the school holidays to try to make sense of the confusion and conflicts he felt, and he would endeavour to work out a way of interacting with people in a new way that did not lead to inevitable fracture and disappointment.

It was just over two years since the accident at the Merthyr Vale Colliery which had killed his father, Elwyn, leaving his mother, Dilys a widow and Huw and his younger siblings, Mair and Dafydd, fatherless. His father’s death was a great irony, in that coal had killed his grandfather, his great uncle and another uncle. It killed them not in dramatic pit disasters but slowly, painfully and over many years as coal dust relentlessly clogged their lungs. As always, a chest infection became pneumonia and pneumoconiosis claimed yet another victim. His father’s death added further to the ever-mounting true cost of the price of coal but was not a result of mining. It was the result of a careless vehicle accident. A National Coal Board lorry had reversed far too quickly without checking properly that it was clear behind. Elwyn Jones was crossing the yard, about to join the morning shift on a cold, rainy morning. It knocked him from his bike, crushing him under its wheels. Huw well remembered the call to the headmaster’s office where he was told that there had been an accident involving his father and he should go straight home.

He had rushed home to find the front door open and the women neighbours of their street were coming and going, some in tears. Through her sobs, his mother broke the awful news to him about the accident that had killed their father. Mair and Dafydd, sobbing uncontrollably, were seated, one on each side of their mother on the living room’s well-worn settee clinging to their mother. The little ones were inconsolable and Huw’s heart went out to them, feeling their pain even more than his mother’s and his own.

He couldn’t take in what he’d just heard. His father — his guiding light, his mentor, and his friend — was dead. He was dimly aware of someone speaking to him. “You’re the man of the house now, Huw bach,” Jim Morris, the National Union of Mineworkers union welfare officer said. “You have to look after your Mam and your brother and sister now. We’ll be starting the compensation claim for your family today.” Jim’s statement was well meant but Huw immediately took on the responsibility implicit in Jim’s pronouncement. In that moment, he ceased to be a child in his mind. That over-developed sense of responsibility would turn out to be a huge burden for many years.

As time progressed, Huw couldn’t process his emotions at all. He felt nothing. He had locked up his emotions; even at the funeral, where it seemed the whole village and the entire colliery had turned out, he shed no tears. The only positive thing that came out of that terrible incident was the pitiful compensation paid by the insurers that at least enabled Huw’s mother to buy their rented house outright and to put a little money aside.

‘Bloody NCB’, exclaimed Huw angrily. He found it hard to find words to express the depth of his anger and loathing towards the National Coal Board. He had grown up immersed in the stories and the culture of the South Wales miners — hard drinking, aggressively masculine, sentimental, passionate and with long memories. Local memories were of events like the Cilfynydd colliery disaster, seven miles from Aberfan, where 194 miners died and Senghenydd Colliery, just 10 miles from Aberfan, where 439 men and boys had perished 53 years previously. Everybody in South Wales knew someone who was killed in that awful disaster of 14th October 1913.

Huw knew he would never, ever go down a mine. Only a few years previously, all lads who shared his age of 14 would have been starting their working life in the pits. He shuddered at the idea. He was at Pontypridd Boys Grammar school and, as a successful student at or near the top of his class in all subjects, he had every prospect of getting an education that would take him away from the Valleys with their industrialised poverty. Yet, the shadow of the mines loomed large over his community and his family.

He grimaced as he re-ran the conflicts that were being fought in his mind. He thought of the stories he’d heard from older retired miners whose bodies bore the scars of a lifetime spent in the dark, dangerous depths of the earth. Those tales were not of heroism or adventure, but of survival and loss. The weight of history pressed heavily upon Huw’s young shoulders, and he felt a deep connection to the miners who had come before him. The thought of the NCB, which he saw as a remote English overseer of suffering and exploitation, filled him with righteous anger.

The National Coal Board had been established 20 years earlier to manage the coal industry. It was supposed to bring improvements and benefits to the miners. However, for many in South Wales, it had become a symbol of broken promises and continued hardship. The lives of miners were still marked by dangerous working conditions, uncertain futures, and the ever-present threat of disaster.

A desire to leave the grinding poverty, grime and hopelessness of the Valleys clashed with his love for Wales and his Welsh cultural identity. He was aware that University beckoned and then a white-collar job that would inevitably take him away from his roots. He loved the Valleys but knew he had to leave them. He feared that he would be betraying his roots by turning his back on his village and on the people who had fought and suffered for their livelihoods. He couldn’t help but wonder if he had a duty to stay, to fight for better conditions and fairer treatment for the miners.

Then there were his mam and his younger sister and brother. Yes, they could all be tiresome but he loved all three of them dearly. His mam, Dilys, had not really recovered from his dad’s death and so Huw already did most of the cooking at home and a great deal of the care of his sister Mair and brother Dafydd. Mair was a 10-year-old dynamo, devastatingly pretty, who never stopped talking and always wanted to play; but Dafydd, two years younger, was quieter and was utterly devoted to his big brother, as was Huw to Dafydd. Dafydd was a miniature version of his elder brother: dark in hair and complexion with the same chocolate-coloured large eyes. Dafydd was well looked after by his sister who kept an eye out for him at Pantglas Junior School, the school that they both attended in their home village of Aberfan. Their school was an old Victorian building, a couple of streets away from their home and the two little ones walked together to and from their every day.

Huw missed his father terribly, particularly their long walks together over the hills. Elwyn would tell him stories of Welsh princes and bards and they would sing old Welsh hymns and folk songs, with Huw’s reedy soprano and Elwyn’s fine tenor voice harmonising together. They always spoke Welsh together — the language spoken in their home, even though, other than old people, most people in the Valley now used what Huw thought of as the language of the English invaders: Saesneg (English). Although it was almost 700 years since King Edward Longshanks had invaded Wales in 1277, Huw shared the capacity of his fellow Welshman to nurse a deep sense of injustice for that infamous event of history.

Elwyn was from coastal North Wales where the only English that you would hear spoken was by the tourists who came in their thousands to the beautiful beaches and spectacular scenery of the Snowdonia mountains. They were in stark contrast to the ugly, industrial valleys where the only place you could guarantee to hear Welsh was in the dozens of churches and chapels of the area.

Huw’s parents had always attended the Calvinistic Methodist Chapel but since Elwyn’s death, Dilys’s life now completely revolved around the chapel, attending services, prayer meetings, women’s meetings and chapel coffee mornings. She expected the children to attend Sunday School and Huw complied with her wishes, but only out of loyalty to his mother. He struggled with the idea of worshiping an all-knowing and all-loving God who had allowed his wonderful father to be taken from him. How he longed for the easy intimacy that he had shared with his father, although he would never express it in those terms. He just knew he wanted — no, needed — to recapture that friendship and sense of loving and belonging.

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