Notes on Abertillery, Newport, Aberfan, and Cardiff (September 1-5, 2025)
September 1 (Monday) Aberystwyth-Abertillery. 5.30 am: Awake. Although, I’d first ‘awoke’ at 2.00 am. Someone was playing the piano downstairs, I thought. But since the only pianist in the house was sleeping next to me — and refusing to countenance the possibility that the mysterious player was either a talented burglar or a ghost – I deduced that my audition was illusory, and I was still asleep. I awoke next, and properly, at 4.30 am, having dreamt that I’d delivered a lecture to undergraduate art history students in a large junk shop. My subject was whatever tattered book came to hand. A challenging, if precarious, strategy. And who is Mr Russo, whose name was mentioned (but never made an appearance) in Sunday morning’s dream?
6.45 am: A walk to the railway station through dampened streets, where I boarded the train that can be heard from my studio window, travelling eastward at 7.28 am. Today, my journey would take-in Casnewydd [Newport], Crymlyn [Crumlin], and Abertyleri [Abertillery] (where I’d be spending the night). A long-anticipated reunion with family and friends. 9.18 am: At Shrewsbury, I caught the train bound for Caerdydd [Cardiff].
En route, I continued to read Iain McLean’s and Martin Johnes’ Aberfan: Government and Disaster (2019), in preparation for my visit on Wednesday. I’ve been struck by descriptions of the appalling and profound silence that immediately proceeded the avalanche of coal slurry.
[The noise] was suddenly cut off, just like a wireless being turned off. … There was a terrible silence. … In that silence you couldn’t hear a bird or a child. Aberfan residents, 3.
11.23 am: Arrived in Newport. Objectively speaking, the city has little to commend it. This is the assessment of those who live here, too. Nevertheless, I remain her lover. However, if truth be told, my affection is for the sweetheart that I knew in my youth, rather. As I walked from the station towards my customary eatery (for a bacon sandwich and pot of tea), I could barely perceive the present condition of the city beneath layers of memories formed during my childhood and teenage years.
Back then, mam would hurry me from Marks & Spencer to C&A to British Home Stores to Littlewoods (‘quality shops’, as they say in these parts), up and down the busy unpedestrianised streets, and, finally, to Wimpy (a treat that was held before me like a carrot — lest my patience and will to live forsook me). Newport was where I first found myself and fell hopelessly in love with art and culture, while studying for an undergraduate degree.
I took the 12.30 pm ‘bone-shaker’ from Newport to Crymlyn. Proof of presence.
En route, I chatted with a retired ‘dinner lady’ who’d worked at, what’s now called, Coleg Gwent [Gwent College] (formerly, Cross Keys College). (In the working-class community of my youth, ‘dinner’ was what posh people called ‘lunch’.) ‘In those days, the food was cooked from scratch – homely, you see. None of these ready-meals they serve the kids today’, she reflected wistfully. The bus broke down outside the college; its engine had overheated. My cousin’s husband arrived to taxi me to their home.
There, I enjoyed several hours of earnest left-wing political discussion, chit-chat about the wayward world, and snippets of family history. My cousin told me a touching story about my paternal grandfather. He was a coalminer and vehemently anti-authoritarian (even though his father had been a police sergeant). Grampa, as I called him, would be in tears when relating his encounters with the abject poverty prevalent among colliers and their families. I’d always looked upon him as an emotionally remote figure. Now I realise, he was a man of deep waters who’d reigned in the pain of those heartbreaking experiences.
4.30 pm: ‘Home!’ Abertillery. From the bus stop I walked to my friends’ house, situated at the edge of the town centre. I’ve known them both, in different contexts, since my school days. Andrew was a guitarist and vocalist in several bands I’d put together in my late teens. His wife was, with me, a member of an inspiring and a confidence-building ex-curricula drama group at Nantyglo Comprehensive School. She became a teacher in secondary and, later, tertiary education, and is presently a serving Justice of the Peace. She’d also contributed significantly to the organisation of the 65th-anniversary commemorations of the Six Bells Colliery disaster.
I saw the sun set behind the Arael Mountain for the first time in over 40 years. I’d not slept under the Abertillery sky since 2008.
September 2 (Tuesday). Abertillery to Newport. 6.00 am: An Abertillery morning.
Writing and reflection. 8.15 am: Andrew and I walked along the Ebbw Fach Trail to Parc Arael Griffin, once the site of Six Bells Colliery. Overseeing the park is Sebastien Boyesen’s sculptural memorial to the mining disaster — which took place on June 28, 1960 — called the Guardian. It’s made of metal, just under four times taller than Michelangelo’s David (1501-4) and exactly the same height as Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North (1998). Indeed, it looks like a hybridisation of a Gormley, Soviet-socialist realist art, and a painting portraying a South-Wales coalminer by one of my former tutors, Jack Crabtree, entitled Big Eric (1983). I’m rarely impressed by public sculptures. But this one is appropriately heroic, ambitious, well-executed, and much loved by the local community. (My own memorial to the disaster is made of sound: Minors for Miners (2015).)
10.45 am: The X15 Stagecoach bus left a drizzled Abertillery for Newport, which was even more drizzled. 3.00 pm: I visited the Newport Museum & Art Gallery to look again at the Welsh collection.
Just inside the main door is a painting by another of my former tutors at the art college in Newport, Ernie Zobole. Landscape 1 (1981) depicts any and many valley towns and villages, seen at night. A woman closes her bedroom curtains against the parting day; another walks a dog; yet another walks alone; vehicles with headlights blazing follow the winding roads, like Scalextric cars their track; illuminated terraced houses cluster snuggly in the middle and far distance; a full moon (nature’s headlight) sits amid attending clouds; and hills arise like whale backs. The spirits of Samuel Palmer, Marc Chagall, and Paul Nash haunt this landscape. I saw Ernie start it when he was working in the third-year fine art studio in 1981. He would sometimes begin, but never complete, a painting at the art college. Resolution required quiet, solitude, and home.
6.30 pm: An evening with my friend and art-college peer, the artist Mark Williams. As on every other occasion when we’ve met for a pub meal, the conversation centred on art, careers, faith and theology, our follies and mutual friends, and matters close to the heart. Afterwards, we walked over the Newport City footbridge and along the north bank of the Arfon Wysg [River Usk] towards Clarence Place, pausing to reflect on what had passed between us earlier, and the poetry of slow, dark waters as they journeyed south towards the Severn Estuary. ‘This is our Thames’, I whispered to myself.
September 3 (Wednesday). Newport – Aberfan. 6.00 am: Awake. 6.30 am: Writing. This may sound eccentric, but in preparation for my trip to Aberfan, I donned a white shirt and formal trousers, and polished my shoes. I didn’t want to go there as just another disaster tourist. The intent was, rather, to pursue research in situ and pay my respects to those who’d lost their lives 59 years ago, in such appalling circumstances.
My mental conception of the village is monochromatic. It has been formed by the TV broadcasts, newsreel footage, and journalistic photographs of the tragedy, which are in black and white for the greater part. Thus, seeing a landscape and scenes that I’ve come to know well, in full, high-definition, colour, and 3D, took me by surprise … even under an overcast sky and periodic rain showers. The Taff Valley is notorious for its downpours. It would be a poignant and intense first encounter: ‘Tears in the rain’, as Roy Batty signed off.
The Aberfan Disaster Memorial is a sub-section of Mynwent Aberfan a Bryntaf [Aberfan and Bryntaf Cemetery]. It’s clearly visible from the entrance. The linked rows of gravestones look like the scalloped edges of white doilies, laid out. I read every name. They were familiar to me, now. There was Robert Breeze, the only victim who as a ‘z’ in his name. Today, for the first time, I could put faces to some of them — like Anthony Watkins and Royston Hodkinson. In some cases, the deceased parents of the children were added to their graves, later. Reunited beneath the soil, at least. Some inscriptions articulated the profound shock felt by the bereaved at the sudden and unexpected separation, along with the earnest belief that their children were now safe in arms of Him who will not let them go.
The Panglas Junior School Memorial Garden on Moy Road is established on the footprint of the school — the ‘Ground Zero’ of the disaster. It was impossible to comprehend that under its lovingly-tended lawns, children and teachers once fought for their lives, and lost in many cases. From the garden could be seen those terraced houses that had survived the tail-end of the inundation. Other had succumbed entirely.
Bethania Chapel, close to the far end of the road — which was one of two chapels used as a temporary morgue for those who’d perished and been excavated from the slurry — had been demolished, and a new building erected in its stead. Today, it was alive with musicians and dancers. A functioning community hub.
As I walked back along the Taff Trail back to the railway station, I instinctively came to an abrupt halt and looked round about. Below were the remains of the school. I was standing in what was the direct path of the avalanche. Above and to my right, the foothills of the tip that fell once stood. Present and past, a beautiful late-summer’s afternoon after the rain and that fateful, grey autumnal morning, coalesced uncomfortably.
From Aberfan, I travelled to one of the villages beyond, where I met with an old friend whom I’d not seen in over 40 years — since my time in Cardiff (see below). How do you summarise four decades of a life lived apart? You don’t. Instead, we talked about our children and their achievements, and the friends whom we’d had in common prior to the long hiatus. He lives in the same house into which his parents had brought him from the maternity unit.
‘You haven’t changed a bit’, he observed (too generously). ‘We aren’t the same people we were back then’, he added later. ‘Essentially we are’, I demurred. In spite of those afflictions that press upon him presently, I could still see in his lively and curious eyes a younger self. He’s conscious of a time to come, in the not too distant future, when he’ll be forced (to evoke Blade Runner (1982), again) to ‘retire’ from this world. ‘If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all’ (Hamlet). And he is prepared (as far as one can be).
And, after the rain, a promissory bow. (I thought of John Constable.)
September 4 (Thursday). Newport-Cardiff. 8.00 am: Breakfast at an eatery chain that I wouldn’t ordinarily patronise. But at this time of the morning, in this city, it was the only gig. The bar played ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’. 9.00 am: I took the train to Wales’ Capital. Cardiff Central station has undergone a process of architectural evolution since the mid-19th century. In the 1930s, it received a major refurbishment. The Art Deco overlay is conspicuous in the main hall and decorative features beyond, such as the exquisite ceramic signage indicating the way to the platforms. There’s no longer a Platform 5.
I lived and worked in Cardiff in between my degree studies, from 1981 to 1982 (prior to undertaking my Masters in Visual Art), and from 1985 to 1986 (prior to studying a PhD in Art History). On both occasions, I was gainfully employed as a freelance graphic artist (and sometime also as a casual designer and archivist at Cardiff City Council, City Hall). Today (I determined) would be my 40th Anniversary Tour. Some folk leave a place, and don’t come back. I’ve never been able to. A sentimentalist, perhaps. But the historian is too strong with me. And history begins with oneself.
After completing my business at the Glamorgan Archives, I walked the route out of the city centre to where I once lived: from St Andrew’s Place to Salisbury Road, across Lowther Road to Richmond Road, down Northcote Street to City Road, and, finally, across to Kincraig Street. The house still bares the name given to it by the owner when I was staying there. It refers to the place from where the Jewish prophet Amos heralded.
From there, I walked down Donald Street to Hendy Street (where I’d walk my girlfriend home, as gentlemen did in those days), before crossing over Ninian Road to Roath Recreational Ground — which is the lower section of Roath Park. Many a time I’d circuit its paths, trying to thrash out my future course and the affairs of the heart. I deliberately don’t undertake this journey around my past very often. The last time was over a decade ago. I’m conscious that my memories of those years lived in Cardiff may be overwritten by the palimpsest of subsequent ones.
Today, I stood in a ‘gully’ (as we call it in these parts) between two houses. I’d last stood there 43 years ago. My mind ran through all the events, sensations, achievements and failures, gains and losses, healings and sufferings, joys and sorrows, certainties and doubts, surprises and disappointments, and loves and heartaches that had been my life in the intervening years. A foreknowledge of them would’ve crushed me, back then. Likewise, I don’t wish to know what’s to come in the years that are left to me.
At the National Museum Cardiff I attended the Hip-Hop: A Welsh Story exhibition. It’s not a sub-culture that I relate to. Nevertheless, some of the movement’s innovations in DJ-ing and turntablism do inform my own manipulation of vinyl and shellac records. What was most impressive is that the story is being told at this museum. The narrative is a recent history: daring, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, youth-orientated, sound, dance, and word orientated, global, and yet also local. I heartily approve of the organisers’ willingness to risk alienating some sections of the museum’s visitors. I wish other national institutions would have the same vision and courage.
The exhibition exited onto the Turner room. The disparity and disconnect, was as shocking as it was enlivening. I couldn’t quite imagine J W M breakdancing (or ‘doing the mallard’, for that matter). I’d have thought nothing of moving from the Turner room to, say, a medieval manuscripts room. We can accommodate the transition from one past to another, easily. But the sudden shift from the immediate present to a remote past is a very different proposition, psychologically.
I ate a ham and cheese sandwich (I prefer the simplest combinations to the anything more fanciful) in the cafe area, while I caught up with writing. Here, on November 29, 2017, I wrote a postcard that was never sent.
Unexpectedly, in the evening, my host, Mark, drove me upwards and outwards to the edge of the city to look down upon the village (and former legionary fortress) of Caerleon, where I’d lived as a student from 1979 to 1981. The viewing point on top of Christchurch Hill is called ‘The Gollas’ by the locals. We travelled on and through Caerleon to two welcoming pubs in the countryside. Mark and I took dinner at Christchurch, drink at Llanhennock, and furthered the themes of Tuesday’s discussion at both. The night sky was now clear following the late afternoon’s rain. The moon shone bright, like it does in Ernie’s painting. This is Arthur Machen country — enchanted, in the magical sense of that word.
September 5 (Friday). 6.00 am: Awake. At the same unconscionable eatery, men queued for their 8.00 am pint of Carlsberg. I took another and final ambulation across the footbridge and along the riverside, following in my footsteps on Tuesday evening. 10.08 am: I boarded the train for Shrewsbury, where I’d meet my younger son and travel with him onto Aberystwyth.
Over the last week, I’ve listened long and rendered advice only when I’ve been asked. While historic and prospective death has been a dominant theme, so too have remembrance, returns, reunions, and renewed resolution.
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice