Aberfam

The fiftieth anniversary of Aberfam sat with me yesterday.
.Fifty years ago I was in labour awaiting the birth of my daughter and as the news filled the ward I was horrified by what I heard.
Children crushed to death by huge slags of coal rubble on the move......
It brought back memories of everything my grandad had told me about the conditions of the mines and the lack of care of those who made huge profits from coal and the men who laboured to produce it.
My grandad had been a miner, locked out after the general strike. He had walked from South Wales to Lancashire to find work.
He told me how it was the women and children who starved during this period . His lovely lilting Welsh voice became hard and bitter as he remembered.
The waste from the mines was left in great heaps , killing all the wild life, and keeping the coal dust constantly blowing onto fields trying to grow food .
He would not have been surprised by the tragedy....along with many more old miners......this had been the subject of many a long nights rant over the years...
Lying in my clean hospital bed I wept then....It was not the pain of labour....it was because all that my grandad had dreaded had finally come to pass and those poor children and their parents were reaping the bitter harvest!
Yesterday I wept again and prayed that mans pursuit of profit could never have such drastic results......
But the anticipated setting up of fracking sounds horribly familiar!


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