Friday 21 October 1966 started like any other weekday in the mining village of Aberfan. It was still raining which did not bode well for the coming half-term break. In Pantglas Junior School teachers were taking their registers when the mountainside started to slip. They had no warning as mine waste came crashing through the school and nearby houses.
The tip had always scared villagers. Parents had petitioned the council to no avail. Following the disaster, the official Aberfan Tribunal Report concluded that it was down to ‘a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude’ on the part of the National Coal Board (NCB), though no-one – including the Chairman of the NCB – were to lose their jobs. 116 children and 28 adults lost their lives, and countless villagers and rescuers were to suffer from long-term PTSD and ‘survivors’ guilt’.
The dangers of appropriation
By the time Netflix’s The Crown dramatised the disaster, Jo Browning Wroe had already written a factual piece for the New Statesman and was four years into writing A Terrible Kindness.
“It’s something people often ask me,” she tells me. “Whether there were dangers of appropriation in writing about the suffering.”
Despite a raft of good reviews, this has remained a worry. Especially as one dissenting voice in the Guardian (the one newspaper Jo identifies with) labelled A Terrible Kindness ‘a little tasteless.’ “I would never have considered writing a novel from the point of view of someone living in Aberfan,” she says.
The book focuses instead on an unsung volunteer embalmer from Sutton Coldfield who helps staff a makeshift morgue in the village chapel.
Defining kindness
Jo’s protagonist – a newly qualified embalmer called William Lavery – is attending a celebratory dance when this is cut short by a telegram that sets him driving through the night to Aberfan. As the children are pulled from the debris, the young man is there to administer a ‘terrible kindness’ to their battered bodies. And when their small coffins are buried, so is a part of himself alongside memories from his own childhood.
The real focus of A Terrible Kindness is how we grow up or become stunted and families fall apart. So, what’s Jo’s definition of kindness?
“It means acting for the benefit of others…and sometimes that’s hard and costs the person giving it.”
Finding William
We are meeting in Cambridge University Library – a vast storehouse of human understanding. It was here that Jo first stumbled across the disaster.
As a teenager she had seized the opportunity of escape offered her by a B.Ed course at Cambridge’s Homerton College. Years later, curious about a speech her father had given at a conference of undertakers and coffin makers, the library seemed the obvious place to try to unearth it. Jo adds wryly, “Frankly, it was bit of a disappointing talk!”
By chance, as she flipped through the conference notes, she came across an account by Billy Doggart who coordinated the embalmers’ volunteer efforts at Aberfan. “I read it and was just in floods of tears. I was overwhelmed by the phenomenal things they did.”
“Within a week I was on a plane to Belfast, and we met at the airport.” After an initial reluctance, Mr Doggart agreed to talk. “Four and a half hours later he stopped talking and said, ‘Maybe this story could be told.’”
Another embalmer told her, “It was awful, but I can’t disassociate these things from being in love, because I’d just literally got back from honeymoon.”
“That made me think, ‘What if someone went and there was a real brokenness to their lives?’ and got me started on the character of William.”
Music
As a young boy William joins the Chapel choir school of a Cambridge College and gets to sing Allegri’s choral masterpiece Miserere (the title translates as ‘be merciful’) . It is a piece that has enthralled Jo since she was just eight, when her father had explained, “That voice is a boy your age.”
“It is so obviously beautiful,” she says. “You don’t need any background in music or understanding.”
The second is the popular Welsh song Myfanwy, which tells of confused and confounded love. Jo says, it “was one of those gifts that landed in my lap when I was writing.”’ Listening to BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music, she heard how the song haunted one man as he desperately dug out children with his bare hands. “It opens wounds,” he told the programme, “but it also gives me comfort.”
Music is one of the many things that excite Jo about living in Cambridge. “I love going to evensong in the chapels…there are these world-class singers and some of them are seven years old!”
Cambridge
Jo’s student days saw her fall in love with the university city (and her husband), though some aspects came as a bit of shock. “I came from a comprehensive school and had no idea that most of these people would be from a very wealthy background. I was just so ignorant.”
“There’s something about youth and arriving, talent, intelligence. It’s the energy of the ideas pinging around the place.”
Since then, she has taught evening classes at the sixth form college, mentored writing students at the university, and become heavily involved in the city’s literary festival.
“I know it’s very privileged and it’s rarified and, sometimes, there’s a bit of discomfort with that.”
“But there are so many people who are working for good and doing really interesting things.”
Things like the ‘extraordinary reading experience’ of the novel (Richard and Judy book club).
When Jo met one of the survivors of Aberfan, the woman’s response heartened her. “I don’t think I can read it,” she told Jo, “but I think I like the spirit in which you’ve written it.”
As the disaster fades from public memory, thanks to A Terrible Kindness, the story of the resilience of the survivors lives on.
