A noise like thunder – then my classroom went black. How I lost my brother, sister and stability to the Aberfan disaster

Gaynor Madgwick remembers her excitement that morning in 1966. It was the last day of term, and she and her siblings would be let out of school at lunchtime.

They had got up, three to a bed in their little terraced house in Aberfan, a village in south Wales. Their mother had, as usual, already lit the coal fire. Carl, the only boy among the six children, didn’t want to go to school, but they were sent out with some money to buy a few sweets from the shop on the way.

Madgwick, who was then eight, remembers sitting down in the classroom. Not long after, a monstrous rumbling sound started, getting louder and louder. “You couldn’t really describe what it was,” she says. “It was like thunder. It was so overwhelming it pinned everyone to their seats.” Madgwick had a sense of terror – “that instinct of flight took over me” – and she started to get up from her desk. “I remember just putting a foot out to try and run for the door.” Then the classroom window went black and in an instant she was swept away.

The Aberfan disaster on 21 October 1966 killed 144 people when a spoil tip from the local colliery collapsed, sending waste from the mine surging down the mountain, burying the Pantglas primary school and houses that stood in its path. That day 116 children were killed, 109 of them at the school and most of them between seven and 10 – the children whose classrooms faced the slope. Madgwick’s brother Carl, seven, and sister Marylyn, 10, were among them. “A generation was completely wiped out,” she says. She still lives in Aberfan – we meet at her home, and she sits on the sofa next to stacks of old newspaper clippings, reports and photographs.

For years, people including engineers and councillors, as well as the school’s headteacher, had expressed concerns about the safety of tip No 7, the newest of the tips that loomed over the village, then being used by Merthyr Vale colliery. There had been a smaller slide just three years earlier. No 7 had been sited on the mountainside, with two underground streams beneath – elements that made it extremely dangerous. That morning the slope gave way. It had been raining, it seemed, for weeks. “You don’t get a lot of sunlight in the valleys,” says Madgwick. “When it rains, it just keeps on.”

It wasn’t long after 9am when the avalanche of slurry, mud and colliery waste hit the school. “When I woke up, there was debris everywhere,” says Madgwick. “Another survivor was underneath me, another was next to me. We couldn’t move – we were just pinned by all this debris.” A heavy radiator had been ripped off the wall and had landed on Madgwick – it saved her from being suffocated by a build-up of slurry, but smashed her leg. Her arm was trapped in a crack in the wall between her classroom and the neighbouring one. She noticed a child’s arm hanging through it into her classroom and she took the hand, thinking perhaps it was her brother Carl’s. She noticed its lifelessness.

She didn’t cry, she remembers. “I was just in a shocked state. You couldn’t hear the screams and cries because of the noise of the slurry and everything. It was just overwhelming. I had blood trickling all down my head. I couldn’t see my legs and I couldn’t feel them either. I kept on saying, ‘My legs are gone, my legs are gone.’” She looked over at another child with blood trickling from a head wound.

Madgwick remembers picking up a book. “I don’t know why. In shock. I was reading this book, and there was blood on it, I remember that.” She was aware of other children near her who had survived, one girl was fairly unscathed and was trying to climb up into the collapsed roof to call for help, but she says she doesn’t remember seeing many other children. “A lot of them, sadly, were obviously buried.” She lay there quietly, numb. “The next thing, I heard a man’s voice.”

Men were outside in the hallway. With debris piled up against the door, the only thing they could do was smash the window into the hall. Madgwick realised one of the men was her grandfather, Stan. When she saw him, she says, “That moment I’ll never forget, the despair in his eyes. That was the time I started crying. I can’t imagine what he was thinking because he couldn’t come and get me, but he knew I was alive.”

Stan, and several other men who had been early on the scene, got through the window and started to move debris off children and pass them out through a human chain outside the classroom. It was slow work and Madgwick remembers they struggled to free her. She thinks she had been there for around 45 minutes, and when she was finally lifted clear, it was clear her leg was badly broken. It felt, she says, “like my leg didn’t belong to me. It was just swinging.”

She remembers chaos, sirens, being passed from person to person, seeing the bodies of classmates who hadn’t survived. Her shoes were missing and this distressed her, and she wanted to go back to find them. “Losing your shoes, when you’ve only got one pair, I thought, ‘My mother’s going to give me a row,’” she says, with a small smile. “It was important to me, but it was shock obviously.”

Madgwick had been carried out of the school by her father, and her mother came running up, telling her not to worry about the shoes before she was put into an ambulance; her parents ran back into the school to search for Carl and Marylyn.

The hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, says Madgwick, was “not equipped to deal with injuries on a mass scale. I remember casualties coming in, basically seeing to you, making sure you’re OK, then moving on to the next person.” A few hours later, she was settled on a ward, a schoolfriend next to her. That evening all the Aberfan parents came in. “I recall my mother and my father looking so distraught. I remember my mother and father comforting me. I’d asked my parents then about Carl and Marylyn, and my friends, and I was told that they were in heaven.”

She didn’t cry. “I think from that moment I just was quiet. I became very withdrawn. I was a sad child. You’re that child with a lovely bubbly personality, you’ve got a fabulous loving family, with siblings, and then you become a completely different person. A completely different child.” She pauses. “I was numb, I was lost, I was vulnerable. I’m still vulnerable to this day, at 66.”

She was in hospital for three months, and felt isolated. Beyond visiting, it wasn’t usual for parents to stay in hospital with their children, and her parents also had her three other sisters to look after, including the youngest, a six-month-old baby. “My parents were devastated. They just lost their only son, and a daughter.” Her mother was put on a large dose of Valium, which made her seem distant. “My father obviously was absolutely distraught, and he was fighting, he wanted justice. I had lost my friends, and I was in hospital, left.”

The disaster was not really spoken about, she says. Even on her way home from hospital in the car, passing the “black mass, flattened by then” of where her school had been, her parents didn’t mention it. Later, she found out that her siblings had been told not to talk about it and risk upsetting Madgwick, and they all had the implicit understanding that their mother couldn’t cope with any mention of the disaster.

But it was all around. Madgwick says it was as if the Pied Piper had come and taken away the village’s children. “You could see it in people.” Before the disaster, she and her siblings and other children had all played in the streets, but now they didn’t. “Because when we did, we felt guilty because parents were grieving.” There was a strong sense of resilience and community support, but also mass grief. “Everybody was grieving in some way – they’d lost a brother, sister, aunt, uncle, nephew, niece. So we’re all grieving.”

The family often talked about Carl and Marylyn, even if they didn’t discuss what had happened. Madgwick was aware of her father’s campaigning – he became chair of the memorial committee, and was involved in trying to hold the National Coal Board to account – and of other bereaved parents coming to the house for meetings, but still nobody really talked to her about what she had been through. All the focus, she says, had been on repairing her leg and getting her walking again but not on her psychological trauma (a few years later, Madgwick, along with other survivors, saw a psychiatrist).

She was experiencing what she later realised was survivor’s guilt. “I didn’t know what survivor’s guilt was; I was just going through the emotions of how I was feeling. I suffered because no one could help me deal with it.” She did a lot of magical thinking, wishing she could die so that her brother and sister could be brought back, that it would be better for her parents to have lost one child, rather than two. “That was very difficult to get out of my head. No counselling, nothing, I just had to deal with my own mind.” After the disaster, her parents became atheists but Madgwick clung to her faith. “I had to believe that when I die, I will be reunited with everyone – that gave me a lot of comfort.” She will never know, she says, whose hand she held as she lay covered in slurry and rubble, “but it gives me hope that it may have been Carl’s, and that has given me comfort all my life. You have to have something to hope for.”

Since that day, hers has been a difficult life, she says. “I was always a vulnerable child in the family that my parents protected.” At 19, Madgwick got married and had three children, but the marriage didn’t last. “I wasn’t stable in any way. I didn’t give my children a stable upbringing. I couldn’t hold a job down. When I look back, I feel it impacted on so many things.” She has “three beautiful children, and I’m the proud grandmother of six grandchildren”, and a good relationship with her former husband – he lets himself in her front door with a cheery greeting to have a quick chat about one of their children – but she also says: “My life has been unstable, chaotic, quite isolated.” When her children were young, she was anxious and never let them to go to school by themselves. “I hated them going on school trips. The anxiousness. I’ve always been pessimistic. I always think something’s going to happen.”

She used to drink a lot and has had two operations on her wrists after falling and breaking them (the last accident prompted her to stop drinking 10 years ago). “Because I’ve suffered so much anxiety and guilt, and I’ve been in some very bad places.” She was hospitalised with panic attacks around the 30th anniversary of the disaster in 1996 and says she has suffered with psychosis. Three years ago, she was finally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and she has been seeing a high-intensity therapist every week since. “It has taken three years to unravel what happened to me,” says Madgwick.

It has helped her make sense of some of her behaviour. “I was an erratic teenager,” she says. She would shoot birds, which she says sickens her now, but her therapist explained it was a form of “post-traumatic play”. “As a child, when you go through trauma and don’t have any support, you reenact trauma. It makes me feel a bit more comfort knowing that. I’d never hurt an animal now, but I was doing that as a child.” She has always struggled to have relationships, “and that’s been the same for a lot of survivors. I could never sustain a relationship. No one can put up with the way I am. I’m unpredictable. I like to be on my own a lot.”

Although a tribunal blamed the National Coal Board for the disaster, nobody was prosecuted; bereaved families received just £500 in compensation. When the government took £150,000 from the charitable fund set up for the community to remove the tips around the village, it “was another injustice done to Aberfan. It took 30 years to get our money back.” The money was returned in 1997 by Ron Davies, the Welsh secretary in the New Labour government, though without interest or adjusting for inflation. It was another 10 years before the Welsh assembly gave £1.5m.

Those who might have been prosecuted are long dead, but the effects of that day live on. The lack of justice “breaks my heart”, says Madgwick. “It always has. I have never been a bitter person but it started to sort of …” Proper compensation and an acknowledgement of the damage done to Madgwick and other survivors would have made their lives “a bit better”, she says.

She says she threw herself into work, often to the detriment of her own wellbeing. Madgwick has worked with young offenders, for the children’s charity Barnardo’s, and currently works for the council supporting people back into work. It gives her a sense of purpose and pride, but sometimes it has meant “I’ve forgotten about myself. That’s the price I have paid for going through what I went through.” It was partly about coping with survivor’s guilt, “trying to compensate in life. Why was I chosen to survive?”

In 2015, before her father died, Madgwick finally talked to her parents, to try to piece together what had happened, and what the effect had been on them. “That was the only time that I really got to find out things,” she says. “I’ll never have closure, but it does give you that little bit to know certain things.” She published her memoir in 2016, and telling her story gives her purpose. She often gives talks to schools and other organisations. “I believe I survived for a reason. I want to make sure that I keep on telling the story for people to listen, to understand. I don’t want us to be forgotten. I believe I survived to help others achieve their potential in life, to show there is a life outside trauma.”