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. �.