Aberfan

Yesterday I spoke at a Primary School Harvest Assembly.  One of the songs that was sung - by Year 3  (7/8 year olds) - was All things bright and beautiful.  Perhaps nobody else in the 400 plus people in the room realised the poignancy of singing that hymn this week.

On the morning of October 21, 1966 the primary school children sang it in assembly at the primary school in Aberfan, South Wales.  The assembly lasted from 9:00am to 9:15am.  I was many miles away in eastern England, though would have been an 8 year old in that assembly had Aberfan been my home.

Which is why I've thought about it a lot this week.  For 88 children just like me died at 9:15am straight after that assembly when the National Coal Board's reckless mountain of slag swept down the hillside and buried the school, sending into eternity a generation of my contemporaries, aged 7-9 and 28 adults.

There are many sad ironies about that particular hymn being sung which both at the time and on reflection have occurred to many observers.  Although we often blame Nature (and by extension its Creator who also makes the bright and the beautiful) for disasters, the Aberfan disaster lay squarely on the shoulders of man.  In South Wales at the time all that was dark and ugly in the landscape was man-made and all that was bright and beautiful was created by God.  But the hymn still feels wrong somehow,

Yet maybe today as the old school site has a peaceful memorial garden it is more helpful to think of the bright and beautiful as the long-term and the dark disasters as short term.  Of course they do not seem very short term to a village that lost a generation.  Yet worldwide from Cambodia to Congo to Hiroshima to St Petersburg there are places haunted by ancient awfulness which have returned to a brightness and beauty in their time.

I thought of that a couple of years ago when visiting the mountain retreat of the Third Reich in the Alps.  Beauty outlasts the Beast.  In the end nobody in heaven sings songs of mourning - not even the martyrs.