Gaynor Madgwick, now 67, was eight years old when a colliery spoil tip collapsed on her primary school in Aberfan, south Wales, on 21 October 1966. The disaster killed 144 people, including 116 children, 109 of them at Pantglas primary school. Madgwick lost her brother Carl, seven, and sister Marylyn, ten, in the tragedy.
Madgwick remembers the morning as the last day of term, full of excitement. She and her siblings had been sent to school with money for sweets. In the classroom, a monstrous rumbling sound began, like thunder, pinning everyone to their seats. She tried to run for the door, but the window went black and she was swept away by the avalanche of slurry, mud and colliery waste.
When she woke, debris was everywhere. A heavy radiator had landed on her, saving her from suffocation but smashing her leg. Her arm was trapped in a crack in the wall. She noticed a child's arm hanging through the crack and took the hand, thinking it might be her brother Carl's, but it was lifeless. She lay quietly, numb, until she heard a man's voice and saw her grandfather, Stan, in the hallway. The despair in his eyes made her start crying.
Madgwick later took on the harrowing task of identifying children's bodies before their parents could see them, to spare them the trauma. She still lives in Aberfan and has spent decades dealing with the aftermath, including the guilt of surviving when so many did not. The disaster, caused by a colliery spoil tip sited on a mountainside with underground streams, had been warned about for years but no action was taken.
