David Davies was eight years old when he survived the coal tip slide that killed a generation of children in the Welsh village of Aberfan. Most years the disaster’s anniversary passes quietly, he says; much of the community chooses to spend the day reflecting and mourning in the privacy of their homes.
His own recollection of what happened on the cloudy autumn morning in 1966 is hazy. His father, one of the volunteers who uncovered the corpses of more than 100 children from the buried Pantglas primary school, said that when he was handed his son’s unconscious body, he initially thought he was dead.
