All Things Bright and Beautiful
It was another random October Friday in 1966 America.
October 21st, 1966. A random Friday on the central plains.
The other night while watching television, I learned that October 21st, 1966 was by no means a random Friday in the Welsh village of Aberfan.
Yes, I've been somewhat dilatory when it comes to the Netflix series The Crown. Forgive me, Pandemic World.
The third episode of season three opens at the end of a rainy Thursday in an elementary classroom at the Pantglas Junior School in Aberfan. A young teacher is ready to dismiss the restless students when he reminds them to practice singing the special hymn for the Friday morning assembly - All Things Bright and Beautiful.
The students appear to be third or fourth graders, maybe nine or ten years old. They're antsy, end-of-the-day ornery, energetic, bright, beautiful.
Very much like my son.
There's an uncomfortable sense of foreboding as the children leave the school, hustling back to their homes and families through the drenched streets of Aberfan, where the rain had persisted for several days. Each child is carrying the music to All Things Bright and Beautiful, some singing quietly to themselves as they go. The Anglican hymn originated in a place not far from Aberfan a little over a century earlier.
My son sings to himself all the time, never quietly. He's also at that age where he loves to read and yet still enjoys being read to. The book we'd been flying through together was James Patterson's wonderful Word of Mouse, about a very special mouse who escapes from a lab to find his missing family - a story of survival, determination, and the power of friendship. We had but a few pages left to read.
But now he was in bed and I was watching Netflix.
The season three, third episode of The Crown then moves to the next morning in Aberfan - Friday, October 21st. As the same children scurry off to school, the rain has finally stopped, but workers headed for the mines in the hill directly above the village discover trouble.
Serious trouble.
In the school classroom we'd seen the previous day, the teacher is taking attendance just before 9am and one plucky young boy answers, not by saying "here," but by singing the first line of All Things Bright and Beautiful as his classmates collectively giggle. The teacher raises a single eyebrow, as teachers do.
Then tragedy.
At around 9:15 that morning more than 150,000 cubic meters of water-saturated debris break away and flow downhill at high speed. A mass of over 40,000 cubic meters of debris slides into the village in a slurry nearly 40-feet deep.
Season three, episode three of The Crown leaves very little to the imagination.
It was horrific to watch.
The slide destroyed a farm and twenty terraced houses. It struck the northern side of the Pantglas Junior School and part of the separate senior school, demolishing most of the structures and filling the classrooms with thick mud and rubble up to 33-feet deep.
144 lives were lost - 116 were children, all at school.
Then you try to go to sleep. Try.
Well, the next morning there was coffee and yogurt and granola - and a pleading nine-year-old wanting to finish Word of Mouse before heading for school. This was our son's first week back to his elementary classroom after having missed the last three months of in-person second grade and nearly the first six months of in-person third grade due to the pandemic.
So yes, we would finish the book.
My mind was completely removed from what I had viewed on Netflix just eight hours earlier as I began to read the final ten pages of the book. Isaiah, the blue mouse protagonist, had managed to free his family from the lab. The young girl (Hailey) who befriended and assisted Isaiah had brought him along to a special church service - a service for the blessing of the animals. These were the pages I saw:
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