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Richard Edwards reviews
To Hear the Skylark’s Song: A Memoir of Aberfan By Huw Lewis

Huw Lewis’s memoir begins with the Aberfan disaster, when he was three, and ends when he was ten. This intense focus is both a strength and a frustration. It results in a vivid narrative that deserves to join the canon of writing on life in the Valleys, but it perhaps marginalises Lewis’s mature, thoughtful reflections on the cries and whispers of despair he heard in the background to his childhood. Aberfan lost a generation when a tip collapsed above the village. While he begins and ends with this unimaginable darkness, he paints a captivating picture of a community that, despite everything, was ‘a warm and wonderful place to grow up in’.

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