‘The Saddest Thing’ by Elisa Hill

‘I was suffocating; an unbearable weight holding me - complete darkness except for one finger I could move. I moved it and gently touched another person. I knew it was a dream and was trying to get my husband to wake me up.’
For a few days back then my mum turned off the news and radio whenever I was around. I didn't remember this until years later when I met someone from this tiny Welsh village. Their whole family had moved away for work ,one of the few families to leave, and one of the only ones who did not lose anyone.
It was the anniversary, 30 years, and as we watched it on TV, they seemed to know everyone who spoke. My mother-in-law said wryly, "Everyone there is a poet."
"Evans the Shop” that was the name she had in the village. On that dreadful day, she had looked out of the window and watched as the village went by. The usual daily routine. The children had passed a while earlier on their way to school, pleased it was just to be a half day Half an hour or so later, the stragglers came: one little girl, who had felt ill - her mum convincing her that she could manage just for the morning. There goes the milkman, her son-in-law. The post man, delivery drivers, everyone waved at her in greeting. She was a fixture, accepted by all -comfortable and predictable. She had started the shop when the last of the cave-ins had happened, terrified her husband, a miner, would be lost.
There was that terrible rumbling again. It had gone on all night, thunder, miserable weather, misty and drizzling. Then there was a very large rumble - louder than before. It seemed wrong somehow, different to the rest. She went outside. It seemed the whole village were at their front doors, wondering. Then a child came running down the street covered in ash from head to foot. She was screaming, " The schools exploded, the schools exploded."
She looked at her grandson’s new wife, who was looking horrified, but trying not to show it. It was a Sunday afternoon, when the whole family got together. It was still on the TV. People speaking - those she had known since they were in prams
They never built the school again. Her grandchildren were taken by bus to a nearby town.
Her son-in-law, was talking; telling them about how he was one of the first to get there and how he started to pull out the ones near the edge. They had been taken to her cousins’ daughter’s house, just where the ash had stopped. Some were still alive, some died there. The saddest thing was the local doctor who had joined the line of men passing out the children. As he passed his own two sons out he had just paused, looked down at them lovingly and went on to pass the next child.
The mines had closed. Everyone from surrounding villages had come to help. It seemed as if time itself stood still. The miners had downed tools and come straight over to help.
Her daughter’s friend had brought home her new baby a few days before. Her daughter had passed and waved at her saying she would visit her the next day. Her house had been buried.
She looked over at her husband, who was sitting at the end of the large front room, hearing aid off, not wanting to see the T.V. She looked at his hands with the coal dust still in his skin - a deeply ingrained dust.