The valleys

I’m in Cardiff, staying in a Premier Inn with the longest corridors I’ve ever seen. I have a curse when it comes to staying in hotels. I always get put in the room furthest away from reception. If there’s an annexe, I’ll be placed in it. If there’s a hotel wing up a spiral staircase and through a fire escape, I’ll be in the last room on the left!

I’m Cardiff with Michael and we’re wearing two different hats, which both involve getting to know the South Walean Jewish community. One hat specifically involves researching the once thriving, but now dead Jewish community in Merthyr Tydfil.

Merthyr still has a synagogue building, which closed in the mid 1980s when the last Jewish people moved on. Since then, the building, which is a stunning example of 19th Century Gothic Revival architecture, has remained empty and is slowly falling down. There’s a massive hole in the roof and it’s presently on a list of the 19 most “at risk” synagogues in the world. 

You can’t miss it. It sits on a hillside at the end of a street lined with Victorian brick built buildings. From a distance it looks grand, but closer up, it’s impossible to miss the broken windows and buddleia bushes growing through the brick work. Look even closer and you’ll see an old supermarket trolley shoved up the side of the building, filled with bags of mouldy Gregg’s pasties. It’s so sad to see such an important space being humiliated so badly.

But then again, the whole of Merthyr is suffering. On the same street as the synagogue, an ornate early 20th Century stone Miners’ Hall is slowly falling down. Shops are boarded over. It’s very sad. Gangs of young people walk the streets with nothing to do but smoke cigarettes, look threatening and steel traffic cones. 

Of course, my initial response was that the synagogue must be saved at all cost, but then I started to wonder what I was hoping it would be turned into. There are no Jews in the valleys these days so a Jewish community centre is out of the question. A Jewish museum would be pointless because who would go all the way to Merthyr for one of them? A museum which looks at persecution in all of its forms? Bull shit! The predominantly white working class people of this once prosperous town are possibly the most persecuted people in the country. They’re out of work, poor and utterly ignored by government after government. Unless you bother to stop and ask that gang of young people what it is that THEY actually want, we’ll all be grasping at straws. And we’ll continue to fail that particular community. 

We took ourselves into the stunningly beautiful hills above Merthyr to find the old Jewish cemetery, which is amongst the most lovely graveyards I’ve ever visited. It’s still a working cemetery. Most of the graves are 19th Century, but we found graves which were placed as recently as 2017. The views from up there are spectacular. You can see all the way across the valley. The graves themselves are surrounded by tall, straw-like grasses which gently sway in the wind. It’s so atmospheric and magical.

I was particularly moved to read the names written on the stones, which were often Welsh first names with Jewish surnames. My own Welsh relatives are not the Jewish ones in my family, but there was something specifically powerful about being able to commune with Jewish Welsh people. I felt a true sense of one-ness. 

There was also something deeply unnerving about seeing quite so many Jewish graves on that glorious Welsh hillside. Here was all that was left of a community who’d played a vital role in the history of a town and then simply evaporated. Just like that. I wondered how Welsh they felt. Whether they actually spoke Welsh? The sad truth is that, one day in the not too distant future, all the Jewish people in Wales will have either died or moved on. It’s a rapidly dwindling population. 

From Merthyr, we took a very deep breath and travelled to Aberfan. The very mention of this Welsh village fills many with a sense of absolute horror and sadness. In 1966, an avalanche of slurry engulfed the town, killing 144 people, the large majority of whom were children in a primary school. The death of 116 children in one single tragedy is almost impossible to comprehend, particularly when considering the town had fewer than 2000 residents at the time. 

I have always been deeply proud to tell people that my father was one of the rescue workers. His memories of the event stayed locked inside for many years and they’re his and not mine to report so I shan’t be repeating them. Suffice to say I’d never visited the place before and I found the experience both upsetting and very calming. My father was never far from my thoughts. I kept wondering whether the pub we were outside was the one where the landlord gave him a drink on the house. And whether the place today would have been recognisable to someone who was there on that awful day.
The village feels somehow sad. Perhaps I was expecting it to be. Perhaps the residents are bored of visitors who somehow won’t allow the place to move on. Perhaps it was simply that we were there on a Sunday and no one was out and about.
It’s another place in the valleys which has been ignored. There were many broken windows and a whole church in the middle of the village had fallen to wrack and ruin.
A giant wind turbine’s blades poke up from behind one of the hillsides above the town. There’s something rather comically surreal about seeing a set of blades spinning over the top of a heather-covered hillside.
We went to the town’s cemetery where an iconic white granite monument features an arch for every child killed in the landslide. Walking along the rows of little plaques, you become aware that many parents actually lost two children that day. And, of course, in recent years, most of those parents have been reunited with their kids, having grieved them, no doubt, for a lifetime.
I stood and stared at one little plaque for some time. It simply said “Richard, who loved light, freedom and animals.” What wonderful things to love.
We were lucky with the weather all day. Blue skies. Fast moving clouds. Straw-coloured sunlight.
The day ended on Caerphilly Mountain, which was a riot of glorious magenta-coloured lupinesque flowers and brave views across the valleys. It was the most peaceful spot we’d visited. Much of our time had been accompanied by the sound of the A470, which runs through or around all the towns we visited. The hillsides must create some sort of sonic funnelling effect because the sound of the road was very much amplified to the point of becoming somewhat grating.
The A470 runs from the South Coast of Wales at Cardiff all the way to the North Coast at Llandudno. For such an important road, it’s fairly winding and often single carriage way. We started to wonder whether its existence is evidence of the English deliberately suppressing the Welsh. It’s surely no coincidence that the M4 motorway makes it much easier and faster for Cardiff residents to travel to London than it is for them to snake their way up to the north of their own country. Hmm... Do I smell a rat?