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400 pages, Hardcover
First published January 20, 2022
Time to clamp his defences back down before the flotsam and jetsam of his own life is washed up by the tidal wave of Aberfan’s grief; his father’s death, the abrupt end to his chorister days, the rift with his mother, with Martin. And now, Gloria. The cold hardens around him and the weight of the white sky seems to push down on the hillside. He can tell by the rise and fall of their voices that the villagers are singing ‘Jesu, Lover of My Soul’
William makes himself look at his old friend. ‘I’m a head case. Lots of things do funny things to me, including choral music and in particular, you won’t be surprised to hear, the “Miserere”. I’m estranged from my mother, I haven’t spoken to you, my best friend, since I left here, and I won’t have children. Some days I’m fine, others not. I get palpitations, tunnel vision and flashbacks; awake or asleep, they get me any which way.’
I’m damned if I’m going to look for songs that aren’t about love and life and loss and pain and joy. This is being human.
A Terrible Kindness was inspired by conversations I had with two embalmers, by then in their 70’s, who as young men had gone in 1966 as volunteers to the Aberfan disaster, when a mining waste tip, loosened by rain had careered down the Welsh mountainside and onto a small village primary school.
The story is about William Lavery, a young, newly qualified embalmer who answers the call to help. The book begins and ends in Aberfan, but in between are 17 years of William’s life, as a boy chorister in Cambridge, in London training to be an embalmer, and after Aberfan, with post-traumatic stress disorder, and his marriage in trouble, William returns to Cambridge and helps with a choir for the homeless, reconnecting with his musical roots and ultimately a return to Aberfan, to try and mend the fractured relationships in his life.
Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me.
Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco: et peccatum meum contra me est semper.
Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincas cum judicaris.
What if he’d chosen differently? What if all that had happened could have made him a bigger person? If each disaster had been a crossroads at which he could have taken a better path? It’s too painful to dwell on.
What a terrible mess we can make of our lives. There should be angel police to stop us at these dangerous moments, but there don’t seem to be. So all we’re left with, my precious son, is whether we can forgive, be forgiven and keep trying our best.