Seven suicides within a year, all young people who lived within a few miles of each other and died by hanging. Each of them knew at least one of the others, all of them used internet chat rooms on which it is well known that suicide is sometimes glamorised. A bid for immortality then?

An enduring way of attracting attention? It is a neat theory, especially when the young people lived in Bridgend county, an area of South Wales not known for beauty or affluence, or anything really except the young lives of the rugby players J. P .R. Williams and Gavin Henson. The town centre is dominated by the bargain emporium Wilkinsons, and it’s easy to find Peacocks, Aldi and Lidl. It’s that kind of place, ordinary, a small town where people try to work but many don’t. It could be anywhere in Britain; people get by here, not many move on.

But obvious theories can be simplifications, especially when they’re imposed from the outside, and there have been similar clusters of suicides in Staffordshire and Northern Ireland. What do the locals think? They are wary and they want the story to go away. Standing on their doorsteps, they shake their heads. They don’t want to theorise because these deaths are too close to home, they feel for the parents who have lost children — all of whom are mystified and doubt the internet theory. Even the professionals, who we might expect to have an explanation, are baffled. When I speak to a senior social worker who knows the area well, she mentions other cases in which young people have killed themselves without obviously having suffered from depression — the catalyst may have been an argument. “These deaths come out of the blue, without any explanation,” she says. “It could be a sort of copycat thing, and the net is a likely target. From the cases I’ve been involved with it seems that young people are killing themselves as an extreme reaction to everyday things. They’re not being bullied, they’re not in high-achieving families where they feel they’ve failed. It’s as though they do it without expecting any consequences, and that’s hard to understand.”

Melanie Davies is equally baffled. She is the mother of Thomas, who was 20 when he walked to the woods a mile from his home in North Cornelly and hanged himself, using a Tarzan rope already attached to a tree as a swing. Whether or not he knew the rope was there cannot be known, but his mother believes that he didn’t plan his death. “It was spur of the moment,” she says. “He didn’t leave a note. When he went out that morning he said to his brother, ‘Tell Mammy I’ll see her after’. He’d got his trousers out to go to the funeral of Dai Dilling [who had killed himself]. He knew him because they’d been at school together. He’d polished his shoes, he had a tie. I said, ‘You wouldn’t do that to me, would you? Kill yourself like those two boys.’ He said ‘I love you too much for that, Mammy.’ That was a couple of days before he did it and when the police came to the door I went, ‘Oh my God, what’s he been up to? Had a fight or been mouthing off?’ Then the policewoman said, ‘I’m really sorry . . .’ ”

We are in the living room of the home where Thomas grew up. It’s part of a council estate that looks bleak in January, but as an outsider it isn’t the kind of place where you fear to walk or leave your car. Here there are wide patches of grass where children can play and many of the homes, like Melanie’s, have been bought by their residents — scoliosis prevents her from working but her partner of eight years has a good job in security. The house is tidy, Scruff the mongrel dozes in his basket and the walls are full of school photographs and family snaps of Thomas and his brother — and the Wales rugby team.

Thomas, Melanie’s oldest son, was born when she was 14. She hasn’t seen his father since Thomas was 4, she says. She is 36 now. A year after Thomas’s death she still has no idea what lay behind it and dismisses the notion of copycat deaths — he didn’t know Dale Crone or Dilling (the first two young men named as part of this suicide cluster) well enough, she says — and nor does she believe that her son was influenced through the internet. “He’d spend two or three hours on the computer at night but he only used to talk to people he knew well, his friends. I could walk into his bedroom and he never tried to cover up what was on the screen, and he never talked about death or dying. It doesn’t make sense to me. He was a normal kid. Stayed in most of the week but always out at the weekend. He was looking for a job — the amount of application forms I found upstairs. He’d worked at Sony but they’re always laying people off, aren’t they? He was a bit down about that because when he had a job he could go out and buy clothes.

“About a week before he died some of his friends had been messing about like gladiators, his friend tripped and he went down with him and banged his face. He had seven or eight stitches and he was so vain it bugged him. That might have contributed to it. He said, ‘It’s going to scar really bad, Mam’. I said it won’t if you leave it alone. We were going to a family wedding and he said people would ask about his face so he didn’t go.”

The rest of the family did go and returned home about midnight on Saturday February 24 last year. Thomas was not at home and died in the early hours of the following day. The inquest revealed that his alcohol count was two-and-a-half times the driving limit, but there was no trace of drugs; his mother sometimes asked him if he took drugs and he always denied it. She reveals that he had had an Asbo and two custodial sentences of a few months, one at a young offender institution, the other in prison, both for threatening behaviour or violence. She seems unsure about what happened, though she says that alcohol changed him. “It wasn’t his fault but he was with the gang. One of his friends threw a bottle, it smashed near a pram. They went down because of the baby. About three months. He was the most caring, loving boy you could wish for when sober. When he was drunk he was different. When he was drunk he hated the police. The kids round here, they’ve got nothing to do. You see them going round in gangs of six — when there’s six of them and they shout, they do look intimidating.”

Thomas was not in a gang in the sense of an organised criminal unit, she says. He had calmed down since his prison sentence, she maintains, but was frustrated that his convictions were stopping him from finding work.

I ask how Thomas saw his future. He wanted to go to college, find a girlfriend and have children, but not yet, she says. “He was jack-the-lad with girls. He used to tease me and say I’ve got seven kids. When he died, I thought I hope he did, but he didn’t. I’d like nothing better than a knock on the door and someone saying here’s your grandchild.”

His funeral was attended by hundreds of people, she says. Was he confident? “I know he was more confident when he had a drink. If he was worried by anything he’d always talk to me. I’ve asked his friends — were there any other problems? They all say no.”

If there is no explanation does this mean that no one was responsible? I suggest that Thomas felt uncertain about his future. “Everybody gets that, don’t they?” his mother replies. “There was nothing unusual about him. They all look the same, all dress the same. When I saw him in the chapel of rest I gave him a row — ‘you’ve got two pairs of jeans in the house still with the tags on’. He was so particular. I’d bleached his hair blond two weeks before he died. It was longer on top, shaved at the back, but he’d still check it in the mirror. I’d go ‘Yes Thomas, it can’t stick out because it’s too short’. I don’t know why he died and I feel lost.”

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