Lockdown Legends Online by Llenyddiaeth Cymru

Lockdown Legends Online

Memories and Stories from Elders in Wales

Lockdown Legends Online Collected in June & July 2020 By Fiona Collins During the lockdown in Wales in response to the Covid-19 pandemic Copyright © 2020 Fiona Collins & Literature Wales All rights reserved.

Lockdown Legends Online

This project gave an opportunity for older people to use the ‘lockdown’ to recall and recount stories that mean a lot to them from different times in their lives, using technology to connect with each other around Wales and create a shared collection of memories. Here are some thoughts from the participants on taking part: * The lockdown has given one time to think and reflect on life (Jack) * I feel it’s time to put a few facts on paper (Vivian) * In this time, people really go deeper and it’s very retrospective, even if you don’t even try (Erika) * There are layers and layers to people, I think: always something new to be discovered (Jez) * I’ve been collecting stories all my life. There are not many people of my age still living in Llangwm to tell the stories (Jane) * I’m the only one left that knows the local history (Ann) * It’s going back a few years (Annie) * There’s not many around that can remember the first days of the war, and the last (Olive)

It was an honour and a privilege to hear and collect these stories. My heartfelt thanks for your generosity to: Ann, Annie, Erika, Jack, Jane, Jez, Olive and Vivian. Very many thanks, also, for your enthusiasm, help and support, to: Wendy Rogers, Activity Coordinator, Glan Rhos Nursing Home, Brynsiencyn Siân Legg, Newton Court Care Home, The Mumbles Taking care of our elders and listening to their stories gives us an insight into unconditional love, and helps us love them in the same manner. iii

Thank you to Literature Wales for commissioning this project. Fiona Collins, Storyteller and Story Collector

Lockdown Legends Online

The stories, the storytellers, where they live now, and where to find their stories:

1 Ann & Annie’s story, Brynsiencyn, Anglesey

2 Erika Zsuzsanna’s story, Nantmel, Powys

3 Jack Davies’ story, The Mumbles, Swansea

4 Jane Ellis’ story, Llangollen, Denbighshire

5 Jez Danks’ story, Trefenter, Ceredigion

6 Olive’s story, The Mumbles, Swansea

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7 Vivian Williams’ story, Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan

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Lockdown Legends Online

Ann, born 1950 in Brynsiencyn, and Annie, born 1921 in Brynsiencyn, both living in Brynsiencyn. Transcribed 9/7/ 2020

Ann: This is a story from the 1800s onward, could be 1850.

Annie: I’m talking about the Rhos - a road very near Brynsiencyn in Anglesey. It was called the Rhos Fawr in days gone by.

Ann: I’ve been on google for the meaning of rhos- it’s moorland or marshland. There are a few places that are very marshy. They dried up when they were doing the road.

Annie: It had metling on the road, which are small stones. There are so many quarries all around and there were old men sitting cutting the stones. They were paid about five old pennies an hour. And then the cold tar came, of course - black stuff. We were waiting for that to come for playing on it when it was soft, very soft.

Ann: I remember in the summer, the cold tar was gone soft and it was sticking on the shoes. Do they still do the coal tar soap?

Annie: The houses along the Rhos, first was Fron Farm on the left, and then your home Penrhos, Ann, on the right, then two Maes Merllyn, those were attached. Then Merllyn, which means ‘stagnant pool’, and Glan Aber, and then I went over the road to the Francis family: I can’t find the meaning of the house name, Tyddyn Goblet, well, tyddyn of course, but Goblet?

Ann: Could it have been a brewery or hostelry?

Annie: We came to Waterloo, the house on the corner of the junction, the crossroad, which was named after the battle, I should think. Then there were only two houses on the left, Llain Delyn and Pen Gongl, and then we came to the these four little houses, Merddyn Gwyn and Merddyn Ruin. There was a farm, Tŷ’n Cwrt, on the corner.

That’s the end of the Rhos, the end of the stretch, but if you want to go to Brynsiencyn, you carry on, on the left, and there’s Tŷ Gwyn Bach first and Tŷ Gwyn.

Ann: And really now, I’m the only one left that knows the local history of Brynsiencyn and the locals, and perhaps most of them are not interested. Youngsters these days do not want the family history or antiques. They just sell them or throw them away. In years to come they won’t have any family history or local history. People are moving about everywhere, and coming into the village. Brynsiencyn itself, there is a Community Facebook page and I am on it, but I only know two, all the 2

rest are completely new people to the village. They won’t know the history. (To Annie): Your boys will perhaps know ….

Annie: But the end of my story is this Rhos home, Glan Rhos, down the road. I’m living on the road I’ve always lived on, but on the other side of the road. And we’re very happy here, both of us. But I would like to know more about the history. Before Glan Rhos was a nursing home, it was Glan Rhos Gesail, in the shadow of Tyddyn Goblet. The owners’ grandparents had a nursery here, a market garden, and sold fruit and veg.

Ann: With the story of the Bwgan Ifan, I would like to know if they are related to my family again. I’ve been brought up with this story. There was a young girl, who had a baby, and she wasn’t married and the family, her family, wouldn’t let them get married. I would like to go back. Would they be down in the register of the church?

The baby was born and the father, Ifan, had mental health regarding not being able to get married. He killed the baby in the crib and ran off to a farm at the top - he was a farm labourer in that farm to hide the baby in the hay. The police and everyone was trying to get hold of him. They found him in Denbigh, in the town, and they took him to the mental hospital in Denbigh and he died there.

Like I said before, there is a story, some friends of my parents, they retired to Fron Heulog, further up from Pen Rhos. Mr Burton, he was DCI in Scotland Yard, he went to a small library opposite Penrhyn Hall in Bangor. They used to do programmes there, and he found the story and he was 3

thrilled to bits, because it was in writing: could be a bit of a newspaper, I’m not sure. It was late 1890s, the story was widely known then, I should think.

There was a gentleman, friend of our family, he lived in Faner, not far from where Mrs Looms was brought up, a smallholding. He wouldn’t come to Pen Rhos in the evening, from November to March. He thought there was a ghost: he could hear the wind whistling under the doors and it sounded like a baby crying. He was a bit nervous. The story had been widespread, years before. He was a nervous type and would not come in the dark. The baby was killed at Pen Rhos. I would like to know more about the story. The mother, I want to know …. They called the story Bwgan Ifan.

Annie: You can’t find the children buried without a headstone.

Ann: Annie said that with suicide and the death of a baby, they used to not go through the main gate to the church with the coffin, but put them ‘over the wall’.

Annie: There’s no trace of any children being buried there.

Ann: At the moment the grass in the churchyard is very high.

Annie: I know where it is.

Ann: If you have time and patience to go round all of them, looking for the mother … I suppose there would be a register in the church, or in Llanidan Hall: it could be there, with the date and all. I know about Huw Puw, from the song ‘Fflat Huw Puw’, he’s buried in the old church, down by the shore. You turn down opposite the Groeslon Hotel. It’s the very, very old church there. There’s Llanidan Hall and that‘s where the burial was, there. That was the first church in Brynsiencyn. It’s not far from the shore. My father rented the fields there. The gentleman who owned the copper mines in Amlwch, Thomas Williams, also an M.P., was born and lived in Llanidan Hall, and there was quite a few well-known people buried there. ‘Twm Chwarae Teg’ was his nickname; he was born in May 1737 and died in 1802. At the time of his death, he was the richest man in Wales.

Ann: The thing is, Derek, your son, he used to come in on Wednesday afternoons. I would say, you are going way back, but we were in school together. I’m six months older than Derek. He was very angelic, very, very small, very fair-haired.

Annie: O, very fair, yes. He went to college in Abertawe and knows all the tricks. He enjoyed sports, football especially. He played for Wales once.

Ann: I’ve got another story for another time, Rahel o Fôn. She was brought up in Cefn Derwen, the big farm. She went to live in America. She was an evangelist, when she was twenty. She got married and had a son. She was in Wisconsin, in that area, and she died, and they brought the coffin back to Brynsiencyn. They didn’t usually do that kind of thing then. She was buried in the local church. I know where the headstone is. It’s the new church, as you go from Brynsiencyn down to 5

Lanfairpwll. I have been on google, there is the story there as well. She was born about 1845, somewhere like that.

Annie: It’s going back a few years …

Ann: They didn’t used to bring coffins back.

Annie: It couldn’t be done now.

Nodion Annie, Transcribed 9/7

Y Rhôs, neu y Rhos Fawr fel ei galwyd flynyddodd yn ôl. Ddim y tar du oedd ar wyneb yr hen lôn, metlin cerrig yn disgwyl ar y Steam R i’w gwasgu i lawr yna. Yn ddiweddarach y Cold Tar, dyma newid mawr.

Trafailath, rwy’n cofio un modyr oedd yn travelio yn gyson, sef modyr Dr Williams Bryngwyn. Os am weld y Dr, rhaid oedd cerdded i lawr yr hen allt Pwll Budur ac yna i fynu yn ôl i Rhos Fawr.

Y Fron ar y chwith a Pen Ros ar y dde, ymlaen i gartrefi o’r enw Merllyn a Glan Aber ar y dde a Tyddyn Goblet ar y chwith.

Yn rhyfedd iawn, enw y tŷ ar y dde, oedd Waterloo, mae’n siwr fod wedi ei enwi ar ôl y Rhyfel Waterloo. Yna, ar y chwith, Llain Delyn a Pen Gongl, pen arall o’r Rhos Fawr oedd rhes o dai bychain 6

twt sef Merddyn Gwyn.

Ymlaen ar y tro roedd Tŷ’n Cwrt, yn y fan yma roedd un o fy ffrind i yn byw. Os am fynd i bentref y Bryn, roedd rhaid pasio Tŷ Gwyn Bach a Tŷ Gwyn a troi yn ôl, a dyma chi y Rhos Fawr, neu y Rhos.

Heddyw yn rhyfedd iawn y tŷ fydda i yn ei enwi y Gesal, sydd yn gartref i mi ac Ann a llawer mwy, sef Cartref y Rhos, dros 50 yma a pawb yn hapus iawn yma. A dyma ddisgrifiad o’r hen lôn R.F.

Bwgan Ivan Tŷ Lawr, 2 tŷ bychain Pasio Bryn Adda Ymlaen at Waterloo Croesi ymlaen Heibio Tŷ Lon Ymlaen i’r Faner Tŷ’r Lon Fanner ar y dda y giat fochyn Yn ei dalcian Tŷ’n Lon Fanner I fyny ar draws i câu I Tyddyn Prior

Hen Nain imi yn Sefyll wrth giat Tŷ’n Lon Bwga Ifan yn pasio

Annie’s notes, Transcribed 9/7 (English translation) Y Rhôs, or Rhos Fawr as it was called years ago. There wasn’t black tar on the surface of the old lane, but ‘metlin’ stones waiting for the Steam R to flatten it there. More recently, Cold Tar, such a big change.

Travel: I remember one car that used to come by often, that was the car of Dr Williams Bryngwyn. If you wanted to see the Dr, you had to walk down the old hill at Pwll Budur and then back up Rhos Fawr.

Y Fron on the left and Pen Ros on the right, straight ahead to houses called Merllyn and Glan Aber on the right and Tyddyn Goblet on the left.

Surprisingly, the name of the house on the right was Waterloo, surely it was named after the Battle of Waterloo. Then, on the left, Llain Delyn and Pen Gongl, at the other end of Rhos Fawr there was a row of tidy little houses, that was Merddyn Gwyn.

Ahead at the corner was Tŷ’n Cwrt, one of my friends lived there. If you wanted to go to the village of Bryn, you had to pass Tŷ Gwyn Bach and Tŷ Gwyn and turn back, and there you were, Rhos Fawr, or the Rhos. 8

Today, surprisingly, the house that I was in, that was called the Gesal, is home to me and Ann and many more, that’s Glan Rhos, more than 50 here and everyone very happy here. And that’s the description of the old lane R.F.

Bwgan Ivan Tŷ Lawr, 2 little houses Pass Bryn Adda On to Waterloo Cross ahead Past Tŷ Lon On to Y Faner Tŷ’r Lon Fanner and On the right the pig gate At the gable end Tŷ’n Lon Fanner Up across the fields To Tyddyn Prior My Great Nain Standing by the gate of Tŷ’n Lon Bwga Ifan passed by

Lockdown Legends Online

Erika Zsuzsanna, born 1943 in Budapest, living in Nantmel: Transcribed 22 /6/ 2020

I am going to be 77 on Wednesday and time and memories become more vivid and are coming up in different ways, in this lockdown of not meeting other people. Some memories are incredibly vivid and I notice things I didn’t notice before.

I lived in England and Wales over 45 years now, but I grown up in a communist country. Many things trigger memories from my childhood. All this questioning names of streets and statues: who should be honoured, who shouldn’t. It’s a very intense moment for me.

After the Second World War, when the communist regime came in, they took down all statues they didn’t like and changed all the names of roads they thought weren’t suitable. I grown up with those new names. And statues of Stalin, Lenin and Rakosi our own leader in that time, and there weren’t many other statues unless they were honouring the victory over fascism, heroes of rebuilding and the Russian liberators. Streets were given names mostly to mark important moments in the Russian 10

Revolution or World War II victories. I was growing up with these. After the 1956 revolution they changed the names of the roads back to the ones before. I was everso confused. It’s very interesting how names of places are so much part of political movements. The first changes weren’t made by the general population; it was party politics. After the 1956 revolution it was the overwhelming desire of my parents’ generation to return to the old names I didn’t even know.

In 1956 as a child I experienced the revolution, when Russia withdrew its army and people pulled down the statues - it was a physical expression of their anger and marked the beginning of something new.

I will never forget, we used to march past the big statue of Stalin in Heroes Square every year, and in school I was brought up to think Stalin was the most amazing leader ever. We used to make presents for Stalin for his birthday - embroideries and things like that, that children make. But also presents were made communally in the big factories and exhibited in Budapest for everyone to see. That was a general activity. It was a personality cult. We used to sing Stalin’s favourite song - a beautiful folk song from Georgia, where he came from.

My parents weren’t very keen on that, but they would never allow themselves to reveal that to me. There was a secret police and people would inform even on their family members, so they had to be careful.

On 23 October in 1956 this bubble burst and the revolution started. It was an important moment when people pulled down this statue of Stalin. Then I heard a banging, for weeks. Everyone went 11

there with their hammer and tried to break off a piece of the statue as a memento. I had dreams about the hammering: it was a nice sound. I never understood, but now I do: they were wanting proof of freeing themselves out of this. This is one of the moments that was key.

I did not understand a lot about life. I did not understand how the war affected everyone. People did not talk about the war, even if I asked, so I never had the overview of the political situation.

Now I have seen people brought up in a free and harmonious place. Even though people struggled here in the war, it was a different struggle to trying to survive in a very repressive regime.

I lived by the Danube. I was born in hospital and brought home to a block of flats about one minute from the river. We used to walk under the horse chestnut trees by the river. It’s my first home. I remember an occasion walking by the river with my grandmother. She was talking to someone, saying ‘O those terrible times, when the Germans just marched all those Jewish children to the river and shot them and threw in their bodies, so that sometimes the river was just covered with floating bodies.’ And they cried. I was horrified by overhearing this, and I asked them about it. They tried to reassure me it won’t happen again. They told me there were many bridges further down the river and the people waited there and pulled out the bodies and they were buried and honoured. I asked, ‘Who was it who did this? Were they people? Were they human?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ As a child I thought, ‘Then I don’t want to be human.’ I grew up with that kind of contradiction inside me. 12

My house, this was by the castle district. The fighting was going on for about three months around the castle during the war. One day one side of the road was German and the next day it was Russian. They regularly changed positions; it was a deadlock. The streets were full of bodies. I asked, ‘What happened to the soldiers who were hurt?’ ‘O, they were all around. There rarely was time to help them or clear the bodies.’

I asked my mother, ‘What did you do when you had to go out to fetch the water?’ She said, ‘The first day I opened the door, but when I looked out I couldn’t go out. The second day it was the same. But by the third day, I knew we needed water, the young ones had to get water for the others, so I just had to harden my heart and go, because we needed water. I realised it was very, very shocking, but I would have to strengthen myself to do what had to be done and I got used to it.’

Why it comes so poignantly to me, because before the lockdown, when the news came about Italy and how they were burying the dead without anyone there, on their own, no matter how much anyone loved them. So for about six weeks, every day I said aloud a blessing for the dead and said, ‘You won’t be forgotten, you won’t be forgotten.’

But it was mostly for me, and also to create some connection, because this is the Hungarian way to honour the dead. We say: ‘The sun sets, the moon sets, but they are not gone. May they be tied into the bond of life for evermore.’ 13

I did that for six weeks, feeling it very strongly that it had to be done. I felt my humanity diminished if I didn’t give them what they deserved. After six weeks, I started to forget to do it. I started to get used to it - hundreds of people dying on their own, not buried with the rites they deserve. I totally forgot and I thought. ‘How numb we can become when people become numbers.’ I never thought I would go so far into the grief of this time.

I was born in Budapest and lived in Budapest. When I think of my childhood, I know I was loved, but there was this shadow of the war. But even in that shadow there was joy, fun, a different life.

People worked six days a week. When the free Saturday came in, people couldn’t believe it. Life was very hard after the war, rebuilding, like in England, I am sure. It was a very strange time. I felt very privileged that my life was easier than my mother’s.

I think my mother was making beautiful, beautiful gloves, but after a time she was organising production in a small cooperative. My father was also organising events, but he was also drawn to variety performance and performing. When I was young, I went to see him many times. He was organising revues and travelled the world in his little troupe of performers, who used to perform in variety theatres and nightclubs.

They thought because I was a girl, I should be chic and elegant, and they put me in the ballet school of the opera, so I should move elegantly, but it was a bit beyond my abilities and not what I wanted in my life. It was between the worlds. 14

We had a very small family - a lot of my uncles died in the war. Strong in my childhood memories is that most women were wearing black. Honouring the dead is very important in Hungary. We had some beautiful parks, but instead of walking in the park, we used to go once a week to the cemetery to honour our dead and walk about to look at the graves. We used to visit the graves of anyone we knew, and tidy them. It was like a beautiful big park. Cemeteries are more like parks in Hungary, with many big trees. At least, they were like that when I was a child. It was part of life, going to get an ice cream or a cake, going to the cemetery.

Lots of people had little gardens outside town. People went to their orchard, cultivating the ground at the same time as working in factories. It was a wonderful way to be close to the earth. We had an orchard with a tiny house, called a weekend house. Perhaps with a kitchen outside, or on a veranda. It was very, very simple.

The view from our weekend house was amazing. From there we seen the entire town. There was a pine forest behind there: the air was clear.

A lot of people in Hungary have this way of being close to the earth: a bit like allotments, but bigger and they own it.

As I get older I understand more, and a lot of things about my childhood fall into place and I am in awe of their resilience and strength and ways of being. 15

I always thought, ‘I will never hit the mark of my mother, my grandmother, no way whatever.’ I always thought; ’No, this is nothing like they had to overcome.’ Now, in this time, I really feel I can look them in the eye and be proud of myself!’

Erika Zsuzsanna, Transcribed 26 /6/ 2020

I want to start with some memory, which keeps coming up about what happened when someone in the family got ill. When I think back, all we had was about three different things to cure whatever we had, my grandmother used one or the other. You had to be half dead to see a doctor before antibiotics and such advanced medication as we now have. The women in the neighbourhood called on older, more experienced women to have a look at sick children’s spots, rashes etc. ‘Oh yes, it is mumps, or chickenpox’ (in Hungarian chicken pox is called ‘lambs measles’). Childhood illnesses were diagnosed and treated by home remedies first, only when complications occurred we went to the doctor.

One of the plants my grandmother used most was camomile. We made camomile tea with honey for a bad tummy, or nervous disposition. They put it in the bath if we had skin troubles and bathed our eyes if they were sticky. Also we inhaled camomile steam when we were chesty. They were really amazed if you weren’t better soon. My grandmother’s way was: if you aren’t better, increase the dose, more camomile and honey.

Interestingly, now, I gone back to camomile tea, in the evening. I like English tea with milk and 16

sugar during the day, but after the last cup of tea around four or five, I have a teapot with camomile and I sip it, now hot now cold. I sleep so much better.

They had an amazing way of bringing down temperature too. I often had tonsillitis as a child, with high temperature. My mother or grandmother would run in if I was delirious in the night and wrap me in a cold wet sheet. I remember my screams of shock: I can hear me now and remember the settling back, in knowing it will be all better soon. Sometimes two or three times in a night they had to do it, if I had a bad infection. It always worked but had to be sorted.

When I was around five they decided to take my tonsils out. Now children have a more jolly time in hospital with toys. It was a really awful barren looking ward, but I don’t remember being especially distraught, I found it interesting. My parents left me there and the nurses said, ‘We are going to take your picture in this special outfit’, when they dressed me for the surgery. Even as a five year old, I knew it must be connected to taking out my tonsils, but I thought, ‘I won’t tell them, let them think I believe it, let them get on with it.’ I remember when I came round they looked very strange, in the same outfits as me, and I thought, ‘They are all having their picture taken!’ When my parents came they thought I would be distraught but I was ok. They brought me lots of presents and ice cream. The children in the ward, we were calm, all looking after each other, we got minimal attention, but we got what we needed. When my parents came they were really worried how I coped, I had to cheer them up. I didn’t understand why they were so worried.

After a couple of days I started to explore the hospital and became more confident chatting to 17

people, to me it was an interesting place. That’s when I was told it’s time to go home. But I imagine if you showed a picture of those wards and the routine we would be in shock, it came a long way in the last 70 years. Now children’s wards are so colourful, they are held so tenderly. I am glad of the progress in that. But it didn’t kill me; it didn’t do me any harm.

So, the medicines: it was the camomile, the wet sheet, and lime flowers. We loved going to collect the lime flowers with my grandmother, mother, aunt, in the autumn as a Sunday outing - when we didn’t go the cemetery for a walk to visit the graves of our loved ones.

They knew the best places to go to where lime avenues were intoxicating with some branches reachable. We dried the flowers and if anyone had a cold or a cough it was always lime flower tea with honey: loads of it. The general drinking of herbal tea as now was not known to me. It was medicine. The only pill I was ever given called Kalmopirin. I think it was a version of aspirin. We had it very rarely - it was strange to take a tablet, and considered extreme bravery to swallow one!

And we had goose fat to put on your chest and with a cotton scarf over it and then another woollen one to keep it warmer, for chesty colds and coughs. My grandmother always bought a fat goose in the autumn and then spent a day making it into many different things. The fat, as well as for healing, was lovely, and was used to eat on bread with salt, onions, green peppers and tomatoes all year round. And of course the scratchings were lovely. I still love it when I can get hold of it.

The incredible devotion and instincts of my grandmother was really reassuring. She was a simple 18

soul, wasn’t educated in the ordinary sense, but had the right instincts and big heart always to do what needed to be done.

In this lockdown times I suddenly remembered very vividly this story. I don’t think I even told my children before. When I was a small baby, about three or four months, I got whooping cough. It was an epidemic and there were no antibiotics and they thought babies had no chance, because they can’t cough, just suffocate. It was deadly dangerous for a tiny baby. It still is.

The doctor who saw us, all he could say to my family to take turns to keep an eye on me, day and night, never take their eyes off me, and if they see me going blue, pick me up and don’t put me down until I can breathe again. They kept this watch, even when they went to the toilet. It went on some weeks. Day and night they never for a minute took their eyes off me. One early morning my grandmother looked at me and I was ok, but the next minute I was going blue. She tried everything. Nothing worked, I was getting darker and darker blue. In her desperation as she held me in her arms in her nightdress, she started running to the doctor’s house, down five floors of flats and running along the street. And with the running and with the shaking me so hard, by the time she got to the doctor’s house I was just about to come round but she was just about to pass out. The doctor had to look after her for a bit before she could take me home. But I survived! That’s how heroic she was. She saved my life: didn’t let me go. I remember in my childhood when I was told this story, I thought, ‘My god, the things she done in her life.’ She wasn’t especially clever, well-educated, but something about her strength and resilience was amazing. She had a big heart. She had 7 children but lost 3 in infancy. She never could talk about them, every time she remembered she was choked with tears. 19

As children we were given an intriguing suitcase full of paper money to play with from the times of inflation, before or during the war, where the entire content of the suitcase wouldn’t be enough for a box of matches. We loved playing shops with it. They often spoke about the time after the war, when money wasn’t worth anything. There was nothing you could exchange for food unless you had some silver cutlery or gold or furs.

When the fighting stopped, to find food for the family, my grandmother and my aunt went to Dunafoldvar a village almost 60 km from Budapest to a relative who was growing, collecting food for us too. They mostly walked there. There was no public transport. They had a little thing, like a cart, they could pull, so they took some things they thought might be useful for the mother-in-law of my auntie, grandmother of my cousin called Aranka (her name means Goldie). It wasn’t very much they had to give, just warm clothes, bits and pieces. She filled the cart with food: a sack of potatoes, eggs, jams, smoked meat, all what she had there. After a few days’ rest, they started back. My grandmother was pushing and my auntie was pulling that cart all the way back to Budapest full of food. They decided not to stop for a night, just keep going, with a few short rests. It was quite a reasonable road. They started at dawn from the village and kept going no matter what. Somehow they managed to keep going until they were nearly home. (I always get very tearful of this. I haven’t told it for about 40 years.)

When they could see their house from the corner they collapsed on the pavement and could not make another step. People who knew them ran to tell my mother they were there, she went to help with neighbours. They practically had to be carried home. They just couldn’t make another step. 20

Their feet were swollen and bleeding; took a while to recover. But they did it! They brought a lot food and they shared it. They did it. They went through so much. It’s amazing the resilience of that generation.

The situation when there is nothing, absolutely nothing … For quite a time it went on that people had to exchange things for food. The money wasn’t worth anything. It went on for sometime.

Also the rebuilding of the country. It was in ruins, absolute ruins. I only seen it in pictures and again, in 1956, a lot of things were destroyed by the Russian tanks and the tram tracks were all up in the air. What? You can’t get on a tram? It’s an amazing experience.

I still feel I had the easiest part of history until now. It was a very, very hard life: the rebuilding of the country after the war. Then, rebuild it again after the 1956 revolution. To suppress the revolution against Russian ‘occupation’, the Russian tanks came in and destroyed the main roads and many buildings again. We lived in the centre, near where the excitement of the revolution unfolded and the bitter fighting started and went on after.

At the beginning of the revolution there was euphoria for a few weeks, it seemed possible that Hungary will become an independent state. Also political confusion and chaos seeped in. I didn’t understand any of it but felt it.

One dawn we woke up to the whole town rumbling. ‘It is the tanks.’ My mother and grandmother quietly started preparing to move. ‘Tanks are coming, don’t worry, we are safe down in the cellar.’ Before I only went there to bring up coal or potatoes, it was a mysterious place I loved. So it was an adventure, didn’t feel real until the shooting started. It was mostly guerrilla kind of warfare around us, people were throwing Molotov cocktails on the exhaust of the tanks, they burst into flame with everyone inside.

Tanks in town are sitting ducks, very vulnerable. Later it turned out that these young Russian conscripts didn’t even know they were in Hungary. They were told, as it was the time of the Suez crisis, that they are on the way to Suez to defend communism from the imperialist west. As their alphabet is Cyrillic they couldn’t even read the road signs. They were terrified. So they started shooting at any building where they were shot at, or where they saw someone near the window throwing a Molotov cocktail. (It’s a bottle filled with petrol with a rag in it lit)

One of my saddest memories of 56 is when the revolutionaries were beaten down and the burnt out or disabled tanks were everywhere. To see the fear in the soldiers, they were so scared. Even in our road there was this exploded tank with the dead soldiers in it and it blocked the next tank, they just couldn’t go anywhere. By then the fighting, more or less, stopped, but the roads were strangely empty. They were so scared to be caught in the tank, they just came out of the tank and were sitting by it singing all night, every night. They were there for a few days. They couldn’t read any signs, because the Russian alphabet is different, so they didn’t know where they were. They really thought they were going to 22

Suez to fight imperialism, because the Suez crisis was on. And I never forget hearing them singing. It was so painful to hear. During the day, as we had to learn Russian in school, young people started to talk to them. That’s another story.

Amazing to walk by those places now. Everything rebuilt, outwardly doesn't show any signs of this trauma, only in my heart I carry the memories. Last time I went to Hungary with my daughter, we went to the house where I used to live and I thought, how can these stones endure so much? They have seen and endured so much. But that’s how it should be.

Even so, something beautiful can come out of it, that it can be peaceful and beautiful again and nourishing: the same place which seen so much suffering. For me it is still tinged with sadness. These times and people are not forgotten.

My grandmother lived through that and I was quite young, around 10. During the revolution there was a big excitement that the Russian occupation was going to be over. I had no idea what was going on, just one day they said we had to move down to the cellar. You could feel the trembling of the ground from the tanks, even on the third floor.

Everybody in these flats had your own cellar where you could keep your wood and coal for your fires. We had these very beautiful ceramic stoves, so every one kept their winter supplies of fuel and food, carrots buried in sand and potatoes. It wasn’t very big, but enough for a family’s winter supply. We used to buy things in the autumn to last all winter.

When we had to move down to the cellar, we already had our supplies there, there wasn’t much room. Somehow my mother and grandmother made a place to sleep on top of the coal, made it nice and flat, like a bunk bed. It was nice and cosy, we had oil lamps, we maybe had a camping stove for cooking – I don’t remember that, but it felt like an adventure.

There was a big hall for an air raid shelter with benches for people, to gather and sit together. Also to accommodate others seeking refuge, who was caught up on the way somewhere or their house was destroyed. This shelter was used in World War II and this time. So a lot of people stayed and sat there together in that big hall. We had to stay there... I don’t remember exactly, but I think five or six days. We couldn’t go out. If they needed something, if it was a quiet time, people would nip up to their flat. You couldn’t go out while the fighting was going on, the tanks would shoot, and there was nothing to go out for, unless you were taking part in the fighting.

My sister was tiny, she was born in January and this was October. We often popped up to our flat when there was a lull in exploding mortars. One day my mother asked me to fetch something for my sister and come back really fast.

As I was going up to our flat it was a rocket - they explode and become many shrapnels and just fall down like rain all around. And as I was going up something exploded, not right in the flats, but there was an open corridor around an internal garden that led to the doors of the flats, and I found a great big piece of shrapnel and picked it up. It was so hot it nearly burned my hand, but I kept it as a souvenir.

I got to our flat, I went to the kitchen, got what I asked to bring, but as I opened the living room door to get a blanket, the front wall was gone. Half of the living room was gone. I just shut the door and went back down and I didn’t say anything to my mother: I was in such a shock. And later she asked, ‘What about the blanket I asked for from the living room?’ and I said, ‘Oh, it was gone.’ My mother was a bit shocked because of the loss and that I never said a word, but never asked anything just said, ‘That’s alright we won’t go up, we don't need anything.’

Later on, we were wondering, why would they shoot at a third floor flat? It turned out that my father hung his dressing gown on the handle of the window and they thought it was a person, so they shot at it. They might have thought someone was standing there and was going to throw a Molotov cocktail.

Lockdown Legends Online

Jack Davies, born 1931 in Liverpool, living in The Mumbles: Transcribed 28/7/20

The lockdown has given one time to think and reflect on life.

I was born in Liverpool in 1931, but my family, on both sides, come from Wales. My mother’s family came from Penmaenmawr in Caernarfon, and my father’s family came from Bethesda, in the nineteenth century, of course. And I was brought up in Liverpool. The part of Liverpool that I lived in was really quite Welsh. Most of my friends had very Welsh names: the Owens and the Joneses and the Davieses and the Roberts, and all these names.

Well now, to come to the nub of the story: when I was at primary school, there was a teacher named Miss Keaslough, who was very keen on geography and we had maps of the British Empire in the room. This would have been about 1935, I suppose. Anyway, I was excited by ‘faraway places with strange sounding names’. I therefore became very interested in geography, and I took it at school, 26

and eventually I got a state scholarship to Oxford University, and I followed a course in Geography, and got a BA degree in Geography. The college I was at was St Peter’s.

Anyway, while I was there, my tutor there knew that I wanted to join the Colonial Service. By the time I graduated in 1954, I had decided the days of the empire were coming to an end. So what do I do? Well, I took a teacher training course and became a teacher, and then there came a lectureship at Khartoum University, in the Sudan. My tutor said to me, ‘Do apply!’ So I applied and eventually, it may seem crazy, but on the same day, in the same mail I got two offers! One was to be a schoolmaster in a British public school and the other was to be a lecturer in Khartoum. My parents of course wanted me to take the teaching job, but I was determined - this was my one opportunity to go abroad. So eventually I did that, and at that time, the British government had decided that the end of empire was not far off, and what do we do to make sure that these colonies, when they become independent, have a reasonably trained civil service, and other officials? My job was to go and teach geography in Khartoum, to help with this programme - now, me, at the age of 24, who had never been asked to do what I was asked to do. When I got there, there had just been completed the first Sudan census, and I was asked to help produce maps for it. Oh, I’d never have got this job in Britain! It would have been some ancient chap who would have been offered it. So I did that, and in fact, if you knew where to look, you would see that there are quite a number of maps with my name on. In those days Khartoum University was not independent; it was an overseas college of London University, so it gave London degrees.

So there we are, I get there, and what do I do? I helped them with the census, and there were lots of other things we did. In the end I was sent to do a quick survey of water hyacinth on the Nile, using 27

the university boat. This was becoming a right menace, choking everything up, rivers and what not, and it had come over by lorries coming from Belgian Congo, as it was then, to Juba, which was the big town in that part of Sudan. So one of the jobs I had was rough mapping of water hyacinth areas, and also to ask the people what they thought about this water hyacinth. Was it such a bad thing, or what? Well, the answer is surprisingly, a lot of the local people, well, they were cattle owners and what not, and they in fact were quite keen on the stuff, because it gave them extra feed. But the government’s problem was: how do you prevent it spreading too far? But I wasn’t involved with that. I was involved with a survey relating to the new mechanised agriculture in the Sudan.

Anyway, it is a very hot country, and on my first leave in 1957, I got married, and my wife came out with me, and she enjoyed it very much, but she found it very hot. Anyway, the famous Mahdi family wanted someone to teach geography and what not to one of their daughters, because they hoped, not just that she would marry well, but that she would get an Oxford degree. So my wife was employed to do this, and Gwyneth had a lovely time visiting their houses and their areas where they lived.

But it got a bit much, and beside, we were thinking about having children and we thought that Sudan was the wrong place, so in 1960, we decided we would leave. But then I had to find a job. This is the incredible part of the whole story! Again, my tutor said to me, ‘Why don’t you apply for the post in Swansea, at the university here?’ So I did, I applied for a post. They sent me a cable that said, ‘Can you come for interview, in Swansea, on such-and-such a date? However, we can’t pay your air fare.’ So I went to the Sudanese Vice-Chancellor. And he said, ‘Well, I know, we can adjust when your 28

leave should take place, and arrange for the date of the interview to take place in your holiday.’ So that in fact is what I did: came to Swansea - they were surprised to see me! The net result was, I found out afterwards, I was the person they wanted to pick. And that’s how I came to be in Swansea.

I’ll tell you what’s been going on in my mind since we’ve had this lockdown, I’ve been thinking, how the world has changed in the last half century. You were flying in an aeroplane in those days that would only take 32 passengers, and they didn’t fly at night, only flew by day. So, on my first leave back to Britain, we left Khartoum at 8 o’clock in the morning, we flew to the northern border at Wadi Halfa, where we had lunch, while the aircraft was refuelled. From there we went to Benghazi, in Libya. We had tea, while the engine was refuelled, and from Benghazi we flew, in the evening, to Malta, where we stayed overnight. The next morning, we took off, at about 9 o’clock in the morning, if I remember rightly, and we flew to Nice, had lunch, and flew to London, where we landed at what was then Blackbushe Airport, which was one of the junior ones for the developing Heathrow. It was the same plane all the time, belonging to Sudan Airways. So that’s how I came to be in Swansea.

But the other thing that struck me was, I’ve been very fortunate, incredibly fortunate. Not only did I have this time in the Sudan, which was 6 years, but I did have other holidays, before I came on leave for the first time. The rules were, you could go on holiday, and they would pay your airfare, on condition you went to visit a country that was round the Red Sea. Now I had a friend who was a teacher in Amman, in Jordan, so I applied to go to Jordan, and they said, ‘O dear, dear, that’s hardly the Red Sea, but go on, alright, you can go!’ So I went and had a wonderful time; and it was a very different and quiet period in those days. Both Jordan and Iraq had a king in those days. And then, from Jordan I went to Iraq, by bus across 29

the desert, so it was great, and then we went to all the famous places. We went to Babylon and we went to Nineveh and went up into the hills, where the Kurds lived, the Kurdish country. But we were not allowed to go too far into Kurdistan because the government was a bit worried about Kurdistan.

And I did other things as well. I was doing a survey of agriculture and water systems in Jordan at the same time, when I was on the holiday. I enjoyed Jordan, probably most of all the countries. It was very nice. I found them very friendly. I’ll give you an example of their friendliness. My friend who taught in Amman, had a motorcycle, so we went on his bike to the Dead Sea. To get there, we had to go through Madeba. The sixth century church there had a floor mosaic which was a map of the Holy Land. There was a little Christian/Moslem disagreement at the time. Anyway, we went down on his bike, to the bottom, down to the Dead Sea. It’s a very steep climb. Anyway, coming back, we got not too far, when the motorcycle decided it didn’t like this treatment and it stopped. This was miles from anywhere. Fortunately my friend knew a lot about motorcycles and he found out what it was. The clutch had burnt out. So he made one, from some wood, which he got from local Bedouin. He made a new clutch. And it worked! And in traditional Arab fashion, they insisted on giving us a meal. By the time we got back to Madeba, there was a curfew, so we were stopped and arrested by the Jordanian authorities for breaking the curfew; they took us to the local headquarters in the local school, and we got there. The officer in charge had been to Sandhurst, in Britain, and had trained there. We spent half the night talking about Britain, and then he gave us a piece of paper, written in Arabic, and it said ‘These people may break the curfew and go through.’ He said to me, ‘He won’t read it, because he can’t, but that doesn’t matter. He’s got his bit of paper.’ So we went along, in the middle of the night, we were slightly not doing very very well on this 30

rehabilitated motorbike, and then a lorry carrying tomatoes was coming and he stopped and asked us, were we all right? So we explained the situation, and he said. ‘Come on, come aboard. We’ll put your bike on the back of the lorry, and we’ll take you to Amman.’ Which is where I was staying.

Then, other things: I am in Swansea here, and a lecturer, and I wanted to keep up my involvement with Africa. So there came a job of running the Rural Economy Research Unit at Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria. They wanted me as head, because they knew of my Sudan experience, and so on. So my wife and I arrive in Zaria, which is where Ahmadu Bello is, and the first thing I found there, was that the Vice-Chancellor who signed my document of appointment had now retired at the end of the last session, and so they had decided I couldn’t be in charge. They had an American they wanted in charge. This is because the Americans gave a lot of aid to their agricultural research. Anyway, this chap, Sjo, took over and then …. What do to do with me? Now I didn’t fit into the programme. So I set up my own programme, and that was to examine the relationship between town and country in northern Nigeria. So I did that, and I was appointed then for two years. But in the middle of this, of course, we had the Nigerian civil war, so my task now was to get out! My wife and I got out, and in fact it was pretty awful at times, because the northerners and the southerners weren’t getting on very well in northern Nigeria. Because the southerners were quite well educated, they had all the top jobs, and the locals had all the lower jobs.

The next thing is, that we had a refugee from the local area, who was an Ibo (that is, a Southerner), took refuge in our house to avoid being murdered by the local Hausa. Anyway, we got him out of that mess, eventually, and so all ended well. 31

So to get out, we got the first train south, and we got through all right, as far as Ibadan. And we got off at Ibadan, for I had colleagues, friends, in Ibadan, colleagues from when I was in the Sudan. We stayed there, and then the question was - there was this struggle going on for the country - How do we get to the coast? How do we get our luggage there? Anyway, we were made honorary United Nations employees and we went through on a UN vehicle. We got through the various roadblocks and we got to Lagos. How do you get out of Lagos? Because we had this civil unrest. Well, we got out of it and we saw our ship in the harbour, which we were to go on board. The name of the ship was Accra. We were taken across the harbour by boat to the ship and we got on board. A bit of fun with the Customs, but that’s all right.

So, we’re off home. Now, this is the interesting part, I think. There was a Nigerian who got aboard by climbing the ladder onto the boat, as a stowaway. Now he was the new High Commissioner for Nigeria in London, and so he used to record what was going on, every morning, when nobody was about, then when people started coming around, he would shut up his case and be a normal passenger. He became a normal passenger when the captain found out who he was. When we got to Liverpool, there was a whole load of people to meet him from the Commonwealth Office. So he was given a new suit and all that, as it turned out. And then he was taken off by car to London to be the Nigerian High Commissioner. So that was another lot of fun we had.

I served in other countries too. I did serve in East Africa, and this was later on, in the ‘60s, it was a project concerned with agricultural education in particular. I was supposed to take part in a debate on Ugandan TV. This was in 1966. In the end, I didn’t take part in the debate, because the minister 32

for agricultural education, she didn’t like my views, so she wouldn’t let me be there, and someone else from the UN took my place. What they didn’t like was, I said it’s no good putting in all these things from the top, you’ve got to go in at ground level, and if you want people to do things, it must be something they identify with, something they would like and want. But that was not government policy.

So, you may wonder, what happened with the Sudan connection? Well, the British government and the United Nations university were funding a project to do with the zone where the desert and the green come almost together, to see what could be done with that, so I was asked to join the commission, so I said, ‘Yes, ok, it’s a job.’ And I had leave of absence from here. So when I got out there, I found out that, not only was I a member of the team, I was the actual chairman of the bloomin’ thing, because the Sudanese didn’t like the Australian whom the UN had appointed.

So there we are. To cut a long story short, I’ve gone out there every year for up to three months ,helping with research and whatnot in Sudan from 1967 until 1990. Every year. So, there we are.

Then later on, of course, they had a fracas in the Geography department at the University of Sierra Leone. The fracas was that two Sierra Leoneans thought that they should be head of department. Blow me, my tutor, who by now had become Principal of Swansea University here, was asked, because the Vice Chancellor in Sierra Leone knew him, can you suggest somebody who could come and look after this lot? And believe it or not, much to my surprise, they decided that I was the right person to do it. So I went out and I ran the department there for 18 months in the 1970s, while they sorted 33

themselves out. Fortunately, I got on very well indeed with the Sierra Leoneans, both of them, who wanted to have the job, because they said to themselves, ‘Well, he’s a good guy, he’s a good chap, and the other one hasn’t got it!’ So anyway, when I left, I was asked who to suggest they appointed, and there was no doubt about it, the lady lecturer was much more stable than the man.

I also worked in South Africa and Australia, giving lectures as a visiting professor. My favourite place in Australia was Adelaide, which I thought was a very cultural city. That would be in the 1980s, I think. I was there to give lectures on aspects of Africa, which they wanted for their university courses, as they didn’t really have anyone they thought was very good. I did these at James Cook University and also at the University of South Australia, and in South Africa, I did courses there at the finish of my career.

Jack Davies, Transcribed 1/8/20

In September 1939, of course war was declared, and I was actually in the church choir when the vicar announced we were at war. We all had to be evacuated to somewhere in Wales, to North Wales mainly. You had to go, unless you had an alternative place to stay that was suitable, out of the way. Well, my mother’s cousin owned a guesthouse in Penmaenmawr. So they agreed we could go to Penmaenmawr and stay at her cousin’s guest house, Now she also had some other evacuees, who were from London, and we were all in the same boarding house. We stayed there for a while, and my mother and I, we went about and whatnot. We got a bit fed up. My father said, ‘Why don’t you come back to Liverpool? They can’t stop you.’ 34

So we returned to Liverpool.

We returned to Liverpool, and they arranged a system of house teaching, which became much more formalised, because too many people wanted to return to Liverpool, and there was nothing they could do about it, and people needed an education. So they re-opened the primary schools. So ours was reopened. These were all state schools, with the scholarships to take you through to secondary school. This was 1942, and of course we were in the period of the Blitz and all the rest.

The worst part of the bombing period was in May 1941, in Liverpool. And that was a blitz every night. There were some interesting experiences. One was, that, after one of these heavy raids, the BBC broadcast next morning that Merseyside had been heavily bombed during the night, but that the port was still functioning. This depends on what you mean by ‘functioning’. They had, with great difficulty, managed to get a fishing boat to sail from Liverpool, so that they could make that announcement over the BBC, which I thought was really fascinating.

Another fascinating experience of that time was, we had an air raid shelter. But we took refuge during the blitzes, to begin with, in our cellar. I can remember, in May 1941, not supposed to be out during the blitz, standing on our front doorstep, with the gentleman next door, and what we saw was really fascinating. We saw these German bombers coming over, and we saw the anti-aircraft opening fire, and we saw it get hit - one of the aircraft burst into flames, and we saw it was going to go off crashing, and we thought it was absolutely marvellous. We all cheered, as you can imagine.

Now, in this particular period, another strange event happened - well, it wasn’t really strange. And 35

that was, that in these dock sidings at Liverpool, was a large ammunitions train. And the Germans were bombing the place. Now, fortunately, they had a steam engine in the docks, and they attached this engine to the ammunition train, and took it out of the docks area to a place where it would be ok. It was marvellous, fantastic. We all knew about it afterwards. Anyway, the very brave engine driver was awarded the George Medal for this.

Another interesting one was, Liverpool had an important airport. As well as docks, Liverpool had an important airport, and the airport never got attacked. Now why was that? Well, the Germans knew we had an airport, so we had built a dummy airport, and we would get the German bombers to bomb that, put their bombs on it! So that they destroyed the dummy airport several times over, but never touched the main airport.

Anyway, did we get hit? Yes, we did. Our house was. There was a German bomb, a special sort of bomb. All the windows of our house were blown out, and we had to evacuate, and we went to my grandmother’s in West Derby, and so we spent quite a long time there, while our house was … yes, don’t laugh … re- constructed, so that we could live in it.

So, you know, a lot of people had all these kinds of troubles. But you know, everyone knew everyone else. And of course, there were some people who were a bit on the dubious side, and there was one person from our road who always had sugar and whatnot available. You know, he was doing a black market thing, because he worked in the sugar factory. Eventually he was caught, and jailed for cheating.

All this went on up until 1945, up until the end of the war. And of course, you can imagine what it was like on VE Day: everybody cheering and running round and parties and goodness knows what else went on. There was a street party, to which we were all invited, of course.

The other thing that I think was quite interesting, why we were bombed, and got the bombs nearby, was that the main tramway, from the city centre to where the ammunition factories were, ran past our house.

I can add one more family detail, which I think you can understand. My uncle worked in West Africa, and he came over to home on leave. He was going back, and he got on board the liner, which was to take him back to West Africa, and they were attacked and sunk. Anyway, he spent three hours in water, in the Irish Sea, before he was finally rescued, which was rather a difficult thing.

So we had family reasons for being very worried, and he went back to West Africa, because he was in charge of the fleet of barges and so on, on the River Niger, for communications and what not, with East Africa. There was a run developed from Lagos to Kano to Khartoum, and then to Egypt for the Western Front. And he was in charge of the river section of this effort.

Our minister went off as Army Chaplain, so we had our curate in charge. It was very interesting, because he was rather anti-war; he didn’t like it, you know, he wasn’t very happy. So when you had services and things, we went very often for hymns like ‘Onward Christian soldiers!’ and things like that. He didn’t really like us singing those; he didn’t think it was quite right, or what Christians should really be doing. 37

And at our local church, we had a memorial to those people who died during the Second World War. The saddest family was one where there were four sons, and all four were killed on the Western Front.

Lockdown Legends Online

Jane Ellis, born 1922 in Llangwm, living in Llangollen: Transcribed 23 June 2020, and adapted by Jane and her daughter Anne

Cefais fy ngeni yn Gellioedd, Llangwm. Roedden i’n byw efo fy chwaer, Megan, a’m mam a’n nhaid yn yr hen gapel. Bu farw’n nhad pan oeddwn yn 3 oed.

Roedd llawer iawn o’r Sipsiwn Cymreig yn byw yn yr ardal ac roedd pawb yn eu parchu nhw. Un teulu pwysig oedd teulu Abram Wood.

Daeth ysgolhaig o Lerpwl, sef John Sampson, i fyw yn Betws Gwerful Goch. Roedd yn diddori ym mywyd y Sipsiwn. Dweudodd Sampson, pan fyddai’n marw, roedd isio gwasgaru ei lwych ar ben Moel Goch yn Llangwm.

Felly, yn 1931, ar Ddydd Sadwrn, Tachwedd 21, daeth pobl o bobman i’r pentre ar ddiwrnod ei angladd. Roeddwn i’n naw oed. Roedd yr ysgolfeistr, David Williams, wedi dewis bump plentyn o’r 39

ysgol i ddilyn y cynhebrwng, i fyny’r mynydd. Roeddwn i’n un ohonynt, efo Emrys Jones Penybont a Gwyneth Bryn Ffynnon. Dydw i ddim yn cofio’r lleill.

O flaen y cynhebrwng cerddai mab John Sampson yn cario’r llwch. Yno hefyd oedd Augustus John, T. Gwynn Jones, Ithal Lee un o’r Sipswn, a Turpin Wood, a ganodd ‘Dafydd y Garreg Wen’ ar ôl cyrraedd pen y mynydd.

Roedd yno hefyd delynorion a ffidlwyr yn y prosesiwn. Roedd ni’r plant yn y cefn. Cerdded lawr o Gellioedd i Llangwm ar y bore Sadwrn i ddilyn y prosesiwn o’r pentre, troi wrth Capel y Groes ac i fyny’r allt, heibio ffermydd Cwm Llan ac eraill i’r mannau gwastad ar ben y mynnydd.

Roedd yr hen Harry Wood a Myfanwy ei wraig a’i merch Violet yno - dwi’n cofio nhw’n byw yng Nghorwen mewn slums, tu ôl i dafarn y Royal Oak drws nesa i’r workhouse. Mae gen i lun o Harry Wood yn chwarae’r ffidl ar bont Llangwm. Roedd rhai o’r dynion yn siarad ar ben y mynydd. Roeddent yn siarad peth Romani. Doeddwn ni ddim yn ei hadnabod.

Ar ôl i pawb orffen, cerddais adre i Gellioedd ar ben fy hyn ar hyd y mynydd, yn lle mynd i lawr yn ôl i Llangwm efo pawb arall. Es heibio Nant Pŷd, a pigo bwnsh o horsetail i fynd adre i Mam. Dywedais yr hanes i gyd wrth Mam. Roedd Megan fy chwaer yn iau na fi. Doedd hi ddim yn y cynhebrwng.

Roedd 60 o blant yn Ysgol Llangwm ar y pryd, ac un prifathro a ddwy athrawes. Roedd y prifathro Mr Williams yn ysgolfeister da, ond efo ffon yn ei law trwy’r dydd. Cefais fy nharo ar fy llaw efo’r ffon unwaith a ffaintio i’r llawr.

Amser hynny roedd rhaid pasio’r scholarship i fynd ymlaen at yr ysgol gramadeg. Os nad oeddech yn pasio’r scholarship, roedd rhaid aros yn Ysgol Llangwm nes yn 14 oed ac wedyn gadael i weithio. Wnes i basio’r scholarship dairgwaith. Yn gyntaf yn 10 oed. Amser hynny Ysgol Dinas Bran yn Langollen oedd yr unig ysgol yn Sir Ddinbych i ni ond roedd rhaid aros yn Llangollen trwy’r wythnos, a doedden i ddim isio gwneud hynny.

Dywedodd Mr Williams ‘Triwch eto flwyddyn nesa.’ Roedd clod iddo fo, fel prifathro. Pasiais y scholarship eto’r flwyddyn wedyn a gwrthod mynd i Llangollen eto.

Erbyn hyn ddaru mam ail briodi ac bu rhaid symud i Garrog i fyw nesa at y Grouse, 2, Dee Mount ac i Ysgol Carrog. W.D. Williams oedd y prifathro a dywedodd bod rhaid trio’r scholarship eto. Byddwn wedyn yn gallu mynd i Ysgol Berwyn y Bala ar y trên.

Pasiais eto, fi a Mair Edwards o’r council houses a Bernard Bromley a rhai eraill. Doedd Bernard ddim isio mynd, ond aeth Mair a fi i Bala bob dydd ar y trên.

Roedd y trên yn pigo plant i fyny yn Glyndyfrdwy, Carrog, Cynwyd a Llandrillo Roedd junction amser hynny yn y Bala, lle roedd y trên yn rhannu’n ddwy llinell, un i Stiniog a’r llall i Llanuwchllyn ar hyd y llyn. Dwi heb fod ar y trên ers blynyddoedd. 41

Roedd gennym brifathrawes yn Ysgol Bala, ei henw oedd Miss Jones. ‘Cwâc’ oeddem yn ei galw. Roedd hi’n cerdded fel hwyaden. Roedd hi’n real hen ferch, dim yn hoffi dynion.

Ar y trên, roedd coets i’r bechgyn a coets i’r genethod a doeddwn ddim yn gallu cymysgu. Roedd y genethod yn mynd i Ysgol y Berwyn, a’r bechgyn i’r ysgol yn y Cyfnod. Roedd rhaid cerdded heibio’r Cyfnod i gyrraedd y Berwyn ond doeddwn ddim yn cael troi ein pennau i edrych ar y bechgyn. Fel yna oedd hi’n amser yna.

Roedd Megan fy chwaer hefyd wedi pasio’r scholarship a dod i Ysgol y Berwyn. Roedd y plant i gyd yn rhoi eu pennau trwy’r ffenestri’r trên wrth deithio er mwyn siarad efo’u gilydd. Ni oeddwn yn gallu cerdded efo’r bechgyn adre o’r trên yn Carrog hyd yn oed er bod un o’r bechgyn, Eifion, yn byw drws nesa i ni yn Dee Mount.

Un dydd roedd gweithwyr ar y lein wedi ffeindio llythyr gan rhyw fachgen i Megan, ac roedd wedi ei roi i’n llysdad, Gwilym. Yn y llythyr roedd y bachgen wedi dweud: ‘Dear Megan Meet me in Bala next Saturday and I’ll take you to the pictures. Love Lewis’ Roedd Gwilym yn strict iawn a daeth â’r llythyr i’r tŷ a dweud, ‘Dyma be da chi’n wneud ar y trên ie?’ Aeth Megan ddim i Bala ar y dydd Sadwrn wedyn. Mab Lewis ydy’r bardd Aled Lewis Evans o Wrecsam! 42

Jane Ellis, Transcribed 23 June 2020, and adapted by Jane and her daughter Anne (English translation)

I was born in Gellioedd, Llangwm. I lived with my sister, Megan, and our Mam and our Taid in the old chapel. Our dad died when I was 3 years old.

Very many Welsh Gypsies lived in the area and everyone respected them. One important family was the family of Abram Wood.

A scholar, John Sampson, came from Liverpool to live in Betws Gwerful Goch. He was interested in the Gypsies’ life. Sampson said that when he died he wanted his ashes scattered on the top of Moel Goch in Llangwm.

So, in 1931, on Saturday 21st November, people came from everywhere to the village on the day of his funeral. I was 9 years old. The schoolmaster, David Williams, had chosen five children from the school to follow the funeral to the top of the mountain. I was one of them, with Emrys Jones Penybont and Gwyneth Bryn Ffynnon. I don’t remember the rest.

John Sampson’s son walked at the front of the procession, carrying the ashes. Also present were Augustus John, T. Gwynn Jones, Ithal Lee, one of the Gypsies, and Turpin Wood, who sang ‘Dafydd y Garreg Wen’ after reaching the top of the mountain. 43

There were harpists and fiddlers in the procession too. We children were at the back. Walking down from Gellioedd to Llangwm on Saturday morning to follow the procession from the village, turning by Capel y Groes and up the slope past Cwm Llan and other farms to the flat places on the top of the hill.

Old Harry Wood was there with Myfanwy his wife and his daughter Violet too - I remember that they lived in Corwen in the slums, behind the Royal Oak pub next to the workhouse. I have a picture of Harry Wood playing the fiddle on Llangwm bridge. Some of the men spoke at on top of the mountain. They were speaking some Romani. We didn’t recognise it.

After everyone had finished, I walked home to Gellioedd by myself along the mountain, instead of going back down to Llangwm with everyone else. I went past Nant Pŷd, and picked a bunch of horsetail to take home to Mam. I told Mam the whole story. Megan my sister was younger than me. She wasn’t at the funeral.

There were 60 children in Ysgol Llangwm at that time, and one headteacher and two teachers. Mr Williams, the headteacher, was a good schoolmaster, but he had the stick in his hand all day. I had the stick on my hand once and I fainted to the floor.

At that time, you had to pass the scholarship to go on to the grammar school. If you didn’t pass the scholarship, you had to stay at Ysgol Llangwm until you were 14 and then 44

you left to go to work. I passed the scholarship three times. The first was when I was 10. At that time, Ysgol Dinas Bran in Llangollen was the only school in Denbighshire for us, but you had to stay in Llangollen all week, and I didn’t want to do that.

Mr Williams said, ‘Try again next year.’ It was good for him, as the headteacher. I passed the scholarship again the following year, and refused to go to Llangollen again.

By this time, mam had remarried and we had to move to Carrog to live by the Grouse, to 2, Dee Mount and to Ysgol Carrog. W.D. Williams was the headteacher and he said that I must try the scholarship again. Then I would be able to go to Ysgol Berwyn in Bala on the train.

I passed again, me, and Mair Edwards from the council houses, and Bernard Bromley and some others. Bernard didn’t want to go, but Mair and I went to Bala every day on the train.

The train used to pick up children in Glyndyfrdwy, Carrog, Cynwyd and Llandrillo. At that time, there was a junction in Bala, where the train divided on two lines, one to Stiniog and the other to Llanuwchllyn along the lake. I haven’t been on the train for years.

We had a headmistress in Ysgol Bala; her name was Miss Jones. We called her ‘Quack’. She walked like a duck. She was a real old maid, didn’t like men.

On the train, there was a boys’ coach and a girls’ coach, and we weren’t allowed to mix. The girls 45

went to Ysgol y Berwyn, and the boys to the school in the Cyfnod. We had to walk past the Cyfnod to get to the Berwyn, but we weren’t to turn our heads to look at the boys. It was like that in those days.

Megan my sister had passed the scholarship too, and came to Ysgol y Berwyn. All the children used to put their heads out of the train window on the journey, to talk to each other. We weren’t allowed to walk home with the boys from the train in Carrog, even though one of the boys, Eifion, lived next door to us in Dee Mount.

One day the workers on the line had found a letter from some boy to Megan, and they had given it to our step-father, Gwilym. In the letter the boy said: ‘Dear Megan, Meet me in Bala next Saturday and I’ll take you to the pictures. Love Lewis’. Gwilym was very strict and he brought the letter home and said: ‘So this is what you get up to on the train, hmm?’ Megan didn’t go to Bala the following Saturday. Lewis’ son is the poet Aled Lewis Evans from Wrexham!

Jane Ellis, Transcribed 30 June 2020, and adapted by Jane and her daughter Anne

Roedd chwaer i Nain Pennant yn cadw baracs wrth chwareli Avottie a Bowydd ym Mlaenau Ffestiniog. Oes llun yn rhywle, ysgwni? 46

Roedd y dynion yn dod o bell i weithio yn y chwarel. Roedd yn rhy bell iddynt fynd adre bob nos, felly roeddynt yn aros yn y baracs ac roedd pawb yn ei alw yn Tŷ Pwdin. Plant oeddwn ni, dwi’n mynd yn ôl pan o’n i’n blentyn.

Mae gynnon ni gefnder yn cadw siop yn y Bala. Mae o’n dweud ei fod yn perthyn i ni beth bynnag. Aeth o ag Anne fy merch i fyny i weld Tŷ Pwdin. Ond does dim ohonno i’w weld rŵan ac mae’r chwarel wedi cau.

Roedd fy nhad, Caradog, yn gweithio mewn chwarel yn Stiniog. Aeth i ymladd yn y Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf ac ar ôl dod adre i fferm y teulu yn Llandrillo, sef Cadwst Bach, doedd dim gwaith iddo.

Roedd dau frawd adre, dad ac Yncl Ifor, a doedd dim digon o waith i’r ddau, felly aeth i Stiniog am fod rhywun wedi dweud wrtho: ‘Os ti isio gwaith, cer i Stiniog, mae digon o waith yna.’

Roedd yn lodgio yn Dorville Street efo Anti Mary, chwaer i Nain Cadwst. Mae teulu ni fel teulu Abram Wood, ar chwal yn bobman. Dydw i ddim yn gwybod enw’r chwarel, achos roeddwn i’n fach ac yn dal i fyw yn Gellioedd.

Roedd y creadur yn trafeilio ar gefn beic i Frongoch bob bore Dydd Llun i ddal y trên i Stiniog a dod adre Nos Wener a seiclo adre. Roedd wedi ffeindio rhywle i ni i gyd fyw ym Manod tu allan i Stiniog ond aeth yn sâl a cael niwmonia. Dyn ifanc oedd pan fu farw: dim ond 28. Ron i’n dair oed a Megan fy chwaer yn un oed pan bu farw. 47

Roedd rhaid i ni aros yn Gellioedd. Roedd bywyd yn galed iawn pryd hynny. Daeth taid aton ni i fyw. Hen gapel oedd ein tŷ, roedd byrddau round y waliau, hanner ffordd i fyny fel hen gapel. Wrth ben y drws roedd plac efo’r dyddiadau, 18 rhywbeth …. dydw i ddim yn cofio. Sa chi’n cael ffit o’i weld rŵan, y to wedi mynd ac hanner i lawr. Base’n gwneud tŷ neis i rhywun.

O Gogoniant! Y stori am taid a rhyfel y degwm, ‘Sul y Degwm’ yn 1887, sydd yn y llyfr ‘Cwm Eithin.’

Llangwm yn yr amser hynny roedd ffermydd yn gorfod talu peth o’u incwm i’r eglwysi, sef y degwm. Roedd y ffermwyr wedi cael llond bol, a daethant at eu gilydd i ddweud ‘Dydan ni ddim am dalu dim mwy!’

Daeth y bailiffs, ac ar yr A5 ger Pont y Glyn, lle mae’r afon yn troi, roedd rhai o’r ffermwyr, yn aros amdanynt. Roedd hen daid i mi, Sîon Ifans, wedi lluchio un o’r bailiffs i’r afon. Roedd un o’r ffermwyr wedi mynd i’r carchar. Mae na lun ohonynt yn y llyfr, ‘Cwm Eithin.’ Roedd Sîon Ifans yn daid i fy nhaid, Ifans oedd o. Mae llun ohonyn nhw, 31 ohonyn nhw, yn carchar Rhuthun yn y llyfr.

Dwi wedi hel storiau hyd fy oes. Sdim llawer o bobl fy oed sy’n dal i fyw yn Llangwm i ddweud yr hanes.

Yn ystod y rhyfel ron i’n gweithio yn Colwyn Bay yn y Ministry of Food, ac wedyn yn Llunden.

Roeddwn yn briodi am 60 blwyddyn. Mae fy mywyd wedi bod yn Pentredwr, ond dwi’n dal i 48

feddwl lot am Llangwm. Dwi’n meddwl mwy am Llangwm na Carrog. Ddaru bywyd ni wedi newid lot ar ôl symud i Carrog.

Jane Ellis, Transcribed 30 June 2020, and adapted by Jane and her daughter Anne (English translation)

Nain Pennant’s sister kept a barracks for Avottie and Bowydd quarries in Blaenau Ffestiniog. Have we got a picture somewhere?

The men came a long way to work in the quarry. It was too far for them to go home every night, so they stayed in the barracks and everyone called it Tŷ Pwdin. We were children; I’m going back to when I was a child.

We have a cousin who keeps a shop in Bala. He says he’s our relation, anyway. He took Anne, my daughter, up to see Tŷ Pwdin. But there’s nothing of it to see now, and the quarry is shut.

My dad, Caradog, worked in a quarry in Stiniog. He went to fight in the First World War and after coming home to the family farm in Llandrillo, that is Cadwst Bach, there was no work for him.

There were two brothers at home, dad and Uncle Ifor, and there wasn’t enough work for two, so he went to Stiniog because someone had told him: ‘If you want some work, go to Stiniog, there’s plenty of work there.’

He lodged in Dorville Street with Auntie Mary, Cadwst Nain’s sister. Our family is like Abram Wood’s family, dispersed all over the place. I don’t know the name of the quarry, because I was small and still lived in Gellioedd.

The poor thing went by bike to Frongoch every Monday morning to catch the train to Stiniog and came back on Friday nights and cycled home. He had found somewhere for us all to live in Manod outside Stiniog, but he got ill and had pneumonia. He was a young man when he died: only 28. I was three and Megan my sister was one when he died.

We had to stay in Gellioedd. Life was very hard at that time. Taid came to live with us. Our house was an old chapel, there were boards round the walls, halfway up, like an old chapel. Over the door there was a plaque with the dates, 18 something… I don’t remember. You’d have a fit to see it now, the roof gone and half down. It would have made a nice house for someone.

O Glory! The story about taid and the tithe war, ‘Tithe Sunday’ in 1887, which is in the book ‘Cwm Eithin.’ In Llangwm at that time, farms had to pay part of their income to the churches, which was the tithe. The farmers had had enough, and they came together to say ‘We’re not paying any more!’

The bailiffs came, and on the A5 near Pont y Glyn, where the river turns, some of the farmers were waiting for them. My great taid, Sîon Ifans, threw one of the bailiffs into the river. One of the farmers 50

was sent to prison. There is a picture of them in the book ‘Cwm Eithin’. Sîon Ifans was my taid’s taid; he was an Ifans. There is a picture of them, 31 of them, in Rhuthun jail, in the book.

I’ve been collecting stories all my life. There are not many people of my age still living in Llangwm to tell the stories.

During the war I worked in Colwyn Bay in the Ministry of Food, and then in London.

I was married for 60 years. My life has been in Pentredwr, but I still think a lot about Llangwm. I think about Llangwm more than Carrog. Our life changed a lot after moving to Carrog.

Lockdown Legends Online

Jez Danks, born 1948 in Mansfield, Notts, living below Mynydd Bach, Trefenter: Transcribed 2 July 2020

I’m thinking to start when I first came to this area, nearly fifty years ago this year. It was like going back to another time.

I used to borrow an old tractor, a Fordson Major, from a friend. There was a link box on the back. It was very handy for collecting firewood. It was March or April, lambing had started on the farms anyway, and it was that time they call in Welsh ar fin y nos, the edge of night: dusk you’d say in English. I was going home on the tractor and not much more than a mile from home when suddenly I heard a voice call out from the side of the road: ‘Whoa! Stop, stop.’ And a figure loomed out of the hedge. It was an old man holding a large stick. He was wearing a battered old trilby hat, and had a big sack round his shoulders. I’d never seen him before.

‘Have you got a money?’ That’s what I thought he said. 52

I thought, ‘What is this, a highwayman?’ He asked it again, and it was ‘Have you got a minute?’ ‘Well yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose so.’ ‘A sheep has gone down in the field lambing, and can’t get up, and I’m afraid the crows will get it and peck out the eyes.’ ‘Where is it?’ ‘Can you turn the tractor round? Will I go in the box?’ He went in the box and I was driving.

We drove off and got to a gate. He got out and opened it. We went into a field. ‘Keep by the sietin, by the hedge,’ he said. After a while there was the smell of wood smoke and we came to a little house. ‘Go round, up, up - up there.’ He pointed to where the field rose up into a little hill. We reached the top. ‘Stop here,’ he said. ‘It’s too steep to take the tractor down, we’ll have to walk.’

We got off the tractor, left the engine running, because there was no battery, you see. We went down. ‘There she is,’ he said. ‘O good, the crows haven’t got her.‘ So we got her up, got her back up and put her in the box and he got into the box with her. ‘Slowly now, bachgen.’ I put the tractor into low gear; the brakes weren’t that good, you couldn’t rely on them. We got down onto the flat, went past the house and came, at last, to the gate. 53

He said, ‘Can you open it? I want to stay with the sheep.’ I put the handbrake on, got off, walked to the gate and opened it. Walked back to the tractor, climbed up into the big metal seat and drove through the gateway. Got off again. Walked back to the gate and closed it. Back to the tractor, up into the seat, handbrake off, put it into gear, and drove away down the lane. It was now quite dark. I carried on slowly along the lane for a while until the farmer called out from the box: ‘Turn up here.’ The road narrowed and before long I could make out the shape of a house. ‘Here we are.’ ‘Which way now?’ ‘Straight on, go on, go on. Whoa!’ I lowered the link box and the farmer got out. ‘Give me a hand, bachgen.’ We got the sheep into the stabl, no, it was the sgubor, the barn, put her on the straw.

The farmer looked up. ‘Have you got a bit more time?’ he asked. ‘There’s another one.’ ‘Oh no,’ I thought, then I don’t know why, but I said ‘Yes.’ So off we went. There he was in the box, with his sack over his shoulders. I wasn’t even wearing a proper coat, just a shirt with a thin jacket over it; I was cold. There was no cab on the tractor you see. ‘This way?’ I asked. ‘No, no, the other way; down there.’ 54

After a while we reached a gate to another field and there was water all around the gate. ‘O,’ he says, ‘I never seen it so wet here.’ And you know, this would have been 1975 - and the next year, 1976, was the driest summer for years. ‘You can go through it,’ he said, ‘It’s firm underneath.’ On we went. There was only one headlamp on the tractor, it flickered about. It was a bit loose. It was about like a torch. You couldn’t see much further than the front wheel. We came to it at last. ‘Duw, duw, the crows have got it, get it in the box.’ So back across the field, through the gate, through the water, along the lane, back to the farm and to the barn. ‘Damn! It’s lost an eye. Never mind, we’ll have the lamb.’ I was waiting, thinking, ‘Surely there won’t be another one.’ ‘I’ll go now,’ I said. I was pretty cold. ‘I must pay you,’ he said. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘There’s no need.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Promise me you won’t go til I’ve paid you.’ He went into the farmhouse. I waited and waited. I was so cold I was warming my hands over the exhaust of the tractor. At last he came out and held out his hand, and - I don’t know now if this really happened or if I’ve made it up, in telling the story - but the moon came out from behind the clouds just then, and shone 55

on his hand, and lit up two 10 pence pieces. ‘Is that enough?’ he asked. ‘Yes, yes,’ I said. One for each sheep, and it was hours! Then he said, ‘Are you busy tomorrow? Can you come again?’ I don’t know why I said yes …

I got home. I sat for hours in the back kitchen by the Rayburn, thank goodness for it, to warm up. I went to bed. Next morning, when I got up ….. well, I’d borrowed the tractor, it wasn’t mine. I looked in the tank. There was hardly any diesel in it. I’d have to walk. So, down the lane, through the gate into the field, across the river where it narrowed, then up the bank through the gorse, onto the road, past the little house along there, round the corner and past another bigger house, turn left along the lane and I could see the farm round the next bend. When I got there, the farmer was out in the yard. ‘Duw, bachgen, where’s the tractor with you?’ ‘I walked’ ‘Over the bank?’ ‘Yes.’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind, I’ll show you what I want.’ There was a track from the lane to the yard, it was thick with dom, from one side to the other: cattle must have been walking up and down it for years I suppose. ‘I want to clear it. It’s been building up.’ 56

‘With a tractor?’ ‘No.’ ‘A wheelbarrow then?’ ‘No. I’ve got this.’ It was a rhaw coes hir - a long handled shovel. With the short handled shovel, like the English use, and often the Irish labourers, you have to bend down to use it. With the long handle, you’re more or less standing up and you can scoop up, turn and throw whatever it is you’re shovelling quite some way. ‘You know how to use it?’ he asked. ‘Not really ….’ ‘I’ll show you. Start here, and then to the next bit, then a bit more and a bit more, and hwp it up on the side of the bank. And damn, before long, you’ll have done it all. Now you do it.’ He watched. ‘Duw, not like that bachgen!’ He took the shovel and showed me again. ‘Like that, you see? Try again.’ ‘Hmm. You’re not doing it very well, but you’ll get it.’

He went off. I carried on for hours. It was a lovely spring morning and I could hear him on his tractor somewhere. I looked round at the farm and the outbuildings, and I remember thinking that, apart from a couple of wires going to the house, it could have been a hundred years ago. After a long time, the farm door opened and a woman came out. I didn’t even know there was 57

anyone else on the farm. ‘Come and have a bit of dinner,’ she said.

The kitchen was dark, with a fire burning, on the floor, as they say, and a long table with just two chairs, one at each end. The farmer was already seated at the end nearest the fire. ‘Take a seat, bachgen.’ I sat down. The woman brought in two plates of food and set them down. Nobody said a word. There was a partition there and she went to the other side and didn’t come back. I looked round it and there was a sort of little shelf and she was there with her knife and fork eating standing up, with her plate on the bit of shelf there.

And when the farmer had finished, he banged his plate down, and she put down her dinner and came to the pot, ladled a bit more and he carried on eating, not a word. Then she went back. When he finished he went to the skiw, the settle, lay down and fell fast asleep. Within minutes he was snoring, the sack on his shoulders.

I finished mine and she came then with pudding. It was rice pudding, which I don’t particularly like at all. She put his down on the table, woke him up. He came to the table, lifted the bowl and swallowed it all down. He banged the bowl down and she came and put more out for him. He had that and lay back down on the skiw. I felt I should at least try to eat a little, but it was so hot that it burned my lips; hot like it had come 58

from something more than an oven, like a nuclear reactor. I felt I had to explain: I said, ‘I couldn’t finish it, I was so full with the soup, you know.’ She said, ‘O, you can go back to work now then. My brother will be out later.’ So she was the farmer’s sister. He must have been asleep for hours, and when he came out to see how I was getting on, it was quite late in the afternoon. He always said the same thing: ‘Duw bachgen, is that all you’ve done? Never mind, come in and have a cup of tea.’ I would go in and we would have tea with bread and butter, cheese cut into little cubes, Welsh cakes. The bread sliced so thin you could almost see through it.

We ate in silence, almost religiously it seemed. An old dog snored by the fire; you could just hear the sound of a clock ticking. After a while the farmer put down his cup and looked at me: ‘Will you come tomorrow?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Good.’ I went back for two more days, and finally I finished it. It was a bit like a story from the Bible. The farmer appeared just as I was clearing the last bit. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you took your time. What do I owe you?’ ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was three days.’

It seemed that he’d already decided. He took out two one-pound notes. 59

‘Is that enough?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘It’s not much for three days.’ ‘Duw,’ he said. ‘You walked here, that doesn’t cost anything. And you had all your food with us. And then you went home to bed. And sleeping is free! And with the two pound you can buy anything you like.’ You couldn’t really argue with that! And, looking back, it was worth it for the experience, just to see that way of doing things. I doubt you’d find a place like that nowadays.

Anyway, I said goodbye and set off for home when the farmer called me back: ‘You’ve got a fire where you live?’ he asked. ‘If you need firewood, you can come here to the cwm. Come with me; I’ll show you.’ So we went down. It was very steep. He showed me the dead wood and small trees and that. ‘You can take from here.’ Then he showed me two bedw, birch trees, you know. He said, ‘Don’t take those, those are my stops. If I come down in the tractor where it is so steep, and it slips, they stop me.’

He was in his 80s, and had been a horseman. He thought wherever he’d been with the horse, he could go with the tractor.

He and the other farmers, the same age as him, they didn’t really use the gears much: instead they used to talk to the tractor like the horse, stand up in the saddle, which was the seat of course, and say, 60

‘Come on, come on’.

I remember talking to a friend who was a mechanic, and he told me about the early days of the tractors on the farms: ‘You’d have to explain it to them as if it were a horse, otherwise they didn’t get it. We’d tell them: ‘A horse needs food; it needs oats. The diesel is the food for the tractor; it goes in here. The horse needs a drink, it needs water, so does the tractor: the water goes in here.’ They could get hold of that, you see. But the problem was the oil. Then some bright spark had an idea: ‘We’ll tell them the oil is like the blood of the horse, that goes around inside its body. ‘ ‘I see,’ they said. ‘So that’s what keeps it alive.’ Then they saw it. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it. They thought they would be fools to pay for something they didn’t need.

So I went to the cwm many times to get wood, and that was it.

Apart from to say that the sack round his shoulders, it was fastened with a rusty nail. His sister used to wash the sacks and spread them out on the hedge in a row to dry in the sun. He had a clean one every day. He showed me the rusty nail. ‘You see this,’ he said. ‘You need a rusty nail. One time I was going to town as a young man. I thought I’d put in a clean nail, to look smart like. And you know, it was slipping out all the bloomin’ time. So put in a rusty nail.’

Years later, when I was working for the local museum, I was quite often invited to give talks to 61

local history groups, chapel societies, and so on. I’d always take a collection of museum items with me. I remember one place I went, down in the south of the county; they were pretty sharp! They knew the lot, pob dim, as they say. Just before I finished I told them: ‘Oh, I’ve got one more thing with me.’ I held up a hessian sack. ‘Who can tell me anything about this?’ Half a dozen old men at the back put their hands up. One of them called out: ‘You need a rusty nail for that, bachgen!’ Everyone laughed. They all knew it at that time.

I remember going to the museum stores with the curator one day, He said to me: ‘We’ve got quite a few old hand tools; do you know any of them?’ I looked at them and, as they say, memories came flooding back. I said, ‘I think I’ve used pretty well all of them.’ Through working on those farms - even though it was two pounds for three days! So it did pay off in the end.

I hadn’t realised it at the time, but it was the end of the old style of farming. Five to ten years later so much had changed: no one kept a pig any more, hardly anyone bothered to grow potatoes, or bake bread, or churn butter. There were bigger tractors, silage instead of hay bales, no more churns put out on the milk stands. It was the tanker from then on. The old ways had gone. 62

Jez Danks, Transcribed 13 July 2020

What I’d like to talk about today is the sense of locality and people’s idea of where they are. The way we form impressions.... there’s the immediate impression you receive in a new environment, all at once. It can be a bit overwhelming. Then pictures slowly form over the years and we begin to see things we weren’t really aware of at the time. I’d like to talk a bit about people’s… people’s ideas of where they are. It’s something I’ve noticed over the years, mostly from working round local farms.

I went to places where they rarely had any visitors. Sometimes they didn’t even go out more than to mart - or the shop - once a week. I can think of one place, there was a woman that went to town once a year. Once a year! It was only about ten miles away, but she only went once a year, on the bus. When I worked at the local museum, I met people who told me that they’d go from Tregaron to Aberystwyth once a year on the train: a big treat - and what a great journey that would have been! But you can’t do it any more: the line’s long gone.

I went to places that were quite isolated. They’d go to the little local shop, perhaps once a week, and that was all. It was a ritual, a way of meeting people. Old men would sit there in the shop half the day, just to meet their neighbours. Television had arrived a few years earlier, and people visited each other less and less. They stayed at home and became isolated.

The shop became a bit of a focus. There was a ritual of ordering: the shop people knew what they 63

wanted; they had the same every week. There was a particular type of very pink ham, covered with bright yellow breadcrumbs. This ham was a treat on the farms. At the end of the order the shopkeeper would say, ‘Is there anything else?’ Everyone would be listening, waiting. Here was the opportunity for the customer to make an impression, to show off a bit, even. ‘O, give me four slices of ham.’ And she would cut it with a big knife, slowly and very thinly. She would cut the four slices, and then she would pause. There was a chance - an audible intake of breath, a single movement as everyone in the shop craned to see. It was played out. The shopkeeper played her part, the shopper too. He would say, ‘O give me one more.’ As if to say: ‘Well, beat that, then!’ And she would slice it and everyone would sit back.

When it came to the cheese it would be: ‘Hanner pownd o gaws.’ The knife would be wiped with a cloth, and with everyone looking on, she would do it so slowly, dramatically, and put it on the scale: it would be exactly half a pound – they all knew it would be!

It was like the old music hall acts. People did the same act every year and everyone went to see it. They knew the act and wanted to see it again, that’s why they went.

But I’ve digressed a bit from the shop.

So they went to see the same ‘act’ every week in the shop, and met their neighbours. And they would get the same shopping every week. Flour, salt, butter, tea, sugar, biscuits, sweets, newspaper, sometimes even a magazine – mostly things they didn’t produce on the farm.

And of course,

cigarettes or tobacco for pipe smoking or chewing.

I heard of one farmer got through two ounces of tobacco a day - can that really be true? - chewing and smoking. It was so bitter, the taste. They would just get a lump of tobacco and chew and chew and then spit it out.

I used to give an old man a lift. He used to walk down the hill from his house. He wore hobnail boots, a muffler and a big old-fashioned cap with a button-down peak. He would walk down to the shop. He used to walk down to the shop, and sometimes I would offer him a lift back up the hill. And one time I said, ‘ It’s a nice day.’ And he said, ‘Like the third week of August 1937.’ It was not unusual to hear older people talk in this way: there were far fewer distractions - no electricity in pre-war times, so no television, radio, phone - it was quite easy for them to recall events and when they happened. So he could very easily place it with all the details: which farm, who was working there & what job they were doing, very often who said what, the time of year, sometimes right down to the day of the week.

Would it be a Monday? More likely to be a Thursday. Monday was mart day in Aberystwyth, Tregaron on a Tuesday. Wednesday was Cardigan, I think, but not many people would travel that far. 65

Because the same things happened every week, every day, so you could place things by that routine.

And something else I’ve just remembered about that man, the one who’d talked about 1937.....I was walking with a friend one evening, it was a Sunday, and as we approached his house, we could hear singing. My friend asked me what I thought it could be, and I suggested: ‘Probably he’s got the radio on for the Sunday service: it’s a bit far for him to walk to the chapel these days.’ But the nearer we got, the less it sounded like a choir or congregation; and as we drew level with his house we saw that the front door was open, and inside there he was, dressed in his Sunday best, sitting bolt upright on the settle by a blazing fire; singing and singing in a beautiful clear strong voice.......

But back to the sense of place....... When I first moved into the old place I was in for years, in 1974, the old farmer who owned it said to me, ‘How do you find it?’ He spoke to me in English, I hadn’t got much Welsh then, and I took him in the English sense of ‘how do you like it?’

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘How do you find it? You come from England, you come down a big road and then another road and then down the lane, all this way to the farm.’ He couldn’t get over it, how I’d managed to find his farm. 66

Then he said something that has stuck in my mind. ‘There’s only people who’s born here lives here before.’

When people come and they complain about ‘the Welsh’ and so on, and they hardly know them, it annoys me a lot. I say, when I came, I was lucky enough to meet them and they were invariably courteous and friendly, quite happy to tell you about their life and goings-on in the area. They couldn’t easily imagine your life. They very often only knew people they had grown up with, so it was up to us to make some kind of connection. They were open to other people and interested in them.

One of the first jobs in that area - no, the first one, actually - was painting the tŷ gwair - the corrugated iron hay barn on a big farm. That led to more work; there, and later, on other farms, for the best part of thirty years. The eldest son was about my age. His dad was very much the patriarch. What a character! I can’t think of where you’d find anyone like that now ….. Anyway, one day the farmer and the younger son went off, and I was left alone painting the house.

The older son came over and we chatted a little; nothing in particular, but no doubt about the weather; a constant topic! After a while, he turned and looked at me quite directly: ‘Can I ask you a question?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘What do you think of it here?’ So I started to say, ‘It’s very nice.’ ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be polite, I want to know.’ ‘ Well,’ I said, ‘I really do like it.’ (Or words to that effect, I think). 67

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I tell you why I ask. You’ve lived in other places, you’ve got something to compare it with. And even then, you like it here. I tell you why I ask,’ he said. ‘I love it here, but I haven’t been anywhere else, so I might be a fool to like it here.’ ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’m glad then I wasn’t mistaken.’ Then he saw the Land Rover coming back and he said, ‘Oh, we’ll have to stop now. They wouldn’t like it, us talking like this.’ He’d waited to have the chance to ask me. He wasn’t an old guy, he was in his twenties, only a couple of years older than me, it turned out, but it was unusual to ask such a thing.

Another time I worked for a much older farmer. He was well known in the area for making walking sticks, and being pretty good at other crafts too. I had finished painting for the day, and was about to leave. ‘Finished for the day?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Come up on the tractor.’ I stood up on the links and he was driving. I was swaying about on the links and we went up to the top of a field and then stopped. He turned the engine off, and it was very still, the sun just starting to set. I remember wondering: ‘What are we doing here?’ He said, ‘Let’s have a smoke.’ And after a while: ‘Duw, it’s lovely here.’ 68

We’d just gone up there to have a look and have a smoke.

That combination of going up and balancing and having this cigarette given to me, smoking and watching the sun set...... just little things really, but for some reason, that day, he wanted to share it with me. I’ll never forget it, but I’m sure if, a couple of days later, I’d said, ‘Let’s go up to the top again.’ He’d have said, ‘Duw, bachan, what are you talking about?’

I’m going back to where I used to live: there was a farm about a mile away, across the other side of the valley. And some mornings, when it was clear, you could hear singing, and it was the farmer going across the yard after milking. And if I saw him later and said I heard him singing, he’d say, ‘Duw, peid â gwrando - don’t listen - Jess bach.’ And I said, ‘No, it was nice.’ And one day he looked at me and he said, ‘Do you know why I was singing? I was happy.’ A lovely man; and his wife, from South Wales, a lovely, friendly couple.

I went to their farm to gwyngalchu, that’s the proper word for limewashing, I think, but I don’t remember anybody saying that then; weitwasio - whitewash - more likely, but in any case, they’d splashed out a bit and got a drum of Snowcem, cement paint that was fashionable then. The talcen tŷ, the gable end, wasn’t looking good. I went to do it: it was quite near the place I told you about the other day. I walked up there with a bucket and a brush. 69

When I arrived, the farmer’s wife said, ‘He’ll have finished milking in a minute. Come in and have a cup of tea.’ He came in and said, ‘O, there you are, ‘achan. I’ll get the ladders out in a minute. A cup of tea first though.’ He was talking and talking. There was so much about the area that I didn’t know, and he was just the person to tell me all about it. Listening to him, it was quite easy to drift off into another world, his old world. Next thing, I could hear the sound of frying. ‘Would you like some chips?’ I had chips and fried egg and tea, and then more tea, and then their teenage son came in from school. He looked surprised and asked his mother: ‘What’s Dad doing here?’ The next day, the mother explained why he was put out: it was the first day he’d ever come home from school and found his dad in the kitchen instead of outside, working on the farm.

So the next day I told her when she invited me in: ‘No, no, I won’t come in. I’ll have tea when your son comes in from school.’ ‘Just a quick one...?’ ‘No!’ ‘O, alright then.’ Otherwise I could never have got the work done.

They seemed perfectly happy to spend a day talking. Talking, laughing, reminiscing.

It was

wonderful. There was not the pressure there is today: I’m not sure you could do it like that now. Because I was interested, I would ask things about the area. They would tell you, they liked to tell you; I was a new audience for their stories.

The way I would get the work, I didn’t have a phone, but at the mart in Tregaron or Aberystwyth, they would talk to the farmer next door and he would come hack and tell me: ‘So-and-so wants the tŷ gwair, or whatever, painting: you know where is it?’ And if I didn’t, he’d tell me. That way I eventually got to know many of the farms in the area. So I would go there, to see about the job, always in the evening, after milking. They would talk, talk, talk and then look at the clock and it could be 11 o’clock. ‘Duw! Look at the time’, they would say. ‘Never mind, bachgen, come tomorrow and do the job.’

That’s how it was: a bit like the shop, going there had been more about having a chat than actually arranging anything about the job.

Can I just mention this last thing? I know we’re running out of time, and I’m only just coming to the thing I was going to tell you in the first place.........

Driving along the lanes, you’d see a farm in the distance, with its outbuildings, and if you went closer you could make out familiar features: O yes, there’s the tŷ gwair - the hay shed - a barn or two, often an old cartws where they’d keep a tractor, sometimes even an old pigsty, all the usual stuff, but when you got closer, and went in the 71

house, you’d soon realise that, although it looked like other farms, in many ways it was quite different: the people had moulded it to their way of doing things, and I suppose the farm had moulded them too.......

But this place, I’d gone to paint in the usual way. They wanted the window frames painted red and it’s perhaps for that reason I’ve always thought of it as Tŷ Coch, Cefn Coch, something like that. But there are farms in the area with those names, and it wasn’t either of them, and actually, many many years later when I drove along the lane where I thought it was ........ I couldn’t find it.

Anyway, I went to paint. The farmer was older than the wife, a fair bit, I think. I remember every day that week it looked as though it was going to pour with rain. I would put the ladder up and think, ‘O, it’s going to rain.’ But it somehow held off.

It was a lovely old place. In the morning the farmer would cross the yard with a mug full of hot water and he would go into the barn. He had a little bit of mirror there, propped up on a shelf, and a cutthroat razor, and he would shave there.

At that time my diet was rather restricted; there were quite a lot of things I didn’t much care for, so I would take sandwiches and just go in for tea. I went in for tea one day. The farmer was already sitting at the table, and his wife was pouring tea. ‘O, it’s kept dry for you.’ ‘Yes, so far.’ 72

‘Sit down and have a cup of tea.’ I sat down and there was the usual talk of weather, how the crops and animals were, what neighbours were up to. In the middle of all this, she put her cup down and said, out of the blue: ‘Let’s speak English for a change.’ And her husband put down his cup and went out, and she said, ‘That’s upset him.’ She said, ‘Do you know why I said that? We are trapped in our language. We say the same things over and over, and that’s all we say. Now then quick, quick, he’ll be back soon. He hasn’t finished his tea. Have you been to London?’ I said, ‘Yes, I have.’ ‘Have they red buses there?’ ‘Yes, they have.’ ‘Have you been to the top of it?’ ‘‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You can see all the shops and everything from there.’ ‘The train that goes under the ground, like a mole! Have you been in it?’ ‘Yes I have.’ ‘Now then, what do they call it?’ ‘The underground.’ ‘No, not that.’ ‘The tube?’ ‘Damn, that’s it, achan, the tube! Have you been on it? Is it dark? How does the driver know where to go?’ 73

Then ….. ‘Look out, he’s coming back,’ she said. He came in. ‘Have you finished that bloomin’ nonsense?’

And that was that. Had she ever talked to anyone about London before? She seemed to know a bit about it, learnt about it at school, perhaps. Did she ever ask anyone about the tube before? Did she ever get a chance to talk about London again?

I was going home. He was sitting on a log outside. It was quite unusual to see someone sitting outside. He said, ‘Look at that, achan. Mae’n braf, mae’n hyfryd.’ (‘It’s fine, it’s lovely.’) He was looking at a long hill in the distance, Mynydd Bach, it’s known as locally, and that’s what we could see. It was lovely, the sun was going down. ‘Where do you think that is?’ he asked. Well, this seemed a bit odd, as it could only have been about four or five miles from his farm. Something made me a bit cautious, so I asked, ‘Have you always lived here?’ ‘Yes, I’ve seen this view every day of my life.’ I thought, I’d have to be careful. I said, ‘Is it Mynydd Bach?’ ‘Duw, no. That place is far, far away.’ In the side of that hill there’s a house. The sun was catching the window. ‘See that?’ he said. ‘There’s something shining there, I think there’s a house there. I wonder who lives there? ………. I don’t think they are people like us.’ 74

And I began to realise that in his mind, it was another land, another realm. Next thing, I’m pretty certain he said this: ‘They might have gold plates to eat off.’ ‘O, do you think so?’ ‘Yes, look at it. Damn ….. I wonder if I will ever go there. We might meet there one day, achan.’ There was a long pause as we gazed into the distance ......... then: ‘Will you finish tomorrow, do you think?’ ‘O, yes, if it keeps dry.’ ‘Iawn, achan, see you tomorrow.’

I drove home, thinking about what I’d heard that day: and afterwards, probably years later, it struck me that, although they appeared confined to their little farm, day in and day out, they’d both found a way to lift themselves out of it, to escape if you like.

And perhaps we all do it to some extent,

daydreaming, drifting away, whilst all the time appearing to be getting on with some everyday task. There are layers and layers to people, I think: always something new to be discovered.

Lockdown Legends Online

Olive, Born 1930 in Liverpool, living in The Mumbles: Transcribed 29/7/20

I was born in Liverpool, but I was brought up in Kent from the age of two, and of course I remember the war years. We left Liverpool because my father had died, and I was two years old. And my mother was prevailed upon to take the two children, that was my brother and me, to Kent. And I grew up among my cousins and aunts and uncles, and I must say I had a very happy childhood, but there was always the sadness, that I never had a dad.

Anyway, it’s all a long time ago, and I’ve survived. I’m 90, just had a 90th birthday.

We lived in a little place called Crayford, which was next door to Dartford, and near the Dartford Tunnel under the River Thames. Well, we lived in Crayford, and the fact of the matter was, there was a big factory there, called Vickers Armstrong’s, and it did a lot of production for wartime activities. That’s where I was brought up, because my uncle was one of their senior engineers, and we came down so that they could give my mother some help and protection. 76

We must have moved there round about 1933, and war broke out in 1939, by which time we were quite nicely settled. My mother, as a young woman in those days, she used to go to evening classes and she got quite proficient as a shorthand typist, which was quite an achievement. As I grew up she always used to say, ‘I want you to learn shorthand and typing. If anything happens in your life, it will be a good cushion to fall back on. So I have learnt shorthand and typing, but I have long since forgotten it. But I remember that quite well, as I grew up, and I went to a Technical College, and that’s where I learnt that trade. But I was never happy in it. Anyway, that’s it. They were the formative years between the ages of about 3 and 9.

I could tell you about the war years, because we were on the flight path for the German bombers coming over to London, and we saw it all. As I said, as far as I’m concerned, it started in 1939. I remember all the fighter planes speeding across the skies on their way to London. It was a beautiful autumn, lovely blue skies; and I remember the Spitfires used to have their fights up in the sky, and we could stand in our back garden, sort of half under cover, watching them. That I do remember, and that would have been about 1940, 1941.

But, going back to the beginning of the war: I had an aunt and uncle, that were retired Salvation Army officers, and I must say, and I will praise them, they did a wonderful work. My auntie, she was a big cuddly kind of lady, and my uncle had not been well. The Salvation Army people gave them a cottage on the Essex coast, at a little place called Brightlingsea. They went down there for my uncle to recuperate, and that summer we went down for our holiday. 77

On the morning of the 3rd of September - I think that was the day war broke out. It was a Sunday. And my aunt and uncle went to the army. When I say the army, I mean the Salvation Army, because they were very involved in it, and their daughter, Cathie, took my brother and me for a walk, and we picked blackberries on that 3rd of September. I can recall, it was a lovely morning, mild and sunny, and when we got back - of course I was only 9 - when we got back, I can see my uncle now, he was in his Salvation Army uniform, and he moved across the room, and he spoke very quietly to his daughter, and I remember her going quite pale. And there was silence.

We had our dinner, and then I can remember, after lunch, they sort of talked about it more, what it might mean, because my brother was 13 and I was 9, so we knew little about worldly matters. That was my first introduction, really, to the word ‘war’. None of us knew what it meant, we just had to wait and see.

Well, the days ticked by, and then, of course, my aunt and uncle would say to my mother, ‘Well, what are you going to do about the children?’

Well, we stayed on, at Brightlingsea, my brother and me. He went to one school; I went to another. I went to a village school, and I loved it. Our classroom, to make one room into two, we had a curtain down the middle. I thought that was just remarkable. And we were there in a very severe winter. They used to bring those tiny little bottles of milk, I think they were about a third of a pint, and they used to line them up in front of an open fire, believe it or not, in those days. The caretaker used to come to stoke it. He used to keep it very tidy, I must say, even when it was burning. And this milk, 78

it used to get everso hot, just amazing, as it was a distance from the real heat. We used to enjoy it, and then we used to trundle home, in the snow.

Anyway, that was my first experience in Brightlingsea, on the Essex coast, and they used to breed and catch oysters there. I absolutely adored living there, but we were only there for a few months, because things did not take off, as a war, so they thought, ‘O, it’s safe for them to come home.’

So we went back to Kent, my brother and I, and that was fine, but then, it wasn’t long before we had to have an air raid shelter built in the back garden. There were Morrison and Anderson shelters in those days, and ours was an Anderson, made of corrugated iron. I quite liked it myself, because you’d go in the door and there were bunk beds, one on the left and one on the right, and as a little girl, I thought it was quite cosy, but to adults it was an irksome experience, and a very worrying one. That was our air raid shelter, and we used it frequently in the early part of the war, because we’d hear the drone of the airplanes from Germany, coming over to bomb London, and then, of course, we would hear our planes going out, and it was a very sad, sad experience, because you knew what that sound meant. You knew some of them would never come back, and you knew that somewhere many people were going to be killed. And I can remember feeling quite forlorn about that.

Then came the day when the Germans decided to give a blitz on London and that was severe. It was severe. And when that happened, our family had some friends that lived in Bath, and my cousin Eunice and me, we were taken down to Bath to live with this lady and gentleman, who we’d never met before. They had three children of their own, that were quite adult, and their youngest boy was 79

only 16, and he had volunteered for the Navy. So their hearts were rather broken, to think that their 16-year-old boy had gone to war. So I just hope that Eunice and I helped to fill a gap in their lives. But we do know that young Colin, he was blown up with his ship a few years later.

So Eunice and I, we went off to Bath to live: very nice, a new experience. We lived in a road called Coronation Avenue. It was a very very steep hill. I went to school and my headmaster’s name was a Mr. Bealey and one of his senior teachers was a Mrs. Horn, and I took to her, and I think I learned more about maths, or arithmetic, in the year that I was there, than I’ve ever learnt in my life. I remember her arithmetic lessons quite well. We had these little straight desks with inkwells, and she had a very upright kind of boxlike desk in the front, all dark oak of course.

The lady and gentleman we lived with, we called her Auntie Minnie and her husband was Uncle Colin. And they were most kind, most kind to us. He was a master baker, and of course, with the rationing, all the young brides-to-be used to bring their packages of fruit and sugar to him to make their wedding cakes. So I’ve seen quite a number of wedding cakes in the process. He couldn’t ice them, but he used to decorate them with marzipan. He really was quite clever at making decorations from marzipan. And the bits and pieces that were left over from the flowers and the leaves that he did the decorating with, he used to push in Eunice and my direction, and that’s why I have a sweet tooth for marzipan, that’s lasted all my life.

Do you know, when he was well into his mid-80s, he was invited by the local school to go and tell the children and to demonstrate making bread. He was a lovely man.

On a Friday night, because he only ever worked at night, to do all his baking for the Co-op. He was a master baker for the Co-op. When he came home on a Saturday morning, he had several boxes of cakes and buns and I don’t know what, that we used to eat over the weekend. But we always used to look forward to seeing what he had brought home, for the weekend. On Saturday afternoons he always took Eunice and I into the countryside for a walk. I remember those walks quite clearly, and on one occasion we came across a huge clump of kingcups growing beside a stream. I’d never seen kingcups before. I have seen them since, and whenever I see them, it always reminds me of Uncle Colin and the walks we used to take in the Somerset countryside.

So we had a nice experience as evacuees in Bath, and of course, well, children were not - they gave us quite a lot of freedom, under supervision, and I can remember Uncle Colin giving us the bus fare into town, because we used to like to go to look at the cathedral and the Roman baths. Then there was a little coffee shop on the square in front of the cathedral, and it was a real joy to be in, and we used to go there. I don’t know if it was tea or coffee we drank, but we drank something. That was a charming memory.

At school times, we didn’t have a playing field, so we used to be taken up to the local recreation ground for a little bit of exercise. And it was there that I started my piano lessons, with Miss Hodges up the road, and I was having a piano lesson one night. When Bath was bombed, I was there when they had the first bombs. One of them dropped on the dairy, just a little down the road from where we were living, and for me that was worse than living in Kent! So anyway, Miss Hodges, that was the piano tutor’s name, she and her father walked home with me. I don’t think Eunice was there on that occasion. They walked home with me, to make sure I was safely home. 81

But shortly after that, we left Bath and were brought home to Kent, and I stayed in Kent. My education at school was very erratic, because they were all very elderly teachers, and of course, we had to be ready to run down the air raid shelters, at any time. So yes, my education, between the ages of about 11 to 16, was very erratic.

When I was 14, I passed the scholarship to a Technical College and that’s when I learned shorthand and typing, but in later years, I never practised it, and I ended up by being a draughtswoman in a Town Planning office, which I enjoyed, because I liked maps, I liked geography, everything to do with the land. It appealed to me.

So some of it, if I had my time again, I would repeat, and some I would leave.

But right at the end of the war, of course I was that much older, I knew what it was all about, I knew the sound of the doodlebugs, and they used to fly over us. Right up until about 1945, when the war finished. Those doodlebugs and rockets were quite frightening, they were really quite frightening, because you couldn’t hear them at first. It was only when they were right over your head that you heard them, and saw the flames coming out of the back of the doodlebug. I remember I had a very very nice school friend, who ultimately became my sister-in-law. And I remember I had gone round to her house, and between where I lived, and she lived, there was quite a lot of farmland, and a street called Perry Street, and off Perry Street was a nice golf course, so it was semi-rural. I had gone round to her house, to tea, and I always came away from her house early, to make sure I wasn’t out in some fiendish experience on my way home. And on this particular day, there was a beautiful blue sky, and 82

I saw this doodlebug. I had not seen one before, and I can honestly say, it terrified me. It just terrified me, and I was about 14 at the time, very inexperienced of life.

When I look at some of the children that I meet round here, they’re streets ahead in confidence than I was, at the same age.

But anyway, that’s beside the point. I can remember seeing this

doodlebug. I ran and ran and ran. I must have run for about five miles to get home. And I must have been nearly in a state of collapse, because it wasn’t many weeks after that that I went to live and stay with my father’s mother and aunt and uncle, who lived in Bedfordshire. And I went to them and I spent the last five or six months of the war with them. And I was happy there. I didn’t hear any aeroplanes, and it was countrified. It was a country existence and I loved it. Anyway that was that. And my cousins, who lived in the same house, they come down to see me here, all the way from Bedfordshire, so we’ve kept in touch, and I expect we’ve all got tales to tell. There’s not many around that can remember the first days of the war, and the last.

Olive, Transcribed 2/8/20

I recall an incident in my life when I was about 19, 20. It was all to do with an emerald green umbrella. All right then, here we go!

I was temporarily working near Trinity House, on Ludgate Hill in London, and like all offices, we always had an hour for lunch, and on this particular day, I left the office, and it was April, and of course we had some April showers. I can remember it being bright and sunny, but there were puddles on the ground and it was a damp kind of air. And I wanted to go to Boots the Chemist, which was 83

not far away, so I took my emerald green umbrella, which had been a birthday present from my mother.

I adored this umbrella. It was long, and it had a handle that was the shape of a snake that was curved round. It was very unusual. So there was no mistaking it. You didn’t come across those at two a penny.

Anyway, I took my umbrella, I got to Boots the Chemist, and in those days, if you recall, they used to have a little glass upstand on the edge of the counter, to keep things on the counter.

On this day, I’d done my shopping at Boots the Chemist counter, and there weren’t many people in the shop. And I used to put my umbrella, while I was fiddling with my bags and things, I used to hang it on the glass upstand. And on this particular occasion I forgot I’d left it there. I did my shopping, paid my way, pushed through the double doors, and out into the daylight.

And forgot all about the umbrella, my precious umbrella.

When I got back to the office, I phoned up Boots the Chemist. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘We get quite a collection of things here. Give it a few days, and it’ll probably turn up, but you can keep phoning, to see if it does turn up.’ They took my telephone number, and she said, ‘We’ll let you know if an umbrella conforming to that description turns up, but you keep asking, and phoning in.’ Anyway, that was the arrangement, and I left it. I did phone up, once or twice. 84

And about three weeks later, three weeks later - and remember, this is in London, where there’s thousands of people, in and out of shops, up and down the road … about three weeks later, I wanted to go to Boots the Chemist again. I made my way to the shop, and I can remember the feeling now. As I approached the counter, there, over the edge of the counter, hung an emerald green umbrella with a snake-like handle, which was very distinctive. I was rigid, with fear. I thought, ‘Who’s playing tricks on me? Anyway,’ I thought, ’This is extraordinary!’

There was something inside me that said to me, ‘Hold on. Hold on.’ And I looked to see the other people in the shop, and there was one lady at the far end counter. I thought, ‘Well it can’t be her. She can’t have stolen it from the counter three weeks before. She’s too well-dressed!’ I thought, ‘She wouldn’t want an umbrella. She’d buy her own.’ And I also looked at the heels of her shoes, to see if they were down-trodden. Neither were they down-trodden. So I thought, ‘Well, it can’t be her.’

And I hung back, I stood aside, and I watched. I thought, ‘I’m going to watch this lady.’ And when she’d finished her shopping, she came up to my green umbrella, hanging over the little glass upstand of the counter, and she took the umbrella.

I thought, ‘So she has got it!’ And I knew, deep down on the stem of the umbrella, there was a special black mark, and I thought, ‘Well, if I can see that, it’s got to be my umbrella.’ 85

And I pushed through, out into the daylight, beside her, so that I could look down into the stem of the umbrella. Yes! There was the black mark. And we got outside on the pavement, and she started to walk in the direction she wanted to go, and I thought, ‘This is my last chance to ask her about her umbrella.’

And I did! I don’t know what came over me. I tapped her on the shoulder, and she stopped and looked, and I said, “O, excuse me, you have a very nice umbrella here. I used to own one like this.’ And I said, ‘Tell me, have you had it as a gift? Have you bought it? ….. Or did you find it?’ And when I said, ‘Did you find it?’, I said, ‘Did you find it in this shop?’ She became dumbfounded. She was rigid. She could not speak. And she was trying to push this umbrella on to me. And I said, ‘No, no. Can I have a look at it?’ And she handed it to me and she was making all kinds of animal noises. She was literally dumbfounded. I looked at it, and I said to her, ‘Did you find this umbrella on that counter?’ ‘Uuh, uuh, err,err,..’ she was going. Anyway, I said, ‘It’s mine. Can I have it please?’ Whereupon she just couldn’t stop pushing this umbrella on to me, and I said, ‘Well, it is mine.’ 86

I said, ‘You found it here, about three weeks ago, didn’t you? On a Wednesday, at this time of day.’ We never said any more. I said, ‘Well, I’ll have my umbrella back.’ Which I did. I walked away as though I’d robbed the Tower of London. But anyway, of course, I hadn’t. I mean, it obviously was mine, because she didn’t put up a fight about me not having it. So anyway, there we are. That was my umbrella back.

But sad to say, the end came, when I left it on a petrol bus, a few months later. You get on the buses, with these things, and it was there beside me, and I got up, walked away. I never saw it again.

That is the story of my emerald green umbrella, and I think it is a remarkable story. To think, three weeks later, that I should have gone back to the same shop, and there was the umbrella, in the same spot, where I had left it.

Anyway, there we are! That’s my tale. I’ll never forget it, because I felt so … I felt awful, taking it back. But then, it was mine!

I use to belong to a Horticultural Society, and one night, they wanted interesting tales, and I got up and I told them that. They, too, were quite dumbfounded. Poor woman! I expect she was frightened 87

to death. I know. Fancy! The whole of London - and I saw the person that took it, I was in the shop at the same time as three weeks previously.

Anyway, that’s my tale.

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Vivian Williams, born 1934 in Rhymney, living in Penarth: Transcribed 24 June 2020

I was born in Rhymney in 1934, born in a place called Penydre House: it sounds very grand but it isn’t. It was part of a pub, well, attached to the pub. My father worked in the brewery and my grandfather worked in Rhymney Brewery. I’ve got various medals they were awarded. My grandfather in particular had one of only seventeen awarded, and a silver watch for the finest turnout of horses for a brewery dray. I’ve still got it. It was quite unique. He was technically a drayman: he controlled the horses. But he was never sober, so the horses used to bring him home!

My father was an only son. He had three sisters. The youngest worked at the brewery, where she ran the office: she carried a lot of weight. She died at 49 and covered a lot in her life. How the heck did she do it? She was a brilliant shorthand typist. She was PA to Colonel Griffiths, and Colonel Hore of Hore’s Bank in London, both of whom were very distinguished people.

The brewery was on the bank of the river at the top of Rhymney. In front of the brewery, there was a row of houses called Tre Edwards, and my grandfather lived in number 12, their family house. 89

We lived in number 4 and we owned number 17. We moved there from Penydre House. I had three sisters.

Well, one of the most interesting things then, my father was born in Manest Street in Rhymney. He too had three sisters, but next door was a family called Lewis: they were one boy and three sisters too. My father and their son, Lewis, were like brothers. They were the same age. They always went on holiday together. Uncle Lewis followed his father into the pit and my father followed his father into the brewery.

They went on holiday together to Blackpool in 1934, and my father met my mother there. That’s how I came about. I always say I was conceived on the beach in Blackpool. My mother was from Yorkshire. She followed my father back to Rhymney, which caused quite a stir generally. I was born in December 1934.

My Uncle Lewis had three sisters. The eldest of them was Auntie Nell. She had gone to Teacher Training College. She was a woman with three firsts in her life: One of the first students to pass the entrance exam to Hengoed Grammar School; One of the first women students at Fishponds Teaching College in Bristol; The youngest headmistress appointed to a school in the Rhymney valley. That was because of World War One. She in turn had a second sister Elizabeth. She married a hairdresser, Bermingham, who come to Rhymney in World War One. 90

They had an eldest sister and she was Susan. They also had a youngest sister, Harriet Mary. Everyone called her ‘Toots’. She married Vivian Thomas. She had no children, couldn’t have children. I was named after Uncle Vivian: that’s another whole family story.

I can’t say I was an unwanted child. Technically I had two mothers, my mother and Harriet. I did have my mother very much alive, but my aunt, Harriet - not a blood relation, but couldn’t be much closer - looked after me from a very early age and I was encouraged to do so. It caused a lot of friction to me and to the family.

My mother felt she was above Rhymney, which didn’t go down very well in Rhymney. I had to work for every penny I had, but I was spoilt by Auntie Toots. If I had a shilling and my mother knew, she would want it, so I used to hide it under a stone. My mother was a very difficult person, not an easy person at all, and yet, on the other hand I wasn’t very fair to her, because my loyalty was to Auntie Toots. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this!

On the Lewis side, Auntie Liz and her husband, who was a Bermingham, he had a brother as well, that my father and Uncle Lewis were very fond of. That’s how Auntie Liz met Bermingham. He went off later and left her with four girls.

Auntie Nell had lost a daughter, Margaret, and had a second daughter, Mary, but she became guardian to Prudence, one of Auntie Liz’ daughters. She didn’t become guardian to Gwladys, another 91

daughter, but helped her a lot. Then there was the oldest daughter, Connie and the youngest daughter, Joyce, who lived with her mother and then went to Bournemouth.

Connie was the eldest daughter, and Auntie Toots and Uncle Viv, especially Uncle Viv, took a big interest in Connie. Connie went as a housemaid to Sir Morgan Croften in Kensington, and she was there for many years. Auntie Toots used to go up and stay when Sir Morgan was away, staying with the butler who ran the house. Connie and her mother worked in the Cumberland Hotel in London, where Connie became Room Manager. Eventually Connie joined the Army, the OAC on the Rhine after the war, and Auntie Toots used to send her food parcels, including tins of coffee. Connie was in Germany, in Berlin. Connie eventually moved to Bournemouth, and persuaded her mother to join her there. Eventually Connie married, out of the blue, a chap called George Burchill, a very nice chap. They bought a house in Bristol and used to come almost every weekend to see Auntie Toots.

I was resented by these girls, because they felt I was an intruder, taking over their place with their aunts: that went on for years. Prudence, particularly, who lived in Rhymney: Auntie Nell and Uncle Frank set her up as a hairdresser in Rhymney. She resented me. One time, Prudence was invited to tea in Rhymney, at Auntie Toots and Uncle Viv’s house. It was always a beautiful tea, beautiful table. She locked the back door, and locked me out. I came home from Sunday School, expecting to come in, and I was locked out. So I climbed up on the wall and Uncle Viv saw me. He hit the roof with Prudence and I was brought in.

I passed the 11+ and went to the Lawn School in Rhymney, the secondary school. My mother and father had three girls after me, and my mother never really settled in Rhymney. She was a Yorkshire girl and had to fight her side for recognition. Eventually they bought a business in Cardiff and moved to Cardiff, to run an off licence.

Rhymney, although it is dear to my heart, it breaks my heart when I go there. From somewhere that had thirteen chapels, it has two now, and from three churches, only one, and only twelve in the congregation. And no pubs …

I think I was an encumbrance, an embarrassment, so my mother, who was very ambitious in lots of ways, announced I was going to work in London at 15, as soon as I left school - without consulting me.

I remember going with my mother to an interview with a chef at the Rembrandt Hotel in Thurlow Street in Kensington and then taken out to Stockwell to a recommended hostel. I hated it from the minute I was there. I was only 15, and it was a hostel of Borstal boys and all sorts of dropouts. I didn’t like the hotel either. I was a trainee chef.

So I in turn got myself a job at the Dorchester Hotel and found another hostel called the PM Boys’ Club in Eccleston Square. This was a fabulous place. It was a hostel for young people such as myself and trainees from the world-famous Westminster Catering College. I was very happy there. As I was working shift work, I had every afternoon off, and I used to explore all over London.

Eventually I came back. They formed a catering college in Cardiff. They had been open a year and I was a second entry student for the College of Food Technology. I came back to Cardiff and stayed with my parents during the week and went to Rhymney every weekend to stay with my aunt and uncle, and Auntie Toots and Uncle Viv helped me financially and she did all my washing. We used to have a lovely Sunday lunch and then I would get the quarter to eight train back to Cardiff on Sunday evening to go to college on Monday morning. It was a full-time course. This went on for two years.

Even, looking back on it, the train journey from Rhymney to Cardiff was a unique experience. We’d meet up with the same people every Sunday as the train pulled out of Rhymney to Pontlottyn. You’d meet up with all the theological students from the Methodist and Congregational training colleges in Cardiff, who’d been up to take services in all the different chapels. The conversation always went like this: What was the best food? What was the best chapel? What was the best manse? And … Who were the best payers?

I met every Sunday Graham Hughes, one of the Rhymney boys. He was in the RAF and used to come home every weekend. He was going to Cardiff on the train to pick up the coach to go to his base. Graham in his turn went on to the Royal College of Art and had a distinguished career.

When I finished in college I had to go into the forces, on National Service, and I went in the RAF. 94

You couldn’t say where you wanted to go; you were sent where you were put.

I ended up after initial training, in the RAF Catering in Innsworth in Gloucester, as an instructor. But the funniest thing in this set-up: I was allocated a billet and because of my rank I was in charge of the billet. I took over the billet Graham had vacated!

I was in the RAF for two years; I enjoyed every minute of it. I met and made friends with a lot of interesting people. I met and made friends with a theological student - he officiated at my wedding, in time. I did two years, and then I came home and my mother saw an advert for a job in Chepstow: Catering Officer for the Burns Plastic Surgery Unit in St Laurence Hospital in Chepstow.

So I applied for this job, never thinking I would stand a chance for this job, and I had a telegram asking me to attend for interview the next day. There were five others on the short list before me. I was the last one. I wasn’t even 21. I got the job! I got the job in September and I was 21 in December.

I was completely green. I got the job on my catering experience, but I was on a learning curve. I was able to be resident in the hospital. I had very little experience of controlling staff and a very big catering department. It was a learning curve. I quickly had to learn how to handle staff, and ordering, costing, food control: it was all new to me, and I suddenly found I was totally in charge. Fortunately for me, I seemed to fit in with the rest of the hospital staff. I quickly become friends with a very, very charming lady pharmacist, and other staff. I become very active in the Conservative Party in Chepstow and made a life for myself. I become very much part of it. I was a founder member of Chepstow Rotary as representative of the hospital. I became an active member of the Masonic Lodge in 95

Chepstow. I eventually met my wife, who in turn was a sister tutor in St Laurence’s training school. Eventually, across the road from St Laurence’s Hospital was a very old established Ministry of Pensions Hospital from World War One, under the auspices of the Princess Royal. They became part of the Health Board, and I was asked to take over the catering there. We also had a small hospital, Chepstow and District Hospital, so I became Group Catering Officer for the Chepstow Hospitals.

It gave me for the first time in my life ….. looking back on it, I got away with murder, because nobody knew where I was, if I was at St Laurence’s, or where. I was mobile; I had a car. I enjoyed that period of my life.

St Laurence’s Hospital had quite an interesting history. Emlyn Lewis, an eminent plastic surgeon, was approached by Archie Lush, Nye Bevan’s close friend, to open a Burns Unit, which was needed in Wales, with the steel works and so on. That’s how St Laurence’s was established. They took over St Laurence’s, which was an American Hospital in the war. They only had to develop it as a Burns Unit. Lewis and his family lived in the officers’ original residence. Then Emlyn Lewis decided it was time to buy a beautiful property in Chepstow.

I decided to get married and I was offered their flat - a beautiful appointed flat at the entrance to the hospital with a private entrance to the flat. We lived there for five years: we were able to entertain. My eldest sister Mary, I introduced her to the local undertaker, Jim, and they got married and they settled in Chepstow.

We lived there for 17 years. Then Emlyn Lewis died. St Laurence was coming to the end of its life. 96

The writing was on the wall. I decided I had to look for a different career. I applied to be a lecturer at Barry College of Further Education and I was appointed there as a Catering Lecturer. My wife and I by this time had two daughters. My daughters went to Howells School.

We bought at auction our first house in Cyncoed in Cardiff. My wife in turn became a Sister Tutor in the School of Nursing, and even became Matron of a cancer hospital in Penarth. So we moved to Penarth, and bought the house we are living in now.

Vivian Williams, Transcribed 1 July 2020

When we came to Penarth, I was still working in Barry. I was fortunate that I was appointed there as a lecturer, but I never progressed. I always had personal satisfaction, in that my students passed the exams; I never had a failure, but I never progressed in the college. It changed quite dramatically after the principal retired, got a lot bigger and so on. I became quite disillusioned at the end. I got involved in the YTS students. I found that very difficult. My health broke down, I had a very serious operation, and in the end, I was able to take early retirement with a pension, enabling me to live a good standard of life.

Then my life took a different direction. I got involved with Cardiff Action for Single Homeless, based at the Huggard Centre. I raised an awful lot of money for them. It was very early days, before they had their purpose-built centre. They were in terrapins in the centre of Cardiff. I became active with the local Conservative Association, and it was out of that I became a Parochial Church Councillor in Penarth. I did that for many years and out of all that, I suddenly had a letter from Downing Street, 97

from Tony Blair, offering me the MBE - out of the blue. I was delighted to accept. It was in the Millennium Honours.

Somebody I have become quite friendly with since then, got the MBE at the same time as me: the Welsh comedian Max Boyce. He and I were invested at the same time. At that time they were doing the investitures in Cardiff Castle, and I was invested there by the Prince of Wales.

I discovered afterwards who it was that nominated me for the MBE: the Chair of the Huggard Centre. They were approached for a reference. I don’t know how these things work.

My only regret, when I had the MBE, was that my aunt had died in Rhymney and wasn’t there to witness it. She would have been very, very proud.

I had for many years been a member of the Hearts of Oak Friendly Society. Suddenly I was approached and asked to become a delegate, representing this area of Wales. Their meetings were held in Holborn, London, in their hall, and their offices were in Leicester. I used to have to go to Holborn every three months. I really enjoyed being a delegate. They used to have fabulous dos in the Russell Hotel and the wives were invited. Then I was asked, would I let my name go forward as President? They wanted a Welsh President! I let my name go forward and I was appointed VicePresident. That meant I had to go to monthly meetings in London and I had to not make a bloomin’ ass of myself!

Then came the year when I was President: it was a very exciting time. One of the highlights was 98

when my wife and I were asked to take tea with the Queen Mother. We sat at her table - it was quite an experience! - in Westminster Abbey in the Jerusalem Chamber.

I remember, she had done her work very well: she knew all about us, knew about our two daughters. We were told to address her as Ma’am, and not to ask her questions. But I was always taught to speak out, speak up, speak clearly. So I asked, ‘Ma’am, how do you know so much about us?’ ‘I have a dear friend in Penarth.’ ‘O, who is that, then?’ I asked again. ‘Irene, Countess of Plymouth.’ She was the same age as the Queen Mother. We knew her very well. She was a delightful person. The Queen Mother’s Ladies in Waiting would contact people and find out all the information that was necessary.

Eventually I was offered the Freedom of the City of London. We had to go to the Guildhall. There was a small ceremony, with the sponsors present. We had a beautiful framed embossed certificate, which is hanging in my hall now. All these things took place, and I’ve got them.

After that, life seemed to settle down quite a bit, but eventually, unfortunately, the Friendly Society ceased to exist. I’m still in contact with lots of friends I made during that time, but the Society itself was taken over by other organisations, and that’s it!

We carried on here. Eventually, my dear wife had Alzheimer’s and had a stroke. We went through that very difficult period, with lots of problems. She died, and I’ve been without her for some years. We have two daughters: one is in Australia and the other lives with me, and takes care of me. I’m nearly 86.

I’ve had a lot of downs in my life, but I’ve glossed over those. I’ve told you the happier times.

One of the first things when I was in Chepstow, was that we bought a house called Glanmor House. It had quite a history. It was a lovely house. We sold that when we came to Cardiff, and then Penarth. I’ve become very active in the church here. I was active in the church in Chepstow too, of course. Going back, during the time in Chepstow, when I was actively involved with the Young Conservatives’ Association, I was fortunate to attend the Conservative Leadership School at the Earl of Swindon’s home. I was representing the area, with four other friends, people from Brecon and the Valleys. We went up by car. That was quite an experience.

In recent years, I’ve had a major cancer operation. I was losing weight and told to go in for a blood transfusion. When I was on the ward, a doctor I knew from my wife’s illness came through and said, ‘Good lord, what are you doing here? Don’t leave without asking for a cancer test.’ So I had two tests.

When I went for my results, my two daughters were there. I was told I had terminal cancer and given six months to live! I said, ‘That’s ok, I’ve had 80 years, I’m ready to go. I don’t want any operations or pulling about. 100

I just want a little injection and that’s that.’ They said, ‘Well, we can’t do that, you know.’

Then they found it had gone to the appendix, and if it burst, that was it, so I had to go in. I had this massive operation. Fortunately, I had a very, very good doctor and fortunately they avoided a colostomy. I’m touching wood I’ve got over it.

I’ve had a few years of freedom. I’ve been on a couple of cruises, I’ve been to the Caribbean, and enjoyed it. I’ve cut back on lots of things, like the Conservative Association, and I’ve concentrated on my holidays. I enjoy my lifestyle. I’m coming up to 86, and I know I’m not as well as I was, but I’m going on living.

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