I was born in Shanghai! Not the exotic Chinese city out in the Far East, but a street of council houses on the outskirts of the little village of Gowerton, some 6 or 7 miles west of Swansea. The steet's official name was Mount Pleasant, although, I have found a very old book belonging to my father, which had his name and address on the flyleaf as "Iestyn David Davies, 74, Council Houses, Gowerton." The street was made up of some 86 houses, mainly occupied when I was born, by miners, steelworkers, tinplate workers etc., and their families, but why it was always known, and still is by the older inhabitants, as Shanghai, remains a mystery, at least to me.

There was Upper Shanghai and Lower Shanghai. I was born, in Lower Shanghai, on 20th January 1934 at 12.20.an, (so I am told) in the "big back bedroom" of No. 74, the bedroom normally occupied by my mother and father.

Rear of Mount Pleasant, open back door is No.74

There were four bedrooms, so it was quite a large house. My father's mother, Mary, slept in the front large bedroom, and my sister, Marion, in the front small one. I was eventually to occupy the small back room. Every bed had a "po", or chamber pot, underneath it, which had to be emptied each morning if necessary, especially when I was ill, which I generally was every winter.

Downstairs, there was the passage which led from the front door to the back, through what we called the scu1lery, which had a large oblong sink with hot and cold water behind the back door, a table, which was later replaced by a clothes washer with a top that folded down to form a table top when not in use, and, in the corner, a huge, square, brick structure, which contained a large copper boiler over a small fireplace, which used to be used for boiling clothes, and boiling Christmas Puddings in October or November each year. It was eventually taken out from all the houses by the Council, which gave a bit more room in the scullery.

The washing "machine" was a large square aluminium tub on metal legs. The wooden lid had a swivel ball set into it attached to a metal paddle blade inside the tub, and a handle with a shiny ball, which fitted onto the swivel ball when the lid was closed and by this means, one could actually stir the clothes inside. The water was heated by kettle on the fire in the other room, or on a gas ring on the table in the scullery, and Washing Day was one of great activity and general upheaval. Why it was always on a Monday, I never understood and still don't.

There was the large back room, which we called the Kitchen. This was where we lived, where the dining table was, and also the large fireplace. The coal fire was lit in the grate, about 12 inches (30 cms) above the floor, with an oven on the left and a hob on the right. The bars across the front had an ingenious hinge which allowed the top three bars to be lifted and tipped forward to form a ledge, on which the kettle or a saucepan could simmer, and the huge iron kettle, which, as far as I remember, was only used for boiling water for the washing machine or for baths in front of the fire in winter, and maybe, hot water bottles. Each side of the fireplace there was a double cupboard built into the wall from floor to ceiling. One contained the hot water tank, but both, because of the proximity of the fireplace were excellent airing cupboards and places to keep clothes warm in winter. In the corner on the left of the fireplace was the pantry, with its heavy slate shelf, which kept everything cold, and wooden shelves for food, dishes, etc. This pantry jutted out from the square shape of the house, connecting to the coal-house, and next to that the lavatory, which was pretty cold in winter.

During World War II, every family was issued with an air-raid shelter, intended to protect us during bombing raids. One was an outdoor one, which was made of corrugated iron sheets, bent at one end so that the sides came up and bent over to form the roof. This was erected in a large rectangular hole in the garden and then covered with earth. The other was the Anderson Shelter, which was an iron table that took the place of the dining table. It had an angle-iron frame and a steel top, and steel net sides to prevent any rubble falling in on one. Under ours we had a bed made up on the floor of the shelter, and occasionally I was allowed to sleep in it for fun. The most use made of it was as table on top and a playroom for me below. I can remember playing with my toy soldiers under it, fighting battles against the Germans, battles which we always won.

The front room was the Parlour, where the best china the piano and a small fireplace were, and was only used for very special occasions, like funerals, and piano practice. My Grandmother died on 6th May, 1950, and was laid out in her coffin in this parlour, where she lay surrounded by the smell of lavender water and flowers, and where neighbours, friends and family came to see her and say Goodbye, and I was ceremoniously marched in to see her in her coffin and say goodbye, so that I "didn't have nightmares". And this was also where the funeral service was held before the hearse, followed by a car for family mourners, and all other male mourners walking, drove slowly through the village and over to Kingsbridge Cemetery. Only men went to the cemetery, but the women, who remained in the house to set out the food for everyone on their return from the graveside, could watch the funeral procession going across "the common" and up to the cemetery, about a mile away, and even see the short interment service at the grave.

View from back door. The Cornfield, the village, Steelworks & Kingsbridge

My father kept an old pair of binoculars on the kitchen windowsill so that he could watch funerals from Gowerton moving slowly across Stafford Common and up to the cemetery, when he was ill and could no longer attend the funerals himself. They were really opera glasses, but they served their purpose for him, and, anyway, he could never have afforded full size binoculars in those days.

On the other side of the passage at the foot of the stairs and at the front of the house was the bathroom, with a hand basin and a bath with taps. The toilet was out the back next to the coalhouse. We had a large garden for vegetables and fruit bushes and, of course, the clothesline, and the high aerial, which ran the whole length of the garden for the radio in the kitchen.

This is how the house and the street look today...

No.74, Mount Pleasant

And the bottom of the street as they are today

It is strange, but whenever I have a dream which is about something happening to me, it is always set in 74, Mount Pleasant, and not in my present home.

Family

My father's family. Back row My father - Iestyn David Davies and my grandfather - John Davies. Front row Dad's brother - Thomas John Davies and my Grandmother - Mary Davies

My father, Iestyn David Davies, was born in Gendros, between Fforestfach and Cocket near Swansea on 14th January, 1897, and had a younger brother, Thomas John. His father was John Davies, born, (I think in the Rhondda valley) in June 1867, and died on 11th January 1925.

His mother was Mary Davies, born on 1st October 1867 in Spitty Row, Lougher, then, at least partly, in Carmarthenshire. Her father was Thomas Davies, a miner, and her mother was Sarah Davies, nee Thomas. They were married in Porth, Rhondda on 6th October 1894, and he died at the age of 57 yrs 6 months on 11th January 1925 when they were living at 7 Morgans Terrace, Gowerton. His occupation was described as Inquiry Officer, Ministry of Pensions, Cardiff.

Notes about the life of Mary Davies, my Grandmother

Thomas John, Dad's brother, had a terrible stammer when he was young and was advised that if he could not get words out he should sing them, which he did, and, although he still had a slight stammer when he was older, he also had a wonderful tenor voice and sang at all sorts of functions.

My mother, Lilian Annie Bruce, was born on 24th June 1898 in Colchester, the daughter of a serving soldier and his Dutch wife, of whom I know nothing, except that she had a hard life with her husband. Mam spent her early childhood in Salisbury where her father was stationed. When she was a small child, she used to tell me, she sat one day on the doorstep doing some sewing, and dropped her needle. She got up to look for it, and searched all over. Someone realised she was missing and her mother and the other children started looking for her. Eventually the troops were turned out for a complete search and she was found wandering on Salisbury Plain, still looking for her sewing needle! When her father was discharged from the Army having served his time, the family went to live in Plymouth where he took charge of a Post Office and telephone exchange.

She met my father, romantically, at the wedding of his cousin, Glyn Davies who, as a soldier, was serving in Plymouth where he met Violet Ryder, my mother's best friend from their school days. My mother came over from Plymouth for the wedding, met my father, and "bingo".

Mam and Dad on their Wedding Day

My father's mother, Mary, however, never really forgave him for marrying an English girl,

Grandma (Dad's Mother) with the new baby - me!

and although Mam looked after her, nursed her when ill, and did everything to try to please her, she never really forgave her for not being Welsh!

Grandma, Marion and me

Dad's father, John Davies, had lived as a young lad at 32, Elizabeth Street, Pentre, Rhondda, joined the army in about 1886 (?) for three years with the colours and four on the reserve. Oddly, I did the same thing some sixty-two years later. I served in the RASC and he served in the Welsh Regiment when it was still spelt Welsh and not Welch as it later became. He served his time, reaching the rank of Sergeant, and just when his Reserve Service was about to end, the Boer War broke out, and he was recalled. This time he stayed in the army and rose to the rank of Warrant Officer, Class 1, and became a Regimental Sergeant Major.

Dad's Father, R.S.M. John Davies Welsh Regiment

He died on 11th January 1925 at the age of 57. My father, whose eyesight was so bad that he wore spectacles that looked like the bottom of two milk bottles, and was therefore rejected by the army, worshipped his father and all things military, and had sets of books all about the wars and battles his father had served in, including, I believe, World War 1. His proudest possessions were his father's dress uniform, including his Sam Brown belt, badges and medals. His greatest disappointment came when after his father had died his mother, Mary Davies, cut up her husband's red tunic and navy blue trousers to make a rag mat. We had his peak cap and cap badge for years until someone in the village borrowed the cap for a fancy dress party, and it was never returned. I still have his Sam Brown belt. My uncle, Thomas John, was never interested in the army, as far as I know.

My mother's father, Robert Bruce, had also been in the Army. The story in the family was that he was from a semi-aristocratic family, descended from King Robert Bruce, and related in some way to the Bowes-Lyons family. The sons of the family had to enter professions according to a strict set of rules. I am not sure what profession my grandfather was supposed to enter, but he went off and joined the army. The family bought him out, but he went off and joined up again. Again they bought him out, but the third time he joined the army, they cut him off with the proverbial shilling. He, also, rose in the ranks to RSM in the Royal Army Service Corps, married a Dutch girl, and after leaving the Army, ran a Post Office and Telephone exchange in Crown Hill, Plymouth. He was a cruel drunkard, whose wife died after giving birth to five daughters and two sons, and who beat his children and drove them all to leave home to get away from him.

When my mother was in her teens, she and some friends went to a dance, something he had forbidden them ever to do. Dancing was considered sinful, but oddly, he insisted that all the children learned to skate. When he discovered when he was drunk that they had been to a dance, he locked my mother and two of her sisters in their bedroom, placed his belt and open razor on the chest of drawers outside their door, and told them that when he returned he was going to kill them all. He then went off to the pub.

They decided to do as they had planned many times to do. They went out the window, taking Winnie, the youngest, with them and fled. Mam was working in a restaurant owned by a Mr. Sellick, and she went to him, as he had often told her to do to get away from her father's cruelty. He took her and Winnie in, and his wife looked after them, but Winnie was eventually taken into an orphanage, because she was so young and of such low intelligence. She was subsequently placed in Lorna Doone Farm in North Devon, as a "scivvy", and she remained there until she retired, looked after by the two farmers, Mr. Richards and Mr. Burge, and their wives, who owned the farm in those days. The farm was also a tourist attraction, and Winnie worked in the kitchen, cleaned the rooms for the guests, and conducted day visitors around the farm explaining all its history, and proudly pointing out the gun which "shot Lorna Doone" in Oare church, which was just up the road about a mile. The window in the church looking in at the altar was always kept open because that was where Carver Doone shot Lorna during her wedding to John Ridd! I don't know if it still is. R.D. Blackmore, who wrote the story, is buried alongside the church in Newton, Porthcawl. The gun which "shot her" was, in fact, bought in a sale in Porlock, or so I understood. When Winnie got older she spent the winters with us in Gowerton or with one of her other sisters, Carrie, in Plymouth, and only returned to Lorna Doone Farm for the Summer season, but eventually spent all her time either in Plymouth or Gowerton.

She, or Mrs. Burge or Mrs. Richards, used to give Mam plates and cups and beakers with views of the farm or scenes from the Lorna Doone story, and we had quite a few of those. I had the plates valued recently, and the coloured one was thought to be worth about £30 and the white one probably about £45.

Mam's others siblings were Carrie (Gorman), Rhoda (Burley), Caroline (Tull) known as Cora Cissie, who died young, Albert and Robert. Albert also became a career soldier in the Royal Army Service Corps, as did his son, Albie, who went to the Army Apprentice School in Chepstow, and ended up, I believe, in the Royal Engineers. Albert also had a daughter, June, who maried Peter Lobb, who was regarded as adopted by Rhoda and Ned, but was probably only fostered by them, because he did not change his name. Cora and Stan had Betty, and Carrie had several sons. I don't think Cissie ever married. Robert, (Bobbie) died before I was born.

My father had only one brother, Thomas John, who married Doris Williams of Loughor, and they went to live in Waunarlwydd, taking Doris' sister, Rachel Mary with them. There they had three children, Edna who was about the same age as Marion, Gloria, who was more my age, and they had a son, Leighton, who died when still a baby. I remember visiting their house in Waunarlwydd, but they moved when I was very young, and went to live in Wembley to find work. They all found jobs in a factory making "Dad's Cookies" biscuits, and had a lodger, an Irish girl who must have been totally confused in that household.

I visited them at weekends when I was in the Army, and found them intriguing. Thomas John, Doris and Rachel Mary always spoke Welsh to each other, and to Edna, who had a little Welsh and always replied in English. Gloria being virtually brought up in Wembley only spoke English, as did Edna's London born husband Walter, and the Irish lodger. Everyone appeared to understand what was going on and being said, and they never spoke the wrong language to the one they were addressing.

Gloria eventually got married to a lad called Derek, who worked for Fords Motors, but went to work in their Detroit factory. He liked the set-up out there so much he persuaded Gloria to go out and join him, and they set up home just over the border in Canada, just south of Toronto. They had two sons, who also married and had sons. They came home from time to time with stories about life in Canada so they all decided that when Thomas John retired, they would all give up their jobs and go to this wonderful land that Gloria told them about. They all found work, Edna's daughter, also called Doris, but known as Dorrie, married a chap called Gill, and her brother, David also married and they all set up their families in the Toronto area. Dorrie had three children, Fulton, Jason and daughter Krisa. Fulton has two children, Anthony and Allysa. Jason, who is a truck driver, has a daughter, Cheyanne, now 5 years old. Krisa also has two children, Matthew and Teja.

Edna died in 1995. She and Walter and some of the family went off camping, arrived at their favourite site near a big lake, and while the men were putting up the awning on the campervan, Edna sat on a tree trunk, had a heart attack and died sitting there. Gloria had a heart attack in December 2007. She was travelling in their car driven by her husband, Derek, and she suddenly slumped. Derek stopped the car, saw the situation and drove her straight to the hospital. She had had a heart attack, and was put on a life support machine. She remained in a coma until all her family had arrived, and then she just slipped away. Dorrie and Derek, David and his wife are still there, keeping an eye on Walter, who also keeps in touch, and I still remain in contact with Dorrie, exchanging news in the occasional Emails

My parents married on my father's birthday, 14th February 1924, St.Valentine's Day, in Tabernacle Welsh Congregational Chapel, in Gowerton, with little fuss, and my mother cherished the memory of one of Dad's distant relatives standing on her doorstep in Sterry Road, and throwing some rice over them as they walked past on their way back to the house. Their marriage was blessed on Boxing Day, 1926 with the birth of my sister, Marion Winifred, and eight years later, with me.

Marion, my Dad, Mam and me on the front lawn at Mount Pleasant

They initially lived in 2, Morgans Terrace, in Sterry Road, where Marion was born. The terrace, I was always led to believe, had been built by either my grandfather or more likely my great grandfather because the family story is that he could not read or write, and a neighbour, who could, looked after all his paper work. When my great grandfather died, it was found that all he had built, including the Vicarage and the LNER Hotel in the village, were recorded as belonging to the neighbour and not my family. After my grandfather died, Mam, Dad and Marion moved to the council house in Mount Pleasant, where I was born.

Violet, Mam's school friend who had married Uncle Glyn, was living in 14 Mansel Street, which was at the bottom of the Cornfield, and Mam and Dad and Marion lived at the top of the Cornfield, and Vi and Mam could see the back of each other's houses. They had a marvellous signalling system which went on for years. If anyone in our house was ill, or anything was wrong, my mother would hang a piece of cloth, a tea towel or something out of the back bedroom window, and Vi, as she was known, would come steaming up over the cornfield to see what was wrong. Similarly, if we saw a cloth hanging out of Vi's bedroom window, Mam would drop everything and rush down to Vi. The system only came to an end when Vi died, when I was a young man working in Newport or Bridgend in the early 60's.

The main square of the village was the crossroads, known locally as the Gower Inn Square, because the largest building on the cross roads was the Gower Inn.

Market Square Gowerton, known locally as Gower Inn Square

It has since had to change its name because there was another Gower Inn, actually in Parkmill on the Gower Peninsular, and ours is now The Welcome to Gower. If one thinks of the Gower Peninsular as being the shape of a boot, Gowerton is the top lace hole. It was an industrial village with a Steel works, a Tinplate works and a Foundry, and had had a slant for digging coal. For some reason it was called the Cuckoo Slip, all that remained of which was the tips, obviously called the Cuckoo Tips.

The road north from Gowerton led to Kingsbridge (Pont-y-Brenin) where the cemetery is situated, and on to Gorseinon, Grovesend and Pontardulais. The road West ran to Penclawdd, Llanrhidian and the North Gower coast. Going East was Sterry Road, with Cecil Road branching off to the right, Sterry Road going to Waunarlwydd and ultimately to Swansea, via Cocket and Fforestfach, and Sterry Road leading to Dunvant, Killay, Sketty, and then Swansea.

Sterry Road and the Post Office, Gowerton

At the junction of Sterry Road and Cecil Road was a structure of which Gowerton was proud. It stood just outside the front gates of one of the largest houses in the village, where the Piper Family lived. It was a wrought iron network structure with no roof, oval in shape with an entrance which permitted no one to see inside, as it was the Gents’ Public Urinal and was known affectionately as “St. Paul’s”. It stank to high Heaven and was known far and wide.

Pipers’ House, incidentally, was brought to my attention in a strange and remarkable way many years after I had left the village. I went to Canada with the South Wales Burma Star Choir in 1982, and we sang in a church in Niagara Falls. At the end of the concert we all trudged down to the basement hall for tea and buns, followed by a large number of the audience. One very elderly gentleman tugged on my sleeve and asked me if there was anyone in the choir from Gowerton.

We were a choir of about 50 singers, all from Bridgend, Porthcawl, Pyle and Port Talbot mainly, and I was the only one with any connection with Gowerton. It turned out that he had left Gowerton as a young lad when his family sold up and emigrated to Canada, and the house they sold became the Pipers’ house. He asked after a lot of people from the village, all of whom were of my father’s generation or older, but surprisingly, some of them I knew, like Tommy Peebles the Butcher. On my return I took photographs of the house and the views from the house, and sent them out to him, and we corresponded for several years. Two years after this meeting, the choir went to Canada on tour again, and again sang in Niagara Falls and we met up again, when he showed me photographs of himself in school as a little lad in short trousers, and expected me to recognise his schoolmates and tell him how they were getting on. He also showed me the Bible which was presented to him by the Minister and Deacons of Bethania Welsh Baptist Chapel, signed by them all and wishing him well in his new land, when the family emigrated. It just happened that I knew Bethania well, because I was in school with the younger son of the minister, Y Parch Trefor Owen, who was as well known in the village as the Vicar was. This old chap in Niagara Falls was now 82 years of age, and we corresponded for some time before his letters stopped and I got no reply from mine, so I assume he had gone on to greater things.

From the Gower Inn, going south, is Mount Street, at the top of which Mount Pleasant goes off at right angles to the left, (if that is not confusing). Half way up, Mount Pleasant half turns to the right, and from the bend, Park Road runs back down, roughly in a North-Easterly direction to join Cecil Road, which is the main road out to Dunvant and Swansea. This leaves a large area between Mount Pleasant and the rest of the village. Most of that area was taken up with woods, the Cuckoo Tip, and a large field known to everyone as The Cornfield. In all my time, I never found anyone, even amongst the most elderly inhabitants, who ever remembered corn being grown in it. All I remember in it were occasionally cows, occasionally sheep, and almost all the time, the children of the village, especially Mount Pleasant, playing in it, usually by sliding down the coal tip into it. It was in the Cornfield that I had my first fight with another boy while we were in the Elementary School. I cannot remember what the fight was about, but a big crowd of boys ran to the Cornfield instead of straight home after school to see the fight. As far as I remember, after only a few blows each, we forgot our disagreement, abandoned the fight and went home for tea. The cornfield was where cricket, football, Cowboys-and-Indians, and even bicycle polo, was played, despite the steep slope, which led to a small flat area at the bottom, behind Mansel Street.

The tip was very old, or at least mature, and consequently covered in grass and gorse, which invariably got set on fire, either on purpose by ‘naughty’ boys, or accidentally, by older boys sneaking into the gorse for a clandestine smoke. The “First Woods”, immediately behind the Gowerton County Grammar School for Boys, was where we kids learned to climb trees, played War Games, Cowboys and Indians, found the sticks to make catapults and Bows ‘n Arrows, looked for birds’ nests and all the other things kids did in wartime South Wales. Then, across Park Road, was the “Second Woods”, at the far end of which was Gowerton County Grammar School for Girls, and a well-defined path that ran from one school to the other.

Although it was a small village, Gowerton had two railway stations. The Great Western Railway from Paddington to Fishguard and the London, Midland and Scottish Railway ran from Swansea, through Mid Wales and up to Scotland. The LMS station was on the main road, with a level crossing, which was constantly holding up traffic in and out of the village whenever a train went through.

It was, in fact, though, the GWR which gave the village its present name. Originally, it was called Ffosfelyn, or Ffosfelen according to some. It grew up around a watermill grinding corn and wheat in what became Mill Street, hence the name Ffosfelyn, or Mill Stream. But because of the coal seams in the area the little stream that ran through the centre of the village, as opposed to the River Llan, which powered the mill, was tinted yellow on its bed, hence the Ffosfelen, or Yellow Stream. The argument probably still goes on. However, because the GWR railway station served passengers from the Gower, as was its practice, it was named Gower Road, and eventually the village became Gowerton. It is strange, and it used to fascinate me, to hear the people of the village talking. If they were speaking in English, they called it Gowerton, and if in Welsh, they called it Gower Road, or Gwr-rôd. Rarely did one hear it called Ffosfelyn or Ffosfelen. Incidentally, the people of the Gower peninsular always call their area Gwr. Gower, incidentally, used to be the name of the area from Hereford and Newport in the East down to Carmarthen in the West, and not just the little peninsula as we know it.

The village also had its own cinema, the Tivoli, on top of the hill by the side of the LMS line. There, every Christmas, Harry Thomas, the owner, (known, believe it or not, as Harry the Tiv,) would put on a special Saturday morning programme free for the village children, and give each one of us a packet of sweets, and an apple, or orange, as we trooped out. This caused a lot of trouble during the Second World War when we had evacuees in the village. Sweets and fruit were very scarce, and so at Christmas time the only children who had sweets (no fruit) were the evacuees, who were lucky if they held on to them for long. My first few years, I am told, were taken up with being ill every winter, mainly with Pneumonia, Bronchitis, etc., and every summer with anything else that was going. The doctor, Dr. Morgan Owen, originally from Blaengarw, near Bridgend, was at everyone’s beck and call, day and night, and was worshipped in the village, so much so that when he retired in 1976, it was suggested, and seriously considered, that a statue of him be erected in his honour. He turned that idea down, but there was a door-to-door collection made for donations, and on 22nd September that year, there was a presentation to him, I think of some silver, in what I knew as the Grammar School, but by then called the Upper Comprehensive School, to which everyone in the village was invited, and the place was packed.

He warned my mother and father that I was unlikely to see my first birthday, but, apparently, I did.

My favourite picture of me, aged 2 or 3. Second prize winner in the Gowerton Carnival

And my second. And my third. So he must have treated me well to have survived as long as I have. He was a most conscientious and dedicated doctor, like my father-in-law. He built and equipped his own surgery with its own dispensary, and his own recipes for medicines, in which everyone had utmost faith. Sadly, towards the end of his career he had to have several fingers amputated, because, it was said, of the effect of the X-ray machine, which he bought himself in order to diagnose his patients’ complaints. Many a time I stood on the platform with my chin on the rest and my chest pressed against the screen while he stood in front of me on the other side of the screen studying the picture of my chest on it. Standing so often in front of the machine in direct line with the rays must have had an effect on him eventually. He wanted to give up when he lost his fingers, because he felt none of his patients would want him touching them with hands like that, but those same patients would not let him, and he was sadly missed when he did eventually retire from practice.

Apparently, although I do not remember my very early childhood, when I learned to talk, I was forever telling stories about incidents and things that I had done, that occurred “when I was very small, before I was born, living on my own in Cocket.” Cocket was then on the outskirts of Swansea, and close to Gendros where my father was born, but how I knew about Cocket when I was a very small child, or why all the things I talked about were supposed to have happened there before I was born, has always remained a mystery.

Our playground, as children, included the old coal tips, the fields and the woods, but especially, the street.

Me, aged about 7 years?

With very few cars on the roads in those days, and the bus running up or down the street only about 3 – 4 times a day, we had few interruptions to our games of Mob, Please Jack Can I Cross The Water, Cricket, Catty and Doggy, Statues, and, of course, Knock the Knocker, which often ended with one of us getting a clip around the ear from an irate householder fed up with being disturbed by knocks on his door and never anyone there when he answered it, except some sniggers from behind someone else’s hedge or wall. We also built “fourers”, consisting of a plank of wood, two wheels on the back with a seat in between, and a smaller piece of wood which was bolted on the front so that it could swivel, holding the axle and two front wheels and for turning corners. In other parts, it is called a “gambo”, or a “cart”, or “trolley”.

Another favourite activity for some, was going to the scrap yard at the far end of the Richard Thomas and Baldwins steelworks, way out on the marsh, where scrap iron was brought in to be melted down and re-used to make fresh steel. This was a treasury of playthings for us kids. Bicycle frames, bicycle wheels, and all sorts of strange bits and pieces would be found, taken clandestinely away, and turned into any number of useful things to play with. Every lad, at some time or other, had a “boneshaker” bicycle from the “Scrap”, which could be ridden downhill and then pushed back up to the top to ride down again. One lad once even found a motorcycle frame complete with wheels and a saddle, but all the tyres and upholstery had been burnt off, so only the metal parts remained. After a good oiling, it provided hours of fun, albeit very dangerous fun, for all us kids, who would ride it down the side of the tips and across the cornfield until it either stopped naturally, or we fell off. Then was the job of pushing a very heavy vehicle back across the field and up to the top of the tips for the next lad. Towards the end of the WWII, someone found several railway trucks full of rifles, with all the wood burnt off, and in other trucks were the firing bolts, which had been removed from the rifles. Within days, nearly every lad, including me, had a rifle that could be cocked, and fired with a shout of “bang”, and we re-fought the War all over again. Some boys (or their fathers) even shaped stocks and butts from wood and rebuilt the rifles realistically. Then the police were said to be looking for all the stolen rifles, which were hastily disposed of, hidden or buried. Mine was buried in the garden, and as far as I know, is still there.

My father came home from work one day with a bicycle for me. It was small, as I was only about eight years old at the time, and it had no front wheel. Dad did it all up and we painted it light blue, but could not be ridden until he found a front wheel for it. Meanwhile, it would stand up on the back wheel and the front fork, and I was able to sit on it and imagine riding all over the place. Eventually, he found a wheel of the right size, probably in the scrap yard, or from one of his work mates, and I was then able to mount it and ride it with no difficulty because I had long since found my balance on it.

The boundaries of our playground area was anything up to about three miles or more from our homes, and no one worried then about any danger we might have been in. It was not an issue. I do, however, remember feeling a sense of fear for the first time, when some 84 German Prisoners of War escaped from a POW Camp in Bridgend and were said to be roaming the countryside trying to find their way back to Germany. I had visions of passing a gorse bush on the tips and finding a hungry German hiding there waiting for a child like me to come past so that he could eat me. I also remember the relief when word spread through the village that they had all been rounded up and were back in custody. That, and sitting on the outside of the bedroom windowsill, held by my mother, so that we could watch the bombs dropping on Swansea, seven miles away, and see the flames and smoke pouring up into the sky, were the only frightful memories I have of my childhood, and even watching the blitz of Swansea was an adventure. I do remember the park, what we now call a playground, which was half way up the lane from the village to Shanghai. It had swings, baby-swings, a roundabout, and a “jerker”, which consisted of a long wooden seat with metal “n” shaped handles to hang on to, and a child would stand at each end, with everyone else sitting along the seat, which was held up by strong iron poles hanging from the overhead frame. The child each end would manoeuvre it so that it swung back and forth as a gigantic swing. The park was always closed and locked on Sundays, but an older generation of boys had bent the upright bars of the railings around the park, and dug hollows under the railings at certain points, so that we never had trouble getting in to play there.

In the corner backing on to the wall of the Grammar School was a Fives Court. I do not remember anyone ever playing Fives in it, although we kids always tried with a tennis ball and our hands for bats. What I do remember is that the inside of the walls was coated with cement, and it had no roof, and if one threw a “banger” firework in through the open door, or over the wall, the resulting bang would echo round the walls for ages, and could be heard from miles away.

One day, when I was about six years old, I was riding on the roundabout, and decided I wanted to join a friend on the Chute, or slide, at the other end of the Park. I jumped off the roundabout and ran across the park, completely unconscious of the jerker full of other children, and as I ran past it, it swung and hit me on the side of the head. Some older boys carried me home to my mother, who took me to the surgery, where the doctor put four stitches in the wound. Some years later, I was prone to being very stubborn and to “nasty tempers”. My mother tried everything to cure me and eventually consulted the doctor, who advised her that this was related to the bang on the head from the Jerker, and the only treatment was to conquer me, rather than let me conquer her. She had a little bamboo “Charlie Chaplin” cane, probably won in a fair somewhere, which she kept hanging behind the kitchen door, and if I did break into a temper, she would first threaten me, and if that did not work, she would beat me on the legs with this little cane and send me to bed. This eventually cured me, and to this day, I have never since been able to lose my temper, except twice when I was much older.

There was one occasion when we had been to Swansea on the double-decker bus to do some shopping. This was a great treat and I always enjoyed the thrill of riding on the front seat upstairs into, and home from, Town, and having fish and chips in the restaurant upstairs in High Street Woolworths. This day, we got off the bus on Cecil Road, and were walking up The Lane to get home, and I suddenly decided I was too tired to walk any further and refused to go on. My mother cajoled and coaxed me but I ended up on the ground having one of my tempers. In desperation, my mother told me to wait there while she went to fetch “the stick”, and set off across the field, a short cut to our house, and she was in my view all the way up and all the way back. Being the obedient little boy that I was I stayed there until she came back and gave me a crack across my legs, and then I walked quietly home. It was all part of what I still regard as a wonderful, happy childhood. The only other form of discipline was that if I was naughty, I was told that “the Bwgi-bo” would have me. I was never certain what a Bwgi-bo was, except that it was something like a ghost or monster that would jump out on me, but what it would do to me was never very clear either. I later learned that “Bwciod” was a Welsh word and a comprehensive term, which included spirits and apparitions of any kind – imps, gwr-drwgiaid, (or little devils). Mam must have picked this Welsh word up from Dad’s family. She, herself, incidentally, as a small child, did not believe that there were such things as princes and princesses. They were simply characters in storybooks. But having been brought up as a small child in Plymouth, she firmly believed in fairies, elves and goblins, because they abounded in the countryside around, especially Dartmoor and places like that. There was great excitement for us children in the village twice a year, when Studds Fair came to the field behind Tabernacle Chapel, and Sterry Road, the main road through the village, was lined with stalls selling blankets, and just about everything one needed. Later, the fair became just a funfair and occupied the area behind the hotel by the LMS station. The first weekend in February and September, from Friday night till Sunday night, the large steam engine generated power for what we called the “Bumpers” but are now called the Dodgems, the merry-go-round, and the lighting for all the stalls and games which, between them made a din that could be heard for miles around.

On Sunday morning, Mr. Studd insisted that all his fairground staff attended a church service, taken by the vicar, on the fairground site. Candyfloss, toffee apples and sweets were on sale, teenagers brought their girlfriends, and everybody in the village, it seemed, went to the fair at least once during the weekend. I do not think the travelling fair goes to Gowerton now, if there still is a travelling fair, but, as far as I know, the field is still known as the Fairfield.

I remember the neighbours in the street. Minnie and Charlie Phipps next door down, with their children, Raymond (my age) and Desmond (Marion’s age) who served in the War, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery. There was a younger lad, Peter, and a daughter, Betty, who was the boss of all us kids in our part of the street. Although only a year or so older than us, she used to take us on the bus into Sketty, a suburb of Swansea, to go to the Odeon Saturday Morning Cinema, where we saw Westerns, and cartoons and the inevitable serial, which kept us going back next week. After coming out of the Odeon we would take the town service bus into Swansea itself, perhaps go shopping in Woolworths, and then she would bring us all home on the bus in the afternoon. It would be unheard of today that a child would take younger children all that way, and bring them all home safely again! Across the road was a family called Jones, whose only child, Georgie, was Marion’s age, but I remember, when I was very small, his grandfather being ill in bed in the front bedroom with the window always open. Everyone knew he was dying, and in great pain, and we used to listen in awe when we heard him shouting out and crying in pain for months before he died.

Next door up was Mr. And Mrs. Arthur Lloyd, and their son Ronald, but more of them later. Above them was Auntie Olive Creber, her husband and, I think, two sons. I am not sure how they were related to us, but they were. Across the road, below the Joneses, was a Mr. And Mrs. Thomas who had sons, Derek, Michael and Hubert. Derek was my age, and the others younger, but I will talk about them later. Below them was another family called Thomas. This Mrs. Mag Thomas was known to everyone in the street as Auntie Mag, and they had a daughter Peggy, the same age as Marion. She eventually married an American soldier at the end of the War, and moved off to America.

At the top of lower Mount Pleasant, where it joins with upper Mount Pleasant and Park Road, there was a little wooden shop, like a rather big shed really, which sold most things from tea, sugar, potatoes to sweets and newspapers. It was known as “Crokeham’s”, because that was the name of the lady who ran it. During the War, wherever we happened to be playing one would hear the cry go up – “Sweets in the shop”, and everyone would stop what they were doing, rush home and scrounge a halfpenny or penny from whoever was there, collect the ration coupons book and run ‘up-the-shop’ to join the queue. When one got to the counter, one reached up and put one’s coin and coupons book on the counter, and took whatever sweets were available, and rushed back home to share them. There was never any choice, and it was not exactly a frequent occurrence. The disappointment if the shop had run out of sweets before one got to the counter, or one had run out of ration coupons, was unbearable. One just had to accept that that was life. Behind the shop was a huge black metal tank full of water, marked EWS (Emergency Water Supply) intended to be available in an air raid, to extinguish fires caused by bombs, etc. The only thing it was ever actually used for was us children to sail model boats or bits of wood, and threaten to throw other smaller children in.

Alongside, was the start of The Lane, a path which ran down passed the Grammar School and the Elementary School and into the middle of the village. Half way down was a small tree on the edge of the old coal tips. This was the first tree every boy had to climb, before progressing to the bigger oak trees in the wood itself. It was a right of passage, that tree, and was still there only a few years ago. I hope it still is! We very rarely had holidays, only occasional visits to relatives when we could afford it, but various aunts and uncles used to visit us because we were so near to the sea. The Gower Coast and Swansea Bay were so close to us, they all wanted to come to visit us. Auntie Rhoda and Auntie Carrie from Plymouth came from time to time, but the most frequent of them was Auntie Cora and Uncle Stan from Reading with their daughter, Eileen, and Uncle Albert’s daughter, June who lived with them, and they came fairly regularly. Auntie Cora was known to sisters and brothers as “Lady Cora”, because she put on such airs and graces. Uncle Albert came from time to time, riding down from Reading on his motorcycle and sidecar. The only problem was that the noise of the steel works and the tinplate works always kept them awake at night. The work went on day and night without stop and the noise from the furnace doors being opened, the steel and the tin plates being processed made a terrific din 24 hours a day. We were so used to it that we did not hear it, but to visitors used to the countryside or suburbs in England, it was formidable. It was only when the steelworkers and the tinworkers were granted a fortnight’s holiday a year, and the works had to close down for those two weeks, that the silence hit us, and kept all the inhabitants of the village awake for two weeks until the familiar noise started up again.

However, I was taken from time to time in the summer to Pentre, in the Rhondda Valley, to spend a week, or perhaps two, with Auntie Morfydd and Uncle Gerald, who had no children of their own. Mam did tell me mysteriously once when I was really too young to understand that Auntie Morfydd did not want children, and used to “wash herself out” to make sure she never did. However, Uncle Gerald was a born father and loved children, and I had a whale of a time on my holidays. This was also partly because, in those days, children were allowed to play on the roads and as No.6, Elizabeth Street, Pentre was well away from the main road through the valley, we had all the streets and alleyways to play in, as well as the river at the bottom of the street, and the mountains each side of the valley. We had a great time sliding down the mountain side on cardboard sheets or trays or boxes, and also trying to catch “Crochins”, little fish with whiskers, in the river. The water in the river was always black, as were all the stones at the bottom and the sides, and us after we had been paddling in it. I noticed that the river was always clean and never ran black on Sundays, and I thought it wonderful that even the river respected the Sabbath as we all did. It was several years later that I realised the black dust in the river came from the Colliery washeries further up the valley, where all the newly hewn coal was washed, and which did not work on Sundays.

During the holidays, of course, there was no school, so we had all day to play, and were usually out until quite late, playing in the dark. It would be unheard of today. Our favourite game in Pentre was “Catty and Doggy” in the daytime, but after dark, it was “Devil Up The Pipe.” This involved one of us going to the local chip shop to ask for a bag of scraps. The chipshop owner would put a scoopful of fried batter scraps into a piece of paper and give it to us for nothing. We would then share the scraps and eat them, and then stuff the paper up someone’s drainpipe and set light to it. The burning paper would be drawn up the pipe sending out smoke and flames and sparks out the top and making a very satisfying roaring sound, which delighted us. It happened one evening when I was not well that the others did it to my Aunt’s drainpipe and the noise inside the house was incredible.

Uncle Gerald also gave me the treat of a lifetime. He had left school although he had passed the Scholarship and could have gone to the County Grammar School. He went to work in the Railway Sheds in Treherbert cleaning engines to earn money for the family instead. He went on to become an engine driver, every boy’s ambition in those days, and at the end of his career drove the main line trains from Paddington to Fishguard, considered to be the top job on the Great Western Railway network. When he finished one of these journeys, he would return to Cardiff, and then often drive a local train up to the Sheds at Treherbert to get home. While I was on holiday in Pentre one year, he told me to be on the platform at Ystrad station at a certain time, when he would be driving one of these local trains. I was there, and he took me on the footplate to ride up Treherbert. As we passed the bottom of Elizabeth Street in Pentre, he lifted me up to pull the chain which sounded the whistle, to let Auntie Morfydd he was on his way home. He even let me “drive” the engine for a short while! I felt like a king.

He also gave me his Mechano Set, which kept me occupied, especially when I was ill, in making models of all sorts of things, from lorries, tanks, ships, and cranes, to a pair of crossed rifles. I had another uncle, Uncle John, who lived further up the road in Elizabeth Street, whom I enjoyed visiting. I was intrigued, as a small boy, with this very old man, who was an ex-miner, and told fascinating stories, and seemed to enjoy my company. I went to visit him one day, and found him sitting on his stool in front of the fire, and holding his thumb in front of the bars. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he had burnt his thumb earlier, and was now burning the burn away! I have tried it since when I have had a burn, and it works, but it is a very painful process – short, but painful. Uncle Gerald also gave me his Meccano set, which I still have, but why he had a Meccano set at all I do not know.

Auntie Morfydd’s father had been a celebrated poet and won several Chairs at various Eisteddfodau, both locally and nationally. I was repeatedly told tales of his winning the Chair in the National Eisteddfod when held in Treherbert one year, and being carried, shoulder high, sitting on his Chair from Treherbert all the way to Pontypridd, being cheered by the crowds that lined the streets. One of his chairs was in the living room, and I, or so I was always told, was the only one allowed to sit in “Uncle Joe’s Chair”. I was told that he would sit in one of his bardic chairs with his eyes closed, apparently asleep, for hours on end, and would suddenly sit up and call to one of his daughters, Morfydd or Ceinwen, “Dowch â phaper a phensil, gloy, gloy” (“Bring paper and pencil, quick, quick”) and then recite pages of poetry, all in cynghanedd, the complicated style of classical Welsh poetry, in which some lines had consonants in the first half repeated in the same order in the second half, or even a whole line of consonants repeated in order in the next line, and other more complicated structures. Ceinwen or Morfydd would write it all out, a complete poem.

Another source of amusement for us children in the Rhondda was to go on the sites of disused and largely disappeared collieries and search for “torchie”. The thick wire cables that were used to pull drams and pull the cage up and down from the pit had a rope core running through the centre. Years of running on heavily greased pulleys and wheels had soaked this inner rope, and there was still a lot of cable lying around and rusted if you knew where to look. By breaking off the rusted metal wires, we ended up with a rusty, greasy rope. If one lit the end, it glowed like a cigarette, and if swung around one’s head it would burst into flame and throw off sparks. We spent hours doing that and it achieved absolutely nothing except excitement and fun. A game we did not play in the Rhondda was with carbide and empty treacle or Ovaltine tins. Carbide was available from the ironmonger’s shop, but one had to tell him that one’s father had a carbide lamp on his bicycle. No one’s dad did, and I suspect that the ironmonger knew that full well when we solemnly told him this lie. Then, we would take a tin with a press-in lid, punch a little hole in the bottom with a nail, place a small lump of carbide in the tin, spit on it, bang on the lid and put our thumb over the hole at the bottom. Wait a few moments, and then put the tin securely on a wall or clod of earth, and put a match by the hole. An explosion sent the lid flying yards. We used to have little wars on top of the tips, with two groups of us on opposite sides, each with a ridge of earth on which to secure our tins, and proceed to blast the lids at each other across the intervening space. Today, it would be considered too dangerous, but I never remember anyone getting burnt or hurt doing this.

I do remember one older boy, a bit of a bully who saw that I had an extremely good treacle tin, with a lid that fitted so well that when it was ‘fired’ it went a very long way. He wanted it and I would not let him have it, but after a lot of dire threats I let him have a try with it. He put a large lump of carbide in it, spat on it several times and held in for longer than usual. When he fired it, the whole tin exploded, splitting its seam, and we lost the lid. I was devastated, and never found another tin as good as that one. During the war, my father, whose very bad eyesight prevented him going into the Army, was able to join the L.D.V., the Local Defence Volunteers, (known to everyone as Look, Duck, and Vanish) later to be renamed The Home Guard, and he also became a Chief Air Raid Warden. One night, there was an Air Raid Warning and they were all called out, because some German aircraft had flown over the village and gone on to bomb Swansea. One later flew back over the village, and some few hours later, the Tivoli was blazing. Dad, in his capacity as Air Raid Warden had to attend, as did just about everybody else, and at one stage, when the flames were leaping high into the air and lighting the countryside for miles around, he was standing in a shop doorway having a smoke with another warden, when a police officer came along, and shouted: “Put those cigarettes out. Don’t you know there’s an Air Raid on?”

My father worked in the Fairwood Tinplate Works, and was a Tinman, that is, he put the steel sheets through the tinning pot. The steel was made in the Richard Thomas and Baldwins Steelworks, and some of it was rolled out into strips about one inch thick and about 20 feet long, and sent by rail half a mile or so to the Fairwood, where they were re-heated and rolled out into sheets of various sizes and then sent to the tinman, who fed each sheet individually into the “pot”. There it would first go through a trough of something called flux, and then through a trough of molten tin, and through rollers and finally dropped out the other side as a tinned sheet.

These were then cut to the exact size required by firms who made tin cans, bottle caps, and other tin products. For years, we had in the house a sheet about 18 inches square with the design of a bottle cap printed on it. This sheet had been sent to Australia to a beer brewery, where the design had been printed before it would have been punched into individual caps for their beer bottles. However, it was found by them not to be square, and they sent it back to the supplier, who returned it to the manufacturer, which was the Gowerton Fairwood works. There it was examined, and it was recognised by the expert eyes of whoever examined it, to have been tinned by Iestyn Davies, my Dad. How they could recognise the difference in a plate tinned by one individual and not another, is beyond my comprehension. But the sheet was given to him as a souvenir and we kept it for years. I can remember the excitement in the house when my father’s wages went up to £8 a week, but he still found the money for my sister, Marion, to go to the Bible College in Sketty to learn shorthand, typing, etc., so that she could, (and did), get a job as a secretary.

I started school in the Infant's School in Mount Street.

I do not remember much about the Infants School, except two incidents. There were two yards where we could play, the lower yard where the younger infants played, and another slightly higher, divided from the lower one by a high wall in which there was a gap and about three steps. In the higher yard the older infants tended to play. In the far right hand corner of the lower yard, looking from the gate by the road, were the toilets, one for the boys and one for the girls. It was really a long row of toilet cubicles with a high wall in front of them and a high wall in the middle dividing the boys’ from the girls’ section. The wall in front of the cubicles in the boys’ section was, of course, the urinal. One of our pastimes during “play time”, was trying to pee over the dividing wall into the girls half. No one ever succeeded as far as I remember: we just got wet, but it was good fun at that age. On one occasion one little girl came into the boys part and tried to pee against the wall like the boys did, and a teacher had to take her into the school to wash and dry her.

The other occasion I remember was just after World War II started. Everyone was issued with a gas mask, which had to be carried at all times when out of the house. The gas mask was in a small cardboard box with a length of string so that they could be carried over the shoulder. Some mornings, we had to have a gas drill, which meant we had to stand at our desks, and quietly and calmly walk out of the classroom, down the corridor, across the lower yard, up about three steps into the higher yard, and across to the rear boundary wall over which a hastily-built set of wooden steps led to an Air Raid Shelter. When the head teacher blew her whistle, which meant there was an Air Raid Warning, the whole school had to don our gas masks which we carried at all times, and walk in single file, and sit in the Shelter until the head teacher blew a whistle again to indicate that the pretend Air Raid was over and we all trooped back to our class rooms, very exited, and still not understanding what a war was, or what an air raid meant, except that both was something dangerous.

Later I moved up to the Elementary School, which was next door to the Boys’ Grammar School. I missed a lot of school in the early years because of my frequent illnesses, mainly pneumonia and bronchitis, but including Scarlet Fever, which put me in the Isolation Hospital on Garngoch Common for six weeks. My recollections of Garngoch are of being in a single bed cubicle, which had glass windows on either side so one could look down the whole length of the ward and see all the other patients. There was also a window at the head of the bed so that one could see one’s visitors, who were not allowed to enter the hospital, which was quarantined. Mam and Dad, and my sister, Marion, used to come every Saturday and stand outside in the cold and, very often rain, and talk to me, mainly by sign language from there. Being in the middle of a large common, and open to the Lougher estuary up which the prevailing west winds used to blow, it was not very comfortable for visitors. Any food, toys or books which they brought for me had to be handed in at the entrance, and were not allowed to be taken back out. Once in, everything stayed in. I still remember with sorrow that they brought me a book I had had for Christmas, which was a great favourite of mine, and the pang I felt when I realised I would not be able to take it home with me.

Another incident I remember occurred when another little boy, Ryland Jones, a year or two younger than I was, was admitted and put in the next cubicle. Every morning the nurse would stick a thermometer under our tongues, and every morning Ryland bit his and had to have his mouth washed out and cleared of broken glass and mercury. I think that finally they found another way of taking his temperature without sticking the thermometer in his mouth. Of course, when I was five years of age, the Second World War broke out, and apart from seeing my father in his Home Guard or Air Raid Warden’s uniforms and being held out of the back bedroom window by my mother to watch the bombing of Swansea during the blitz, the War had little meaning for me. I remember the maps in the daily papers showing the progress or otherwise of the fighting, and being frightened for the first time in my life when some 82 German prisoners-of-war escaped from Island Farm Prisoner of War Camp in Bridgend in 1945, but that was about all. I suddenly became aware that there might be an escaped German Prisoner lurking behind a bush who might leap on me as I passed and eat me, and I was ever so relieved when we heard on the BBC radio about a week later that they had all been captured and were secure in their prison once again. For the last few years I have been walking my dogs in that same Prisoner of War camp, although, all that is left of it now is Hut 9, from which.the prisoners had escaped. It is now all overgrown, waiting for the Council to decide what they are going to do with the land.

Eventually I reached the age of 11, in 1945, when I was old enough to sit the Scholarship Examination for entry to the County Grammar School.

Form 3B, Gowerton Grammar School, 1947-8 (I am in 2nd Row from back, and 2nd from the right)

The Headmaster of the Elementary School was a Mr. Gilbert Sluman, who kept his cane in his trouser pocket, where he could whip it out instantly to crack it across the legs of any boy who misbehaved in the schoolyard or in class. It was reputed that he had a steel plate in his head, which mad him more fearsome. My mother went to see him, and told him she wanted me to sit the Scholarship Exam, and he told her it would be silly and only make me look foolish. She insisted that as there was the chance for me on offer, I had a right to try the Exam, and so my name went forward. A lot of boys and girls, certainly a classroomful, probably about twenty or so of us, sat the exam, and only four passed, one of whom was me. The others were Jimmy Evans, son of the local Scout Master, Degwel Owen, son of the local Welsh Baptist minister, (who tried at one stage to teach us Welsh, but not for long,) and I think the fourth was Reggie Morgan, whose mother was a widow, but I have since been told that he was two years later than us. Anyway, off we went to the Grammar School, and Mam and Dad had to buy the uniform, satchel, and things I would need, which they could not really afford, but considered necessary for my advancement. The only other teacher I can remember from the Elementary School was a Mr.Griffiths, a tall smart man with a good head of hair, who always was good and kind, and believed in me. Passing the Scholarship was more important to me than the end of the War!

I had joined the Wolf Cubs when I was 7 years old, even though one had to be eight really.

Me, in the 1st Gowerton Wolf Cub Pack. Aged about 9 years. Last on right, front row

I progressed to a Patrol second and then to Sixer, and remained in the Cubs until I passed up to the Boy Scouts at the age of 11. The Scoutmaster was Mr. Handel Evans, Jimmy’s father. I did well in the Scouts and enjoyed it, passing my Tenderfoot Badge to be enrolled, then my Second Class Badge, after which I could try for Proficiency Badges in numerous activities. The village was almost surrounded by several areas of woodland where we spent a lot of our time during Troop meetings. Otherwise, we were in the Scout Hut, which was the old skittle alley of the Conservative Club, but had been taken over as a rifle range for the Home Guard, during the war. We were always finding discharged .22 cartridges in odd corners. I remember well my test for my Cycling Badge, the examiner for which lived near Bishopston on the Gower. Part of the test was that I had to cycle so many miles, so cycling from Gowerton, via Three Crosses and Fairwood Common to get to the tester covered that. Then I had to demonstrate that I could change a tyre and repair a puncture, and knew about road safety, etc. This I did quite easily, passed my test, and left clutching my certificate, to cycle back to Gowerton. About three miles from the tester’s house, I had a flat tyre on the top of the Mayals Hill on my way to the Mumbles Road. I stopped to repair it, pumped up my tyre and set off again, but within a few yards, my tyre was flat again. After several attempts to repair it, I ended up walking all the way to the Mumbles Road, back to Black Pill, up to Killay and eventually home to Gowerton, something like twelve miles, pushing my bike! When a youth club was opened in the village, held in the Elementary School, with Mr. Efan Williams. A teacher from Penclawdd, as Youth Leader, I joined that as well, and enjoyed many happy evenings doing leatherwork, drama, woodwork, etc. I still have wallet and a writing case that I made there. I joined the choir, and met my first childhood sweetheart, Margaret James.

I had seen her about in the village, and thought she was gorgeous, but she was from a family who had a shop in the village, and did not go “out to play” like most of us, and she went to a private school in Swansea, I believe. The first night she came to the Youth Club, I happened to be walking up the corridor past the door of the school singing on the top of my voice (which we were allowed to do) and I heard someone knocking the door. This was such a strange thing to happen that I swung the door open and there she stood. I was taken aback that I should come face to face with her, and was the one who invited her in and took her to Mr. Williams to introduce her. She went to “Church”, the Church in Wales church on the top of the hill called, oddly enough, Church Street. I went to Tabernacl Welsh Congregational Chapel, the other end of the village. I eventually plucked up the courage to ask her if I could walk her home after club one night, and she agreed. She only lived about 400 yards from the Youth Club! After a while we started “walking out”, which meant meeting after church and walking together for about an hour before taking her back to her front door. It was weeks before I took her arm, or held her hand, and I don’t ever remember kissing her. One did not do that in those days. But she was my “girl-friend” until after I joined the army, but more of that later. My other memory of the youth club is that Evan Williams decided to start a drama group, which I joined, and he decided to put on a play, about a little boy called Peter Ulric Smith. It was a one-act play, and followed the career of this lad, as seen through the eyes of his mother, his schoolteacher, his employer, etc. Throughout the play, his mother sat gazing adoringly at her new baby in his cot, and dreaming of the wonderful life of great achievements he would enjoy, while the reality of his life was being portrayed in little scenes behind a gauze curtain with each character in a little shielded part of the stage, and each lit up when he had to speak a line. I was his headmaster, who had not one word of praise for him, like all the other characters throughout his life. I borrowed a Mortar Board and gown from my headmaster, Dr. Tom James. The only line of mine that I remember was: “Peter Ulric Smith? What a name to give a fellow!” I believe he ended up in prison, or something horrible like that. I finally tired of the Scouts in Gowerton, and Marion was the Lieutenant in a Guide Company in Dunvant, about two miles away, and they met in the barn of an old farm where the Scouts also met. The Scoutmaster, Cyril Lewis, lived in the farm (more of a small holding, really) at the bottom of the Voylart, the road running from the village to Fairwood Common. She persuaded me to go there, so I left the 1st Gowerton troop and joined the 23rd Swansea (1st Dunvant) troop, where I became a Patrol Second, and then Patrol Leader of the Wolf Patrol, and later the Troop Leader. Cyril Lewis, known to us as Skip, was a postman, based in Gorseinon, and taught us all we had to know about Scouting, and we had the whole of Fairwood Common on which to play our Wide Games and practice our woodcraft, camping, tracking, and so on. He also taught us Single Stick, a form of stylised fencing with sticks, and, as I learned many years later, was a sport played by gentlemen’s sons as part of their swordsmanship training, when every gentleman wore a sword as part of his dress as well as for defence. He also taught us to fight with a Quarterstaff, which is very similar but with staves instead of sticks.

The other highlight of the week was the Friday night dance in the village hall in Grovesend, about 3 or 4 miles from Gowerton, on the road to Pontardulais. I had a florin, two shillings (10 new pence), pocket money per week, and on Fridays, I spent 4d for a return ticket to Grovesend on the bus, 9 pence (later 1 shilling or 5 New Pence), to go into the dance, 2p for a glass of pop, for a whole evening’s entertainment. We did waltzes, quicksteps, foxtrots, Continental Tango, Palais Glide, Hokey-Cokey, etc., to music from a piano and a set of drums, and met girls from a wide area, and still had 6d (2p) left of my pocket money to see me through the week. Later on, I started going to adult dances in the Church Hall in Gowerton, where one of the girls who used to go to Grovesend dances attended with her parents. Here we did Old Tyme Dancing as well as some Barn Dancing, and I learned the Dashing White Sergeant, Military Two Step, and numerous other dances, which came in useful later on as I got older. I remember buying a bottle of Californian Poppy perfume for the girl from Grovesend, but it never came to anything. She was courting somebody from Gorseinon! One of my memories of this period is that when I was about 12 or 13 years old, about 1946 or 47, there was a prolonged drought, and eventually there was no water in the taps. The only source of water then was a spring, usually called “the Well”, situated in Cae Basset, on the road to Three Crosses. It was off the road on the edge of Cae Basset woods, about half or three-quarters of a mile from Mount Pleasant. Whenever we went to play in the woods there, we inevitably had a drink from the well. The water always tasted beautiful, and I have a memory of going to the well with a bucket to fetch water during the drought, pulling it on my “fourer”, (a plank with four wheels). There was a queue at the well, because a lot of people were going there for water with milk churns, zinc baths and all sorts of containers. I am sure that by the time I got the bucket home, most of the water would have splashed out on the bumpy steep hill down which I had to guide it.

All our social activities were in addition to the homework we had to do as pupils in the Grammar School, something the other boys in the Elementary school did not have to do. In school, I was in Form 1c, 1b being for the brainier pupils, and 1a for the brainiest. We all had to learn English, Welsh, French, Latin, History, Geography, Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Biology, Chemistry and Physics, in fact, all the subjects, before we were allowed to decide which subjects to drop as we went up through the school to take the School Certificate at 16, after which we could either leave school, or go on to the 6th Form for two years to take the Higher School Certificate, which was necessary for entry to University. And we had homework in every subject, except Gymnastics, which later became known as Physical Education.

I managed to pass my annual exams and progressed up through the school, from 1c to RM (the Remove) and then to 3b. In the second year, instead of 2a, 2b and 2c, there was only RA and RM. In the third year I found myself in 3b, and in the fourth year, 4b, to take the first big exams, for the Central Welsh Board, General School Certificate of Education, at the age of 16. I was never one of the brightest in school, and Mam and Dad arranged for me to have coaching in Mathematics, because I was always hopeless at Arithmetic. I still am!

There was a teacher living in Lougher, who had a large shed in his garden, carpeted and furnished with a table and a couple of kitchen chairs, and here he gave extra coaching to lads like me. I hated, and feared Maths, especially Arithmetic, although I enjoyed Geometry and did not do too badly in Algebra. Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that I never learned my Tables beyond the Seven Times Table in the Elementary School!! Boys, and girls, who did not get to Grammar School stayed in the Elementary school until they were 14, and then left to find whatever work was available, or go to Technical College. Mam and Dad both believed that one was not educated unless one played an instrument, and so I was sent for piano lessons with a woman in Kingsbridge. Every Tuesday night, I would go on the bus, (or walk to save the money) for my shilling’s worth, (5p) of half hour lesson. I learned the rudiments of music and developed a love of playing, but I never really mastered the art of reading the music and playing it at the same time. I usually played by ear rather than by reading the music.

I do not remember most of my school teachers, but one who stands out in my mind was Mrs. Norton, who taught English, and lit in me a fire of enthusiasm for poetry. I always remember her telling the class on one occasion that the saddest words in the English language were “too late”, and whenever I find that I have not done something, and that circumstances have changed irrevocably and I can now not do what I should have done, I remember Mrs. Norton’s words. She also gave me a wigging one day when she had seen my end of year school report and my marks in mathematics. She took me on one side and scolded me severely. She said: “I do not understand you. You are so clever in English, both Language and Literature, and it is the same brain you use for Mathematics, so why do you get such low marks in that?” I promised her I would try to do better, which I did, and eventually got my School Certificates in maths.

I also remember Mr. Ieuan Williams, who taught Welsh in an inspiring way, and Mr. Watkins (Watty), who taught music, and allowed me to play my father’s mandolin in the school orchestra in Assembly each morning sitting behind the first violins. He lived in Bridgend but lodged in Gowerton all the week. His wife was a teacher in Bridgend, and was, in fact, the headmistress of the Comprehensive School when my children went there so many years later. I also remember John Morse. I do not remember what his main subject was, but he also got landed with the Commercial Class, teaching Shorthand, Typing, Book-keeping and Economics, in the Sixth Form. There was also a teacher of French, called Mr, E.G. Davies, who was inevitable nicknamed Egg or Eggie, who had absolutely no control over a class of boys, and was tormented by everyone. How anyone learned French at that time I shall never understand.

Marion, aged 5 years in Class 2, Gowerton Infants School, 1931 fourth from right, middle row

Marion had left school and Mam and Dad had somehow found the money to send her to The Bible College in Sketty, near Swansea, to learn Typing, Shorthand and Bookkeeping, so that she could get a “good job”.

Marion in her early teens

She became a shorthand typist in the Llwchwr Urban District Council offices in Gorseinon, where she worked for a number of years.

She had been involved with the Girl Guides from a child, and became a Lieutenant, and later a Captain of the Girl Guides Company in Dunvant, and later still, the District Commissioner.

Marion, Standard Bearer, of Gowerton Girl Guides Company

She was persuaded by someone to apply for a one-year course at Swansea University College to train to be a Youth Leader. She was accepted and was then able to tell me about the Social Science Course there, and found out what qualifications I would need to get on it. She qualified, and went on to much greater achievements later on. Her first job, as I recall, was with the YWCA in Sketty, Swansea, but she later worked in Wem, Shropshire, in Coventry, in Pwll and Burry Port (two clubs), and eventually in Nottingham.

Marion in her first long Evening Dress

Meanwhile, I was still at school worrying about ‘School Cert’ and ‘Higher’, later called “O” Level and “A” Level of GCE, but also enjoying life when not doing the dreaded homework. I also remember, when my father was ill, money was always short for us. One little relief that I had from time to time was that I had been asked to pump the organ in Tabernacle, our Welsh Congregational Chapel in Gowerton, now, sadly, demolished. An older girl, Alvis John, was asked to be the regular organist, and they wanted a regular organ pumper. It was a fine pipe organ, which relied on bellows to provide the wind to blow through the pipes when played, and the bellows had to be filled by someone pumping a large handle up and down. Alongside the pump handle was a cord, with a weight on the end, hanging out of the side of the organ on a little wheel. As one pumped air into the system, this weight would move down the side of the organ, indicating how much air was in the bellows. If one’s attention wandered and the pumping slowed down, the weight would creep back up until the sound of the organ resembled a dying cow, and required frantic pumping to restore the pitch of the music, causing great embarrassment to the pumper. Since a small child, I had attended Sunday School regularly, until I was about 12 or 13, when I found I was the only boy in the class full of girls, and I got fed up. Mam was getting me ready to go one Sunday, when I burst out that I did not want to go, and why. Surprisingly, she accepted it and I was excused Sunday School until I was ready to start again which was when I started pumping the organ. Of course, apart from Sunday services at 10.00 am and 6.00.pm, plus Sunday School at 2.30.pm, there were also marriages, funerals, and occasional extra services during the week,. Fortunately, my headmaster, Dr.Tom James, was a deacon in Tabernacle, so I was given permission to leave the school to perform my duties as organ-pumper, whenever required. It also provided me with an opportunity to do my last bits of homework or swatting for exams, sitting right at the back of the chapel, upstairs and tucked away by the side of the very large organ.

Several ladies of the chapel used to sit in the front row of the balcony, and formed a small choir in effect, and they always ignored me, sitting several rows behind them on my own. The only time they did take special notice of me was when my aged grandmother was very ill in bed, and rumours were frequently circulating that she had died. These ladies would have a whispered conversation and then one would turn round and ask me how she was. When I would reply that there was no change in her condition, she would turn back and spread the word that she had not “gone” yet, and then they would all ignore me again. Alvis was offered 10 guineas (£10.10s)(or £10.50p in New Money) a year for playing and I was offered 2 guineas for pumping, which I though at the time was very unfair. It was harder pumping than it was just sitting and playing!! When I eventually left school and went off to the Army, I was interested to know who became my successor. That turned out to be an electric pump, which the organist switched on from her seat, and which always supplied a reliable flow of wind.

Attending chapel regularly meant that I saw and heard all the preachers who came when our own minister, James Abel, was away. I remember some of the very old ones who preached in a style which eventually more-or-less died out. It was called “The Hwyl”. This style of preaching was very dramatic, and one of the techniques was to slowly lower the voice, speaking very confidentially, until the preacher was almost whispering (except that one could still hear and understand what he was saying) and when the congregation were lulled by this, he would suddenly raise his voice and shout his message out loudly, causing everyone to jump up with a start. I remember one minister with a mop of long white hair, but I cannot remember his name. I know he was one of the well-known preachers of the day. He dropped his voice on the occasion I remember, and when the chapel was still and mesmerised, he suddenly thumped the Bible on the pulpit and bellowed out his message, but in the process punched all his notes over the edge and into the Big Seat where the deacons sat. He calmly walked to the top of the pulpit stairs, and down into the Big Seat, gathered up all his papers in a very dignified way, returned up to his place. He settled all his papers on the Bible and then announced proudly: “There is a perfect example of a man following what he preaches!” It was one of those rare occasions when the congregation laughed during a service. Another incident regarding Chapel which has stayed with me was regarding dress. It must have been when I was about 14 or 15 years old, because I had just gone into Long Trousers, one of the significant milestones in the journey of growing up. I was getting ready for going to chapel on a hot summer day, wearing my new grey long trousers and a new black blazer. I had on a white shirt and I left the top button open and arranged my collar out over the collar of my blazer. I was about to leave when my father came in and saw me, and asked where I was going. I told him I was going to chapel and he said: “Well, where’s your tie?” I told him I didn’t want to wear a tie, and he said I had to wear a tie to chapel. I asked why, and he said: “To show respect, boy. Respect!” So, I put my tie on go to chapel, and have done so ever since.

He did not seem to notice when I started going to Chapel on my bicycle instead of walking, although cycling on a Sunday was considered to be not quite right. Especially cycling to Chapel! However, I noticed, when I went to get my bike to go to an evening service, and could not find it. I had ridden it to the morning service, forgotten about it, and had walked home. That meant I had to run all through the village or be late that evening to pump the organ. And, my bike was still where I had left it. Those were the days! At school, most of us joined Urdd Gobaith Cymru, The Welsh League of Youth, a sort of Welsh speaking youth club. I joined, of course, and we did things like singing in a choir, singing solo, reciting and Cyd-adrodd. Cyd-adrodd, or Choral Speaking, a peculiar Welsh custom, is a form of group recitation. A group of anything from three up to about ten would recite a poem in unison. This is harder than one might think, because everyone had to speak, not only in time with each other, but also at the same volume and putting exactly the same expression, inflections, etc, so that it sounded as though only one person was speaking. We entered Eisteddfodau, and one of the first I went to as part of a choir and a choral speaking group, was the Glamorgan County Interschool Eisteddfod, held, oddly enough, in Bridgend. It was held in what was then either Bridgend Boys’ Grammar School or the Secondary Modern School, if they had been invented by that time. Anyway, it is now the Brynteg Comprehensive School. I was about 12 years old, and had never been as far from home as this without my parents before, except to the Rhondda on holidays, but I was with friends and enjoying the experience, until I strolled alone across the playing fields to a gate looking out onto what I later learned was the A48. As I stood there looking at the Island Farm opposite, a bus came pass, going west, and on the destination board in the front was the word SWANSEA in big letters, and I suddenly felt very homesick. Fortunately I was then called back to the school for another rehearsal of either the choir or the choral speaking group, and the feeling passed. But it was all a great adventure.

Early Holidays

Later we were given the chance to go to camp in Llangranog, on the West Wales coast, and a few of us expressed interest. I told Mam and Dad about it and they decided that I could go. With hindsight now, I cannot understand how they could afford it, but they did, obviously by going without something themselves. We were picked up by coach, picking up others en route and taken to the camp, which was on a large sloping field overlooking the cliffs and the sea, and full of huge ex-army bell tents and wooden huts.

One row of huts at the top of the field was for the games room, the dining hall and kitchen and accommodation of the “Swyddogs”, (Officers), the staff of the camp, whom we all called the “Swogs”, and, I think, the girls were in huts also,.. In the tents, were four camp beds, and all our belongings and clothes were in kitbags, and kept under the beds. We went to the beach several times and we went by coach to Llangefni in Anglesey to the Urdd Eisteddfod for a day, but mostly we were playing games in the field, and the week sped by. The next year I was given the chance to go again, and for some reason, I went for two weeks, which was great, except for the Saturday morning when nearly all the other boys and girls piled into coaches and disappeared home, leaving only a few of us in camp. They, of course, left after breakfast, and it was not until late afternoon that the next crowd arrived, and in that space of time, I again felt a pang of homesickness. As far as I can recollect, this, and the occasion in Heol Gam school, were the only times I ever felt homesick. Even when I went off to the army, knowing that it would be several months before I would be allowed home on leave, I did not feel it, until I went to the firing ranges in Ash, near Aldershot, and smelt the gorse blossom that covered most of that area, and I immediately thought of the Cuckoo Tips, which was also covered with gorse.

While I was at school, by father was ill, and unable to work, so money was always short for us. This was before the setting up of the National Health Service, and there was no Sickness benefit to be had. We did have some income, but I cannot remember where it came from. I know my father belonged to The Recobites, a charitable organisation to which he had contributed over the years, and he had a weekly payout from them when he was ill. He always swore that if he could not provide for the family and his wife had to go out to work, he would put his head in the gas oven, and “do away with himself”. Mam did, however, get a little job, housecleaning for Dr. Morgan Owen, the local doctor while he was in the surgery, and did lots of little jobs, which brought in a few shillings to keep us going. She also bought any clothes that were needed from the draper’s shop in the village, Jones the Drapers, and paid for them in small weekly instalments. She then got me a job with the same draper, to go around collecting the weekly payments from the customers who paid in instalments, which was most of them. I had a little notebook, with a page for each customer, and on Saturday mornings I went around them all collecting their sixpences or shillings a week. When I took the money to the shop, it was counted and I was paid sixpence (2½ p in today’s money) for every pound I collected, and this was my pocket money. A few years later, the post war government introduced Unemployment Benefit and Sickness Benefit, which, although small, eased the situation for millions of people.

Dad never seemed to cotton-on to the fact that Mam was working and earning money to keep us. I suspect that he did and decided to ignore it because he knew that it was necessary. It is funny how one always remembers the pleasant things, and the not-so-pleasant are filed away and only rarely, if ever, come back to one’s mind. Another even greater adventure than going to Llangranog which still hangs about in my memories of school days, was a cycling trip to North Wales to climb Snowdon. Gareth Williams, my great mate in school, Welsh-speaking, Congregationalist like me, lived in Gorseinon with his mother. He was an only child and his father had died some years earlier. He had an uncle, a Headmaster, living in North Wales and we planned to cycle up to Caernarvon, and stay with this uncle, who was an expert on all the North Wales mountains. With parental permission, we started making plans and decided we would have to “train” for such a long trip. Our training consisted of cycling up to the Rhondda, going via Swansea and Port Talbot and over the Maerdy Mountain to Pentre, to Uncle Gerald and Auntie Morfydd. We went off one Saturday, and slept the night there, and returned on Sunday, via Treherbert and the Rhigos back to Neath and home. Cycling up the mountain from Treherbert, we were riding at one point on what was virtually a ledge on the side of a cliff face, and while on that section of road, we had a torrential storm, and were soaked to the skin. However, once over the top, we freewheeled downhill at great speed and dried ourselves out by the time we got to Hirwaun. Several months later, we cycled to Caernarfon in North Wales, without any further “training”.

It was quite an adventure. I cycled from Gowerton to Gorseinon on a heavily loaded bike, complete with a tent for over-night stays on the journey, and a Sturmey Archer Three Speed. We set off early, the weather remained sunny and warm, and we got to Aberystwyth, about teatime, where, quite by chance, we met one of Gareth’s many cousins, who was staying with some of her friends in a guesthouse for a week. They were sitting in a chip shop as we passed, so we joined them for fish and chips. As we had not arranged anywhere to stay the night, except some vague idea of pitching the tent somewhere, they persuaded us to sneak in with them and spend the night in their room, which we did, sleeping on a very hard floor, and set off again the next morning. All very innocent in those days. The next day we set off up the coast. The weather remained in our favour and we did well until we got to Trawsfynydd, where, as on our training trip to Rhondda, a very nasty storm blew up and the rain was battering us, so we got off the road, onto the common, and hid under a very small bush growing out of the bank, and waited until it all blew over. Eventually it stopped raining and the sun came out again, so we continued our journey. We had stopped briefly in Beddgelert to see the famous grave of Gelert the dog, but oddly, my recollection of that place in later years was unbelievably wrong. Whenever I thought of the incident, I could clearly see a fairly flat road running along the valley floor, and we had to turn left up a steep hill road over the mountain to continue our journey, and Gelert’s grave was on the bank on the right-hand side, with a high retaining wall, and a tall memorial stone. When I visited the grave many years later, I was genuinely surprised to find the grave in the middle of a very large flat field or park and that it had always been there. Where the other picture of it came from I shall never know.

However, we continued, as far as I now recollect, without further incident until it started to get dark, and because of the delays we had not reached our destination. Gareth started getting worried about his uncle worrying about where we were, so we decided to telephone him. We came to a rather steep hill running down into the valley, and through a village, which was really just a row of houses on each side of our road. Gareth decided to stop, and I jammed on my brakes, but failed to stop before I reached him, and my brake handles knocked his hand and drew blood, which upset him. We saw a light in one of the houses, and knocked on the door, at which the light immediately went out, and the house was silent. We saw a light back up the hill a little way, so we trudged up there, Gareth nursing his hand in his handkerchief, and this time the door was opened at our knock. It turned out to be the house of the local schoolmaster, who was a friend of Gareth’s uncle, whom he telephoned to explain our situation and that we were all right, and then gave us tea and cakes, and bandaged Gareth’s hand while we awaited the arrival of his uncle in a car to collect us. We left the bicycles in his friend’s garage, and rode the rest of the way, in style, if not a little weary. The next day, “uncle” took us back to collect our bikes, and we rode the last 8 or 10 miles of our journey, so we can still say that we did cycle all the way.

We then spent a week sight-seeing and, most memorably, being taken by car to a small village, from where we walked up the mountain to Crib Goch, then the ridge of Crib y Ddisgl, overlooking the lake way down below us at the bottom of a sheer drop, and so up to the summit of Snowdon itself. Gareth’s uncle knew the area like the back of his hand and knew where all the deep dangerous bogs were. There we enjoyed magnificent views over the Menai Straits and Anglesey, and out to sea towards Ireland, and inland, to the impressive mountains of North Wales. It seemed to be a tradition to put a stone on top of a huge pile at the very top of Snowdon, and while we were admiring the views and climbing up onto this pile, a family of Americans arrived, loaded down with cameras. One, a rather stout, loud-voiced, dominant male, proclaimed loudly about the view, and started getting his large, expensive cameras out from the bags around his neck, and by the time he had a camera out and held to his eye, the mist had come down for a compete white-out, and there was no more view further than a few yards! Our attitude was – “Served him right!” We followed the railway track down to Llanberis and somehow, I cannot remember how, returned to collect uncle’s car and back home to bed. A most remarkable and memorable day.

To return home, instead of simply retracing our route down the West Coast, we cycled from Caernarfon along to Bangor, around Bala Lake, down the East side of Wales. We got as far as Newtown on the first day, and pitched the little bivouac (which we had carried with us unused until now) in a field on the road out towards Builth Wells. To save carrying too much luggage on this adventure, we had taken very little in addition to clothes and food for the journey, so we had no bedding. We simply laid out the groundsheet in my little bivouac tent, put on all the spare clothes we had with us, and tried to sleep. I lay still and quiet all night, freezing to death, afraid of waking Gareth. Eventually Gareth made it clear that he was also awake, keeping quiet to avoid waking me. We crawled out of the tent just as the sun was rising, and gazed at the mist-filled valley below us looking like a large white lake, with church steeples and towers, and the occasional chimney, peeping out like lighthouses in a sea. Standing there just watching, we could see the mist very slowly lapping the hillside, like a sea in slow motion.

We tried to re-pack the tent, and squeeze it into my saddle bag, but it was soaking wet with dew, and all we succeeded in doing was to rip my saddle bag and ruin it. However, with a bit of string we managed to secure everything and then walk up the hill, pushing our laden bikes, before free-wheeling down the other side of the mountain. We arrived in Llandrindod Wells, and went to the Metropole Hotel, a huge, posh, Victorian hotel, where we could smell cooking. We locked up our bikes, and filthy, tired, and still sleepy, we went in to ask if we could have breakfast, only to be told that breakfast was being cooked, but it would be hour or so before they would start serving. We had no idea of the time, so we sat like Dickensian urchins in the lounge of this very posh hotel, eventually having breakfast, before continuing our journey on to Brecon, to Swansea and back to Gorseinon and Gowerton. I still have difficulty believing that we actually did this, but we did.

I tracked down Gareth many years later when we were both retired and arranged to meet him in Cardiff. He told me with great enthusiasm that the best holiday he had ever had was camping with me and another friend, Henry Wills, in Three Cliffs Bay on the Gower. I was able to reply that my best holiday of those youthful days was the trip to his uncle in North Wales. The other great adventure I was involved in, was camping on Lorna Doone Farm, Brendon, near Lynmouth in Devon with another great mate of mine, Henry Wills. Henry was an evacuee, who never returned to London after the war. I believe his parents were killed in the London Blitz, so he remained where he was in Gorseinon. He was a “typical” cockney, street wise, and a survivor. He wanted to go camping and I had a tent. It was actually two American Army bivouacs, which buttoned together to make a long low tent. My Auntie Winnie, Mam’s sister, was working on Lorna Doone Farm, on the edge of Exmoor, where we as a family had visited her. So we telephoned and asked if we could come and camp in one of their fields for a week. Mr. Richards and Mr. Burge, the two farmers who owned the farm, said we could, so in the summer we boarded the Ilfracombe steamer from Swansea and were put ashore at Lynmouth in a tender, and caught the bus up to the farm. The water was too shallow and there was no dock to put right in to Lynmouth After a welcoming meal, we pitched our tent on the far side of the field opposite the farm, and settled in. We were told to be at the farm for breakfast next morning, and told that we could pay for our stay by helping out in the kitchen and tea room. In addition to being a fully operational farm, with crops, sheep and cattle, it was also a tourist attraction providing lunches for tourists until about 3.o’clock, and then Devonshire Cream Teas until the last bus left about 5.30.

This worked fine for the first few days. Henry, who had done his “apprenticeship” as a Londoner, was quite at home serving at table and chatting up the visitors, while I found myself doing more in the kitchen, washing and drying dishes. Consequently, Henry was building up a huge sum of money in tips, on which I was missing out. Our first job in the morning, after a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, and anything else that could be fried, was to go through the various barns looking for eggs. The chickens, of which there appeared to be dozens, had nests and so on for egg-laying, but, I suppose for self-preservation, they rarely laid eggs where they should, and preferred the tops of barn walls, and isolated places where they obviously thought their eggs would be safe. So we had a great time, climbing up into rafters, and along walls, crawling through hedges, and into all sorts of odd corners collecting eggs, and taking them to the kitchen. Then we were given a zinc bath full of potatoes to peel, after which we took the peelings and any other left-overs out to the pigs’ troughs, and sometimes had the added excitement of having to drive pigs back into their yard if they had got out. Pigs, it seems, can get through a gap no more than an inch wide, which provided us with endless fun trying to get them back.

By the time we had done all these sort of tasks, the first bus was arriving from Lynmouth with holiday makers, and we were in the dining room taking orders for lunch, then serving, and then clearing away, wiping tables for the next group. This went on from about 11.30 until around 3.00 or 3.30, when one bus would arrive with visitors wanting cream teas and taking away the last of those who had just had lunch, toured the farm-house, and perhaps walked up the Doone Valley through a gate across the road, which ran through the farm yard. Auntie Winnie always made a fortune taking visitors, as well as the resident holidaymakers around the farm house and telling them the story of Lorna Doone, and pointing out the gun which she claimed was the gun which shot Lorna Doone at her wedding in the little Malmsmead Church just up the road. I was amused to see that the side window of the church is always kept slightly open, because that is the window through which Carver Doone was supposed to have shot Lorna. Looking in through the window one finds oneself looking straight at the steps where a bride would stand to get married! One could forget it was only a story! We continued either serving at table or clearing dishes and washing them frantically, before the next bus arrived, as they did about every hour throughout the day. Eventually the last bus would arrive to collect the last of the visitors, and we were left to our evening chores, which consisted of washing the stone-flagged floor of the dining room, washing the tables and chairs, and the last of the dishes and stacking everything away ready for the next morning, and when all was spick and span again, we could sit at the large table in the kitchen with the farmers, and the rest of the staff, to a huge meal consisting of half a chicken, potatoes, cabbage, peas, beans, everything one could think of, piled high on a large dinner plate, followed by pudding and tea. Then, about 8.30 or 9.00 pm, we would be finished for the day. We set off one evening to walk to Brendon, the nearest village, about 3-4 miles down the valley. When we came to the Foxhunter’s, the local pub, Henry decided we ought to go in. I wasn’t sure, but there was nothing else to do. We went in to the lounge bar, rather than the bar where all the farmers were, and Henry made himself at home in the corner, and said that he would have a pint. I asked him, never having been in a pub before, a pint of what. He said: “Just say a pint, and she’ll know what it is.” I still could not make head nor tail of this, but eventually took his word for it, and when the woman came to serve us, I asked for a pint and a pint of cider. And she brought the pint of cider and a pint of bitter beer. We had a repeat order when we had drunk that, and set out to walk back to the farm, and thus we spent almost every evening thereafter.

We had intended only to stay for one week, but the weather turned so bad that the boats from Swansea stopped running, even to Ilfracombe, let alone Lynmouth. They could not put in to a dock side in Lynmouth anyway, so we had to wait for the weather to improve before we could get home. After two weeks of working in the kitchen and dining room, we decided we wanted a day off, and despite strange looks from Mrs. Richards, Mr. and Mrs. Burge, who could not get their heads around “a day off”, we caught the first bus on the Saturday morning to go to Lynmouth. After exploring what little there was of Lynmouth, we climbed the hill to Lynton and walked along to the Valley of Rocks, and tried to guess from which outcrop of rocks John Ridd had thrown the goat that was pestering the sheep in R.D. Blackmoore’s story of Lorna Doone. If we wanted to catch the last bus back to Malmsemead, we would not have had time to see all this, but we decided to risk it. By the time we made our way back to Lynmouth, we found, of course, that the last bus had gone. It was now after 5.30, and the last bus would have already reached Lorna Doone Farm and be on its way back. We decided that the river that ran through Lynmouth to the sea, was the one that ran through the farm yard, so if we followed the river up we would eventually reach the farm, and it would not be as far as the road which wound its way around all over the place. So we set off, and after an hour or more of walking through woodlands, fields and scrub, keeping as near as we could to the river bank, evening was drawing on and clouds were building up and eventually it started to rain.

We were in blazers and short trousers, and we got soaked. To add to the discomfort, I tried to take a photograph of the river from a bridge, and dropped the camera into the river, where it first hit a boulder and then sank. When I eventually got it out, it was damaged beyond repair and the film ruined. We struggled on in the darkness until we saw through the trees and bushes, a light in a window at the top of the bank on the other side of the river. So, we clambered over, climbed the bank and found ourselves on the road by a cottage. We knocked on the door, having no idea what time it was, and were answered by an old lady who worked in the tearoom at the farm. She directed us up the road to the village and the pub, where all the farmers would be drinking, it being Saturday, and we could have a lift back to the farm with them. It was, of course, the Staghunters, the pub in Brendon where we went every night. We had a lift back in the Landrover full of farmers, and asked Mr. Richards if we could sleep in one of the barns because the weather was so bad, and we did not fancy sleeping in my little tent. He agreed, so when we arrived at the farm, we set off across the field to the tent, collected our sleeping bags and pyjamas, and tramped back, still in the pouring rain, soaked to the skin, and went into a barn. The bales of straw on the upper level were set out in steps, so we rolled the second step on to the first step, creating a valley between it and the third step, laid out our sleeping bags, undressed and tried to sleep. I never knew until then how hot it can get lying in a trough of straw!! We hardly slept a wink, but we stayed in the barn for nearly a week.

At the end of the third week, we learned that the boats were running from Ilfracombe, so we eventually decided to take the bus there, and the boat from there back to Swansea, and out to Gowerton, very tired, and Henry at least very much richer from his tips at table. On a subsequent visit to Lorna Doone Farm with my mother to visit Auntie Winnie, I noticed two elderly ladies who had had lunch and were set on going up the Doone Valley. Mr. Burge, part owner of the farm, but was now rather elderly and resorted to more leisurely activities than farming, was sitting on a broken chair, by the gate leading to the valley, in his farming clothes, complete with leather gaiters and a leather money bag, rather like the old bus conductors used to use, collecting the sixpence he charged everyone to go through his gate to walk up his valley. The two elderly ladies approached him, and asked how much it was, despite the large cardboard hand-written sign. He told them and one of them produced a half-crown (2/6d). H e delved into his leather bag to find them change. He appeared to be in some difficulty finding the right money, and the old lady said, “Oh, that’s all right – you keep the change”, at which he touched his forelock and muttered “Thank you, Ma’am”. As the two ladies moved away, I heard one say to the other, “Poor old fellow!” Little did they know that the “poor old fellow” owned the farm, acres of land, half of Porlock and large areas of Minehead, Lynmouth and Lynton.

The other place where I camped for several teenage years was Three Cliffs Bay near Parkmill on the Gower Peninsular. We, as youngsters, used to walk, from time to time, from Gowerton up to Three Crosses, via Cae Basset and Cae Mansel, and then strike out across Fairwood Common to Ilston Valley, with its beautiful little church in the village, and a gorgeous valley full of bluebells and wild garlic, and out onto the South Road, past the ruins of the first Welsh Baptist (open-air) Chapel in Wales, and into Parkmill. Across the road from Shepherd’s café and shop, was another café, called Maes-yr Haf, behind which was a path which followed the river through some trees and out onto the estuary of Three Cliffs Bay, with Pennard Castle ruins perched on top of the hill on the left just before one reached the three cliffs, from which the bay gets its name. The steep bank down from the castle levelled out before becoming flat along the riverbank. When we were looking for somewhere to go camping one summer, I thought of this place. Together with Henry Wills, with whom I had camped at Lorna Doone Farm, we borrowed a then un-needed pram from Mrs. Minnie Phipps next door, packed it with my tent, sleeping bags, spare clothes, food, etc., and proceeded to push it all the way through Three Crosses and across Fairwood Common to Three Cliffs Bay, where we stayed for, I think, about three weeks. Our tent was an American Army bivouac, which I bought from Millets in Swansea. It consisted of two rectangular sheets, each with a triangular piece on the end. These two sheets were buttoned together to form a rectangular tent with a triangular back. Unfortunately there was nothing the other end except a triangular hole. It had two poles, about 3 – 3½ feet high, but I soon realised that if I had two of these tents, I could button one gap to the other and have one tent twice the length, with a button-able door at each end and three poles. This worked splendidly, with plenty of room for two, even three plus all our gear.

The river was very shallow when the tide was out, with stepping stones allowing access to the other side and the woods, but when the tide came in the river bed was flooded and most of the surrounding grass was under water. With the incoming tide came the fish, mainly flat fish, some of which would then be trapped by the stepping-stones, and when the tide had left that part of the river we could paddle quietly in the water, and spot the fish as they fled from our approaching feet. Once they stopped on the river bottom and flipped sand over themselves with their fins, they would virtually disappear if you took your eyes off them. But when you knew where they were they could be speared with a sheath knife and fried. We also found potatoes and cabbages in a field on the top of the opposite bank, and bought food in Shepherd’s Café. When we ran out of money we secured the tent and walked home to scrounge more cash from our parents, and walked back again. On one occasion, we were joined by a young couple from Birmingham, who were on a cycling tour. They had a tandem, with a little trailer on the back for their tent and equipment. They pitched about fifteen or twenty yards from us, and were very friendly. Then, one night he came knocking on our tent about 10 o’clock, in something of a panic because his wife was having an Asthma attack. She was obviously in a very bad way, so Henry set off to run to the village to telephone a doctor, while the husband seized the trailer, tipped everything out of it, sending tins of food rolling down the slope, put the sleeping bag into it and between us we lifted his wife into it and wrapped her against the cold night air. We then wheeled her in the dark towards the village, which involved crossing a steep sand bank which ran down to the bend in the river, and then on to the little path which ran through the woods, along a bank with the river just below us. At this point we got stuck, when one wheel of the trailer went over the side of the path and was overhanging the river.

By this time, the poor woman could hardly breathe and the noise of her breathing was frightening. I expected her to just die at any moment. At the same time, Henry was calling from the other end of the path to say he had a doctor there, who wanted us to bring her down to him. We explained the situation and the doctor was persuaded to come under the trees to us. We had three torches between us, and in their light the doctor examined the woman, and then injected her very slowly. As he slowly pressed down on the syringe the woman’s breathing became rapidly more easy and she, and we, relaxed. When she was completely at ease, we carried her the rest of the way, where the doctor had an ambulance now waiting, because he had taken the precaution of calling it before coming to the scene. The woman was bundled in, followed by her husband, and Henry offered to go as well as company and support for the husband. This offer was declined but we said we would wait for him in the village. We sat on a bench outside Jones Maes-yr-Haf’s café for over an hour and then decided he was not coming back that night so we returned to our tent. It was a good job we did because he did not return until about lunchtime next day, and then only to pack up all his gear and attach the trailer to his tandem and set off for Swansea hospital to wait for his wife to be discharged fit enough to cycle back to Birmingham. It was quite an exiting night as well as being a very frightening one. I have seen many asthma sufferers having an attack since, but never one as bad as that one. One year, Gareth Williams came with us, and, being from a fairly sheltered background, had the time of his life. That year the sun shone almost ceaselessly for weeks, and we intended to stay in Three Cliffs for a long time. However, running around in only a pair of shorts, in intensely hot sun, we were soon suffering from the heat. I, particularly, became so sunburnt that we eventually had to give in and set off for home. We struck camp, loaded everything into the pram and set off. I found it very difficult to walk with my legs and shoulders so badly burnt, but we got as far as Fairwood Common eventually. There had been a wartime RAF station on the common, which is now Swansea Airport, and there was an outbuilding of this that was a little café some distance from the road, and we made our way there for a rest and a mug of tea and a sandwich. We found the place, which was not easy to find, and while enjoying the huge mug of tea, I started to pass out, with a vision of a huge Negro face coming up close and backing off and coming up close repeatedly. I leapt to my feet, and said; “Come on, we’ve got to go,” and rushed out, grabbed the pram and set off as fast as I could. The other two followed, somewhat mystified, but it was much later that I was able to tell them of my hallucinatory experience. When we finally arrived back at my house, my mother stripped me and stood me in an enamel bowl and very tenderly swabbed me with cotton wool soaked in milk, until the burn had subsided. Henry and Gareth sat in the other room drinking tea. But that ended our camping for that year. After leaving school, I lost contact with Gareth, but when I started work in Newport I found that he was teaching in Cardiff, and we caught the same N&C coach from Swansea to Cardiff every Sunday night. When I moved to Bridgend we lost contact again, and it was some thirty years later that I tracked him down and arranged to meet him in the Fairwater Conservative Club in Cardiff. He had been teaching in a Welsh-speaking school in Cardiff since leaving university, and, like me, had now retired. I had found out which school he had been teaching at and telephoned but learned that he had retired. They would not give me his address, but agreed to pass on a letter from me to him. One of the first things that came up in conversation was that that camping holiday in Three Cliffs was still the best holiday he had ever had, before or since. When we met, after all those years, we talked about what we had both been doing. He was now married with two adult children, and his mother had passed away. He told me with great enthusiasm that the best holiday he had ever had was camping with me and Henry Wills, in Three Cliffs Bay on the Gower. I was able to reply that my best holiday of those youthful days was the trip to his uncle in North Wales. One year, a few of the younger children in Mount Pleasant wanted to borrow my tent to go camping, but rather than entrust it to their care, I decided to take them myself with Henry along to help. Their parents all trusted me, and we borrowed another tent, and took about five young kids to Three Cliffs. That was a great success. The wild ponies used to wander into the valley from time to time, and little Hubert Thomas, aged about 10, younger brother of Michael and Tony Thomas, who lived right opposite where I lived, fell in love with a little black, curly-haired pony, and would not be satisfied until we agreed to try to capture the pony for him. He worked out in his own mind where it could live and where he could get food for it, both of which were completely out of the question, but we spent several very entertaining days chasing the herd with ropes, which provided a lot of fun, but we caught no ponies!

Jamboree emblem, which was the left hand handshake. I still have it. Our troop headquarters were the old skittle ally extension behind the Gowerton Conservative Club, which during the war was the Home Guard firing range. We were forever finding spent 22mm cartridges in odd corners left over from those days. We had masses of equipment, including a full size Bell tent. What we did not have was a Trek Cart to carry the equipment about with us. I had to finish with the Troop when I started my Probation Training, and eventually it just closed down. Some years later I was contacted by a young couple, new to the village, who wanted to start it up again, and had been told to contact me. I could not help with where all the equipment had gone, but told them of all the places in the woods around the village where they could do outdoor stuff, but they just looked mystified. It was only on my way back to Bridgend that evening after visiting my mother, that I discovered that all the places I had mentioned were now large housing estates.

Another activity while at school was as Relief Postman. Every December, the Post Office would recruit temporary Postmen to cope with the Christmas Rush of cards and parcels. Jimmy Evans and I applied one year, and had a great time. We had to be in the Post Office by 6.0.am, because one of the regular postmen collected the mail from the GWR railway station at 5.30. We would then help with sorting the letters out into the various rounds, or walks as they were called, and then sort our own allocation into order before going out to deliver them. On one occasion Jimmy and I were delivering parcels in a huge wicker truck, which we had to push up the hill to Mount Pleasant and then up an even steeper hill to Cae Basset. We reached the level road at the top of the hill, and sat on the handles of the truck to get our breath back. Jimmy, who was shorter than I was, said he would rest there while I delivered a rather large, heavy parcel to a big private house behind a pair of heavy gates and a long drive. I got through the gate, turning to close it, and turned to go to the house, only to see the largest dog I had ever seen galloping towards me. Its head was bigger than mine, and his feet were immense. It was a huge St. Bernard, and he jumped up, put his great paws on my shoulders and pinned me to the gate. Someone, possibly the gardener, or maybe the owner of the house, called to the dog, which promptly ran to him. I delivered the parcel, which obviously contained large tins of dog food, and returned to the truck. Jimmy was still sitting on the handles and laughing himself silly, because he had watched me, pinned to the gate by a dog that was bigger than I was, calling out “Nice little doggie, nice little doggie.” I could have hit him.

I subsequently got temporary jobs with the postmen during the summers when the regular men went on holiday. I usually had the Cae Mansel/Three Crosses round, and had a post office bicycle for the job. This meant pushing it for about one and a half miles up a steep hill, delivering all the way from Gowerton to Three Crosses, but then the bike came in really useful, to deliver all round that village and to out-lying farms on Fairwood Common. It was also very useful for hurtling back down the long road to Gowerton. I was also glad of it when delivering to farms, especially on the common, because the geese wandered loose and used to attack me on the bike. The pump was an effective weapon the clout them on the neck as I hurtled past them. Christmas time on that route was particularly enjoyable, especially on Christmas morning, when I was given cakes and treats and usually Sherry, especially at the farms, “to keep the cold out!” and usually got home for Christmas dinner somewhat tiddley. I continued on in school and took the Central Welsh Board examinations when I was 16. In those days, one did not have grades as they do today. We had either Fail (under 40%), Pass (40%+), Credit (60%+ or Distinction (80)+. I never had a Distinction, but had credits in all the subjects except mathematics, for which I had only a Pass, which did not count for University entrance. I re-sat the exam the next year, however, and got my necessary Credit. So I had Credits in English, Welsh, History, Geography, Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry , Latin, French and Biology –, enough to set me on the road to qualifying for university, which was my father’s ambition for me. Nearly every father in Gowerton at that time, working in the coalmines, steelworks or tinplate works, wanted their sons to go to university and become teachers, and NOT go down the mines, or into the works. I went on to Form 6, in order to study for the Higher Certificate of Education, because one also needed two or three of those to get into university. This was a two year course, during which I was already making enquiries at University College Swansea regarding the Social Science Course. I needed to qualify at that in order to apply to the Home Office for Training to become a Probation Officer, which had been my ambition since discovering that my Uncle, Fred Davies, was a Probation Officer in Swansea. He used to call from time to time to see my father, and sometimes talked about his work. When I first got to know him, he lived in Bishopston on the Gower, where we used to visit him so that we could go to the beach at Caswell Bay. He later moved to Llanelly for some reason, where he saw out his days of retirement.

Grandma's Funeral

1950, however, was marred by the death of my grandmother, who was 82 yrs old and frail, and had been in bed for several years. Gwilym Thomas the undertaker was contacted, and the coffin duly delivered to the house, and Grandma was laid out in it in the parlour, and the room liberally splashed with lavender water to counteract the smell of death. I still associate the smell of lavender water with funerals and death. Numerous relatives and friends and chapel members called at the house to offer their condolences, and all had to be taken into the front room, the Parlour, to see, and say “Goodbye” to Grandma, and I was formally taken in, because it was the proper thing to do. Mam also told me it was so that I would not have nightmares! It seemed to me much more appropriate to have the corpse in the house where people could come to visit, rather than, as today’s practice is, putting them in an undertaker’s parlour to await burial or cremation, which seems so detached and impersonal. The service was held in the parlour, led by Y Parch (The Rev.) James Abel, our minister in Tabernacle Chapel, and then the men of the close family, including me, left in the chief mourners’ car, while most of the other men walked behind, down through the village and across Stafford Common to the cemetery at Kingsbridge, where Grandma was laid to rest with her husband, who had died in 1925. This was my first funeral, but I had to attend very many in later years, to represent my father when he was too ill or in too much pain to go himself, and, more recently as friends and colleagues and family members pass on.

One of the first funerals I had to attend for my father was that of an aged aunt who had lived in Pantyffynon, Carmarthenshire for years, and whom I had only met a few times when we went to visit all the relatives in that area. I am not sure how they were related to us. It was probably that they were related to my grandmother in some way. However, I cannot remember how I got there – it must have been by bus, unless another relative from Gowerton took me, but I arrived at the house to find it packed with men. There were several ministers from the various chapels in the area, and between them they conducted a service which last for an hour. We then piled into cars and set off for the chapel, where a large number of members and neighbours were gathered. There were, if I remember rightly about four ministers who all contributed to the service, and each stood up in turn to recite verses from the Bible. The service there lasted over an hour, and then we all trooped off to the cemetery, where there were more people waiting for us and there was another service which also went on for about an hour. Then we all went back to the house for food and talking about the old lady, and catching up with all the news from family members who had not met since the last funeral. I have never, in all the funerals I have attended since, known such a long as that - and all in Welsh!! Perhaps it was not quite as long as that, but it seemed like it at the time.

While in the First Year Sixth, I learned that although until then, one had to be 25years old to get onto the Social Science Course, they had dropped the age to 21, with the stipulation that one had to have worked in the big bad world for at least two years, before starting the course. I also learned that I did not need Higher Certificates to get on the course, only a general education. The certificates I had already passed were sufficient, and I found I could change over from History, and Geography which I was studying, to the Commercial Form to do Shorthand, Typing, Book-keeping and Economics, which I thought would be much more useful to me, a) at university, and b) as a Probation Officer, so at the end of the First Year Sixth, I arranged to change over. I therefore re-sat the mathematics exams at School Certificate level, and got my Credits, and spent the second year, learning to drive a typewriter, and to write at speed in Greg’s Shorthand. I also learned the rudiments of Economics and, despite my antipathy to mathematics grasped the general principles of Book-keeping as well. The next problem was what to do from 18 to 21 years of age to gain that extra qualification required by the University College of Swansea, namely, the two years experience of work in the real world.

Enlisting in the Army

I was due to do my National Service as soon as I left school and was duly summoned to a medical and education examination at the Army Recruiting Office in Swansea. I dreaded to think what the police or the army or the Government would do to me if I refused to go, so I went. During the day, after a fairly basic medical examination, during which I was told I had flat feet when I stood normally, but not when I stood on my toes (?!), we had a lecture from the Recruiting Sergeant who explained the advantages of joining the regular army, the main advantage being that regulars were paid twice the wages of National Servicemen, and stood a better chance of promotion.

So, in October 1952, I enlisted for the Royal Army Educational Corps, and was ordered to report to the Depot of the East Surrey Regt., Kingston-on-Thames for infantry training.

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