I remember, I remember, not the house where I was born, but the first of which the layout has stayed with me in some detail. It was the home of my maternal grandparents in Ashgrove, Bryntirion, near Bridgend. A small, low, single-story structure, presumably constructed on a wooden frame, and covered with tarred paper.
The little building, along with many similar houses, was constructed to accommodate some of the 32,000 workers employed at the Royal Ordnance Factory (the ROF, the Arsenal) in Bridgend in the years leading up to and during the Second World War. 75% of them were women, some enjoying employment and wages for the first time in their lives.
The dancing flames of Bryntirion
The house had a narrow corridor running from the front door along its length. I can only recall one room to the left, a bathroom; there may have been others. The first door to the right led into the kitchen, with a large square sink opposite and below a window. There was often a washboard in the sink, along with a then-essential bit of equipment: Reckitt’s Laundry Blue. There was also a scrubbed and bleached pine kitchen table, which later travelled to a subsequent home.
The next door along to the right was the living room. On one wall was a fire grate with two circular swivel plates, on which kettles and saucepans could be heated over the coal fire. Another Reckitt’s product, Black Lead, helped Nan to keep the grate pristine. On either side of the fire were two armchairs with wooden arms and faux leather covering. Evenings were often spent staring at the magic of the dancing flames, and Grampi …
“fixed in his chair
A Peasant, R. S. Thomas
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.”
On the wall opposite the fireplace was the door to a bedroom. There was a feather mattress and eiderdown bed where I slept, warm, secure, and loved, between my grandparents Ruby and Jack.
Outside the house was a small coal house. I used to climb onto its roof, where I became a fisherman. I used Jack’s cloth mine measuring tape with a brass winder as my line.
I am a baby boomer, born in the same year that the coal industry was nationalised and the National Coal Board (NCB) formed, a year before the NHS. It must have been a few years before pit head baths were widely introduced by the NCB. I can clearly remember Grampi covered in coal dust, with a line of blue button scars along his spine, bathing in the small bathroom at Bryntirion.
Coal mining became a reserved occupation during the war years. Jack was certainly a miner after the war, and it recently occurred to me that it may have been Nan rather than Grampi who worked in the ROF. If so, she would have been one of the seven million women engaged in war work. Sadly, there is no one left to check this with.
Jack and Ruby were an unlikely couple. Nan was an admirer of learning and education. She often and proudly repeated a story about a distant relative, an Uncle John, who had “made good” and was a teacher at a public school somewhere in England. Grampi was more concerned with the back pages of the newspapers. As I recall, he wasn’t able to read without moving his lips to form the words.
Guto Nyth Brân
But both impressed on me from an early age that I needed to “pass the scholarship”. Being very impressionable, at one stage I imagined that the scholarship was a race, perhaps along a quay between myself and a liner.
It was from Jack that I first heard some of the legends of Guto Nyth Brân. He was a both a mythical and real athlete named Griffith Morgan (1700–1737) who lived in a farm in the hills near Porth in the Rhondda Valley. Guto is a diminutive of his first name, and Nyth Brân his farm name which translates as ‘Crow’s Nest’. He was also sometimes nicknamed Ianto Full Pelt.
Some of the stories Grampi told me were obviously more myth than reality, but they certainly held me rapt. On one occasion, Guto’s mother ran out of tea, and sent Guto to the shops for some tea leaves. He ran to Pontypridd, some seven miles there and back, and returned before the kettle had boiled.
Another time, the short-sighted Guto took a little longer than usual to round up the sheep on foot. He explained that he had some trouble with the “little one with long ears”. He had rounded up a hare! Even more fanciful perhaps is the story that he could blow out a candle and be in bed before the light faded. Guto is reported to have died after winning an exhausting 12-mile race, when his lover congratulated him – “Da iawn, Guto” – and patted him on the back.
Whatever the myths around Guto, the Nos Galan round-the-houses road race in the town of Mountain Ash keeps his real legend alive. It starts at five minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve and finishes, three miles later, in the new year. The running race celebrates his life and attracts a large field, with guest celebrity appearances. That the atmosphere is something very special I can confirm from personal experience. I completed the race a couple of times in my late teens.
Trying to believe in Jesus
Eventually Jack and Ruby were rehoused in a maisonette in nearby Bryntirion proper. The scrubbed kitchen table from the old house was, I think, repaired by my Uncle Ivor, a carpenter. There was a Rayburn solid fuel range. The kitchen was full of the aromas of kindling drying in a small compartment low down on the range. I remember rice pudding with a brown skin cooked in an enamelled dish, grilled cheese, and hot sweet tea (always with custard creams). Soaked dried peas, ham, and parsley sauce was a particular favourite of mine.
There was one grilled cheese incident where I had a full-blown meltdown tantrum over alleged poor geometric placement of tomato sauce on the cheese. What a brat! It pains me even now to think how badly I behaved.
Later I passed the notorious “scholarship”, the 11-Plus, and had a place at Bridgend Boys Grammar Technical School. I am sure Nan was proud of me in my blazer! By then my parents had moved to Porthcawl, and I had a season ticket to travel on the bus to and from school. On Thursdays I regularly broke the journey to have tea with Nan and Grampi in Bryntirion before going home.
One morning, Mam wasn’t in the kitchen. Dad got us breakfast and told us gently that we had lost a great friend in the night. Nan had passed, and mam had gone Bryntirion to be with her at her end.
That particular night I had had trouble getting to sleep, and the song My Grandfather’s Clock kept going over and over in my brain. It was not something that happened before or since. Coincidence? A false memory? Or perhaps something altogether more difficult to explain, connected to what was happening a few miles away?
Mam later told us that Nan had said she’s been, “trying to believe in Jesus, but hadn’t been able to”. It is perhaps one of the bravest things I had ever heard. And if was entirely in keeping with a woman in Bryntirion who I once knew and greatly loved.
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