Tales of Wales

From William Street to Cwellyn

The soldiers returning from World War II were hardened by their experiences and sacrifices made by their kindred — no longer were they prepared to doff their cloth caps to their employers, the owners of the slate quarries. Nor would they accept the conditions and pittance paid as existed before the war. There were strikes and closures, resulting in my father obtaining the caretaker and gardener’s position with the local council.

We left our terraced house in William Street and the kinship of our neighbours. Our few possessions had been loaded on to Owain y Glo’s Bedford and carted off to the servants’ quarters of our new home.

Cwellyn, an old manor house, had been converted into offices, and filing cabinets, desks, and clumsy bakelite telephones had replaced the Georgian past. Owain was a regular visitor, humping sacks of coal off the truck before sending them rumbling down the chute into the cellar, whereupon my father would shovel the buckets full and carry them upstairs to feed the 15 hungry fireplaces.

The narrow staircases in our quarters led up to my parents’ bedroom, attic, box room and an inside toilet! The kitchen with its red tiled floor, hooks in the ceiling and large fireplace, became our lounge. The adjacent pantry was converted to a kitchen, where bottled fruit and pickled eggs shared the shelves above the long slab of smooth shiny slate. A gas stove standing on spindly legs occupied the narrow end, on the opposite side the mangle, a wooden trough with brass taps, and a copper cauldron.

The cauldron would be fired up on Monday, and the laundry boiled, as everybody had a bath on Sunday. The Christmas puddings would be boiled there too; the rich fruit mixture, containing halfpennies and farthings too, would be placed in white porcelain bowls, with a piece of sheeting tightly tied as cover. They were cooked, then hung out to drain.

I recall one Christmas Eve, with branches of red-berried holly bound and hanging from the ceiling, decorated with silver foil, trinkets and ribbons that mum had collected over the years. A flickering fire cast images, bringing the foil alive, and my older brother was burning to tell me we would receive no Christmas presents as the family was too poor and to forget Father Christmas as he had been killed during the war.

In summer time we would share a bed in the attic, but as the blankets froze during the winter we moved back down to the box room. There we shared the same bed and would roll around tightly in the flannelette sheets and grey blankets to look like the tightly rolled scroll of the Magna Carta.

That evening, our empty darned stockings hanging from the bedpost, I decided to prove to my brother that despite his seniority he did not know everything. Knowing Santa would have to come through the doorway, due to the absence of a fireplace, I carefully left the door slightly ajar, bridging the gap with a pile of encyclopaedias. It was not long before the two sentries were rolled into the scroll position — asleep.

Needless to say Santa was very much alive and had cast a spell over us and he had filled our stockings with the luxury of bananas, oranges, nuts and treacle toffee just like my mother made and a racing car Dinky toy too. Just what I had written and asked for, which also proved he understood Welsh too.

We were therefore both surprised when mother came to share the joyful awakening, with a warning from Santa saying ‘that he would not come next year if we were to play the same trick.’ Indeed she said ‘dad was still in bed with a bad headache just like Santa, as he had been up most of the night looking after him after the books had fallen on him, and as a result many of the children were only getting a few presents, just like ourselves this year.’

I looked tearfully across to my brother, feeling so sorry for the other children but also so pleased Father Christmas had come and just think dad had had really met him.