Land of my mother’s …
Peter, Giffaes, near Crickhowell 2019
This is sure stirring up some ghosts for me …
Robbie Robertson, Somewhere Down The Crazy River
The end of summer. We were both feeling somewhat depressed, and made a sudden decision on Sunday afternoon. Very little on next week. Let’s get away somewhere quiet and peaceful. Country house hotel? Google Cornwall, Wales, East Anglia.
The Usk Valley, Brecon Beacons. View from hotel
So on Tuesday afternoon (we each had appointments in the morning) we set out for the Brecon Beacons of South Wales, just past Crickhowell. My mother’s birth certificate says Crickhowell, Monmouthshire. Was she born there, or was it the legal registration district for Tredegar, just a few miles away on the other, less salubrious side of the mountain? The sub-district is Beaufort, which is 3 miles from Tredegar and the site of the Beaufort Iron Works. I know my grandfather was a steel worker rather than a miner. She was named Daisy Doreen, after her mother, Daisy. She was always called Doreen, and hated the name Daisy. I obeyed her wish. ‘Daisy’ is not on her headstone.
Doreen with my sister. Probably 1943
She grew up in Tredegar. Born 1915, the third child with two older brothers. There would be a gap before the next several siblings, because my grandfather was in France in the army. She must have been conceived just as war started.
Crickhowell, Monmouthshire, 2019
Tredegar was a mining community at the head of the Sirhowy valley. These towns were all industrial revolution creations, Ebbw Vale, Merthyr Tydfil, Tredegar, only in existence to scrape black gold from deep under the hills. There was no other reason to build large towns up there. Her Northeast family dated back in four directions to Pembrokeshire, Monmouthshire, Jersey, Lancashire, all drawn to those South Wales mines for work. Coal is the ultimate fossil fuel, millions of years of stored sunlight crushed from trees into rock, and burned up in minutes. The Labour Party were known to mutter about re-opening mining as a sop to the TUC, but I can’t see it happening on environmental grounds, Margaret Thatcher’s inadvertent green legacy was in destroying the coal industry. Welsh coal had fuelled the industrial revolution. Even in the late 80s, driving along the M4 to West Wales, you could smell the smoke of coal fires as you passed the cities and towns. No clean air rules there. All gone.
My dad remembered going to Tredegar during the mines lock-out in the 1930s. The miners had dug an illicit tunnel into the back of the mines to get coal for their families. My grandad took him in there.
Dated 1917 and heavily creased. I am guessing this was sent to my granddad in World War One. L to R: My Uncle Rex, my mother, Doreen, my grandmother, Daisy, my uncle Jack
My mother left Wales when she was fifteen, 1930. The Great Depression and subsequent strikes, then lock outs by employers had the mines closed. She and her female cousins went to skivvy on the South coast of England, in Bournemouth hotels. Her younger sisters joined her in time. The boys all stayed home in Wales. The girls were all sent away, to send most of their meagre wages back to support the ever growing families. I don’t think Doreen ever recovered from the rejection of being sent away from home on her fifteenth birthday and as the enforced surrogate mother of her younger siblings, while her mother continued to have children, she deeply missed them.
My uncle reckoned in later years the girls were the lucky ones. Doreen was bright. The housekeeper at the hotel had her moved to being a waitress, taught her silver service, persuaded her that losing her Welsh accent would bring a better life. A couple of years serving Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army and his ilk. Starched shirts and starched tablecloths, strict table manners. Whispered conversation … these were the bank managers, doctors and solicitors, not the braying upper classes.. Then she got the ultimate job for her – working in the fashion department of Beales, a posh Bournemouth store. Twenty years ago we stayed at a country house hotel near Dolgellau, another converted mansion, a plaque in the lobby declared that it had once belonged to the Beales family of Bournemouth. The descendants of the staff staying in the old manor houses of the bosses? This will be a recurring theme.
I think now of her as a waitress at a holiday hotel, as I had breakfast served by the young staff here at the country house hotel near Crickhowell. They are also far away from home to work at a young age. No Welsh accents here, some English, but some (I always ask after years as an ELT writer) from Bulgaria. Lovely polite helpful young people from the EU, who have devoted great effort to learning to speak English well, doing a job the British avoid. We are fortunate to have them join us in our country and hopefully they will stay, get out of the service industries and have rewarding careers here. In Terence Rattigan’s play Separate Tables, set in Bournemouth, the young Welsh waitress is called Doreen, my mum’s name.
I’ve never felt ‘Welsh’ though apparently I would be qualified to play football for Wales. Wales are not desperate enough to need me. If international pub quiz rock ‘n’ roll becomes a sport, I’m up for it. Pass me the Welsh flag. I identify as Southern English, where I and my dad and his dad were born, I guess Doreen must have too. 64 of her 79 years were in Bournemouth. I remember just once when we felt Welsh and aggrieved. My football went over the next door fence and the neighbour refused to return it. When my mum protested, she called her ‘A stupid Welshy.’ My mum never forgot, and nor did I. There’s something deeply offensive about your ethnicity being used as an insult. I felt the same when in a bar in Tokyo, I was with Americans and they were all telling Ronald Reagan jokes. I added one … there was a horrible silence, and one said So fuck you, Limey. Moral: people can tell jokes about their leaders, but if you’re a foreigner, don’t join in. And no, I don’t think that the intelligence of the British in discovering that the vitamin C in lime juice wards off scurvy is a topic that makes a good insult, but it’s the intent of selecting your ethnicity that burns.
Giffaes House Country Hotel
We loved the sign in Welsh to a hotel Gwesty. It’s a Welsh word I’ll remember. A gwesty house. We were gwesties of the hotel.
I woke at 3 a.m. the first night at the hotel with a realization about the splendid 19th century mansion I was sleeping in. There had been the entrance to another huge walled estate just a mile away, which we had taken by mistake, and a nice lady on a golf cart had re-directed us. This side of the mountains, the Usk valley, is extraordinarily beautiful country. Just a few miles from that post-industrial wasteland on the other side. Sleeping in the house of the enemy? Surely these estates were the mine owners’ houses. In this case the steel mill owners, they owned the Blaenavon iron works. My Welsh grandad graduated from the mines to become a crane operator in a steel mill, a skilled job he was proud to do.
I looked out of the window in the morning. The estate has a wall round it with towers and a gate house. Now, in Poole, we are plagued by urban deer eating our flowers and I’d love a wall round the garden. But was such a wall designed to keep the deer out … or was it to keep out my ancestors and their neighbours?
View from our room. A walled garden with towers.
We rarely went to Tredegar when I was young. My mother still had lots of family there, but I sensed it was too far back in time. We went when I was 6 or 7. Because my dad was a sales rep for John Bull Rubber Company (later absorbed by Dunlop – they made tyres) we had a new car, an Austin A40 Somerset. It was August, and I remember barefoot kids in vests throwing stones at it as we drove by.
My grandparentsL Jack and Daisy, with the offending A40 Somerset
I recall my uncles covered in coal dust teeth and eyes gleaming white, coming home from the mines to wash in a tin bath. We stayed with my Uncle Jack in Tredegar, a few doors away from my grandparents. We went on a trip to see the dams with my grandparents. We have a photo.
My sister Wendy, me, Daisy and Jack ,my grandparents, Elan Dams
Jack Northeast was my mother’s older brother, and my dad’s best man at their wedding in 1937. Jack was a long distance lorry driver and would visit us a couple of times a year in a huge orange Foden lorry. My dad used to meet him ten miles away, at Ringwood, and lead him in. I would come back with Jack, sat high up in the cab, and on arrival he would demand to read my Beano and Dandy comics with me. He was my favourite uncle.
My mum and Dad’s wedding 1937. L standing, Jack and Daisy Northeast. My Uncle Jack, My dad and mum, May and Bert Viney. Seated left my Auntie Lilian, right, my Auntie Iris
My dad and Jack stayed great friends. They met in Brussels during the war. Jack was a military policeman, my dad ran the motor pool garage, Jack always said he went to see my dad and walked into the garage in his redcap military police uniform, and half the unit started climbing out of windows to escape him. Jack escorted the German propaganda voice, Lord Haw Haw, back to England for execution in 1945.
My Uncle Ernie, one of my mum’s younger brothers, died in April 1958. His car came off the road at Black Rock near Abergavenny, very near where we are staying, which is why he is on my mind. It was a secondhand Jaguar and I had to promise my mum never to drive a Jaguar. Our headmaster at Bournemouth School had a great loathing of lounge lizards in secondhand Jaguars, and predicted I would become one. I remember the morning Ernie died. My mum had woken screaming with a headache at 2 a.m. She couldn’t see, she felt sick. At 8.15, just as I was about to leave for school, the phone rang. Ernie had been killed at 2 a.m with appalling head injuries, so, no, I have never driven a Jaguar.
The town clock, Tredegar, 2019.
The next time I went to Tredegar was when I was twelve or thirteen, second or third year at grammar school, just me and my mum. We took the Royal Blue coach to Cheltenham – no Severn bridge in those days. We waited a long time, then a coach to Newport, then an ordinary bus up the valley. In retrospect, I realise we were there because my grandad was ill.
Uncle Jack
We stayed with Jack and his wife, Anne. Every day, Jack took me out in his tiny A30 van with his highly strung border collie drooling down the back of my neck. The dog went mad with rage every time it saw sheep. Did I say this was among Welsh hill farms? He had a new job selling supplies to hill farms in the Brecon Beacons, mainly Delsanex udder wash. There were sheep every few hundred yards. We had lunch in transport cafes, mugs of tea; milk and a lot of sugar in the cups before the tea was poured in. He chatted to me like an adult. He gave me piles of blotting paper advertising cards for udder wash, which I used at school and which evoked great hilarity. My cousin John was there, son of the oldest brother, Rex, who I never met. I don’t think my mother saw him in decades either. John had been sent to live with our grandparents who always called him ‘the boy John’ as a form of address. ‘The boy John, come and get your tea.’ He took me to see the parrots in a cage in the park in Tredegar. He told me the local lads had taught them to say Fuck off! when anyone said Hello or Pretty Polly to them. It had worked. I resolved to try it with the caged birds in Bournemouth Gardens. I have never seen him since.
After my grandad died, my grandma, Daisy, would just turn up unannounced in Bournemouth once a year or more. She got my room, my mum moved in with my sister and I moved in with my dad. This could last two or three weeks. I hated it. We barely saw her. My mum’s cousins lived in Bournemouth and she spent every evening with them at the Bingo hall, which my mum could not afford. Daisy disparaged this, complaining that my mum could afford to have a tea trolley – a sign of effete middle class Southern decadence, but could not afford nightly bingo with glasses of Mackeson cream stout. But we didn’t live in a council house, as she did, and my mum and dad had a mortgage. Then her departure as unannounced as her arrival, she would be off on the Royal Blue bus to Hounslow to stay with my Auntie Iris. Iris was the other one who had lost her Welsh accent. She had been sent to live with my mum as soon as she was fifteen, just before the war started. She joined the army as soon as she was old enough, was very soon a sergeant and ended the war as an officer with a clipped RP accent. Daisy stayed a shorter time there. Iris didn’t play bingo either.
Aneurin Bevan House: Tredegar centre
Then there was my Great Uncle Ben. Daisy’s brother. A character. He had moved to Bournemouth to live with his daughters, my mum’s cousins. He used to walk around the area all day, and my dad would see him, stop sometimes and take him with him while visiting garages in Dorset and the New Forest. Car radios were new-fangled and unreliable and Uncle Ben was a great raconteur and tale spinner. Ben had sat next to Aneurin Bevan at school, who was also his next door neighbour. He carried a newspaper cutting of how much Nye Bevan had left in his will when he died, comparing it to his modest wages as a cabinet minister. Aneurin allegedly used to steal Ben’s pencils at school and bully him, and Ben never forgave him, in spite of Aneurin being regarded as the founder of the NHS. Bevan was why we had free milk in schools until Margaret Thatcher “Milk Snatcher” stopped it. On the other hand, the free heavily sweetened orange juice in 50s schools helped fuel an epidemic of child tooth decay.
Me with statue (?) of Aneurin Bevan, Tredegar centre. My Great Uncle Ben distrusted him
Ben was politically even-handed though, loathing Winston Churchill even more. Ben was to the left of Aneurin Bevan, I realize. Ben said he was in the crowd when Home Secretary Winston Churchill sent mounted troops to Wales during the Tonypandy (strikes / lock outs / riots) (your multiple choice) of 1910. Was Ben really there? He told me the tale many times, along with walking from Tredegar to Ebbw Vale across the mountain in deep snow regularly. I don’t know, but Churchill continued to be loathed by the miners. Ben said his wartime broadcasts were booed in South Wales. Years later, at Hull, a friend’s dad, an ex-Scottish miner who had worked in the East Midlands too, confirmed Ben’s account of Churchill being booed in mining communities right through to the 1950s. It affected our family. My dad voted Conservative, my mum voted Labour. I remember major rows at election time. I now consider that division to be a positive. Too many people have unswerving tribal loyalties to one political party or the other. I feel free to vote tactically. That’s why we buy The Daily Mail on Tuesdays for the health section, The Guardian on Fridays for the film and music reviews and The Telegraph on Saturdays for its sheer bulk, as with The Sunday Times.
Ben did odd stuff. He kept telling my dad the garage door needed painting. My dad was too busy. So one day we came home to find Ben had borrowed a blow torch and stripped it. ‘Now you have to paint it,’ he said. He died in January 1965.
I spoke to my Mum’s younger brother, Herbert, at my mum’s funeral in 1995. Herbert had also become a lorry driver, and had also stayed overnight with us in Bournemouth several times. My mum was very fond of Herbert. Herbert and Ernie were the uncles I had seen covered in coal dust back in the 1950s, they were very close in age. Herbert asked me what I remembered about Tredegar. I said it was pretty unfriendly, just women talking endlessly over tea for hours, often about bingo, only Uncle Jack and Auntie Anne ever talking to me. I said I never recalled my grandad ever speaking a word to me. Herbert explained that his dad couldn’t talk to me, because I looked exactly like Ernie who had died just a year or two before. Maybe, but at the time I felt strongly it was generalized anti-Englishness, definitely the feeling I got from my cousin The Boy John and my Auntie Pam, the youngest sister, who had stayed. My dad reckoned that too, so maybe he influenced me. My dad reckoned my uncles, in “working class” jobs earned more than he did in his “middle class” job.
I have never seen a photo of Ernie, but I guess I have a Northeast look. My grandson, Huxley is only two, and he looks so much like Jack that I often call him Uncle Jack as a joke, He doesn’t mind. Yet.
Back to the trip to Wales in 2019 …
We’d spent the day in Hay On Wye and Crickhowell. We had not heard a single Welsh accent anywhere. Weird. The next day we met several Welsh fellow guests and some were Welsh speaking, but no staff with Welsh accents. None of my mum’s family spoke Welsh, apart from a few expressions like mochyn budr (dirty pig) one which my mother was fond of. It is said Monmouthshire and most of South-East Wales spoke an English dialect as far back as the 13th century, which is why the road signs with the Welsh text above the English text annoy me, and I reckon it interferes with road safey, e.g. as trying to enter a car park off a roundabout with four lines of Welsh text to be skipped before I could read that it was the short stay section. Words like ‘tacsi’ for ‘taxi’ or ‘telefision’ are just bloody daft, as is the dual sign ‘Conway / Conwy.’ Welsh lacks the letter X. When we were filming in 1990, the director was from Tredegar. His family were Welsh speakers at home. He had a Welsh speaking assistant and they conversed in Welsh about the director and cast. He tried to include me in the conversation saying if I had a mother from Tredegar, I must be able to follow them. I said I had noted mochyn budr in reference to one cast member.
Welsh speakers at home? That would have been a minority in the area according to my family, though when I looked up Beaufort, where Doreen was born, it says it was Welsh-speaking and that there was a fuss in 1904 because a new minister at the chapel gave the service in English. Had the Welsh speakers always been there? Or had they, like my great-grandfather, migrated from Welsh-speaking Pembrokeshire in search of work?
We were told in Crickhowell that people in the serene Usk valley called the inhabitants of the decrepit mining towns ‘the people from the hills.’ Sounds like Game of Thrones with The Wildings beyond The Wall.
We decided to go and see Tredegar. The Heads of The Valleys road is “The Wall” – a vast engineering works creating a swathe of dual carriageway brutally carved out of the side of the mountain. It’s still under construction and has been for years.
Construction work, Heads of The Valleys Road
My car’s built in sat nav, now 10 years old, has no idea of the new road’s route, so we are a triangle on the screen moving in roadless country on the map. We passed Black Rock where Ernie drove over the edge. One hell of a drop. Notices declare the road construction to be EU regional improvement aid for Wales. It must be designed to bring employment to these blighted valley towns. I can’t see it will entice young people to stay. To repeat, these towns are ‘geographically challenged’ because coal and iron was the only reason they ever existed up there in the hills. Once it’s gone for good, why build a super highway across the top when the M4 links the major viable towns just twenty miles to the south.
Wales has received £4 billion from the EU since 2000, and this is claimed to have created 37,000 jobs. And then Wales voted for Brexit? Why? Blaenau Gwent, which is Tredegar’s area, was the highest Brexit vote in Wales at over 62% yet it has had all this EU wealth spent on infrastructure. The most deprived areas, plus also the Southern geriatric belt, where we live, voted Leave. Monmouthshire was Remain confirming my view that nearly all the places you would want to live voted Remain. The Usk and Wye valleys are stunningly beautiful, and the towns, Crickhowell, Abergavanny and. Monmouth are great. You think of all of them, I’d like to live here.
On a national scale, the Heads of the Valley money would have been far better spent by-passing Abergavenny with the A40, or even more joining up the south coast A27 / M27 road between Chichester and Dover, with its far greater traffic between more populous and thriving towns, all jammed with traffic. Sorry. It would.
I don’t know, but there’s one thing
I’ll never do again
And that’s take a glimpse into someone’s life
And claim I know them from within
Mark Germino, ‘Fire in The Land of Grace’ about his brief visit to Graceland.
I”ll try and heed Mark Germino’s cautionary warning.
Tredegar 25 years ago, when we stopped to show it to our kids, when we were travelling between Pembrokeshire and Tintern, was streets of boarded up houses. It was like some sort of sci-fi dystopia, five years after an apocalypse. We didn’t see the boarded up houses this time, but the town centre looks blasted.
Cefn Golau, where my grandparents lived
We drove up the steep winding hills full of grey pebbledash ex-council (I assume) houses to Cefn Golau where my grandparents lived. Their house has gone, now part of a four house gap in the row of shoddily built early 50s buildings. There are other gaps around. As I remembered, the back fences lead onto a few feet of blasted barren heathland at the very top of the hill. Google it. It’s famous for its cholera cemetery on top of the hill.
From the Tredegar Website:
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49 Gainsborough Avenue: where my grandparents’ 1950s house used to be
Demolition: 2003 from the Tredegar website. This could be their house.
The house next door 2019
Gardens nearby are full of used tyres, broken fridges. The mid-afternoon traffic was six or seven ‘tacsis’ (taxis) up there in Cefn Golau, so social services delivering kids home up the steep hills. Whoever thought, ‘let’s build houses up here.’ I can see that disaffected Leave vote from Blanau Gwent – build a smart flashy semi-motorway, but leave us isolated clinging on the side of a dismal dull hill without any shops, pubs, children’s playgrounds, libraries, surgeries, churches, community centres. The old community centre, named for a rugby club was boarded up and collapsing. Four houses had gone where my grandparents houses were. Why not put a playground there? The Leave vote meant here, ‘anything, really ANYTHING has to be better than this.’ I believe it’s anti-immigrant, and perversely, strong in areas like this where no immigrant with any sense would ever go.
Rugby Club community centre, Cefn Golau
In the town centre we chatted with a friendly guy who said the local greeting was ‘Who are you belonging to?’ He pointed out the Tredegar Arms, a pub being converted to a smart new hotel in the hope that tourism was coming. He said Japanese tourists had already been spotted in the area. No chance.
You want to support local businesses but everywhere was closed except for a grubby convenience store. That made me think. The road in and out leads under a crumbling 50s or 60s shopping centre. It appeared empty. We saw kids walking back from school. I don’t think that new road will revitalise the place for their generation. If they have any sense they’ll be off to Cardiff or wherever as soon as they can. I thought of Jerome, Arizona which I have visited. 10,000 people in 1917. 444 in 2000. It was a copper mining town, the copper seam ran out, the town died, so people moved on, except for a few hippy artisan shops catering for modern ghost town tourism. The American miners were right. Get out.
The Wye Valley with Tintern Abbey
Friday was the opposite, the tranquility of our favourite place, Tintern. When you take the road down the Wye Valley from Monmouth to Tintern, you realize the difference between driving somewhere and quietly motoring. The Wye Valley is motoring. We have been there once a year for many years. Both our family trees wind back through many places to Chepstow, a town split by a bridge between England and Wales.
Chepstow. I took the photo from the corner of the narrow street where Karen’s great-great grandfather lived.
Tintern Abbey is a few miles up the Wye valley from Chepstow. Both of us have ancestry in the area. We have read James Long’s novel, Ferny, about people meeting again and again in different incarnations over centuries and joke that we might trace back to a randy 14th century Cirstacian monk and an innocent milkmaid from the village. Or a randy milkmaid and an innocent monk. The thing about Ferny is that you might switch gender from one incarnation to the next.
We stopped in Crickhowell on the way home on Saturday. It has one of the best small independent bookshops, Bookish. We bought children’s books and The Testaments audio CD by Margaret Atwood. They had devoted the window to the book and audio, and had a large Margaret Atwood book display. That reminds me what swine publishers are … all that effort by the independent shop, and just down the road in Abergavenny W.H. Smith are advertising the book at half price, which is what the independents paid for it if they’re very lucky. Crickhowell also has a great friendly butcher / deli where we loaded up on Welsh cheese, local heritage tomatoes, salad and honey. On the counter were packs of cannabis tea. It’s supposed to help you sleep (and like CBD oil won’t make anyone high). ‘Does it work?’ I asked. ‘Not like the real thing,’ I was told.
Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home,
Paul Simon, Mrs Robinson
Back to the country house hotel. I had a sudden memory of 1977. Karen wanted to go to Shurdington, a suburb of Cheltenham. She had spent a very unhappy term at school there between Belfast and Bournemouth, staying with her granny who was still living there. She was bullied because she had a Northern Irish accent. She remembered walking up to the ‘big house’ now The Greenways, a country house hotel. We had read about it in a colour supplement and decided to splash out on a couple of nights. It was from a generation before us. Suits and ties for dinner. One sitting for all at 8. Sherry (La Ina, the best) with the very limited menus at 7.30. Two choices of starter, two of mains. Port or tea in the lounge afterwards with everyone conversing cheerfully as if at a family weekend. Very social. They were all thirty plus years older than us, but didn’t seem to mind the age gap. Waiters in tail coats. Immaculate service. We thought, ‘this is the end of an era.’
The Usk Valley, evening
So on to 2019, looking around the mahogany lined dining room as we enjoyed our nouvelle cuisine dinner. Nearly everyone, like us, early retired. A few are ten years older. No one wearing ties, we are a different generation. We don’t do that. All the cars outside are nice. Not all big, but mainly newish. Some Range Rovers, BMWs, Audis, Mercedes, Porsches, Jaguars (NOT mine, I never consider Jaguars) among them. Mainly white or light metallic. We are not the black car generation. It’s an expensive dinner but worth it.
The hotel drawing room … half a world away, just a few miles from Tredegar
A thought nagged. Many of us are baby boomers. Will the next generations let us hold on to our money? Brexit. Social disruption. Michael Gove (I spit on the ground every time his name gets mentioned) spoke on the radio years ago about clawing the accumulated wealth from our generation, and he’s a Tory. These guys got their private education, no university student loan debts with rich parents, first car, house deposit – and now find our generation is living inconveniently long before passing the lot on. Bastards. He also ignores the fact that much of this wealth is theoretical, locked into house prices. If Gove, the right wing Tory, is after us, what will Labour do? Is this the end of another era? Are we sitting here listening to the dance band on The Titanic?
In 1535, the Cistercians in Tintern Abbey must have been consoling themselves with the thought that parliament might vote down Henry VIII’s “Brexit” from the Church of Rome and saying it may never happen.
Look at what did.
Tintern Abbey
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