Number One
was an end-of-terrace cottage on the East side of Mynyddislwyn, looking down on
an industrial valley. The cottage probably dated about 1880. Nanna lived there
all her life. By the front door, which was never used, there was the front
room. The room was only used to mark birth, marriage or death, the curtains
were always pulled, it was holy, dark and cold. Later I remembered the words of
Dylan Thomas’ Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard: “Before you let the sun in, mind it wipes
its shoes.”
The living
room had a large central table, two small windows looking down the valley, and
a coal fire. At the back was the kitchen with a great black range and a door to
the yard outside. There Pot nobly slept on a camp bed when the whole family
visited.
There was
a tap over a stone trough in the high-walled yard, which sufficed for daily
washing. No one complained about the cold water. That was just the way it was
for everybody. For the weekly bath water was heated in kettles and pans on the
great black range and then poured into a shared tin bath. Pot went first, then
Nanna, then the rest in a ranking determined by age and gender.
Overlooking
the valley, on the most unpromising ground, Pot nurtured a fine array of fruit
bushes and Nanna kept chickens. By then I had a little sister, Christine, and
we would help feed the chickens and creep into Pot’s beloved garden to eat the
blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries.
The toilet
was ‘up the mountain’! We would scuttle through the yard, skirt the coal shed
and climb steep stone steps. There we would sit on a wooden seat in a small
sentry box. A large gap under the door ensured that the wind always whistled
around your ankles. In the door a quatrefoil opening allowed you to gaze almost
all the way to Newport. On a length of string were threaded ripped-up pages of
the Daily Mirror. When visitors came, Nanna would quickly put some ‘proper’
toilet paper there instead.
In this
tiny cottage, originally the property of my grandmother’s family, lived Pot,
Nellie, and their seven children: my father Daniel, the eldest and called John
by all but his family, Eileen, Christine, Sheila, Clive, Gerald and Geraldine.
One night
as I lay in bed it dawned on me. Pot had come from Ireland, just like Twrch Trwyth.
He had seven children, just like Twrch Trwyth. The coincidence was too much.
Perhaps, on dark nights he was Twrch
Trwyth. I clutched my bedclothes around me and gazed through the starlit pane
to see any sign of him coming or going.
There was
a wild shriek, and a black engine pulled black coal into the black night.
