“Would you like this footballer rabbit? He’s called Robert,” said Mummy showing me a knitting pattern. Rhetorical question. Of course I would; we had very few toys. Little Cubby, so miraculously rescued at Dolaucothi Hall, belonged to my brother...
The sunshine of most of those previously discussed memories obscures the fact that our playgrounds were bombsites. Under the grass and flowers, behind the facades of the little streets, there was suffering, bereavement, poverty, war work and graves. And fear. A lot of...
I suppose my joined-up memories really begin in about 1942, well after we had come back to live with our parents in Swansea. The worst of the bombing was over – maybe the docks were unusable by that time. I remember this time like somewhere seen in a dream. The little...
My parents came back. How lucky I was! How very grateful I am – when I remember to be – that I was not one of those whose father or mother, or both, were killed in the war. I believe it was not all that long – a matter of months perhaps –...
My own earliest memories come from the place to which the children of Bryn Mill school and their teachers were evacuated. Pumsaint is a village, now in Powys, named for ‘Five Saints’. “Gold has been dug up here since Roman times,” they will...
Just Don’t Mention the War The big traumas in life can be managed, for better or for worse, according to the experiences one has had earlier, even from the times before memory and how other people dealt with the little, dependent child. My early experience of...
