32 Lon y Celyn
Whitchurch
CARDIFF CF14 7BW
[029] 20657156
email: apatsull@aol.com
I found reading people’s memories of Cardiff enormously enjoyable and I take great pleasure in discussing aspects of my childhood with anyone who’ll listen!! I’m sorry to say I’ll be seventy years old this year, but still only about twenty in my head and always will be! No growing old gracefully for me - disgracefully more like!
I was born in Whitchurch, my father being a member of a family of tinplate workers from Melingriffith. My grandfather, David John Williams was superintendent of the tinplate works and my father, Harman Williams, and his six brothers all served their apprenticeships at the works. His four sisters did not work! When I was around three years old my parents moved to a little cottage on Thornhill Road - Baytree. It’s still there on the side of the road having been saved from demolition when the M4 was built. We picked mushrooms in late summer and early autumn, blackberries in the summer, nuts in the autumn, primroses in spring and we knew where there were damson and crab apple trees for making jam. An idyllic childhood with all sunny summers and snowy winters. That’s how I remember it anyway. The snow of 1947 when I was eleven was particularly memorable because it was so deep we couldn’t see out of the cottage windows when we got up in the morning.
My mother, Hilda [nee Breakspear] was born in another cottage on Thornhill. This was Rose Cottage which was one of a pair of semi-detached cottages which were sited just before the entrance to the crematorium. Mum was born in the inside of the two cottages, and in the outside cottage lived a Mr and Mrs Jones. Old Mrs Jones had been a warder in Cardiff Prison and accompanied the last female prisoner to be hanged when she went to the gallows!
There was another little cottage further down the road called Primrose Cottage. This was a thatched cottage and stood at the end of the lane which ran up to Heol Llanishen Fach Farm. The farm is still there but now in the middle of a modern housing estate. The farmer was Ivor Llewellyn and I was friendly with his daughter Ann. Her brother now lives in America and last I heard he was very involved in a Welsh Society out there.
We had no bathroom and no hot water so on Friday nights, bath night, the tin bath was brought in from it’s hanging place on the outside wall of the cottage and the gas boiler filled up to heat the water. Youngest got to use the bath first. It was a bit like a Chinese water torture in a way because the kitchen roof was galvanised iron and the steam condensed on the roof sand then dripped back icy cold on you in the bath! I suppose people pay a lot of money for such treatment in health spas these days!
For me, Rhiwbina school was sheer paradise. I was an only child for seven years and therefore had no other children to play with so I couldn’t wait to get to school, even though it was a very long walk for little legs [with obligatory gas mask hanging around my neck]. No Heol Llanishen Fach in those days so it was down to Beulah Road and then back up Heol y Deri to the school. Standard packed lunch in the summer was always tomato sandwiches, because that was the cheapest and you could grow them at home. To this day the very smell of a tomato sandwich transports me back to my days in Rhiwbina school!
My late great aunt, Bronwen Harman was a teacher at the school when it first opened. Auntie Bron was my paternal grandmother’s sister and she lived in Tongwynlais. I am rather puzzled as to how she travelled back and forth to Rhiwbina school as she lived on Merthyr Road in Tongwynlais! A mystery. She retired before I started school. When I passed the scholarship in Rhiwbina school I passed for Penarth and this was an incredibly long journey for me. Leaving the house at 7:30 am to walk to Birchgrove Halt, then to either Queen Street or the General where I changed for the Penarth train [steam of course] and then the walk from Penarth station to the school. I got home in the dark after a long lonely walk up Thornhill in the winter months.
Food rationing only affected me as far as sweet rationing went - that was a blow, but my Mum was pretty innovative and made sweets for me. Sometimes we would shout at American soldiers in the back of lorries “Got any gum chum!“ and invariably they would throw some out for us. Mum could turn her hand to almost anything, even skinning rabbits, and feathering the pheasants my Dad shot in the area that is now mostly crematorium.
We had plenty of fresh meat even if it meant that at the end of every meal there was a little row of lead pellets on the edge of the plate! Must have swallowed some I suppose. Dad grew all our vegetables, Mum made all our clothes. Dad skinned a few rabbits in an attempt to make us mittens and there were usually some petrified animal skins nailed to the outhouse door! Never worked though. I think he fancied himself as a sort of Davy Crockett or Crocodile Dundee!
Fresh milk was delivered by Jack Rees, our local farmer from Pant-y-Scawen farm. He used to arrive in his cart pulled by Ginger the carthorse. Milk was measured out from churns on the cart and put in a jug my mother left on the door step. Water came through to the kitchen from a spring across the road. In summer when the level dropped we had to go down to the spring and collect water in a bucket. The water was gorgeous and on hot days we used to get cycling clubs calling in for glasses of water.
Groceries, with a ration book, came from Mr Burden in the Classic Stores at the crossroads. Butter was cut from a large block and wrapped in greaseproof paper. Sugar from a large bag weighed out into small blue bags, tea likewise. Biscuits came from a large deep tin and put into paper bags after weighing. All along the front of the counter were open sacks full of dog biscuits. I tried one of these one day - not nice!
The war affected us inasmuch as German war planes used Thornhill Road as a guide to the R.O.F. factory at the crossroads. Even at the age of five I could differentiate between British and German planes by the sound of the engines. We had loads of tents erected on the sides of Thornhill Road and these housed American soldiers guarding petrol dumps. Only black Americans - seems white Americans were too good to be housed in tents! These guys were absolute gentleman and were so polite to my mother who was only in her twenties. They were also very generous as they had better food than we were getting and they often gave my mother some items that we could only dream of.
I recall one day a convoy of American tanks came up the road heading towards Caerphilly. They stopped and asked my Dad if they were going the right way for Newport. Dad said they needed to go back into Cardiff and go east, so they turned everything around. Such a noise and such a mess and when they eventually moved off there were no grass verges left in our part of the road because the tanks had churned them to mud! When Mum asked Dad what had been going on and he told her what had happened she pointed out that they could have got to Newport via Caerphilly!
We had an evacuee billeted on us. She was a young girl around nine or ten years old and had been bombed out in Birmingham. A double decker bus had arrived at our house and it was full of evacuees and my mother was told to go out and choose one! She decided she’d get a five year old as company for me. She brought this little girl into the house and the bus waited outside. However, once inside this little girl just stood there and screamed and cried. Some of these children must have been mentally scarred for life with experiences like this. I couldn’t understand why she was crying, I was too young to understand, but Mum had to take her back and we got Doreen instead.
Doreen stayed with us for quite a while and came to Rhiwbina school with me. The plus side of this was that Birmingham City Council paid for a taxi to take her to and from school and of course I went too, so for a while I no longer had to do that long walk. Every time there was a raid poor Doreen would shake and turn white. We all used to sit in the pantry which was situated under the stairs and wait for the all clear. I only ever went in an air raid shelter once and that was in Cardiff Castle when me and Mum were in town one day and an air raid occurred.
After a night raid by German planes we would go out next morning and look for shrapnel. Not really sure why, but shell cases seemed to be prized as they were made of brass and looked quite good as ornaments. Also we used to find what looked like strips of silver paper everywhere. Something to do with blocking radar I think. It was illegal to keep anything you found - you were obliged to hand it to the police.
However, my mother and I had a particularly “good” find one morning when we came across a unexploded incendiary bomb. Foolishly my mother stuck it under her coat and home we went. She put it under the sideboard to wait for my Dad to come home from work. Imagine - he had just cycled up hill all the way from John Williams down the docks on a hot summer day to be excitedly told by me that we had a bomb under the sideboard! I can remember it even now and could draw a picture of it - it had a small propeller in the rear end. And what did he do? He decided to dismantle it and see how it worked! After dismantling it he took the detonator into work and they all sat around the brazier at lunchtime wondering what kind of an explosion it would make. Then some bright spark said “There’s one way to find out and threw it in the brazier”. Dad said he’d never seen so many spilled cups of tea and sandwiches trodden into the ground as men leapt this way and that. Old men could have qualified for the Olympics jumping over lathes! It only went “pop” apparently. How I survived my childhood is a miracle considering Mum and Dad appeared to be rather foolhardy!
No television of course, we didn’t get one until the coronation. We didn’t have electricity anyway, only gas lamps downstairs and candles upstairs. Our radio was run on a battery which contained acid which had to be replaced from time to time. This meant carrying the battery all the way to Heol-y-Deri where there was a shop which would top it up. I took it one winter day when there was thick snow around Baytree. I thought it would be a good idea to put it on the sledge that my Dad had made for me. It was a heavy one because he had put steel runners on it to make it go faster. I realised what a bad idea this was when I got to the crossroads - there was no snow down there!
We used to go to the Monico cinema, usually once a week. Walked there and back because the bus service to Thornhill was extremely sparse. On the way home we would make as diversion down to Hill’s Fish and Chip shop at Birchgrove and eat them on the way home.
I could go on and on but you’ve probably glazed over by now!
Ann Sullivan [nee Williams]