We left the Piccadilly Line to visit Pobol Y Cwm. It was Alex’s grandmother’s birthday at the weekend. Mam, as she is called in the family was born one year after Armistice Day – on 11th November 1919 making her 92 years young. The weekend was a chance for Mam to draw on her childhood memories of South Wales. She was one of eight girls and two boys. The girls were Gwyneth, Lillian, Marion, Olwen, Tegweth, Gwynira Mavis & Linda and the boys were Sidney and Stanley.
Mam grew up before the Welfare State came into being and large families such as hers had to rely on their wits and the community. She remembers the harshness of the General Strike in 1926 and vows that she would rather die than vote Tory because they put a stop to the Coal Board’s habit of dropping off coal to mining families. That winter children were left cold with no fire in the hearth. Her father, and one of her brothers went up to the Patches – places where the coal was near the surface - and they hacked at these and got coal out from the earth and delivered it to the impoverished families.
There was another poignant story of her much loved father. He was David John Williams, born on 17th October 1884. One of their neighbours was a young woman whose husband was killed in the Great War which finished one year before Mam was born. Her father wrote a poem about the heroes of the war who made the ultimate sacrifice. He brought the poem round to all the houses in the village and sold it. The money raised, he gave to this young woman and her baby son, who also paid a part in the sacrifice of war. I read the poem and thought it a highly fitting account of loss on this Remembrance Weekend.
