In Living Memory

Looking across the Towy Valley with Dryslwyn Castle atop the outcrop in the centre.


The alternative title to this was "Doing Without" as this post is about that as well. "Doing Without" is deeply unfashionable in this day and age, but it's a lesson I learned in my childhood and sadly our eldest daughter is having to learn the hard way now, as she doesn't have a job yet - though she did get an interview last week and I have every finger crossed.

My late mother-in-law was born in 1909. Her father was killed in WW1 when she was only 6, the eldest of 4 children. Her mother struggled to make ends meet even before she was widowed. The final insult was the shilling the Army invoiced her for the blanket they used to bury her husband in. "Pan haggety" was a frequent meal - potatoes fried in a little bacon fat. Eggs came from the elderly neighbour across the way who kept hens in her back yard until they started laying soft-shell eggs and she had no money to get more hens. She baby-sat the young ones too, whilst Alice's mother worked 12 hour shifts at the local laundry. Once the old lady's varicose veins burst, spraying the walls with blood, but the Doctor refused to come out to treat her unless there was half a crown paid up front . . . She went without, and they tied old sheets round her legs to staunch the blood.

When money was really tight, it was "kettle broth" for supper. A few pieces of stale bread would be crumbled in a bowl and then boiling water poured over, with a pinch of salt and pepper for flavour. Fruit was a luxury that was rarely seen, apart from the obligatory tangerine at Christmas. Alice's most wonderful Christmas present was a tuppenny exercise book to write in . . .

In the days before Christmas one year, I fell into conversation with the old lady behind me in the checkout queue at Tesco's. She was telling me that she had grown up in the row of houses which used to be where the bus station was now - Blue Street. Her mother had kept a shop, but they weren't ever allowed any "goodies" from the stock for sale. One Christmas there were a few oranges left over and they had their first oranges as a Christmas treat.

Another day, another queue. This time the old post office down by the school my children attended. Again, it was close to Christmas. "Christmas!" exclaimed the old chap behind me, "Christmas! Why, it's Christmas every day for people now, with their two cars a family, and their central heating and their holidays abroad. When my dad was growing up there were families they never even had the money to rent anywhere. They would walk from farm to farm, begging for work. All they asked for was a bed in the hay barn at night, and some fat bacon to eat in return for a day's work. All they had were the clothes the stood up in, and a bit of old sacking to keep the weather off." It is hard to imagine such poverty.

Some of my Ag. Lab. ancestors were buried "on the parish", with just a small wooden cross to mark their last resting place. The final years of their life were spent sharing a room with a lodger (who paid the rent), and they would have a "outdoor relief" which saved them from a bed in the Workhouse and was a cheaper option anyway. They worked into their 70s and even 80s if their strength and their "rheumatics" allowed. All Ag. Labs. had rheumatism - it went with the outdoor life in all weathers.

We had a few years when we first moved here when every arriving bill was a nightmare, and when we really lived hand-to-mouth, but we managed, and at least we had a roof over our heads - even if it was a rather leaky one - and we still ate three meals a day - though sometimes the main meal got a bit repetitive and all the "treats" were baked at home! We didn't start buying Christmas presents until we had the Christmas money from various relatives and added it to the frugal amount we could spare, but Christmas Day was always a happy one and we managed on better than kettle broth . . .

The Land by Vita Sackville-West

I was fortunate to find this book last week in the 2nd hand bookshop in Llandeilo. It is a very long poem about the weald and downland of Kent and I don't know how I have lived so long and not really come across it before. Here is just a little scrap to tempt you and although it is in the summer and harvest section, I think it could apply any time and perhaps place, since we have Merlin's Cave about 6 miles from here:

When moonlight reigns, the meanest brick and stone
Take on a beauty not their own,
And past the flaw of builded wood
Shines the intention whole and good,
- And all the little homes of man
Rise to a dimmer, nobler plan
When colour's absence gives escape
To the deeper spirit of the shape,

- Then earth's great architecture swells
Among her mountains and her fells
Under the moon to amplitude
Massive and primitive and rude,

Then do the clouds like silver flags
Stream out above the tattered crags,
And black and silver all the coast
Marshals its hunched and rocky host,
And headlands striding sombrely
Buttress the land against the sea,
The darkening land, the brightening wave, -
When moonlight slants through Merlin's cave.

A glimpse of Talley Abbey through the trees, taken yesterday.

Census occupation: Charwoman

As requested, another glimpse into Ann Jones' life . . .



The moon was sinking in the sky as Ann trudged up the garden to the ty bach near the water's edge. Moonlight highlighted the river, the swift-moving wavelets dipping and tossing downstream, wave-crests opalescent in the moonlight, slapping against rocks and trailing through the fingers of low-hanging branches. In the rushes on the far bank the old dog otter watched her before he slid silently into the water. A Tawny Owl hooted in the ash trees. Another day had begun.

In the cottage, her daughters slept on, covered in a warm blanket made at one of the pandies up Llandyssul way. The embers in the hearth had survived another night, and she deftly brought them back to life and, rousing her daughters, quickly mixed flour and water and an egg from her hens which had amazingly still kept laying sporadically despite the lateness of the year. The griddle cakes were soon sizzling in a little lard which was kept in a pig's bladder against the cool wall. As she steadied the planc she burned a finger, and reached for the little pad of hay to hold it with. The girls were dressed and ready, with the honey jar on the table, before the griddle cakes even needed turning, sitting on the little bench their da had made from river-wood and rough-hewn branches. It rocked on the uneven floor. The smell of the heated lard made them wish there was bacon, but they knew better than to hope for even a morsel until the next pig was killed and then it would be feast time, with a bucket of offal to share amongst the three Anns and their families who lived cheek-by-jowl here, sharing every rise and fall of daily living.

In the pre-dawn darkness they crossed the road to Ann-stockings, where she left the girls whilst she worked, paying her friend a few pence a week for the privilege. As the horizon beyond the farm began to lighten, she plodded up the lane to the farmhouse, where only a single room showed a light.

It was not a job she did through choice. She had been a dairy maid from leaving home, at the big house up the hill, but when children came along they'd relied on her husband's money. His death had changed all that. Now she was widowed, she was a charwoman - little better than a skivvy really - doing all the dirty jobs, the heavy jobs that the live-in girls hated to do. Mr Davis was kind to her, kept her rent to a minimum and let her have any beestings to cook up in a curd tart, blood sometimes for a black pudding when they'd killed a pig, and a length of chitterlings for the casings, beside the bucket of offal to share with her neighbours. This kindness in return for her scrubbing out the shed where the beast had been rendered into edible and non-edible, a job rendered even more unsavoury if the guts had been trodden on and spilt their contents everywhere.

In winter, her arms ached from scrubbing the huge pans used for cooking, and her hands were dry and cracked from frequent immersion in water. If it was the copper pans she was cleaning, then her lungs and eyes would be smarting from the boiling vinegar it took to clean them inside, and she regularly walked to the marshy field where the Mares tail plants grew which were used to polish them. Daily, hers was the task to scrub the orange floor tiles of the kitchen with a scrubbing brush and lye. The kitchen table fell to her lot too - scrubbing the greasy spots with fuller's earth and soap and then scouring the planks with chloride of lime water and silver sand until her fingers bled, some days.

First thing she would clean out the ash from last night's fires and blacklead each grate, laying each fire fresh, before filling the coal scuttles from around the back of the barn. She would trim each oil lamp, and carefully wash the smoke marks from the chimneys.

In summer, the sunshine showed up all the dark corners and the china would be taken down and cleaned regularly, the duster used with authority the length and breadth of the house and spiders sent scuttling from their corners as their webs were dragged down. The rugs needed to be regularly beaten, as the dust from the lane outside came in through the open windows and settled everywhere. If she was lucky, she might get a few hours' dairy work on a Fair Day when the other servants were given time off or if the milk yields were unusually good, but never a drop for her children - milk was far too precious a commodity for folk like them.

Each summer, it was time to whitewash the farm and outbuildings and she also helped with that. To make the whitewash, waste fat was needed, even that which had gone rancid was considered meet, and odds and ends of the winter's tallow candles found a final use. Chopped with the narrow spade they used for digging post holes, she then boiled it up in the old cauldron, adding dry unslaked lime. This was always done on washing day so that the soapy wash water could be utilized. It stood overnight and became a white spongey mass which formed the base of the whitewash. Then the younger lads, those not afraid of ladders and heights, would paint the farm and outbuildings, keeping the flies at bay and making the farm look God-faring, for as their preacher told them, cleanliness was next to Godliness . . . . .

The Wrong Side of the Law

With the gales soughing round the house all day and showing no sign of abating even now, I have rewarded hard work on The Chair (I am now at the sewing-with-a-curved-needle stage) with the occasional break on the computer. I found a fascinating page or fifty on the Crime and Punishment section on the National Library of Wales website. Not much happened in our Parish, just a married couple sent to prison for a month because they attacked the local constable. In the adjoining parish, however, hell seems to have broken loose on many an occasion, and they sounded a pretty lawless lot. These crimes took place in the 18th C. I have omitted the names of the perpetrators, just in case someone in their 20th C family tree recognizes them . . .

There must have been some striking evidence here:

"Murder of Thomas David, tailor by stabbing him with a knife. Prisoner described as a 'quiet, honest, well-disposed man'.

Plea: Not guilty.

Verdict: Guilty of manslaughter.

Punishment: To be whipped"

Status: Labourer

Offence: Theft of money and a silver watch.

Location and date

Parish: Coychurch; County: Glamorgan; Date: 5 July 1754

Plea: Not guilty.

Verdict: Guilty.

Punishment: Death, pardoned, transported.


Then, what on earth was going on here?!

"Riot and assault on prosecutor (the vicar) whilst he was solemnising a marriage at Llan..... church."


Sometimes, though, the most dreadful accident would happen:
"Manslaughter of fellow servant, Margaret John, aged 13 years by accidental discharge of gun, according to information of witnesses. The accused, aged 15, fled. No indictment."

"Murder of Henry William George by striking him with a chair." (The accused was found Not Guilty).

Next parish across again, the following:

Status: Yeoman

Offence: Murder of Robert John Robert, Llangadog.

Date: 24 July 1774

Plea: Not guilty.

Verdict: Guilty of manslaughter.

Punishment: Prays benefit of clergy, branded

As to the punishment, perhaps someone might be able to explain it? Well, branded I understand, but the rest?

Little Llettygariad

The weak light from a tallow candle, guttering in the draught of a cracked window, spread a tiny puddle of amber across the wet lane as Christmas Parry marched past little Llettygariad, intent on his own warm fireside, this cold November afternoon.

A warm orange glow from the open hearth pooled across the slate slabs as Ann Jones cut slivers of bacon from a cooked pig's head, just a wee one, for her neighbour Ann's runt of the litter had finally been overlain a few weeks into its short life, the competition for a spare teat having weakened it. Waste not, want not, the odds and ends of a suckling pig was not to be sneezed at and it was making a tasty broth.

Outside, the wind was getting up again and the day's heavy rain was thundering past in the river, carving scallops into the rocky platforms beneath the surface, the dull clunk of a passing stone strangely loud above the tear of the water heading seawards. White horses tossed their heads and reared and bucked as they crossed the massive outcrops of subterranean rock, catching their manes in the trailing fingers of the beech twigs. Whirlpools formed in scoops of the riverbank, circling madly before being sucked into the maelstrom of water, punctuated by the winking of bobbing deadwood, dragged from its resting place by the rising flood. The weight of water plucking at the bank sent reverberations which Ann felt as she worked, but it was no worse than it ever had been in spate and only once in living memory had the flood sent her from her home and across the road to her neighbour's cottage, for fear they would be overcome in their beds.


A tendril of ivy beat time on the darkening glass; a mouldered piece of sacking stuffed in a rotted windowframe flapped like a dying moth; there was a sudden flare of light in the hearth as a stick collapsed beneath the cooking pot. A footstep along the lane drew Ann's attention to the window: I caught her eye for a second, sensed her weariness and then the veil of time drew, shroud-like, between us and Llettygariad became the ruin I know from many a journey past: the tumble of the rubble walls sinking into the tangle of nettle and bramble and the glossy leaves of laurel flapping in the wind, roots in the room where once a hand rocked a cradle and prepared a simple meal.


http://codlinsandcream.blogspot.com/2008/02/walk-in-sunshine.html and
http://codlinsandcream.blogspot.com/2008/11/lost-in-time.html

Will both take you to posts with other mention of Llettygariad in, on my original Codlins and Cream blog.

Winging it . . .

Do you ever have a job to do where you find that although you have started, you have got to the stage where you don't know what the heck you are doing? I had one of those days today with reupholstering my husband's armchair. The book open on the table beside me gave all sorts of illustrations of different chairs, but NO answers to the questions I had in my head. Anyway, in the end I just had to make it up as I went along, using common sense . . . Largely, it worked, though I had to unpick and resew the extra bits of material I'd put on the side to tack onto.

The Mobile Library came today. I got DH a book about house restoration, and jokingly said to the Librarian, "I wish we'd had this book when we first moved here." I took it indoors to my husband, and he said much the same thing, admitting that he knew NOTHING about any of the jobs we had to tackle here, and believe me, there was a LOT of restoration work to be done. That shocked me a bit, as I really thought he pretty well always knew what he was doing! When we had injections of money, we paid for the rewiring to be professionally done, and the central heating extended, and chimneys lined, and some major building restoration on rooms which were completely derelict. Then the was the digging-out of our well so we had our own water supply and didn't have to rely on sharing a supply with Next Door's cows . . .

I have to confess though that at times, my heart has been in my mouth when one of the builders had to do things which weren't strictly in the manual - like capping a chimney singlehandedly - edging along the ridge tiles with the lump of slate slab clutched to a manly chest and then going back for the bucket of cement to keep it in place . . . Every time I look at the next chimney over I notice the upside-down wok which has been doing sterling service as a cowl for probably 15 years now . . .

Then there was a more recent roof adventure where we had to climb out of one of the Velux windows in a spare bedroom, scramble the few steps across the roof to the inglenook chimney stack and then lay across the chimney to knock off loose bits of render which were causing a problem. You can see the window, chimney stack and catslide roof in the photo below, at the back of the house. Hopefully when we move, such shennanigans will no longer be necessary . . .

Unashamed nostalgia

I was a child of the 50s and can even remember when there was only ONE channel on the b&w telly. We didn't have a kitchen - we had a scullery. We had a Geyser for hot water. The bally house was so cold and damp the clothes used to go mouldy and until I was about 7, I had my baths (Saturday night of course) in an oval tin bath in front of the - coal - fire, with the clothes horse surrounding me, swathed in blankets to keep the draughts away! We had lino and a carpet square. The washing was done in a copper which lived in the corner of the scullery, and I used to love helping my mum put the washing through the mangle which screwed onto the end of the enamel-topped table in the scullery, under the food hatch my dad had put in the wall. We only had an outside toilet and it trained you to have a very long-distance bladder on cold winter nights! I had a lovely old Victorian cast iron and brass bedstead, and can remember unscrewing the brass knobs and hiding my treasures in them and also making wonder tents by tieing a piece of string to the bedends and hanging a blanket over it. Having a cold was never much fun though as mum used to rub Vick on my top lip to clear my nose and it made my eyes water no end.

Mum never shopped in town, because she was very deaf, so dreadfully handicapped and frightened of "going into town", even though the bus stopped right outside the door. But no matter as there was a Co-op, 4 corner shops selling groceries and a hardware store within a half mile stretch (and we were in the middle of that). mum - and the neighbours - shopped daily, as this was in the pre-fridge days too, so meat had to be used up quickly and leftovers kept in the meat-safe in the larder which was a cupboard under the stairs. Sunday's roast was always put through the clamp-to-the-table mincer for Shepherd's Pie on a Monday. (For some unaccountable reason I seem to have a collection of mincers now . . .) Milk was stopped going sour by standing the glass bottle in a bowl of cold water (Brown and Harrisons' Dairy delivered daily too, and still had horses and carts in my childhood) . Cheese was only one sort, Cheddar, and wrapped in greaseproof paper, but that didn't stop it getting a hard slightly greasy rind on it.

Fruit and vegetables were eaten in season and there were always strawberry-picking jobs going begging in the summer. I always wanted a strawberry-picking job until I found out that it gave you terrible backache! I grew up in Southampton and the hinterland to the East of the city, between it and Fareham, was mile upon mile of market gardens, which supplied the towns and if you were out for a drive, there were always many roadside stalls to buy locally-grown produce from at sensible prices. Organic no, but it never went very far to be eaten.

You could count the car owners in our road on the fingers of one hand until the early 1960s when we finally got a car too - an old Triumph Mayflower with real leather seats that smelt wonderful on a hot summer's day, when I would, impatient as ever, sit in the car from after breakfast onwards, waiting until lunch was over and we could go "out for a run", which would usually be our favourite bits in the New Forest, or up to "Little Switzerland" at Corhampton near the Meon Valley. I always implored my dad to "go the long way home" to make the outing last longer.

We, like many of our neighbours, had a big back garden, and mum used to keep chickens. We had fruit trees too and I can remember hot summer nights when the windows were open, and I would listen to the Nightingales singing in the Damson trees.

Anything "recyclable" was collected by the Rag and Bone Man, who came along our road with his chestnut mare Susie (which had never seen a brush in her life).

My friends and I had such freedom to roam, and would go out all day long in the summer with just a packet of jam sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. I reckon we knew every inch for about 5 miles around our road, and as we were all horsey, we knew the name and whereabouts of every pony too! Most mums were stay-at-home (as I have been), and they could all repair clothes, unravel a jumble sale woollie and reknit it as something else, make jam tarts and bake cakes, and chicken was something you had ONLY at Easter or Christmas and was generally called a Capon, which was a neutered male . . .

No-one expected their mother to work full-time and have a career; nor to go and work out at the gym or learn to drive (no need really, as such good transport system) or get her pre-baby figure back within a month of the birth; housework was for women; hard gardening work for men (digging and mowing) - women got the fun jobs like planting. Family relationships were held together well as not many families moved away to live/work. You knew the neighbours by name for 100 yards either side of your house, and the length of the road by sight if not name. You walked to school. A few people had extra-curricular activities such as learning to play a musical instrument, but that was usually through school. There were Brownies and Guides but mostly we made our own fun, some of it quite dangerous fun too . . .



I lived near what had been a working brickworks until about 1960ish. Where they had dug out the clay to make the bricks, left behind were "cliff edges" of the exavations, and at the bottom were pools of water, where Great Crested Newts and Common Newts, Frogs, Toads, tadpoles, and dragonfly larva used to live, and a wonderful marshy area we called Flamingo Marsh. Here the Sundew plants lives and we would tease them with grass stalks and make them think a fly had landed on them. We used to slide down the cliff faces on teatrays, and we and the local boys (we girls were terrible tomboys, need I say?) used to make rafts to push out onto the ponds. I can remember one raft turning turtle once, and we had to throw a rope to the boys who were floundering out in the deepest bit of pond.

We had brick fights, learned to run extremely fast to dodge the billy goat who was tethered down in the brickworks, and one of our favourite pursuits was to tie plastic bags over our feet and splodge out into the middle of Flamingo Marsh and jump up and down. A corresponding area about 10 feet away would shudder in unison! There was a smaller pond with what we called "the wall of death" surrounding it. As long as you ran really fast you could get to the other side without falling in - centrifugal force I suppose. Anyway, we made Alison Hams run round there, but we didn't tell her she had to run fast and of course she fell in!

Probably the most dangerous pursuit (apart frm lobbing bricks at each thers' heads) was to go on the "treadmill", which was a machine they mixed the clay in for bricks. It had just been abandoned, and we used to tread on the "lugs" that dug into the clay, and make the central barrel of the machine move round. Had we slipped . . . instant broken and crushed leg . . .

Rose-tinted spectacles? Not really, as compared with today there are probably what are seen as many negatives for women. I liked it all well enough to try to recreate a similar childhood for my children, even though it meant moving to Wales to do it . . .