Chapter 4 -- My Mum and Me, the Early Years

Most of my very early memories are not of my mother but of myself. I remember images flashing from disjointed locations.

The strongest memory I have of my mother is one of a perfume mixed with a hint of cigarette smoke. When I was feeling sad or lonely as a child, I would open her closet and smell her black dress suit, and she would be there with me.
As a small child up until I was about nine, I was what is considered today, "a latch-key kid". I attended Terrace Road Infants and Junior School.

Ahh!  Terrace Road Primary School.  A granite, Dickensian monolith, perched high above the sweep of Swansea Bay, and alongside the cobbled hill of constitution.

Oh, to roll a tyre down that hill, and watch the ants below scurry about seeking shelter.

Although I dreamed long and hard of doing that, I never did.  I wonder if Anthony Fyfield did? 

I attended Terrace Road School (Infants and Junior) for over ten years.
During my time at the school, the Infant's Head Mistress was Miss Snead and the Junior school Headmaster was Mr. Davies(sp?).
When I look back over 60 years, I remember the school as a kind of Welsh, Dotheboys Hall: the classrooms heated by coal fires, the outdoor toilets, the grim headmaster with his squeaky brogues, his elbow patched Harris Tweed suits and Harris Teed hats.

He caned me once thinking I had sworn in the playground.  I hadn't but he didn't let that stop his obvious enjoyment of my suffering.  He always walked with a purpose, and that purpose was to catch children at some wrong doing.
Then there was six foot Mr. Llewellyn who made my ear bleed when he hit me (for nothing I did wrong, I'm sure).  My four foot ten inch mother, always very protective of her cub, sailed up to the school, and stood toe to toe with him as she looked up his nose. She warned him that if he ever touched me again, he would reap the consequences.
I remember the strange smell of stale biscuits that permeated the boy's changing room, and the acrid smell of stale urine that always seemed to swirl around the girl's changing room.  Sometimes looking out of a window, I can still girls with their white shirts tucked inside navy blue bloomers, playing rounders in the yard as they slapped around in their gray/white daps.

Years later, I realized that the stale biscuit smell was actually the scent of boys socks that had been worn for a few days too long.
I remember the long glass-topped exhibition cabinets that surrounded the hall, filled with "treasures" from all around the world; the shark's skull was always a fascination.  "Please can we take it out, sir?"
Mr. Rees, Mr. Roberts, Mr Llewellyn and Mr. Barratt(?) are all that remain in my memory now.
Would I recommend Terrace Road School?  I don't know. It's been more than 55 years since I was there.

But if you're looking for ghosts and memories, pay a visit, sit quiet in the hall, and listen to the stories.

Chapter 3 -- The House on Poppet Hill

In Swansea, in the area known as Mount Pleasant, right next to the Farmer's Arms public house, was number 18 North Hill Road.
The area of Mount Pleasant was midway between the town and Mayhill. The whole area was a mix of council housing and working poor, some of whom had aspirations of being members of the idle poor.
Our house fronted onto the street. It was in this house that my grandparents (Mam and Dad) had birthed and raised 13 children, of whom 11 survived.
It was a two up, two down, Victorian row house with no bathroom, no toilet, no running hot water or stove.
Outside the front door the garden was a piece of land measuring approximately 10'x10' that I hesitate to call a garden. Nothing ever grew there, not even weeds. This piece of dry, compacted dirt meant that the house was about about 12 feet from the road, and that meant that it was somewhat of a luxury in older Swansea row houses, most of which opened directly onto the street.
In the back, was the garden, at the bottom of which was the whitewashed outhouse. It was in this very garden that Dad dug a bloody great hole and installed the Anderson shelter that beat the Nazis in WWII. I have the vaguest of recollections about me playing in said shelter. I don't remember it being dug up but at sometime it must have been because one day, it wasn't there. Another piece of childhood filled in.
Across the garden from the Aderson shelter (about 6 feet) was a small pine-like tree. A diminutive evergreen, under whose dusty, fallen needles was buried Joey, my pet budgie.
In addition to the floor plan of the original house was a "lean-to" that Dad had constructed to make more room. Here in the lean-to was the gas ring--still in operation in my early childhood--and the copper boiler, under which a fire was lit and in which the laundry was stewed and bleached to a brilliant white (colours included).
I lived in this old house with my mum and Grandad until I was five, and in that year (1957) my grandad died.
I remember him so slightly. He had white thinning hair which he dressed in a "butterfly" centre parting. He wore a belt and braces and colourless shirts. I remember sitting on his lap while he shared his "sop", a mixture of sweet milky tea with bread, out of a blue and white ringed bowl. I dearly wish I could remember him better. My grandmother (Mam) died in 1947. She was a fully realized woman of whom my mother said, "...looked like a galleon in full sail."
When I was nine my mother married for the first time. His name was Jim Quinn and was an old acqaintance of my mother's. They worked together in the Mackworth Hotel, Swansea in the late 40's early fifties.
I don't know when or where they met again, I only knew about Jim when my mother told me<>

Chapter 2 -- Family Notes

Hilda May was the second youngest of 10 children of Frank and Mary Arnold (nee Lodwig). In addition to the surviving children, Frank and Mary had two other children one that died at birth and a baby girl who survived a couple of years before dying as the result of being burned to death while laying in front of an open fire. Frank and Mary would forever be known as Mam and Dad to their children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, and indeed, the whole extended family.
From oldest to youngest the siblings were (I think):

• Ethel
• Lily
• Llewellyn
• Clifford
• Violet
• Hetty
• Hilda
• Dolly

It's a shame I don't know the dates of birth and death of these family members but if anyone reads this and can help me out with the right dates I'd be appreciative (since I wrote the previous, I have engaged in family tree and have discovered the birth and death dates of all the family members, and then some.
The grandparents (Frank and Mary) and all the children and even some family "additions" lived in a small terrace house in Swansea (18 North Hill Road). North Hill Road used to be called Poppet Hill and was high above the city of Swansea in an area known as Mount Pleasant. The stout wooden gates of the Swansea Union Workhouse protected the inmates a mere 200 yards from the hous. I was later to find a distant ancestor who enjoyed their hospitality.
By the time I was born all the siblings had married and moved out of the family home. My grandmother, Mary had died in 1947 and my mother who was unmarried chose, I believe, to look after my grandfather until his death in 1959 at age 89. I expect the fact that she was unmarried, a single parent, and therefore alone, had little impact on her decision.
I lived in the house on Poppet Hill until I was 10, when my mother was married and we moved away to the distant lands of Penlan, a 1950s council housing estate on the northern heights above Swansea. I lived there until  I moved out, a short and miserable nine years later.

Chapter 1 -- In Memorium

There are many rights and wrongs of being on the web. Most of the rights are there to protect users from the scurrilous types who prey on unsuspecting surfers. I thought I was somewhat savvy in the ways of Internet sculduggery but no, I was caught, like many a hapless soul before me.

I recently found my way to a site that offered on-line memorials of loved ones for life. I was hooked more by guilt than anything else (but more of that later) but I decided to enroll and place a memorial to my mum, Hilda, on the web-for ever.

I'm usually cautious about sign ups especially where the threat of money to pay hangs over the occasion. Still there was no sign of a fee anywhere-until I had completed . Then they informed me that to have my memorial launched and hosted I would need to pay a donation of 99 pounds!
Heartbroken! I was pissed! I wasn't going to pay for something that might disappear in the blink of an eye, and the drop of a tear. No sirree. However, it did give me a thought of where I could host a memorial for all the world to see, should they be so inclined...a blog.

No one else may ever read these notes on the life and times of my mother but they'll be here, and as long as the Internet exists and this blog service is in action her memory will live on.

I write this story of my mother knowing very well that she would give me grief for writing it. But this work is to celebrate her life but also to perhaps free me from the sadness of still missing her.