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<>