My Life on a Hillside Allotment Read online

  In the summer we went to the sea on double-decker buses, which would be packed with children because the church congregation in those days was enormous. Not that we kids were particularly religious: we all attended Sunday School and even enjoyed it, but really it was these trips every year that we went for.

  Sometimes we visited Coney Beach, near Porthcawl, where they had a funfair. We were allowed a fixed sum of money for the fair, and when the money was gone, it was gone. So we’d spend all day on the beach, with our egg sandwiches and jam sandwiches (full of sand) and a bottle of pop. Then, just before we went home on the bus, we were allowed about an hour at the fair with our ten pence (4p), which seemed to last no time at all. And then it was all over.

  Looking back at photographs of when I was a child, I’m amazed that when we went to the seaside we were dressed up exactly as if going to normal Sunday School. All the boys wore a shirt and tie, cap, short trousers, a pair of socks up to the knees and clean shoes. And we were expected to sit there and not get dirty. If I was allowed to go in the sea I had to wear ‘bathers’ – shaped like shorts – knitted by my mother. They were uncomfortable and seemed to stretch for miles in the water and fill up with sand, so that as you walked back up the beach these heavy wet woollen things would drag at you like a ton weight.

  When I look back, childhood summers seem to have always been sunny. The sun can’t have shone all the time, but you don’t remember the wet days. When we had Double Summer Time (an economy measure to make the most of daylight by putting the clocks forward two hours) it seemed to be light sometimes until eleven o’clock at night, and bedtime didn’t go down well with me. I’d complain bitterly at having to come in while the sun was still brightly shining. And then, after we children had gone to bed, all the women would take kitchen chairs outside, form a group on the pavement and knit. And you’d be stuck there, trying to sleep, with them all talking away and clacking their knitting needles.

  Even though everybody else was the same, I remember being well aware that we were poor. Most of the time I lived in wellington boots. They appear in all the photographs of me as a child – I’d have a pair of short trousers on, a jumper about nine sizes too big, and always these wellingtons. And as they wore out, so my socks came into view at the toe.

  You made your own fun as a family, because there was no television to sit down in front of, not until way into the sixties. For entertainment most people would congregate in the rarely used front room and play cards. Outside the home there was no bingo, and the church hall was the main focal point for entertainment: there they’d put on concerts, whist drives and other social events, and at Christmas there’d be a pantomime.

  Everywhere in the valleys the church or chapel – mostly Anglican, but Methodist and Baptist too – was the centre of the community, together with the pubs, of course. But Sundays in Wales were ‘dry’ for a very long time, with all the pubs closed, and in some places it was well into the eighties before pubs could open on a Sunday. In Tenby, for example, you simply couldn’t get an alcoholic drink on a Sunday unless you were a member of the Conservative Club.

  It always seemed strange to me that there were so many Conservative clubs dotted round the valley, which has always been a staunch Labour stronghold. But as well as providing alcohol, the ‘Con Clubs’, as they were affectionately known, always had the best snooker tables and were run by efficient committees. I became a member of the Tonypandy Con Club and, like everyone else, had to go before the committee and swear allegiance to the Conservative Party. Few members were true to their vows, I’m certain, and it was always a bit of a joke at elections when the Conservative candidate actually gained fewer votes than there were club members. What people will do for a drink on a dry Sunday!

  It was mainly the men who would go out for a drink, although I don’t remember my father going very often to a pub or club. I think he was happier up on his allotment, which was probably entertainment enough for him. He had taken on a plot in the early forties, immediately after coming to the Rhondda from the Midlands, and as early as 1950 I would be there with him.

  He’d often go up there for the whole day, with a couple of sandwiches and a flip-top Corona pop bottle that my mother filled with tea. My father thought nothing of drinking cold tea, something I couldn’t stand. I would go up there with him and he would amuse me as long as he could until I’d had enough, when I would go back home – our house was only about a hundred yards away. As I got older I would stay longer and longer, until I was eleven and thought, I can do this. Before that I was simply sent or taken to the plot to be useful. Every family member was expected to help with the chores: you might run errands to the shop for your mother or help around the house. In my case I was usually expected to help my father on his allotment.

  * * *

  Terry’s Tip for January

  JANUARY IS THE TIME to carry out all your cleaning and maintenance jobs on the plot: as my father always insisted, an hour spent now is worth five in the spring when all your effort is needed to plant out your plot, and I’ve proved him right.

  On a cold day, clean up the greenhouse to get rid of algae and pests lying in wait for the new season. I mix one capful of household bleach in half a bucket of warm water (or you can substitute a bleach-free alternative cleanser), and use this to wash all the frames and glass panes with a soft brush, making sure I brush well into all the nooks and crannies to kill any over-wintering pests lurking there. The clean glass will help to increase the amount of light in the greenhouse, which will stimulate the plants to grow more vigorously.

  At the beginning of the growing season in February, while the days are still short and often grey, seedlings need as much light as they can get to give them a good start in life. This thorough clean-through before you re-erect staging and get everything set up for the earliest sowings is the best possible preparation for the new growing season.

  * * *

  Anthea’s Recipe for January

  Beetroot Jelly

  IF YOU HAVE some beet in store in January, use a few roots for this recipe while they’re still in good condition: the result will be a thick, pleasantly tart jelly that goes well with your cold meat dishes. These quantities will fill 2–3 1 lb (450 g) jars.

  1 lb (450 g) beetroot

  1 pint (600 ml) malt vinegar

  4 oz (125 g) sugar

  1 oz (25 g) powdered gelatine, plus water to mix

  Boil the beetroot until tender; allow it to cool, then peel and dice into small cubes. Pack these loosely into jars.

  Boil the vinegar and sugar together. Dissolve the gelatine in a little water, and then add this to the boiled vinegar.

  Return to heat, bring slowly back to the boil, and then allow to cool.

  Pour this liquor over the beetroot in the jars, getting out as much air as possible.

  Seal the jars with clingfilm, and when cold fit their lids. Once opened, store in the fridge.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Plot on the Mountain

  THE ALLOTMENTS WHERE my father had his plot, and where I garden to this day, lie on a steep slope near the foot of the mountain, Mynydd Tyntyla. This location has always influenced the way the plots are worked as well as the things I used to do there as a child.

  If you live anywhere in a Welsh valley it is very difficult to avoid the effects of geography. The river, main roads and railway all tend to run side by side in a ribbon at the bottom while the terraced houses creep up the lower slopes on either flank, so whenever you leave your house you have to climb or drop down a hillside.

  Coal mines occur both in those valley bottoms and on the hillsides, while the tops are generally the preserve of windswept farms and their flocks of hardy mountain sheep. Our bit of the Rhondda valley, with its townships of Tonypandy, Trealaw, Llwynypia and Porth, was typical in that the work of most men there was firmly based on mining, although there were a few other occupations, including plenty of building. My father worked a concrete mixer.
/>   We had one of the very first soft drinks companies, Thomas & Evans, later famous throughout the land as the manufacturer of Corona soft drinks. William Evans originally set himself up in Porth as a grocer in 1888, and in 1903 he started a business bottling mineral water. By the early twenties (helped considerably by the temperance movement) his sales were strong enough for him to form a private limited company producing Corona soft drinks. Although the firm is no longer based in Porth, the original industrial premises remain as the Pop Factory, a studio where they make television programmes and hold concerts.

  The various soft drinks they produced were basically water, flavouring and a colouring, together with the carbon dioxide that put the bubbles in – their advertising slogan was ‘Every bubble’s passed its FIZZical’. This carbon dioxide was added not as gas but frozen, as ‘dry ice’, which was made at a small works near the allotment site. As we walked to school we’d pass the place and see all these blocks of dry ice outside, waiting to be taken to the bottling works at Porth, and we used to snip bits off to throw at each other.

  To keep the drinks pressurized, the bottles had a rubber ring at the neck and a movable bit of steel wire to clip the top in place. All these bottles were returnable and carried a deposit – no broken glass littering the streets in those days, bottles were too valuable – so we’d collect them up and take them back to the shop to earn a few pennies to spend on sweets.

  Popular sweets then were huge round gobstoppers that kept you quiet for some time; Spangles, which were long packets of square fruit sweets; and Lossindant mints, hard stripy humbugs. My own favourite was the sherbet dab or dip, a lollipop in a bag of white powder flavoured with lemon juice: you licked the lollipop, dipped it in the sherbet and then sucked off the tart flavour – yum. I suspect you might have a problem walking through the valleys these days carrying a packet of a fine white substance!

  Most men living around us worked down one of the pits as coal miners or ‘colliers’. The last bus to come down the valley was always called the colliers’ bus, because it would be full of miners coming off the late shift.

  There were two kinds of coal mine in the valley, deep pits and levels, neither of them pleasant to work in. In the deep pits you needed a mineshaft and a cage to reach the workface. These pits had a vertical shaft that went down a long way because the best coal, which was high-quality anthracite, was very deep, far below the valley bottom. The principal pits near where we lived were the Glamorgan or ‘Scotch’ Colliery, which closed the year before I was born, and the Lewis Merthyr and Great Western mines, which merged to become Tymawr Colliery when I was about twelve.

  An unfortunate result of the deep pit workings was the amount of waste material that came up with the coal from the underground shafts. This waste, popularly called ‘slag’, needed to be disposed of somewhere, and the cheapest method was simply to dump it on the beautiful hillsides, where it formed unnatural black and misshapen hills that deeply scarred the once wooded and green valley sides for decades.

  Fortunately nature, with a little help from enlightened people after the closure of the pits, has reclaimed the hillsides – albeit in their new artificial form – and restored them to their former glory. So to an unknowing eye the valleys look green and natural again, already adorned by large densely wooded areas of great beauty, filled with deciduous trees such as oak, ash, a large scattering of white-barked silver birch, and rowans that speckle the hillsides with their bright clusters of red berries as summer draws on. Gone are the days when the hills were cloaked in drab forests of firs, grown to serve the insatiable appetite of the mines for pit props.

  In addition to the deep pits there were ‘levels’, horizontal mines that you simply walked into. They were driven into the face of the mountain as far as you needed to go to get the coal, which was dug and brought out in ‘drams’, solid trucks that were pushed out manually along the level because there was no mechanized means of bringing them out. This coal from the levels was steam coal, quite inferior to the anthracite used for making steel and exported all over the world from Cardiff docks.

  Coal was everywhere when I was kid. Colliers were entitled to a supply of concessionary coal, about six or seven loads a year delivered to the front door in a big two- or three-ton tipper truck. This would be divided into separate compartments, one for each address, so the truck would arrive at one house, open up the first compartment and tip the load, leaving it there at the roadside in front of your house before moving on to the next drop-off. And this ton of coal was exactly as mined, in huge chunks mixed with loads of ‘small coal’.

  If you weren’t a miner you bought in supplies that were broken down into nuggets and bagged and delivered by a coal merchant, who would take it through to your coal house or the coal cwtch as it was known, situated in the back yard. Fortunately in our house there were no fancy carpets on the floor because when our coal was delivered, the bags of black nuggets had to be carried through two rooms to reach the back yard.

  The Coal Board, on the other hand, delivered and tipped it loose, and it was the householder’s job then to carry those big lumps indoors. Alternatively you traded your ‘small coal’ with someone in the street who didn’t have a concessionary supply: they would carry and stack your delivery for you and in exchange would take all the small stuff home in buckets, and this was used to cover the merchant’s coal when banking up the fire at night to keep it in until the next day. And you’d get the street in front of the house swept up for you as well.

  * * *

  Cwtch

  THIS VERSATILE WORD is widely used in the valleys and beyond, even by those whose first language is English. The ‘w’ is a vowel, sounding rather like a short English ‘oo’, and the whole word rhymes with ‘Dutch’, spoken with a North Country accent. It has a number of uses:

  • The basic meaning, linked to the similar word cwt (‘hut’ or ‘den’), is the shed or space where coal was kept.

  • It’s also a cuddle, as in ‘Give us a cwtch then’, used particularly where children are involved.

  • Therapists use the term to mean a healthy hug to keep the spirits up – even the Lions rugby team have cwtch sessions!

  • It’s commonly used to order a noisy or disobedient dog to its corner: ‘Bad boy, go cwtch!’

  • It can mean to hide something: ‘Keep that safely cwtched, now.’

  • You’ll find cwtch bars in pubs and restaurants, cosy corners that were once called ‘snugs’.

  • And children use it in play to keep others away: ‘Stay out of my cwtch!’

  * * *

  There were two distinct levels at the rear of our allotments, little private mines where individuals worked. There were a lot of small levels like that in the valley, started by people who knew the coal was there and simply went up and dug it out. You’d reach the coal very quickly; not the decent seams for which you had to go well in but certainly enough to run a domestic fire. All you had to do was come to some arrangement with the landowner about mineral rights, probably paying him a percentage of whatever you made from the mine. There are still remnants of those workings up on the mountain above us today, although there’s no trace of the levels themselves, only the water that runs from them and supplies all our allotment plots.

  It was the construction of a new level on the mountainside which ended my father’s brief venture into farming in the fifties. Next to the allotments were three acres of ground, known as Cae Cae Farm, that somehow became available, and my father decided to take it on as a smallholding, with pigs – two huge sows, I remember, quite enormous animals – ducks and a lot of chickens. Whenever one of these had a clutch of chicks, they were brought into our front room and kept in a box in the corner with a little heater for warmth until they & were big enough to go back out again. The black and yellow ducks might have as many as a dozen chicks, and I would often see them strutting round the yard with all their little ducklings strung out in a line behind. On one occasion a mother duck and her ducklings wen
t missing, until some children came to tell us they were in the river quite a distance from the farm. They had swum down the farm’s drain, gone nearly half a mile underground, and emerged totally unscathed in the river.

  I can remember the animals at the farm but I don’t recall any ever being slaughtered. If they were, the deed was probably done out of sight without my father telling me, which would have been tactful because children get attached to these creatures. I remember seeing a few hens that had been killed and were draining in the back yard, but it wasn’t something that happened much – poultry wasn’t as popular a food as it is today, and chickens were generally regarded as more productive if kept as layers.

  This enterprise lasted only about five years before the land was needed for a new level (not private enterprise this time because the ground was compulsorily purchased), and what was left after they put in the roads and started digging the coal was not enough for a viable holding. So no more livestock farming for my father. It was back to basics, at which he was extremely good, producing on his allotment all the vegetables and fruit to adorn our table at home throughout the year.

  There had been an allotment site adjacent to Llwynypia Hospital since 1917 and it had statutory status, which meant that it was protected in law. Anyone who wanted to cultivate a bit of ground – usually because they didn’t have a garden of their own – had the right to apply for a plot and rent it for the purposes of growing food for themselves.