14 Wern Fawr Road: Life in a 1950s Welsh Household
We lived at Wern Fawr Road in Port Tennant, Swansea, until I was eight, packed in with Nan and Grandpa Davies, Auntie Cynthia, Uncle Teddy, and by 1960 us five kids. The house seemed enormous through the eyes of a small child. It probably wasn't.
There was a bay-windowed parlour at the front, strictly off-limits to children. Nan's sanctuary. A glass-fronted cabinet with her ornaments in it, a sofa and settee arranged round a coffee table we never once used for coffee, and the good china, kept for visitors who rarely came. Proper carpet in there, proper curtains, unlike the rest of the house. Only Auntie Cynthia was allowed in to play the piano.
Everything that counted as life happened in the middle room, the combined living and dining room. The kitchen had a glass-roofed lean-to and a fireplace that heated the water for the whole house, and every other room had its own fireplace besides. The toilet was outside, so there were chamber pots under the beds for the night-time emergencies.
We had our weekly baths on Sundays, in a zinc tub in the kitchen, or outside in summer, because the kitchen fire was the only source of hot water we had. There was an actual bathroom upstairs. We just didn't use it much when we were small.
Monday mornings, our clean clothes turned up on the fireguard, nothing ironed. Monday evenings were soup, made from whatever bones were left over from Sunday's dinner, usually chicken. It was thin and it tasted like shit, and I still wish someone had thrown in some barley or lentils or anything at all besides boiled bones, carrot, and potato. But that was how you stretched food when there wasn't much of it. To this day the smell of soup takes me straight back to those cold, steamy-windowed Monday nights, and somehow it's still comforting.
Cynthia had it worst of all of us, though I didn't see that at the time. My mother's older sister, a nurse, with the air of someone not to be crossed. She barely spoke to us kids except to tell us off, and looking back I don't blame her. She was a single woman sharing an overcrowded, noisy house with five children under ten, watching her younger sister's chaos unfold daily around her.
Mam had fallen pregnant at sixteen, married at seventeen, and had five kids by the time she was twenty-three or twenty-four. Cynthia was still unmarried. I can only imagine what she made of the whole circus.
Uncle Teddy, Edward Davies, used to put me in the laundry basket and push me round the room, which almost certainly wasn't what laundry baskets were for, and I loved every second of it. That's nearly all I have of him. He was doing his National Service in the RAF, and one night in 1958, riding his motorbike back from or out to leave, he went into the back of a lorry that was being towed, with no rear lights showing. This was long before anyone had heard of four-way flashers.
I was four. I didn't understand that he'd died. What I remember is Nan standing at her bedroom window, looking out, crying quietly to herself. I asked her what was wrong. She didn't answer, just picked me up and held me while she carried on sobbing. It's taken most of a lifetime to understand what that moment actually was.
The photograph at the top of this page came from a door-to-door photographer, the kind who used to call round offering to snap the children for a few bob. My mother told me I was filthy when he turned up, so she grabbed a blanket and wrapped it round my bottom half before he could take the shot. You can tell he did something to the cheeks and the eyes to rosy them up a bit. No Photoshop back then, so credit where it's due.
My brother remembers Grandpa Davies as a grumpy old fucker. I remember someone who slipped me sweets the moment Nan's back was turned. Neither of us is wrong. Memory doesn't keep a single, agreed version of anything, it keeps whatever version each of us needed to carry. These are mine, and I expect everyone else in that house carried their own.
The parlour's forbidden carpet, the awful Monday soup, Nan crying at the window. That's what I thought I had left of Wern Fawr Road.
Turns out the more I remember, the more I remember.