sound and smell rising out of the place and beginning to envelop you. I remember us working our way across the thronging concourse, seeking out our train, utterly trusting my mother to find the right platform – completely in her hands in that wonderful, literally carefree way of childhood, which goes eventually and which you can never get back. I would spend the entire train journey with my head out of the window – not too far, for fear of getting decapitated by another train coming the other way or the arm of a passing signal, but part of the way out. There was something magnetically compelling about catching sight, on bends, of the rest ofthe train that you were in, and I positioned myself where I could see this magic whenever it happened. By the time we got to Cardiff, where we changed for the valley train and Pontlottyn, half my face would be blackened by the steam, like some kind of peculiar London-born Pierrot doll. At which point my mother would have to spit into her wadded handkerchief and clean me up. The first time we travelled up from Cardiff on the Merthyr line, I thought I was in fairyland. The line ran along and through mountains so green they hurt your eyes, and the river wove in and out of the valley like a blue ribbon. I was a young lad who had lived among the bricks and mortar of London. Here, you could virtually smell the colour green.
In Pontlottyn I had two uncles – Uncle Llewellyn and Uncle Idris, known as Uncle Id – and a batch of cousins, large and small. Uncle Id had two sons, my substantially older cousins, Cyril and John. John was a miner whose leg was badly injured when a tunnel he was working in caved in on him. Some weeks later, he came out of hospital. It didn’t stop him riding a bike, though, with his broken leg stretched straight out in a plaster cast and his other foot doing all the pedalling.
You might think Cyril, meanwhile, had taken a blow to the head, because during some possibly over-lubricated evening or other, with a few of his beer-drinking mates, he had taken a bet that he wouldn’t drink a glass of petrol. On the plus side, I guess he must have won the bet. But the petrol did untold damage to his digestive system, put him in hospital for quite a long time and, essentially, crippled him for the rest of his life. Kids: don’t do this, either.
Obviously a fairly deep streak of eccentricity ran through this part of the family generally, as evidenced by the fact that, sometime around 1940 or 1941, with the Blitz in full swing, a party of them had come up to London to stay with us in Lodge Lane in order, basically, to have a look at the war. I guess they must have thought it was the kind of thing that wasn’t likely to happenall that often and that you might as well get a sight of it while you could. So up they came. And they were, apparently, thrilled when a doodlebug obligingly cut its eerie mechanical path above our roof in broad daylight, bringing the excited Welsh visitors rushing from the backyard, through the house and into the street in order to track its course, while my mother tried and failed to convince them that it might be better if they joined the rest of us under the kitchen table at this point.
Anyway, the general trend was for the London part of the family to visit the Welsh part, rather than the other way round. Sometimes we would stay with Mum’s friend, Mrs Rogers, who lived on the hillside in a place called Abertysswg, in a big house that I was very impressed with. Other times, though, we would stay with Uncle Id, which was a different experience. Uncle Id had been a miner, but had retired in order, it seemed, to be able to spend more time doing what he principally loved, which was drinking. He lived very poorly in one of a network of tiny workers’ cottages in the heart of Pontlottyn. The houses had no gardens but backed on to a little square of wasteland, partly given over to stinging nettles, in the middle of which was a string of toilets –