Tony Rees, collected by Hope Valley u3a
I Remember, I Remember…
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He's fading, like the A.R.P., the People's War, the chocolate bars he brought on leave when I was small. Those aircrews over Germany, though, through what's adverse, touched the stars' intensity. I half recall how we and things made sense and knew it when Uncle Arthur took the flack to searchlights on the killing sky. Back in the days before we blew it he told my Dad, 'I won't come back to all that'. They knew when to die. |
The mind is a precis-machine: what doesn't interest mine, is wiped out ruthlessly, and this isn`t a sign of age either, it has always done it. I would not have had such vivid wartime memories of the Rhondda, for instance, if I hadn't been dragged away from there, kicking and screaming, when l was thirteen. Writing this has shown me it also makes up suitable tales to suit its current opinions and feelings. I don`t trust it much.
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In 1940 we were living in a place called the Pandy ('fulling mill' in Cymraeg) in the village of Machen. Through a wood by the house ran the River Rhymni. On the other side of the river a field ran up to a road which I believe to have been on the Chartists' route when they marched on Newport in 1839, armed and intending to establish democracy in Britain. Beyond that was the Quarry, which I remember as being full of lorries and tanks but that must have been a lot later, if ever. Our neighbours, the Davies family, worked there and would 'borrow' explosives and detonators to blow up tree stumps, which was very exciting. |
The old mill was still there, and made a sort of target for the Nazi bombers. At the upper end of it was the Davies's farm, a very small small-holding l think it must have been. I don't know the family's real names, my parents, fondly delighted with my infant prattlings, chose irritatingly to preserve them all. 'Boop', I know, was Albert Davies, who used indignantly to kick unexploded incendiary bombs out of his cabbage-patch. 'Day' was Mrs Davies, who was later to act as our nurse/minder and whom I was, rightly and justly, later to beat about the head with a poker. But what about Ongee-Pongee? I think he must have been the father of `Boop` or `Day` and probably the explosives expert.
Joined to the farm was a small cottage where a Jewish family were living. Their old grandfather would sit in our drive reading (the Talmud or Capital in my romanticising mind, but probably the Daily Mirror). Once a German fighter came over. The pilot gestured at his machine-gun as if about to shoot, then laughed and flew off. This is a good example of childish memory; it wouldn`t have been physically possible for anyone to see any such thing! A friend of mine can clearly recall watching the Coronation in colour on TV; he saw it, obviously, in technicolour at the cinema.
Our house was attached to the other end of the Jewish family`s cottage, and it had a sort of verandah in front, like the porch you see in folksy American films, where folk sit, rock and philosophise. In our case it was used in the night for watching flames leaping up beyond the hills to the south. Awake for once, I saw these very clearly. It might have been Bristol docks and it might have been Rupera Castle, a camp our soldiers joyously burned down one night when drunk. I think though, that it was Cardiff getting it. My cousin Alun, who now lives in Winster, was in that city awaiting call-up at the time, and he tells me that it would have been altogether a better thing to watch than to experience.
As far as I can make out, the Till Eulenspiegels would turn for home worn out by their merrry pranks and seeing our mill in the moonlight, think it a good place to jettison any remaining bombs. We certainly seemed to catch a lot of incendiaries but we were done no great harm, except that something big once went through the roof of the cottage rendering it uninhabitable. The Jewish family must have gone away at this time.
Nobody ever seemed to have thought of Anderson shelters in the Pandy. When the sirens went we used to go down and sleep under the big table in the kitchen or so I am told. Wakeful at all other times, I found raids soporific and would sleep through them all.
My father was a very left-wing pacifist who'd tried to organise a Curates' Union before the War. He'd preached, too, that the fascist uprising in Spain was the first round of the European War to come. This Rhondda commonplace was ill-received by the rich of Machen and he'd have been in serious trouble if he hadn't been a near-county-standard cricketer, which excused a multitude of sins amongst those appeasers. However, by 1940 he had compromised his principles so far as to become Quarter-Master Sergeant in the Home Guard.
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Grandpa and his second wife, a singer, had by now been bombed out of Portsmouth, to which place he'd retired. Having parked themselves on us for a while, they moved on, gypsy-like, having dumped dad's half-brother Bill on us. Bill, eleven years older than me wanted at that time to be a pilot and my main work was to test him on aircraft silhouettes. He made it and was trained in Canada like my cousin Alun but was too late for combat. Instead, he went to Queen's College in Cambridge, which was not quite the same thing. |
We kept open house for all the soldiers in the Pandy, our contribution to the ‘War Effort’. Soldiers would sit around our kitchen, drinking tea, smoking woodbines and talking religion and politics. Some of them were ex-theology students; others, I fear, were there because of mum, who everybody agrees was extremely pretty back then. Bill was a radio expert as well as a would-be pilot and I think he yearned for all these theological pongoes to evaporate. Anyway, we were all listening to the radio one night when a voice with, strangely enough, Bill's accent, broke in with: 'We interrupt this programme with a special announcement. All British troops to return to base IMMEDIATELY. Repeat: all British troops to return to base IMMEDIATELY.’ In 1940 this could mean only one thing: ‘They'd LANDED’ and now it was battle-to-the-death time. Soon dad was cycling madly along the Rupera road behind our stampeding guests, trying to explain Bill's sense of humour.
The thing that obsessed me during most of the War was the lack of anything sweet. Ruth puts it down to the prevalence of bottle-feeding in the `thirties’, saying I needed comfort. Rationing left me with remarkably good teeth (the traditional Rhondda coming-of-age present was a full set of false ones) but at the time I lived in a perpetual hunger. Mum never ceased to lament the disappearance of something called Five Boys Chocolate but used to make rice puddings with whole tins of Nestlé's sweetened condensed milk when she could get them. We'd be allowed to scrape out the tins afterwards with teaspoons, but it was NOT enough. When we moved up to the Rhondda by car all that I can remember about the trip is that our dogs ate the whole of our sweet ration en route. l have never felt quite the same about dogs since.
I am a bit vague about cars but we seem to have had one till our move but not for long thereafter. It is my impression that you had to be an essential user to be allowed any petrol at all, and there was plenty of public transport in the Rhondda. Car parts, I know, were extremely difficult to get hold of. My godmother's husband, Eddie Burge, seemed to have had access to petrol but his car was, of all things, an Opel, and he used to spend any spare time he had going about the United Kingdom in trains to plead and haggle for bits essential to its functioning.
The Rhondda was a very different place from Machen. I was used to rivers being black, never having seen one that wasn't but here everything seemed to be black except when it was raining. What's more, I went to school on a regular basis now. We spent all our break times at Craig yr Eos (Nightingale Rock), obsessively playing soldiers. I was always one of the generals. I have a scar between my fingers still, caused by an inexpertly wielded child's tin hat. There was a place that was called a clinic in Thomas Street, the other side of Ton y Pandy (Mill Leyland) Tip but I don't think they bothered with little things like bloodied hands. What they did was dish out foul cod-liver oil and perhaps dried egg.
We had our own scraggy hens, who lived mainly on worms and Faith, though I seem to recollect my father, with deep shame, producing some sort of Christmas bird obtained on the black market down the Vale. I recall my inoculation over in Hendrecafn (homestead horse trough) School, mainly because the doctor was not only enormous but also the first black person I'd ever seen. I'm afraid I howled.
Mrs Davies from the farm came to Penygraig (Crag Top) with us to act as a sort of nurse and babysitter when my parents were busy. She would take us regularly to the chip shop on Bank Street, where she would just as regularly demand, 'Six-penn'orth of fish and one chip', much to the local people’s pleasure. Otherwise, her presence was a very mixed blessing. When David and I had gone to bed and the lights were out she would dress herself up in a white sheet and crawl moaning up the stairs, till she was outside our room and we came out to be terrified. In the end, I thought it best to take a poker to the ghost's head. Perhaps it was after that that she left us.
Or it might have been because we had American soldiers billeted on us around this time. Our three soldiers arrived with horrible crisscross metal things they were supposed to sleep on but we were able to provide proper beds, with which they were much taken. Grateful, they used to provide us with things called 'candies', which turned out, for all our suspicions, to be an exotic and very delicious sort of sweet. Alas, when they were leaving, David took and hid their hats for souvenirs. These were much admired by the children of Vicarage and Llanfair Roads.
Grandpa and Edith were living in Builth by now, in which place he was in charge of a YMCA and asked us to stay while they went elsewhere This was the first holiday we had ever had. We used to walk along the Wye to Shaky Bridge with jam-jars with string tied round them to fish for minnows. By now there were Italian POWs working in the fields and mum was once ill-advised enough to return a smile from one of them. We couldn't shake him off until we had trudged what seemed like fifty miles home, pretending firmly all the while that he wasn't with us at all.
There were resident Italians at home in the Rhondda too, of course. They ran what were called 'Bracchi shops' in all the mining valleys. These were cafes where teetotal miners and other pub-and-club-excluded persons could get coffee, tea and, if extremely lucky, icecream. Old Caravaggi, who ran ours, was believed to spend his nights up on the mountain signalling to the bombers, but if so he must have forgotten the code, for no bombs ever fell there. I was sympathetic with him in his pariahdom, for it seemed I came under the same cloud. 'That's a bloody Eyetie name, mun!' an old collier told me when he heard I was called Tony, so it gives me real pleasure nowadays to know that one of the Sidolis was later to play rugby for our country. The only other member of our alien group was Doctor Anderson who, like Dr Thomas, lived close to our house. He was, allegedly, half Japanese, which can't have been easy for him and when not high on drugs he was usually drunk. One of my father's succession of curates, Cyddlon Lewis, had a nosebleed one Sunday. Dr Anderson produced an enormous syringe. 'Remember he has to preach tonight', said dad, a little puzzled by this unusual treatment. 'Bugger won't wake up till Tuesday', chortled the doctor, happily for once.
I wasn't much aware of the progress of the war until the Crossing of the Rhine, a thing of wonder but I can recall the Rhondda people being hugely taken with what the Russians were doing and how the peace was going to be. I remember sometimes being allowed to sit up and listen while dad, Austin Lewis, the vicar of Williamstown and Dafydd Thomas, our communist doctor, drank whisky and argued politics and religion. That seemed to me at the time to be what life was all about and I still think arguments between trained theologians (Dr Thomas was an ex theology student) and people with some knowledge of Marx (as had all three) are far better entertainment than chess. It was around this time that dad's friend Huw Menai wrote his poem on Stalingrad, which I seem to have remembered after all these years. It went:
May it forever live, and be
The blood-soaked symbol of the free,
Against whose walls of pride and pain
The might of Evil smote in vain.
May it still stand, a beacon light
To guide us through the after-night,
To build a new world in a new mould
Out of the rubble of the old.
I apologise to his dialectically-materialist spirit if I've got it wrong! My father had spoken on communist platforms back in 1926, or so he said. I'm pretty sure that everyone we knew was pro-Russian and pro-communist at the time of Stalingrad and thereafter, as the Nazis were slowly rolled back. I remember being taken to Pontypridd (Earthenhouse Bridge) to see Cossacks performing, riding standing up, jumping through burning hoops and the like. It was very exciting.
In Tai School (Tai = houses, because the lessons were originally given in private dwellings; strictly it was Dinas Boys' Primary) I learned the way to deal with bullies with a straight left to the eye (they don`t like wounds that show) and also how easily one may turn to a life of crime. They had what seemed an excellent arrangement in Tai. Our troops needed reading-material so we were asked to bring books in and we were rewarded, by an odd system of barter, with chocolate powder from America. At first I found this an excellent arrangement (we had lots of books in our house) but after a while dad began to get sticky about the way his library of 6d Penguins and orangy-covered Left Book Club editions was shrinking and sweetness was denied to me. Therefore, I and some lawless resolutes, raided the cupboard where the chocolate was kept and ate our wicked fill. Caught out, I was properly and thoroughly caned but I still thought it was worth it.
Auntie Margaret, Bill`s sister, came to live with us at this time. She was teaching at Porth Secondary. She would often be left to baby-sit us, and she was always particularly concerned about our possible alarm in thunderstorms:
‘Are you two frightened? You'd better come in with me.'
'No. We're fine, thanks.'
'I'll come in with you then.' She was in fact petrified.
Dad was fond of poetry and would often read us Tennyson and such but it was Margaret who brought me into the Twentieth Century in this respect. Of a saving disposition, she abstracted a copy of the Selected Poems of T.S.Eliot from her school, and presented me with it, possibly for my eighth birthday. As a result I am one of the few people still alive who ever read Eliot 'fresh', so to speak, untroubled by his reputation for fearsome erudition. I thought they were marvellous poems fair play and for this I am grateful. Encouragement also came from my godmother who became a fairly well-known poet called Jean Earle.
It was Margaret, too, who took me to see the Belsen pictures in the cinema down in Porth. I'm not sure that I'm grateful for that. I had known about the Camps because the Thomases down the Dinas end of Vicarage Road had a young German man living with them and he'd been shot in the head while escaping. He didn't seem to be Jewish, so I'd guess he must have been a KPD activist, rescued by the Party in the days before it was wholly crushed. He'd been a brilliant law student apparently but now he was, as we used to say, 'a bit twp’ (stupid). The pictures, though, were worse than the worst anyone could have imagined about the Nazis and I don't think that those who saw them could ever feel quite the same about people afterwards. I don't know if my parents knew about this cinema visit, probably not; Margaret was pretty much a law unto herself! How ironic that those horrors are used as a sort of justification for the horror now inflicted on the Palestinians.
It will have been on a different and later occasion, I imagine, that the Porth cinema management put on what must have been some sort of election feature, in which Churchill appeared as his Tory self rather than as the just-about-tolerated War Leader. That was more than this audience could bear to see: the hateful Monster of 1910 and 1926 showing its loathsome face here, as if by right, after all their sacrifices. The people went mad. Everybody was hooting and booing, while many were jumping up and down shaking their fists, and throwing things at the screen. I don't know what the management did, stopped it probably but it was interestingly unlike our usual cinema visits.
While Margaret was with us she was proposed to by George Thomas, a horror whose magnitude it is difficult for anyone from outside our own particular culture to begin to grasp. Thomas was later to become an MP, Secretary of State, Speaker of the House of Commons then finally Lord Tonypandy and he was ‘dreadful’. He was so typically the 'broad-minded Welshman' those masters delight in that I have extreme difficulty in convincing people that his father was in fact an English builder from Somerset and in a good way of business too. Anyway, it has since transpired that he was a closet homosexual, who ought not to have been offering any woman matrimony. I think grandpa, who was no fool, got some inkling of this and warned her in time. Instead she married a Swiss surveyor and wrote, I'm told, a book on Yoga in, of all places, Southern Rhodesia.
'And then when it was the month of May
A thousand-year Reich had passed away
...The Mis-Leader lay under the Chancellery.
Of low-browed corpses with little moustaches there were two or three.
....The vetches flowered. The cocks were quietly moping.
The doors were closed. The roofs stood open.' (Brecht)
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So now it is time to mention my mother's brother Arthur. He was a flight-sergeant gunner in Short Stirlings, I think. He survived much better than gunners were supposed to, though mum reckoned that his hair began to go white after Arnhem. Anyway, we now come to the bit that gives me the gravest doubt about memory. This is what I and David independently recall. It is VE Day at last and they are building the bonfire behind the garages on Llanfair Road. 'Well', says dad, 'Arthur will be all right now.’ |
'No', says mum. 'He's dead.' And soon the telegram arrives: they have crashed in Norway. David and I have both frequently used this as an example of fore-knowledge dreaming, for it is agreed at least that there was a dream. Imagine my surprise, then, when I happened to mention this to mum in her seventies and found that she denied it hotly. 'No I didn't', said she, '1 dreamed that Bill was dead!'
This surprised me so much that it became one of the causes of my taking up family history. The true story (as recounted in the Norwegian Report) is that as the remaining Nazi leaders prepared to surrender, it was suddenly realised that Norway was full of German soldiers and there were no Allies there at all. Perhaps a hard core of the racist madmen would decide to make a last stand up there amongst the Aryan snows. It seemed essential to send paratroops, so planes and a scratch force were rapidly assembled. The weather, however, proved appalling and the mission was aborted except for three planes that some incompetent let go. Two of them crashed. The Norwegian Report leaves us in no doubt about the date: it was the Tenth of May. VE Day was done and past, and I'm the greatest fool at last! There was no telegram. So much for memory!
Just a few more snapshots. One is the Rhondda as I always now recall it, strung with lights like necklaces all along the roads and streets. I must, surely, be remembering the end of the blackout, whenever that was. My picture is more brilliant than any costly fireworks display.
It must have been well after the war that we went down to Carew Cheriton in Pembrokeshire, where grandpa was now in charge of a NAAFI on an RAF Camp. I know it was after the war because we had a car again, a big old Lanchester and we'd been roaring exultantly along the runways with me on the running board. I jumped off and ran, yelling as exultantly, into a sort of hall in the main station buildings to find myself being observed in a huge silence by what looked like hundreds and hundreds of airmen. They were waiting to get in their buses and go (presumably) home.
In Llantrisant (Three Saints' Church) they'd opened one of the first Remploy factories and they'd brought skilled German workers to train our people. Suddenly we had Franz Roedig in our class at school and he used to ask us up to his home in Crawshay Street. Everything in their house was exotic. Franz had masses of Nazi stamps over-printed by the various Allies (I probably still have some of them around somewhere). His mother made strange cakes I delighted in, and they called their cat, for some strange Teutonic reason, Putzi. We were broad-minded internationalists in our gang, so we let Franz join it, though we had to lose a chauvinistic Islwyn Watkins to do so and I still feel really bad about that.
On the eve of Election Day 1945, Dafydd Thomas and some other Disrespectful Elements went out by night with ladders and in the morning the Labour Committee Rooms were found, puzzlingly, to be covered with Communist posters and I do mean covered: chimney, roof, windows, doors and all. The whole Labour Party was out scraping them off all day, not that it mattered. Labour won both seats, with the communists second in our East, Plaid Cymru, (I think) second in West. The Conservatives lost their deposits in both and we soon discovered Labour was now in power. I don't want to pretend to a greater knowledge of politics than I really had but I think I understood that something important had happened and I knew that all the grown-ups were very, very happy. To use a phrase that was yet to be uttered, they believed that, `We were the Masters Now’.
Postscript 2013: some years ago a relative sent me a postcard drawing my attention to a letter from a Norwegian gentleman to the 'Rhondda Leader', containing a photograph and asking if this was Flight Sergeant Arthur Davies. It wasn't, so I was able to put him right and send him a real one. We got in touch, and it turned out that he was a very nice Norwegian policeman who had made it his life's work to see that monuments were put up for the aircrew and (mostly Canadian) paratroopers in the (three not two) planes that had crashed. As a result, the family got involved, and over thirty of us (more than half of all those who attended) flew to Oslo for the dedication of the monument for Arthur's plane. They managed to take us to the top of a mountain, where a column had been erected amongst, amazingly, bits of the 'plane that were still lying around. I found it moving, despite the urge of one of the cousins to makes speeches, as I did at a later ceremony in Oslo, where they'd put odd remains of the dead under appropriate gravestones.