MORNING SERIAL

I HAVE a fragment of memory that had me blundering once just a couple of steps into her musty smelling room – I must have only been beginning to learn to walk. There was a glass-fronted display cabinet against the wall to my right, and I came face to face at eye level with a black, perhaps jet, figurine behind the glass. It had a leering, grinning face. It looked to me like the very essence of evil and I recoiled from it, running away and weeping for my mother.

Upstairs, I was wary of the trap door to the attic. I knew that it was dark up there, and dusty, and no one lived there but spiders and silverfish. When I walked along the landing I was always careful not to walk directly under it, lest it suddenly spring open and shower me with old, dead husks of insects and skittering spider legs.

There were these dark corners of the house, but I always felt safe and secure, so long as my parents were there to watch out for me.

At the heart of every home in those days was the fire in the middle room. In our house, Mam was always first to get up in the morning in order to set it. She did this every day for years on end. She was the first to tackle the cold and dark on winter mornings, warming our clothes on a clothes horse near the fire. On waking each morning I would, at first, cling to the warmth beneath my blankets, aware of the freezing air in the bedroom as it pinched at my nose, reluctant to quit the perfect warmth under the covers. Only when I really had to would I break out from the warm pocket of the bed, padding downstairs as quickly as I could to make it to the living room where Mam had dulled the sharp edge of cold for the rest of us. Given the chance, I would study with fascination the adult, alchemical skill of fire lighting. First the inky pages of the Daily Mirror or the Merthyr Express crumpled into balls, and then over that, the kindling that dad had split with a hatchet some time before. Then the lumps of coal on top. The paper was lit with a Swan Vesta and flared up and then, with a flourish, a sheet of outstretched newspaper was applied across the opening of the fireplace to draw the fire; the taut paper straining and charring alarmingly as the flames roared up behind it. Then the paper was whisked aside to reveal the finished product – the coal fire burning, domesticated and calm.

To Hear The Skylark’s Song A Memoir by Huw Lewis is published by Parthian, Library of Wales, at £8.99 www.parthianbooks.com CONTINUES CONTINUES TOMORROW TOMORROW