MORNING SERIAL

SECONDS were always available and Gareth and I would quarrel over the bones from the joint to pick clean, and we worried out the marrow with our tongues.

After dinner, most Sunday afternoons were set aside for visiting my grandparents.

My mother’s parents, known to us grandchildren as Nan and Dad Pierce, lived in Bryn Teg Terrace, across the river in Merthyr Vale. Bryn Teg was a man- made cliff face of a street and the most elevated in the village. Each house was reached at the front by about twenty precipitous stone steps, and the street stretched along what was then the main road between Merthyr and Cardiff, which was, even in those days, too busy with traffic to play on. Their front doorstep gave a panoramic view of both our sibling villages and of Merthyr Vale pit which seemed to clank and whirr much louder when heard from here than it did in Cottrell Street.

To the rear, just across the narrowest of alleyways, which you could span with your outstretched arms, sprang up the great bulk of Merthyr Vale mountain, as steep as any alp. A monstrous, sandstone retaining wall strained, buckled, and occasionally partly failed to hold back the enormous compression caused by the mountain’s natural inclination to fold itself back into the cut that had been made to build the houses.

After rain, water oozed between its stones, eroding the mortar and slowly winning the battle the hillside waged to heal itself, no matter how many repairs might be made.

The whole street clung to the hillside in defiance of geology, living on borrowed time since being thrown together quickly and cheaply by the coal owners less than a century before.

It was not built to last. Nor did it, in the end.