MORNING SERIAL
‘HOMEMADE.’ Dad Pierce would say, ‘No one makes rice pudding like my Mary.’
He was the only one that didn’t know it was Ambrosia rice pudding out of a tin, the skin on top engineered by Mary by placing the pudding under the grill. He never did find out.
We children piled onto the settee as Blackie, my grandparents’ Scots terrier, fussed and shuffled on his short legs, his asthmatic wheezing growing steadily worse as we teased him. We would half listen to the grown-ups talk of the old days in Pwllheli and Dolwyddelan, of relatives in Canada and New York living glamorous lives, and of failing health, of which there was little evidence. Blackie would begin to scratch incessantly, and Nan Pierce would reassure us in her gentle voice and north Wales accent:
‘Don’t worry, it’s not fleas. It’s just that his blood’s too rich.’
When it was time to leave we would crane our necks and wave goodbye from the street at the bottom of the steps, and from his vantage point above my grandfather would wave back and raise his gaunt and bushybrowed face to look around, all disapproving of the industrial view and the smoky air. Like one of the Old Testament prophets from my Sunday school stories he stood on this man-made crag of a southern hill, breathing the unclean atmosphere and surveying the colliery’s sprawling mass below, having long since weighed this place in the balance, and found it wanting. Then he turned to go back inside, his expression showing his pained acceptance of the wrongness of it all.
And so to Crescent Street, to see my Nana and Dada, my father’s parents. Their street, Crescent Street, was built right on the eastern bank of the Taff.
It was a double terrace, and George and Lily, together with my Uncle Wyndham, their youngest son, lived at number 19 which, like the other houses on this side of the street had a long garden separated from the river by a flood wall that would prove to be, ultimately, useless as to its intended purpose. The wall had a flat top which was wide enough to run along for almost the whole length of the street.