MORNING SERIAL

THE furniture, heavy and brown and top quality, having been bought at Schwartz’s in Merthyr, was assaulted with Pledge.

The outside toilet in the garden was mopped up with bleach and hot water heated on the kitchen stove, and her sink, the kitchen ‘bosh’, was beaten into submission with lashings of Vim.

Even the front room, which the family never used as it was kept ‘for best’, was scrubbed, hoovered and polished until the woodwork gleamed and the scent of lavender filled the air.

Wash day followed a different battle plan involving the conscription of hot tub and mangle, bags of Reckitt’s Blue, a packet of Omo, and pale yellow bricks of Sunlight soap for rubbing on shirt collars. Wearing her pinny with tiny blue flowers on it, her pockets full of clothes pegs, her hands plunged in water so hot that I would never be able to bear it, she worked amidst the steam rising from the pans of vests and shirts simmering on the stove.

In my mind’s eye I can walk toward her now, amidst a smell of hot clean cotton and billowing steam, and see her clearly with her fine white hair, her hands raw and red from the near boiling soapy water, the translucent skin about her pale blue eyes creasing as she smiles at me. ‘Let me peg these out a minute,’ she’d say, ‘and then we’ll have a proper cup of tea.’

Of all the Sunday visits to Crescent Street, summer Sundays were my best beloved. Summer saw my grandfather’s garden at its abundant best, whirring and buzzing with insects and radiating warmth from its black alluvial soil.

Nearest to the lean-to kitchen with its tar paper roof that blistered in hot sunshine were planted the salad vegetables. Tidy rows of lettuce, beetroot, radishes and spring onions which released their keen aroma after rain.

Next to them was a small patch of used tea leaves and eggshells which my grandfather allowed to rot down to compost, convinced that these two odd ingredients made the best fertiliser of all.

Just here, somewhere under the path, was an ants’ nest.