MORNING SERIAL

I SPENT an age cutting out pieces of grey plastic sponge, to represent the donkey’s coat, which I then glued to a piece of donkey-shaped, donkey-sized cardboard. The figures were hung around the walls of the main hall in time for our carol concert.

In our chapel Nativity play, I was chosen to be one of the three kings and I wore a robe made from an old curtain and a cardboard crown, and I carried solemnly before me a painted cardboard box with sticky paper jewels studded all over it. It was empty, but there was meant to be frankincense inside it, and I wondered what on earth frankincense was.

Our father worked at the Hoover factory while our Uncle Wyndham was a surface worker at the pit. This allowed Anne, Allyson, Gareth and I to attend the two big “works” Christmas parties that were held in the run up to the big day.

The annual miners’ children’s Christmas party was held in the miners’ club in Merthyr Vale. Standing right opposite my maternal grandparents’ house, the club was a Brutalist building that had its main entrance level with the street at Bryn Teg, but because the land beneath and behind it sloped away so steeply, most of the building was suspended in mid air, held up on spindly concrete pillars invisible from the roadway. Even as a relatively new building, it seemed to perch without any certain intent on that hillside, like all of Bryn Teg.

Hundreds of us would turn up for the party, and we were sat together in the main hall at trestle tables covered with paper tablecloths, our chairs jammed together so tightly there was barely room to move. The food was always good. A slice of ham and a bag of proper chip shop chips from the Windsor fish and chip shop just down the road, washed down with orange squash that tasted of the plastic bottle it came in. There was jelly for dessert, and we ate amidst the hoppy whiff of beer seeping in from the lounge bar next door.