MORNING SERIAL

OF the one occasion she’d gone underground, when for some reason they’d allowed wives down the pit to take a look, that it was alive with black pats down there too, but the rats were even worse. Of how she’d seen the coalface where her husband worked; eighteen inches high and six inches of water in it.

‘You work hard now at school, so you can wear a shirt and tie to work every day,’ she told me.

She swore the weather was different when she was young; the summers hotter, and that in one particular year, even at the Easter holiday, you could have fried an egg on the pavement.

Many times she told me of the occasion she nearly died of quinsy, and the doctor was called. He lanced the abscess and gave her an emetic of hot vinegar so that she vomited up the foulness of it.

And she told me that she had not a single tooth in her head because her parents had paid for a dentist to extract them all in one sitting, and that that had been her eighteenth birthday present from them. In those days that was seen as a mercy and an economy, since the assumption was that one would lose all one’s teeth in any case, and it was better to get the whole thing over and done with.

Half remembered fragments of her childhood. If I’d known the right questions to ask, I could have learned so much more. Still, such as these memories are, I do not want them to die.

Other than that time away in Eastbourne, Lily moved only once in her life; when she married George Lewis from Taff Street and they settled here at number 19.

In their youth they had known that generation who were the beginning of this place. Her father had spoken no English and had moved here from Machynlleth for a job in the pit, while her husband, George, had sprung from a confusion of Irish and Pembrokeshire antecedents, all, Welsh and Irish, arriving here for the same reason.

They raised three surviving children in number 19: the eldest, my Aunty Eileen, my father David next, and then my Uncle Wyndham.