MORNING SERIAL
ON those summer Sundays my grandfather’s garden would provide us with our tea: hot boiled potatoes smothered with salty Carmarthenshire butter, with tinned salmon and spring onions soused in peppered vinegar.
Co-op Indian Prince tea brewed strong and drunk with heaped teaspoons of sugar, and rhubarb tart and Ideal milk for desert. Crammed into the tiny kitchen, the adults would trade gossip and tease us children and each other.
My Nana would tut at my grandfather’s habit of drinking his tea from the saucer, as he blew at it to cool it down. Uncle Wyndham might sing Elvis numbers into a spoon, my Aunty Eileen saying, ‘’Ark at him, b’there,’ and rolling her eyes in exasperation.
I might take up station sitting cross-legged under the kitchen table, listening to the adults’ talk and laughter and understanding only half of it. The warmth of summer air would drift in from the open back door, as I was slyly fed bits of cooked ham before time by my grandmother, and I would feel wholly at home and happy.
I recall on one of these summer Sunday afternoons climbing onto the roof of the coal cwtch my grandfather had built from corrugated iron, and lying flat on my back to stare at the stillness of a sky of silent blue. The sun was gently warm on my face and the smell of the garden, damp from recent watering, drifted around me, and quite suddenly I felt a deep, untroubled peace. In that peace was a child’s certainty of the permanence of things. The future was far off and indistinct and it was ludicrous to contemplate it. Time slept. This place, this garden, this safe harbour that my grandfather had made would always be and these times would never end. Live placidly, like this, and all these things would be true. Happiness was real and unending, and I was immortal.
Then, as I lay there something profound happened to me. I remember it with perfect clarity some forty-five years later. Indeed, I have no doubt that it is in fact the reason I remember the whole episode of clambering up onto that shed roof and lying flat to look at the sky.