MORNING SERIAL

THE coaches dropped us where we had begun, outside the chapel; each child in turn piping up, ‘Thank you, drive!’ as we disembarked. The street lamps were winking into life as we gathered our belongings, tired goodbyes were said, and we all walked home with weary legs, our shoulders itchy beneath our shirts.

I slept that night the deep, deep sleep that only children truly know, and that likely only children truly deserve.

Next morning, we children woke with agonising sunburn across our backs and shoulders. Mam sat us on the kitchen table and dabbed our flame-red skin with calamine lotion as we whimpered and twitched in pain. For the next few days, morbidly fascinated, we peeled the skin off each other’s shoulders in long strips as it sloughed itself away.

Summer turned to autumn and at weekends we often set out, armed with old biscuit tins, to go blackberrying. This free harvest could be found all around the village, at the side of paths up to the mountain and along the canal ‘bank’, which marked the route of the old Merthyr/Cardiff canal, long since filled in.

We picked for hours, searching for the biggest and juiciest specimens, which of course never made it to the tin and were eaten immediately after checking them for grubs. All of us collected dozens of nettle stings too, and we rubbed our bare legs with dock leaves to ease the itchy pain.

The berries that did make it back home were baked into tarts by my grandmother, with steaming, slightly soggy pastry, and we ate them coated with sugar and doused with evaporated milk, or with sterilised cream from a tin.

School started up again and the mornings grew colder, that thrilling, expectant autumn chill in the air.

Nana knitted me another cable-stitch jumper, one with the same green wool from the wool shop on Aberfan Road.

I was fond of this one too, and wondered whether green might not be my favourite colour after all. All the boys at school developed a craze for playing conkers.