Dolafon
The boys and I spend 3 days at Dolafon, our family house in Llanbedr. We set up the house up for winter and tidy the garden. In lovely autumn weather we visit the ancient church in the dunes at Llandanwg where David is at rest and we walk along the beach. It is beautiful, quiet and elegiac.
A journey through my life
Travelling to Llanbedr is a journey through my life. Most Brummies know and love that swathe of countryside stretching from Worcestershire and Shropshire, through mid-Wales to Cardigan Bay. Some of my earliest memories are of noise, smoke and steam as we boarded the Great Western Train – green engine and chocolate and cream coaches – at Snow Hill for holidays at Borth. Can it really be seventy-five years ago? I have made that journey countless times since.
After Borth, there was Chorley, Near Bridgenorth, now on the Severn Valley Railway, where my family kept a caravan at Rays Farm. In the early ‘fifties, Rays Farm was still in essence a Victorian farm, (remember that lovely tv series a few years ago?) though they had two tractors, a red Fordson and a green Ferguson, Bonnie the big shire horse still did her share of the work. We drew our water from the pump and the farmyard was our playground. My brother Robert and I would collect the eggs, stroke the kittens, chase the piglets and help with the haymaking. One summer we hand-reared a bull calf. There was a whole world of woods and brooks to explore.
In our teenage years, Robert and I stayed on the train to Aberystwyth, for visits to Aunty May and Aunty Betty in Cwm Rheidol – walks up the valley to Devil’s Bridge, a host of unforgettable characters (just like “On the Black Hill” by Bruce Chatwin). Gosh, how the north wind whips up Terrace Road in Aberystwyth.
And then there was Spywood. I always look out for the spectacular view of the nearby hills, Corndon, Roundton and the Aldress, between Welshpool and Newtown Here my sons had their brooks and woodlands to explore, and the same opportunities to experience the countryside and the changing seasons that I had as a child.
So much to look back on – bonfires and birthdays in the summer, Jack Jones the farmer taking the boys with him to walk the fields, Bilberry picking on the Stiperstones, walks in Spywood Dingle and Ashes Hollow on the Long Mynd, outings to the Ironbridge Gorge, the Welshpool and Llanfair railway, pony-trekking, David reading “the Land of Green Ginger” at bed-time.
Not forgetting freezing cold winter days and nights when the pipes would burst and the car would get stuck in the mud – all part of a wonderful, rich, unforgettable experience.
“Objects contain absent people”
For the last twenty years, we have taken the line north from Dovey Junction to Llanbedr and Dolafon, the house we shared with Robert. Sadly Robert died in 2007.
Dolafon is more than just a beautiful stone house facing the river. It is also 55 Clydesdale Road. When Robert moved in he brought a lot of the furniture and belongings from Clydesdale Road, the family home where we grew up.
And now, bits and pieces from the next generation, buckets and spades, fishing nets, little Welsh hats, children’s pictures, have found their way into the house, not to mention a lot of stuff from Warriner Gardens. (We never really downsized!).
Julian Barnes put it so well when he wrote “objects contain absent people”. Almost every object at Dolafon contains for me a memory, an absent person or a ghost. These are at the same time sad and comforting. As I reflect on my own life, I can live with my ghosts. Those objects contain so much warmth, love, sadness, fun, laughter and richness of experience.
And when I look at my sons, daughters in law and beautiful, beautiful granddaughters – all real and present, not ghosts – clever. noisy, talented, energetic – I feel great hope and optimism for the future.
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I will let Liz Berry have the last word in her beautiful poem “Iron Oss” She puts it so much better than I can.
IRON OSS by LIZ BERRY
Iron osses, little wenches of the sidings, watch over us
on our passings, our wum-comings;
through the Smethwicks, factories laploved and tumbled,
the trollied cut with its rainbow of sump-oil
and behind overgrown buddleia, banqueting halls
fizzing like bottles of pop on Friday afternoon
with stunned new brides and bhangra-armed grooms,
for love is a journey to an unknown station.
Pit-bank wenches, run alongside us, through Rolfe Street
and Galton Bridge, Sandwell and Dudley
where the bones of tough-work sink secret as fossils
beneath the edgelands new greenery.
Watch over babbies dozing as their moms dream
of nights lost cantering in long grass,
watch over the wenches laughing in their gorgeous make-up,
off into the new life or just off chapping-it.
Watch over Sam solving six down for Leila from Stafford;
Magda on the early shift; Mrs Begum alighting
for HMP Featherstone. And as we pass, drum your hooves
for Sharon-Ann’s Academy of Dance and Cheer,
a sparkler of joy in the trading estate’s gloom;
for the blokes in the breakers yard, smoking in the rain;
the old boys downing Banks’s in half-cut pubs,
wammels lost to the nettled heaven of the allotments.
Watch over us all, little osses, for some days
it feels life is nothing but travelling, waving goodbye
to all we know, never quite certain of who we leave
and who we carry within us like tender luggage.
Watch over those who have long gone,
taken the dawn train on a one-way ticket,
and those not born yet, sweet unseen passengers
still held in the darkness, waiting for the signal,
the green light and the whistle
to call them into that first bright station of their lives.
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Notes on this poem.
I grew up in the Black Country and am still in love with its dialect, its lyrical, guttural, surprising, rich beyond belief word-hoard. It’s rarely seen as an eloquent vernacular and I wanted to change that. I use Black Country dialect in my poems to shine a light upon it, to celebrate it and to help pass forward some of those enchanting words. ‘Iron Oss’ is a praise poem for Kevin Atherton’s much-loved public sculpture of the same name – ten black horse silhouettes which gallop alongside the railway line from Birmingham to Wolverhampton. It uses a few of my favourite Black Country words: wum: home; wammels: mongrels and the fantastic chapping it: girls on the pull!