WAGBAI: ABERPORTH

ABERPORTH

            Speaking of family… I’ll fly ahead here to the end of the war, though I’ll need to return shortly to the last of the war years.

            We were in Aberporth on August 14, 1945, V-J Day, for Victory in Japan, marking the end of all hostilities in the Second World War and a cause for great national celebration in Great Britain and elsewhere throughout the world. V-E Day, Victory in Europe, had come three months earlier, on May 8, before the summer holidays, so I was still at school. We celebrated there with fireworks and a bonfire, like Guy Fawkes Day. But V-J Day was in August and we were on holiday. As in previous war years, we were spending the holidays that year in Aberporth where my grandparents lived. It was a long trek by car from Bedfordshire to the west coast of Wales, and “petrol”—gas, as we know it over here in the States—was always a big concern. Like everything else in those days it was rationed, but I suppose my parents were able to save up enough coupons to make the journey possible. There were no motorways, of course, and many of the regular roads were narrow, twisty and slow-going. This was particularly true of the last few miles on the drive to Aperporth, on the road between Carmarthen and Newcastle Emlyn. In Carmarthen we would drive by the old oak tree...

... propped up by steel and concrete for fear that it would fall—legend has it that the town will be flooded when the old oak falls; then long miles along the shady road that followed the sparkling river Teifi (the “f” is pronounced as a “v”, in Welsh)...

... where fishermen still navigate the roiling waters in their coracles—ancient, round boats fashioned out of basketry and tar...

... casting out their nets to catch the salmon for which the river is well known. We have relatives, the Georges, in Newcastle Emlyn, but we don’t stop there; we climb all-too-slowly for us children out of that small town, up a long, steep hill, and start the seemingly endless descent into Aberporth. Such excitement! First one to catch a glimpse of the sea was rewarded with a silver sixpenny piece.

            We didn’t stay with our grandparents. Their little house, Penparc Cottage...

... down by the village’s first bay, would have been too small for all of us. We stayed further up the street at Miss Griffith’s lodging house, Bryn Mawr, in a cavernous room that Flora and I had to share, sleeping in big wooden beds that were covered with puffy white duvets. We loved Miss Griffith even though she was “chapel”—that is, like most of her Welsh compatriots, she attended the protestant chapel on Sundays, rather than our church. She was a sweet Welsh-speaking lady, devoted to our family. A spinster, likely in her fifties—she seemed ancient to us—she was famous for her Welsh cawl, a leek-based stew, and her rice pudding, a sweet and creamy treat topped with a brown crust from the oven. It was from Miss Griffith that we learned our few words of Welsh: “nos da” for ”goodnight” and “bore da” for “good morning”, “bara menyn” and “bara a chaws” for “bread and butter” and “bread and cheese.”

            Once unpacked and settled into Miss Griffith’s it was off for the walk down past Dan the Felin’s field, with the friendly dappled horse we named Airdale, and on down to Penparc Cottage, armed with our shovels and pails and the shrimping nets my father had made for us to catch the prawns that dart elusively amongst the rocks and the slowly shifting strands of seaweed at low tide. The smell of the seaside was delicious and distinctive, calling us to irresistibly to the beach with its familiar salty tang…

But first there was the obligatory stop at Penparc Cottage, a low, long, white-washed building with a grey slate roof and, in front, a neat green lawn and a path that led to the front door. It was always dark inside, perhaps because the windows were so few, to keep the winter’s cold at bay, and perhaps because the furniture was all of hard, dark wood—the Welsh dresser and its neighboring bench on the front porch, the large armoire where my grandmother kept her secret stash of treasured family heirlooms. A tiny woman of boundless energy, she was an Air Raid Warden in the heavily bombed city of Swansea during the war. She could vividly describe the deafening sounds of the explosions and the heat of the burning buildings, and used to boast of the occasion when she gathered up an armful of unexploded incendiary bombs after a German air attack and tried to pass them on to one of her male coworkers so that her arms would be free to pick up more. According to her story, (and to her great indignation!) the man very sensibly declined. One of the Nazi incendiary bombs, long since disarmed, was among the objects in the drawer of her armoire. She would pass it to me, lovingly, so that I could feel its weight.

            “Grane,” as the entire family called her, was the live wire. My grandfather, “Grimp”...

.... was a stately, distinguished, sober man with a crown of silver hair and a serious mien that he compensated with a wry and wicked sense of humor. The scion of a local Cardiganshire farming family, he was ordained a minister in the church of Wales and, after a long stint at St. Gabriel’s Church in Swansea was installed as Chancellor of Brecon Cathedral. I think it’s true that he met and married my grandmother in the earliest years of his ministry, as a curate in the East End of London—at that time a working-class, Cockney area around Brick Lane that has since been largely rebuilt, following the devastation of the bombs, and thoroughly gentrified. It was also a notably Jewish part of London, and it was always a source of amusement to me that Grane, the epitome of the Anglican clergyman’s wife, was born an Isaacson—though she always insisted that her family was “the non-Jewish Isaacsons.”  This, despite the family heirloom of a table inlaid with Hebrew letters and various other evidence that would point to a different conclusion. No matter, she was most certainly devoted to her Grimp, whom I remember mostly at breakfast time, when he would sit quietly at his place at the antique drop-leaf table and bow his head to say grace before buttering a piece of toast and slicing the top off a single boiled egg. Quiet though he might be, Grimp was no pushover. He spoke the truth forthrightly, when truth was needed. He was also a hardy soul. Even into his late years, he would don an old-fashioned swim suit early every morning and plunge into the cold waters of the Cardigan Bay that lay just a hundred yards or so from their kitchen window, swimming back and forth with strong strokes across the bay.

            It was Aberporth, then, where we spent V-J Day. There was a big parade down the main street and my father felt it our civic duty to play our part. For the family, that year, he had put all his skills to work to make a seaworthy canoe, and we had towed it down from Aspley Guise to Wales on a two-wheel flatbed hitched up behind the car. So we decorated up this canoe with loads of seaweed, and Union Jacks, and a colorful assemblage of other flags and banners, converting it into the parade float that was our contribution to the festivities. Flora and I were dressed in sailor suits and waved at the crowds from the canoe with our mother, beautiful as always in a bright swimsuit, while my father sat at the wheel of our car and towed us slowly along with the rest of the parade. While “winning the war” meant little to us children, we were swept along in the glow of elation that the grow-ups all around us felt, released from the abominable burden of the conflict that had so sorely affected the lives of every one of them. It was a moment of shared ecstasy that no one who lived through it could forget.

Aberporth. This watercolor by Neil Widgery hangs in our Laguna Beach cottage.