Terry Matthews

Memories of Terry Matthews, 3 August 2010

Early Life

I was born at the Lower New Ranks, Blaenavon, in 1935 so I remember very little of the years leading up to the commencement of the Second World War. I do have flashes of memory, however, of a man (Mr. Roberts) coming up from the country (Llanellen) with his horse drawn cart loaded with churns of milk which he sold from door to door in pint and half-pint measures poured from his measure directly into your waiting jugs. I also have memories of Mr Belli, who kept the Italian ice cream shop in town, coming to ‘the Ranks’ in his red and white painted cart to sell his ice cream, usually in penny cornets.

Lower New Ranks

We lived at number 9 together with my grandfather, Jim Matthews, who worked until he was 70 years of age as a fireman at Kay’s Slope and Garn Drift Collieries prior to that he was fireman at Milfraen until the explosion [1929].The house was one of 18 similar houses in the row. It had a living room called the “kitchen”, a small room behind called “the room” where my grandfather slept and where I climbed into his feather bed with him in the mornings and he told me stories of his own childhood and younger days, or read the ‘Dandy’ and ‘Beano’ to me. He also taught me songs such as ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’ and ‘In an Old Australian Cottage with Ivy Round the Door’.

I remember another man coming I believe from Swansea, also in a horse drawn cart which was loaded with cockles which were sold by the pint. My Grancha would go out and buy a pint of cockles which he would boil in a cast iron saucepan on the open fire in the kitchen until they popped open and he and I would eat them. After I reached years of understanding and realised that the poor things were literally boiled alive I never ate another cockle again.

Behind my grandfather’s room was a lean-to pantry with a cold water tap. This is where food was kept and everyone washed and did all other things which required the use of water. Each house had just a front door and on the outside of that a half door (bottom half that is). A half door on which the women and old men would lean, talk and laugh on warm summer evenings. So you see, the half door was a very important part of the social structure of that small, compact community.

Of equal importance was the large stone outside each house which acted as a door stop for each half door - a stone on which the adults would sometimes sit, a stone on which the children would sometimes play. Each household and family were quite possessive of their own particular stone. The stone was a symbol of where one’s territory began and one’s neighbour’s territory ended. Perhaps it marked a family’s own personal space.

Outside toilets with no flushes were shared – one toilet between two families – so if you saw your neighbour walk across to the toilet with a bucket of water in one hand and a book or daily newspaper in the other, you waited until he or she returned to the house before going yourself.

Second World War

At the beginning of the war I remember Garn-yr-erw School, which I attended, having sandbags placed outside and windows having strips of paper over them so that in the event of a bomb dropping, the glass wouldn’t shatter and fly everywhere. We children were issued with gas masks which we took to school with us. I remember being most upset because I had an ordinary small adult, black-coloured one; while my friend, who was two years younger than me, had a red coloured Mickey Mouse gas mask. I considered this to be most unfair.

I remember the evacuees coming to Blaenavon. They came by train, arriving at the bottom station from where they walked or were transported to one of the schools – I think it was the Church School – to be allocated to families with whom they were to stay.

Our Mam came home with a little boy called David – I can’t remember his surname – he was about five or six years of age and came, I believe, from the London area. Understandably he was not a happy little boy and he cried almost constantly, particularly at bedtime, for the week or so that he stayed with us. Eventually we realised that this was because he was accustomed to go to his bed fully clothed so that when the air raid warning sounded he was already dressed to dash to the shelter. Mam also discovered from talking to him that he had a sister a few years older than himself who was staying with another family in our town. It was arranged that he should go to be with her.

We had another little boy called Eddy who was about my age and who I believe was also from the London area. He stayed for a year or maybe two. Eddy and I lived in a sort of armed truce. If I had a toy or anything else to play with, he would want it. Mam would say “give it to Eddy because he’s away from his home and his Mam and Dad”. This sort of situation could not continue for very long and it came to a head one Friday when my mother was down town shopping and only my grandfather and we two boys were at home. The inevitable happened; Eddy and I started to quarrel.

Now, Grancha came to Blaenavon from Herefordshire as a boy of ten years to work in the coke yard driving a horse and cart to earn money for his own keep and to send some home to help keep his widowed mother and younger sister. His way of solving problems had always been ‘straight talking’ and if that did not work he would resort to fists to sort problems out physically. When Eddy and I started to quarrel, without uttering a word, he opened the half door and pushed us outside onto the hard beaten earth in front of the houses which we referred to as the ‘Baillie’. Over there we fought and sorted out our differences – I like to think that we were better friends after that but I really cannot remember. I do know that when I think of that episode of my life I feel a pang of guilt and I think to myself “poor Eddy was away from his home and his Mam and Dad”. 

During the war years one of my grandfather’s main sources of pleasure was to wait for the air-raid warning siren to go and then to open the door wide leaving the electric light on in the living room behind him, then to lean on the half-door and to quarrel with the air raid warden who told him to “close the door and put the light out!’

Next door to us in number 10 Lower New Rank lived a lady called Mrs. Whent. She had no children of her own but she was a staunch member of that close knit little community and was liked and respected by all. In front of the houses every house had a garden plot and below the gardens Mr. and Mrs. Whent had a field. It was only a patch of fairly rough ground with a bank down one side, but it was a field. 

Periodically throughout the war years, Mrs. Whent would organise a party in the field. Trestle tables and chairs would appear as if by magic. Bread and butter would appear and things which we had almost forgotten about such as jelly and blancmange. Sports would be organised; everyone, children and adults would have a grand time and forget the war and all that it brought with it.

When I was nine years of age I was admitted to a children’s sanatorium in Llandrindod Wells. I spent six months there. I remember it as a really unhappy, miserable part of my life. On my tenth birthday when I was still a patient in that place, my parents visited, bringing with them the most wonderful birthday cake anyone could wish for, complete with coloured icing and all sorts of decorations and inside a beautiful rich fruit cake. Mrs. Whent had done it again! She must have worked her way across the entire row of eighteen houses in the Ranks, collecting a bit here and a bit there until she had the ingredients to make and bake that cake.  

Some years before my tenth birthday my grandfather, Jim Matthews, died and before I was discharged from Highland Moors Children’s Sanatorium my parents had moved our home from the Lower New Ranks to Garn-yr-erw.

The Black Houses

So home now was number 13 Fair Mount, Garn-yr-erw, commonly known as ‘The Black Ranks’. One of the great advantages of living ‘up the Garn’ was that we had a good two bed-roomed house with front and back entrances. Another advantage was that each house had its own toilet with a flush. These were situated in a row some distance from the gate into the back yard. One of the disadvantages was that several of our neighbours kept flocks of geese, which grew noticeable less in number as Christmas approached. When visiting the toilet, even though we had a flushing system, I would carry a bucket half-filled with water to swing around myself to fight off the geese that would come rushing towards you as soon as they saw you leaving by the back gate, with necks outstretched and wings flapping and making a hideous hissing sound. Believe me; those geese were creatures not to be trifled with! They would attack with little or no provocation. They were particularly nasty in the spring of the year when they had goslings.

My father could play the piano (mainly popular songs) so on Saturday evenings Mam, Dad and I would walk over to ‘The Whistle’ where we would meet some other families. We would all sit in the pub kitchen where children were allowed and where there was an old ‘Honkey Tonk’ piano which my father would play and a good time would be had by all. 

One of the disadvantages of living in Fair Mount was that the house was infested with Black Beetles; we called them ‘Black Pats’. Apparently this had nothing to do with domestic cleanliness because it was said that these ‘Black Pats’ came up from the old mine workings which had taken place years before under the land on which the houses were built. Everyone desperately tried to get rid of them and on Saturday nights when we returned home, Dad would very carefully unlock the front door, feel with his one hand for the electric light switch and, switching on the light, would dash into the house followed closely by my mother and me. We would kill as many ‘Black Pats’ as we could by stamping on them with our feet. This reduced the numbers somewhat but the ‘Black Pats’ were still numerically in control when we moved house several years later.

Similar to our neighbours we kept some chickens out the back; we also had a duck and a drake. The drake had a band of white feathers around his neck so inevitably we called him ‘The Vicar’. After living at Fair Mount Terrace for a few years we were allocated a brand new prefabricated house. In 1947, a week or so before moving Dad sold ‘The Vicar’ and his accompanying ‘wife’ to the landlord of The Whistle. For a week or so those ducks returned home almost everyday. In my mind’s eye, I can see them now, like a pair of homing pigeons, flying high in the sky from The Whistle, over Kay’s Slope and Garn Drift, around the old Muck Tip and descending into our backyard where I would catch them and carry them back over to the pub. 

49 Heol y Parc – ‘The Prefabs’

So we moved to Blaenavon town, to one of the Prefabs which were situated on Church Road. There we not only had a new dwelling place, but one free of ‘Black Pats’. We also had an indoor flushable toilet, hot water, a fitted kitchen, complete with fridge and a bathroom. These are things we take for granted today but in the late 1940s I assure you they were real, almost unimaginable luxuries. 

Thirty years have passed since I left Blaenavon to live elsewhere, but each time I visit, when I drive from the Abergavenny side to the top of ‘The Keeper’s’ and look down at the town, I still feel a deep sense of belonging and that, in a way, each visit is a ‘coming home’.