Winkles for Tea

There were no washing machines in those days, but Grannie allowed herself the luxury of having a ‘washerwoman’ to attend to the laundry. Many of the village families did B&B as Mumbles was then a favourite watering hole. There were no package deals, no cheap flights to exotic faraway places! Indeed, where better, in those halcyon days, just before the Second World War than the pretty fishing village of Mumbles and the beautiful Gower bays just beyond?

Grampie had a rowing boat, the ‘Viola’ in which he gave the ‘lodgers’ trips around the bay and I often went out in the boat, with Grampie chewing his twist and telling me sailors’ tales. We would go to Langland Bay to pick laverbread from the rocks, which Grannie would boil in her big soot-blackened saucepans. It seemed to take forever to cook and smelled the sea all though the house.

I remember sunny days spent picking winkles down at Southend. Grannie would make a bottle of proper lemonade with real lemons and well-water and some jam sandwiches. Then Grampie would get his big bucket and I, my small one and off we would go on our winkle-picking safari, which began at the mighty Knab Rock. I would wear my ‘winkle clothes’ which consisted of an old dress, old gym shoes and a straw hat. Grampie wore his trousers rolled up and on his head a red and white spotted handkerchief knotted at each corner.

At certain tides there was a sandy path from the Rock to the Pier and it was along here that we would go. The sand was always wet and gritty and there were shallow pools between the stones and the rocks, where sometimes Grampie would let me sit down, take off my shoes and dabble my feet—but always with the instruction ‘don’t tell your Grannie!’ Then he would turn over the stones and I would pick the winkles and put them in our buckets. Sometimes there were also small crabs and shrimps in the pools, but we never touched those as we were after the winkles! When our buckets were full, we began our homeward journey and for me, the best part—winkles for tea! When we arrived home, Grannie would wash the winkles in salted water, put them in one of her sooty saucepans and boil them over the fire. When they were cooked, she would tip them out onto a large plate, cut some thin bread and butter and we would sit around the table to eat them. Grannie would give me her hat-pin (I am sure it was not her Sunday-best one!) to pick the winkles out, but it was not easy and they would fly all over the plate and over me! Grampie liked vinegar with his, but I just liked the lovely thin bread and butter with mine.

Two of them that I especially remember were Aunt Jen from Wootten-under-Edge and my mother’s cousin, Elsie Lugg from Bristol. We used to go down the bays or for a walk to the pier, where we would usually enjoy an ice-cream. We also used to take the Lodgers out and they were all enchanted with our beaches, Caswell being the favourite, mostly reached by a walk around the cliffs. Sounds, smells and tastes still evoke memories. I will never forget the cold sweet taste of water direct from the well. I recall black and white cats always called Jim andcanaries, generations of which were called Pip and all of which sang beautifully, sounds which bring back memories of No.19, along with the memory of listening, while in bed to Grannie’s carriage clock marking the hours with ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Bonnie Dundee’. Other noises recalled but now rarely heard, include the rockets or maroons fired to muster the lifeboat crew, the rattle of the Mumbles train and the Church bells, now heard less often, although the clock still chimes the years away.

My grandparents’ house was also full of unforgettable aromas—sea smells, fresh bread baking in the coal oven, even the soot, and beeswax and linoleum in the bedrooms. The perfume from the jasmine and honeysuckle, which entwined around each other and climbed up the front of the house from the front garden. The intoxicating smell of apples in the attic where they were stored and where the fragrance remained even after they were all used up so that they always seemed to be there. I used to help Grannie store them and she always impressed upon me not to put bad next to good, else the bad would rot the good. She never let me forget the significance of this and paralleled it with bad people corrupting the good.

In those days, around 1932, Gloucester Place was a quiet pretty village street with railed or walled front gardens full of spring and summer flowers. The only traffic was the stick & paraffin man, with his horse and cart, the cockle woman who brought home-grown veg with her cockles, also the coal man. But my favourites were the beautiful dray horses, which brought the beer to the Victoria Public House a little further up the road from No. 19. Other memories of long ago include watching the lamp-lighter light the gas lamps in the Gloucester Place and seeing Grampie attempting to climb the greasy pole on Regatta day in his bathing suit, which had built-up shoulders and legs!

Next door to No.19 was a large double-fronted house called Woodland Villa. I believe the name arose from the fact that when the house was first built approximately 100 or more years ago, the woods, which now hover on the skyline, like a crown over Gloucester Place came much further down the street. Woodland Villa belonged to the |Hayward family and there were four children—three girls and a boy. When the eldest daughter married, Grannie made her some pillows, with feathers from her own back-yard chickens sewn into the ticks by hand. Megan tells me she still has them over fifty years later. It was to this house that we were one day to move and although I loved my time in no.19, we are happy here.

Those were lovely days, which have lain half-forgotten in my memory until I began to write this story. Memories evoked perhaps by the scent of jasmine, a whiff of tobacco, a snatch of one of Grampie’s songs or a soft feather pillow. Never really gone, just filed away in a ‘time’ cabinet, to be taken out and caressed when desired.

Seventy years on, the quiet village street is no more. Almost every household has a car or cars. They lie littered like a never-ending necklace of clumpy metal up Gloucester Place, across Westbourne Place and down Park Street. (Most streets are sadly now like this) The stick man and the horses are gone and replaced by juggernaut lorries which bump their way up the street about their deliveries, scraping all the walls as they do so. Times have changed and we cannot leave our doors unlocked or lower windows open as in my Grandparents’ day.