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My childhood was an idyllically happy one of extremes. My adventurous and generous parents would jet us off to the West Indies for Christmas and to glamorous European resorts at Easter time, but I was never happier than during the summer months when, with my younger brother, Andrew, I spent most of the school holidays with our maternal grandparents in West Cross.
Every morning, there was an exciting expectancy, when we woke up in the little terraced house with the pebbledash walls, to the smell of laverbread and bacon being cooked for breakfast by our beloved Gran. From the bedroom window, we could see across the shimmering sea to the Mumbles Pier, where our parents had first met at a dance and where our ‘Bampa’ would take us, as a treat, to see the lifeboat and buy us commemorative pencils.
Straight after breakfast, we would cross the field, where the long grass tickled our legs as we ran, to see my best friend, Sandy. We trampled our own path between the two houses, because we used it as a short cut so often.
Jenny aged 8
The three of us would then hold hands across the main road—watched from the window by Sandy's Mum—and head for the centre of our small, private universe—Lilliput Bay (photo).We could spend hours on the beach, laughing, talking and playing make‑believe games and not notice time passing. We'd sit on a tree branch to wave to the passengers on the Mumbles Train and hope to catch a glimpse of our great‑uncle, Cyril, in his Inspector's uniform.
We'd jump off a high concrete block onto the sands until our knees ached. We'd search the beach for seaweed to pop and shells to collect and, sometimes we'd find dead animals washed up, after a storm. We'd hide when we heard Gran shouting for us to come home for dinner.
Sometimes, at the weekend, Bampa would take us down at low tide, to collect cockles. He'd carry a big sack and we'd follow with our buckets and spades on the long walk out to the edge of the sea, where the muddy sand would ooze between our toes, as we looked for the tell‑tale worm casts, before digging down for the perfect little white shells.
We'd sing ‘Cockles and Mussels alive alive Oh’ as we returned home triumphantly, with our sack full of cockles, which Gran would put into a big enamel bowl of salt‑water in the scullery, before boiling them on the stove for our tea. At the end of the day, we would sit outside on the stone steps at the front of the house, look out to sea at the red sunset and consider ourselves the luckiest and happiest children in our own innocent Lilliput Universe.
The Mumbles Train at West Cross
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