Caswell Valley Septembers 

From the time I was three years old until the outbreak of war in 1939 (some eight or nine years) my parents rented a bungalow in Caswell Valley for the whole month of September. This was a magical time for me, the memories of which have stayed with me all my life.     

 When we began our stays at our bungalow, which was called ‘Wyoming’, it was the first week in September and still summer. We would go down to the beach and swim in the sea, which was calm and all the summer’s warmth still there; after the second week, the weather would begin to change, the world turning towards winter, the mornings cool and misty and in the evening air, a chill. It became dark earlier too, though midday was still warm and mellow.

     There were blackberries and elderberries in the hedgerows and autumn’s invisible brush would begin to paint thin gold lines on the edges of the beech leaves. There was a red-gold harvest moon and the stars so big and bright that I felt I could stretch out my hands and touch them! Sometimes towards the equinox on 21st September there might be a storm or a wild wind. Then we loved to go to the beach and look at the ‘white horses’ on the sea and we might perhaps venture into the water if the waves were not too big and rough.

I began riding lessons at Twomey’s Riding School at the top of the valley. I had always loved horses and wanted to learn to ride. I shall never forget my rides down the autumn valley to the beach and back up Caswell hill to the stables. During these holidays, Grannie and Grampie would walk over to see us from their home in Gloucester Place, Mumbles—Grannie’s lodgers having departed by now, so she had more time to spare. They liked to come and watch me riding and Grannie would say in her Gloucestershire-cum-Mumbles speak, ‘Yissen be careful thee dissen fall off!’ which meant, ‘Yourself be careful you don’t fall off!’

Grampie would take me for walks in the woodland and show me the tree where he planned to cut a branch for a walking stick when it was ready. I think we must have waited about two years before he deemed it right! I still have this stick today. Then we would all go and pick blackberries and elderberries. My mother would make a blackberry tart on the oil stove at the bungalow and Grannie would take the elderberries back home to make elderberry wine. 

          On a Sunday, we might meet them at St. Peter’s Church, Newton and my mother, Grannie and I would attend the service, while ‘the boys’ went back to the bungalow where, no doubt, my father would just happen to have a flagon of ale or two for himself and Grampie! This did not happen every Sunday, as Grannie was hard-pressed to leave for her beloved All Saints’ Church at Oystermouth. I suppose those Septembers were some of the happiest of my childhood. We little knew what was about to happen!

           Then one Sunday morning, sunny as I recall, my father had gone across the field from ‘Wyoming’ to where some lads had tents, where they must have had some kind of radio receiver or crystal set. I will always remember Daddy coming back, standing in the doorway and saying, ‘ We are at war with Germany!’ It was 3rd September.

           We remained in the valley for the rest of the month, (we had paid our rental after all !!) although some families left to go home.  We were in the period of the ‘phoney war’ as it became known and although the sky was the same blue and the sea just as warm, somehow nothing was really the same. No one knew what to expect — would Germany invade us? Would we be bombed? All was different, a sense of foreboding hung over the valley as the autumn mists veiled the sun.

           When we left ‘Wyoming’ that autumn, little did we know it would be for the last time. We were not to return again once the war had ended, as our lives would have changed forever — my mother was to become ill and sadly die at the young age of 53 in 1947.

           I am so glad that we, as a family, had those ‘Caswell Valley Septembers’. I have so many wonderful abiding memories of those golden days in ‘Wyoming,’ the little black and white painted bungalow with the pink rambling roses tumbling about its veranda. There, we used to sit on many an evening and listen to the records of the day on our wind-up gramophone — tunes of the thirties such as George Formby’s ‘When I’m cleaning windows’ or Jack Hulbert’s ‘Who’s been polishing the sun?’ and many more.

           Such is the pattern of life, which we have to accept— the good and the bad. The good memories help to tide us over the bad ones. It is all there in our own ‘life book.’

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