My early years were spent in the mining village of Abercynon, attending Abercynon Infants School, and Abertaf Primary School.
I remember the cold winters and hot barmy summers, frequently interrupted by the usual wet weather that Wales is renowned for.
I was born, at a very early age, in Mountain Ash Hospital. Where I was one of several boys born to various mothers who had all decided to call their baby boys either Martyn, Martin or Mark, this resulted in my father being shown various different babies until with help from my mother he was eventually shown the correct baby, me.
There were many times, especially in my teenage years that my father asked my mother if she had in fact picked the right baby!
My father was a postman whilst my mother, who already had her hands full caring for myself and my two elder sisters, also had several jobs helping out various elderly and sick relatives by doing their cleaning and shopping.
My first memories are living in a house with four rooms downstairs and four bedrooms upstairs, there was no bathroom but it did have an outside toilet which was next to the small shed used as a coal bunker.
As the house was built on the side of a hill it meant that the base of the house was about 5 feet above the pavement and that the back garden was at the same level as the upstairs windows.
At the front of the house was a small garden that was separated from the house by a flagstone path that led to some steps that led down to the pavement outside.
This Garden was my mothers pride and joy and she spent many an hour doing the weeding and tending the plants and was a definite no go area for us kids.
At the back of the house was another larger garden that was a mixture of play area and flower beds.
At the back right hand side of the garden was the back door which led onto the back lane.
My mother could never understand that while I complained about helping out in the garden doing such chores as watering the flowers and vegetables and of course weeding, I was at my most happiest when I was digging large holes in her beloved garden. My father used to often joke that he wouldn’t be surprised to wake up to a garden full of kangaroos.
The actual reason for the digging, was that at the time, apart from westerns, I was mad keen on war movies, and I was actual digging trenches/fox holes that I could use to protect the house from some imaginary force or forces that were hell bent on stealing my mother’s renowned Welsh cakes.
However, much trouble I got into digging fox holes in the garden it was not nearly as much trouble as I got into when playing cowboys and Indians after watching fort Apache.
There I was, not a young boy in the back garden, but a red indian brave just outside fort Apache in Arizona.
The arrows I used were made from wooden dowelling with plastic ‘feathers’ at one end and rubber sucker cups at the other. The bow was made out of some sort of curved plywood with bright red string.
I would fire the arrows at the house/fort and then run down from the garden to the back yard to retrieve the arrows taking great CARE not to be shot by the imaginary solders at the windows of the fort.
However, whilst the arrows I fired at the wall just bounced of the brick work, the arrows fired by the indians at the fort stuck in the wood and stayed where they were.
Then during one of my attacks on the ‘fort’ I missed the wall and my arrow accidentally struck, and more importantly, as far as I was concerned, stuck to the window.
The window was one of the old sash type, made up of a top and bottom half. The bottom half was made up of one large pain of glass and the top half was made up of two smaller panes of glass separated by a vertical wooden separator in the middle of the window. It was to the top left had pane that my arrow had hit and stuck to.
My mother had told me not to fire the arrows at the window as they could break the glass, but the warning from my mother was soon forgotten in the pleasure I got from seeing the arrows I fired stay where they struck and quiver slightly, just like the arrows fired by the indians in the movie.
So although it meant it took me longer to retrieve the arrows that were now sticking to the windows, as I now had to go down to the back yard, go into the house and through the kitchen and hallway, then up the stairs to the back bedroom, where my sisters used to sleep. Slide up the window, retrieve the arrows, reclose the windows and retrace my steps back to the back garden.
This also took longer as each time I went upstairs I had to make up a story that would not make my mother suspicious about what was actually happening. This was not as easy as you may think as we had a downstairs bathroom, so I couldn’t use the excuse that I was going to the loo.
Well, after several treks back and forth, it finally happened the glass decided that it just couldn’t take anymore and cracked and when I say cracked it wasn’t just one or two cracks, but a myriad of cracks all spread out like a spiders web from the centre. The arrow had not hit the smaller top left pane that I was actually aiming for but just left of centre of the large bottom pain.
There were a couple of thoughts that went through my mind, the first was wow that really looks like it’s been hit by an arrow, well more like a bullet. The second thought was ‘mam’s going to murder me’!
Then I started thinking of how I could retrieve the arrow before my mother would notice what has happened.
… more to follow …