Stories

People and Places

Eluned Rees asks where the best tales come from.

Our lives are full of stories, and I have been thinking, as I get older, of the effect they have on our lives.

Think of the terrifying stories of the Old Testament – a man being swallowed by a whale, a young man fighting a giant, another in a lions’ den! Thank goodness the new Testament stories are less scary until we get to the Crucifixion.

But family stories are also important as influences on us. My father was full of stories of his childhood, on a farm in the Cothi Valley. They didn’t learn of the end of the Boer War for days, as there was no radio in those early days. The doctor came on horseback, and actually he was murdered, and my father was named after him, as he was delivered by him.

My mother was brought up in Morriston and she had stories of the Second World War. There were many nights of hiding in the Anderson Shelter at the bottom of the garden, and as she returned from a typing course in Cardiff, her train was forced to stop before entering the station, while they watched bombs raining down on Skewen. It was like daylight for days. My father could see the light in the sky even from Cwrt y Cadno!

Their early married life began in Llanwrda where he was curate. They lived in ‘rooms’ sharing a kitchen with the owners, my father cycling to take services in Llansadwrn and to Llandovery College where he occasionally taught Welsh. My mother learned Welsh in an area where old people and children spoke no English, and she succeeded. Then they moved to a big cold Vicarage in Llwyndafydd, without electricity upstairs, and candles and a lamp until I was born. You could say I brought light into their lives!

But which stories have I shared with my own children? Will they remember them? Of course, stories of the Vicarage, school and church, a Welsh rural village life mainly, and I felt it important that they visited places which were important to me.

Which raises the question, which is more important to pass on to future generations, the stories of people or places? You could say that people come and go but places stay the same? Or are they intertwined? The lovely tradition of calling a person by the name of their home, for example Dai Brynteg or Lloyd Penplwyf, shows the indelible link between a person and the land. What, I wonder, do you think?