sounds of travelling ... work in progresss

listening to the traffic drive up the swansea valley through clydach where i now live digs deep. to when i used to lie in bed in granny's house as the few 1950s cars slowly puttered through resolven illuminating my bedroom ceiling as they passed. it gave me the sensations of excitement and security at the same time. a big adventure negotiated from the cosiness of my own blankets. guess i've always been a home boy. preferred travelling in the mind.

we used to visit resolven a lot mum and i. on the swansea train to the foot worn station serving the little town where she had hated growing up. don't know why she disliked it so much. it must have been pretty dirty, like most of south wales when men had man's work to do and women cooked, cleaned, and had the babies. respectability was rife and no-hope mothers didn't shoot up smack. its nastier and more hopeless now.

granny lived in a nice end of terrace on the main street with rachie her fond neighbour to one side. to the back what seemed like a huge garden held a substantial wooden swing frame, borders, a lawn. pear trees grew uncertainly in a walled bed right outside the back door. there may have been a swing in the frame. honeysuckle swarmed before draping itself over the cross bar.

it was the doctor's house. i never met him. don't know if he ever saw me. he'd been a doc in world war one and since had aquired a taste for the drink. what pain he was trying to fix no-one ever knew. these days one might imagine. post traumatic stress hadn't been invented then and alcoholism was not understood as a disease. more of a weakness.

nobody wins a war. wars give history a chance to blow itself out of a bottleneck. but history is an unforgiving general who thinks nothing of grinding mere mortals under its armoured heel. grandad didn't win his war. like so many of his contemporaries he offered his all in defiance. only to be wasted like the leaves in autumn. my gut feeling is that he probably tried his best. at least to help those who had stopped the bullets. and the gas. and the shrapnel.

she had had the benefit of a good education had my gran. been to university in aberystwyth in the early 1900s. one of the leaders of her age really. and she had married the doctor before he left for europe.