The White Pumps and the Daffodils

To Nian

It took 40 minutes to walk to Y Drenewydd. 40 minutes through the winding roads of the Severn Valley, the older ones helping the youngest over the styles and runlets. The bridlepath was marked with the feet from centuries before, and horseshoes had made coal-coloured pits on the soft eath. The waves of the river under a bridge danced, but they out-did the sparkling waves in glee, and one of the little girls began to whistle hollowly. It was like the wind through the miners cottages of the Southern Valleys, and the tune was immediately recognisable:

Here we are again, happy as can be
All good friends and jolly good company 
Never mind the weather, never mind the rain
Now we're all together, whoops she goes again

The same song would resonate in the memories of grandchildren more than eighty years later, in the horizon of the next millenium. This was a time when the 20th century still seemed full of hope, and promises of peace.
Behind the flock of children walked a woman, her face lined beyond her youth, and a man, his weatherbeaten complexion and chiselled face betrayed by lines of laughter at the corners of his eyes.

In Y Drenewydd they stop at the small churchyard and the children pick some daffodils to leave at the newest graves, the earth still dark and moist, the wound not yet healed. But these are the graves of strangers, for the dead of the young family lie at llanmerewig church. A church where, 65 years later, a couple would take the first tentative vows of love.
They stop at a bakers, and buy a chelsea bun to share, and then enter under a peeling sign reading "Newtown General Store". Minutes later they emerge, the youngest clutching a paper bag. Inside is a pair of white pumps.

The next week it is time for the children to walk to school. 3 miles in the morning, three home again in the evening, a hot potato burning into the pockets in the Winter, a slab of bread and cheese in the Summer, but these were the children of Welsh farmers. They were tough. But before the lane there was a field, a large, gaping stretch of churned soil, muddy in the Winter, dusty in the Summer. And as the youngest child reaches the edge she utters a cry. Her pumps are smeared with mud, and it is seeping into her socks, and she cries as if it is seeping into her heart, and the pumps are brown, and there is no white to be seen. And that night she cleans them well after supper, and the next day, and the day after that, and everyday untill her feet have grown too large, she walks across the field without the pumps on, barefoot. And she is scolded at school, and feels the sting of the ruler too many times, but she never walks through the field with the pumps on again.

The terracotta-patterned linoleum is peeling at one corner, and the 1960s curtain fabric is unexpected against the Marks and Spencer table cloth, a recent Christmas present. The sun pours in through a window unopened for 20 years, and the potatoes sit in an old Cornflakes packet above the peg bag and the jelly as it sets in the cool of the porch. Nain tells me about her house, about her school, about her white pumps, and how she had to "carry them in her hands". She wrings the hands out methodically as she talks, reaching the last the detail of the memory, hands lined with tales of washing and motherhood. 94 years old today.

She talks matter of factly, the coronation china displayed in the glass behind her, the square television waiting expectantly for todays weather forcast. She tells me it is hard to be the last one left, and I believe her. She says she would like to have someone to discuss the memories with, and adds that they weren't all happy. And as the timer beeps for the ham, and I stand, she insists:

"But we were happy Daisy. My dad was always working, and we weren’t wealthy we were poor, but we coped. He was a farm worker and we got land. Only a small farm, so he had to go out and do work. But oh my god, dad was one in a million."

And then the trifle needs seeing to, and the room fills with the sickly lemon smell of morrisons value washing up liquid, and the day continues. But above the overcooked potatoes and orange squash, my mind still wanders with the children in the valley in Powys, and the daffodils, beneath the trees
fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The little girl in white on the left

Me and Nain and my baby brother