Alun Buffry's Blog: The Autobiography of a Head by Alun Buffry, Part 1

Taken from The Autobiography of a Head

"I will avoid saying that I was born at an early age because I cannot remember it. My mother used to say that I had been found under a Mulberry bush, so I believe her. That was February 1950, in Barry, South Wales.

In fact, I cannot remember the first three years at all!

I can put a date on my first memory, the 3rd of September 1953.

I distinctly remember waking up in a massive bed with my father. My mother was not there. We were about to go to pick her up from the ‘Nursing Home’ and to meet my new baby sister, Gwyneth.

We went in a big black taxi and I had to wait in the taxi with the driver whilst my Dad went inside the building.

He soon came back with my Mam who was holding Gwyneth. That was when I first realised where babies came from and that I was an exception. The nurses made them!

Gwyneth very kindly brought me a gift, a ‘potato man’ kt. All I had to do was get a potato from Mam and stick into it the arms and legs and eyes, nose, lips and hat and I had a potato man!

I loved Gwyneth from that point on, although now I have few memories of her during my younger years.

Mam and Dad, in those first few years, ran a small sweet shop. I can remember standing there one day, the customer side of the high counter, looking up at the rows of sweet jars on the very high top shelves. Mam was like a giant too. I was not normally allowed in the shop, for obvious reasons.

Years later I learnt that during the Second World War, Mam had worked In a munitions factory, “putting round screws into square holes” as she used to say, lodging with a couple that I later knew as Auntie Alice and Uncle Bert, who were not actually related to us at all. In those days family friends were often called Uncle and Auntie for us kids.. Later in my childhood, we often went to visit them in Cheltenham. Uncle Bert taught me how to race snails.

Dad had been stationed in Cheltenham and served on the searchlights and as a chef. He told me that he and the other cooks used to have competitions to see who could remove the longest strip of peel from a potato without it breaking.

After the War ended, he took a room with Alice and Bert and also worked with them as a confectioner. That was where he met Mum, apparently. Dad’s name was Staley Richard, but she called him Jim, for some reason that I never knew.

I have other memories of that time between the delivery of Gwyneth and my first day at school and three and a half years later. I can remember my cowboy outfit and gun, my red peddle car and my train set.

We lived in a large terraced house in Barry, not far from the docks, along with my Mum’s parents, Nana and Grampy and also my mother’s sisters, Auntie Nellie and Auntie Phyllis.. I can hardly remember Nellie as she died when I was a very young. Grampy had worked as a docker and liked a flutter on the horses. I can remember him feeding me pieces of fat from a pig’s hock that he loved to eat; I hated the lean!

Grampy was the son of William Langley who had been a travelling showman and ran donkey rides on Barry Island beach, until one day a donkey kicked the then-young Grampy (Alf) on his leg where he had been kicked the day before in a football match; it lamed Alf for life and William gave up running the donkey rides after that. William was dead before my Mum had been born in 1911.

Nana had been a serving maid in a house before she married Alf. Her name was Bessie Ellen Louise Palmer. Years later, I learned that both families, the Langleys and the Palmers, had moved from Somerset to Barry to find work in about 1890. Strangely Alf had a sister called Bessie and Bessie had a brother called Alf, although not related. I discovered that decades later when I was researching family trees.

I remember most of my Uncles and Aunties on both Mum’s and Dad’s side of the family.

On Mum’s side there was Uncle Bill and Auntie Lorna, who lived locally, with my cousin Pam. From Nelson in the Welsh valleys, there was Uncle Sid and Aunty Sal, who was really Sarah but called Sal by family and Stella by friends. Uncle Sid used to come line fishing with Dad and I from the Barry Island beach and pier (Barry Island was not at that time an island and was connected by road and rail and had a good fairground and popular beach. Sid and Sal had two children, Victor, who was a couple of years older than me and I used to wrestle with, and Ann, a couple of years younger than me and whom I had a huge crush on. Uncle Charlie and Aunty Doris lived in Winnersh, near Reading. They had two daughters, Anne and Audrey. Charlie was a photographer and showed me how to develop and print black and white films; he drove a motorbike and side car and took me to spot trains and take photographs of them as they sped past. I also remember Bessie’s sister whom I knew as Auntie Sarah although she had been Christened Elizabeth Sarah, and he son Arthur, a builder, who married Hilda.

Auntie Phyllis was unmarried and lived with us.

On dad’s side I remember his own parents, Maggie and Sidney. They lived in Argoed near Blackwood, in the valleys. Sidney was a coal miner in the local pits. I remember being at their house when he came back from work, blackened with coal dust. Then, after he had washed, he reappeared, clean and white. For a while I thought I had two grandads, one black and one white. Sadly he died when I was still young, after falling off a ladder at work. He was a foreman and had asked somebody to climb a ladder, but the man had refused and, as apparently Granddad was not the sort of man to ask somebody to do something that he would not himself do, climbed the ladder and fell. I remember being told that Nanny and her youngest son, Maurice, along with her daughter Sheila, had seen Grandad standing at the top of the stairs and he had told them not to worry as everything would be OK. Then there was a knock on the door and a policeman telling them Sidney had fallen and died.

Apart from my Mum’s Mum’s sister Sarah, I never knew anything about the other siblings of my grandparents, although there were many and very little about my great grandparents most of whom were dead before my parents were born in 1911, (my Mum) and 1915 (my Dad).

Uncle Maurice was the youngest of my uncles, just about twenty years older than myself and unmarried. Sheila was married to Ken who was a prison warden. There was also Uncle Hayden and Auntie Delse who had two sons Gareth and Nigel, Uncle Frank and Auntie Rachel, and Auntie Margaret, and Uncle Islwyn and Auntie Iris who had two sons older than I, Brian and Idwell. Of course I met them all and remember them all, but we did not spend so long with them.

Mum and Dad had given up the shop after my sister was born and Dad worked on the railways..