Visiting ‘Mamgu' (Poetry Monthly)

Memories of visiting ‘Mamgu’ in Maesteg mid 1950s

“Thirty miles, a ‘spangle’ to suck every ten, soon be there … look there’s the pub with our name spelt wrongly on it, must be well on our way now … and there’s that funny advert, so we’re getting near to Bridgend … and up the hill to Maesteg. Listen to Canta saying “I think I can … I think I can … I think I can.” d’you think he’ll get up to the top? [Canta was our old Ford, as in Cantafford it] … look! we can see over the town to the cemetery on the hill the other side, and Llys Marmor in its corner. … … Hullo, Mum, how are things” ‘Oh, Edgar’s on the couch, can’t do much, and I can’t get this chimney-oven to the right temper, Margaret got a little electric we keep in the back porchway. I spose it’s reliable, always the same, but everything tastes like factory food. Jane, my help, says everything modern is better, and she’d get better wages if she went to work down the factory instead of coming here to clean for me, and I don’t know if she’d be less grim if I paid her more, but we seem to be giving her so much anyway (why not just tell her to go if she wants to, probably just pressurising you, but you’d be lonely without her calling in wouldn’t you?) You girls go and play in the yard to give Dadcu quiet, but don’t go in his stonemason’s shed, and don’t go up the hill, and if you cross the road [dead end] be careful and don’t slip down on to the colliery railway, and if you go into the cemetery don’t run, and come back when we call you for lunch … now eat all that pudding and you’ll find a surprise at the bottom … (what surprise? there’s nothing here) – the picture [flowers] of course. You lot going up the mountain in the drizzle this afternoon? mind the boggy bits, we never go up there, just walk down to town, but not often now, my feet get so full of my shoes, so I just stay by-yer, and all my friends say it’s too hard to come up to see me, think they’re too old, so they stay buh-there, in the town, and we all find it strange trying to use this telephone, and it’s so cold out there by the front door, on the stone tiles, we never use that door, and be back for tea … (This cake seems like a handful of dried fruit was chucked down from the top of the mountain and some happened to land in it. MUM! don’t cut that loaf towards your chest!) I do always carve the ‘bara’ into my bosom, got it wedged well cwtched buh-there safe and steady to saw it straight, the ‘cyllell’ on’t jump. Don’t go in the front room, girls, ‘merched’, it needs to be kept tidy for Margaret’s 11+ tuition children [tiptoeing in it seemed like a dead place] and keep out of the middle room, it’s Dadcu’s bedroom now. (What’s that little door in the wall outside the back door? It’s full of cobwebs behind) Oh, that was our cold store before we got our little fridge. Stan! take the pots-siambr upstairs, no-one will want to come down to the toilet in the back porch in the night, Ooh – NancyMargaretMaryEdna what’sthename… Nancy! where are iw?’

[I've put this in autobiography as based on many various hazy memories, but all squeezed together, and joined up and filled out a little with some imagination to hopefully represent the remembered ‘feel’ of the occasions.]

I've attempted a reading on soundcloud if you want to get something like the accents.

https://soundcloud.com/rhiannon-weber/visitingmamgu