Walton West

Back from a trip. Hiatus in stories. Here you are.  Just something simple and personal.

Walton West church is hidden away down a tiny lane on the Pembrokeshire coast; one field across is its churchyard, a broad sweep of sea beyond it and gnarled crab apples trees shaped by the sea wind. 

Here: Laura Margaret Llewellyn- my great grandmother- and her daughter, Florence Beckett, my grandmother. She was born in a house just by the beach you see here. But beyond in the churchyard, my best beloved John Llewellin Beckett, uncle, adopter of his own middle name (I don't know if his mother ever gave him one), but with the spelling he preferred. There are Llewellyns thick and fast in this place. And if you come here with the indomitable auntie Betty, she can take you round to graves old and new -- even explain the use of an epitaph or tell you a potted life story. That's if she has time. She does not care, she will say, to be morbid.

Roland Beckett, my grandfather and Florence, my grandmother, gave life to twelve children in all, with ten surviving childhood. With them all, the tough, kind figure that was Nanny, great grandmother. Always she lived with them. And I grew up with a vague idea that grandmother and grandfather had a bit of a difficult relationship now and then. I know that, when all the children were grown and most had left home, Roland and Florence divorced. Let's hope he found happiness in some other arms: a woman in Tenby about whom I know nothing.  But she was subsequent, don't you know.

In farms from the Swansea valley (for my mother was really a Valley girl by birth, you might say), to Kidwelly and dotted about Pembrokeshire; from Wiston to Creswell Key - my grandmother's last house before she came to live with her large brood - my mother and her brothers and sisters lived a demanding but loving life. I long to hear the stories of all this; I grew up always wanting ten children, after all. 

Last night, I heard about how they swam and splashed in a bathing pool in fields in Wiston; how my uncle John could not buy an engagement ring for my auntie Betty because, as he told her, he had bought a cow instead; how my great grandmother was so ravshing that she stopped traffic in Tenby main street and how --  well, you don't need to know all this. It's just that when you come from a big family, stories come thick and fast and I am grateful for their telling. And yet, much as I love this church on this peaceful little lane, I'd like them all back -- all those grandparents and cousins and uncles and aunts and great uncles - in one place, again - if I could. And just once - in case they all argued.