Where do you come from?

My family: both sets of grandparents; lived in the valleys. My parents got to know each other in Maesteg Grammar School. Although I had no personal experience of living for an extended period in the South Wales Valleys the majority of my immediate family had significant chunks of their lives in an environment which is essentially foreign to me.

The time that I spent in my maternal grandparents’ house in Vicarage Terrace in Maesteg was hardly the normal valley experience. Maesteg is not the conventional narrow sided valley; the main street is quite broad and, in my memory, bustling and affluent. Vicarage Terrace allowed extensive views from the window to the other side of the wide valley; the garden of my grandparents’ house stretched back (seemingly for ever to my juvenile eyes) into a field with a small stream bubbling over carefully constructed mini waterfalls, through a gate onto the side of the mountain, down which I had bumped my way on an improvised sleigh wearing a wildly unfashionable bobble hat at an age when I didn’t care.

My experience of the ‘real’ valleys was when we did a grand tour of the relatives and, as a child of some six or seven years old I was paraded, presented and kissed by a variety of kind, old, frightening (and hairy) men and women who all (invariably) told me that the last time they saw me I was only that high and now, just look at me. All of them, without fail, the same words. Cups of tea and hard biscuits. And on to the next.
It was during one of these epic tours of the valleys and the relatives that my father stopped the car on a mountain road, took me out of the car and indicated the small village at the bottom of the valley and said to me, “That is where I grew up!” He said it with pride and a sort of gentle affection. And then he looked at me. And I was staring with open mouthed horror at the idea of growing up in a place which so obviously lacked all the necessary requisites of a city. I may have been young, but I knew that green mountain sides and acres of open space could not compensate for the trolley bus that took me from the end of Dogfield Street in Cathays to the Empire Pool. I knew that the only safe open space was Roath Park, not the side of a mountain. I expected streets of shops not corner shops. And I knew that I liked the anonymity of a big city to the comfortable fraternity and community of a small town. It just wasn’t for me to the same extent as it just was for my dad and his siblings.

All of these thoughts came to the forefront of my mind when watching a BBC 2W film on the Rhondda Valley. I joke that for me Caerphilly is North Wales, but the number of times that I venture north of that town in Wales is somewhat limited. Uncle Eric is the only person I have visited in Maesteg over the last year or so. All my other relatives who lived in the valleys are mostly dead, or at least those great aunts and two-generations-ago-folk that used to populate the valleys for me.

It’s ridiculous to generalise from me to the city, but I do think that we Cardiffians have a problem with the valleys: they are so close and yet so far. My version of the Valleys is built on what my parents, their generation and my grandparents were and are: the economy built on coal and the primacy of education as the way out. The quality in depth in the valleys of educated people with socialist principles and the rest of the myth!

When I used to go to the valleys regularly there were still coal mines working. I did not experience the soul of the valleys being ripped out and a new entrepreneurial system being put in place.

The BBC programme used a photographer and art teacher to point to the colour and new spirit in the valleys and question the black and white picture of deprivation which, as Patrick Hannan has pointed out, often populates the holiday park of the past which is such a popular resort in Wales!

It’s a challenge.