Got to keep this blog going, by hook or by crook,
Got to keep going until that bloody book…
A friend and I went to Penarth to do a gardening job. Finishing early, we walked up Clive Crescent in the warm, still spring air to the little park at the top of Penarth Head. We had a smoke in the hazy sunshine, looking out over Flatholm (Ynys Echni) and Steepholm (Ynys Rhonech) shimmering on a glassy sea. There was an old woman sitting on a bench nearby. She got up from her seat and came over to us. Unprompted, she began to speak.
“I’ve lived here all my life. I remember the docks. I remember when there was a ladder down the cliff to the beach. I remember cycling around the Vale on empty roads at weekends. It was a working town. Now nobody knows their neighbours. Nobody is from Penarth. No local people can afford to live here any more. They’re priced out of their own town. My son lives in Barry. I’m 84. Not long left. Nobody knows anything about the area and its history. Nobody’s interested. There’s no community any more. You could be anywhere…”
And so she free-associated, opening up her heart and mind to two complete strangers. She must have recognised something in us and knew we would be receptive and respectful. As she spoke, her rheumy eyes scanned westwards to Trwyn Larnog and “the Holms”, as she called the offshore islands, and out to the wide ocean beyond. She was at the end of her days. We were her witnesses.
Got to keep this blog going, by hook or by crook,
Got to keep going until that bloody book…
On the way back to Cardiff we stopped for a pint at the Oystercatcher on Terra Nova Way. The names of both the pub and the road tell you all you need to know about this part of Penarth. Here, the Taff Vale Railway’s Penarth branch ran alongside the 1865 Penarth Dock (closed in 1963). In the 1980s the eastern part of the docks were gentrified with crappy toytown houses crammed in around a synthetic marina where absentee social climbers from England could park their yachts, and the remainder has subsequently been given over to desolate, desultory consumerism, of which the Oystercatcher, part of the Hungry Horse chain, is a textbook example. Bored bores ingested their plastic, reconstituted, industrial food under the ersatz ye-olde eaves, only communicating with those they knew already and too lazy and brainwashed to want better. We threw back our overpriced pints, noted how few people were using the 2010 Pont y Werin footbridge spanning the River Ely (no wonder, it leads only to pedestrian-hostile highways and bleak non-places on both sides), and headed home. It’s some kind of a life.
Got to keep this blog going, by hook or by crook,
Got to keep going until that bloody book…
Ladder indeed. Silly old biddy. It was a proper cast-iron staircase.
Near where it used to be, I once met a very old man with a small child – introduced to me as his grandson – digging out fossils from the base of the cliff. They had a pile of them in a bucket. If they’d kept at it they’d have brought the whole headland down by now.
“Got to keep this blog going by hook or by crook
Got to keep going until that bloody book”
I hope that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop the blog when the book is out, Dic. Please keep blogging. It’s a fab blog, and got me into into learning all about Cardiff and its history. Thanks for that, Dic, very much.
Also, I just remembered, you said you would put all the info that had to be left out of the book onto the blog. Please do.