Losing my parents
Posted on: February 25, 2012
My Father, as I have said, was in poor health and had suffered several heart attacks during the seven years he had been home from work. Somehow he had got over each one and slowly recovered. He wasn’t able to get out much; a walk down to the Ivy Bush pub for a pint was the most he could do, not as much for the pint as for the chat he would have with his old workmates. Indeed, he never did have to pay for his pint. Usually there was one waiting for him behind the bar, paid for by one of his many friends ready for the next time he could get down there. One of us would go and meet him, and walk slowly home with him. He would take ages to walk up the hill to our house. He could so easily have given up and sat in his corner by the fire, but his spirits kept him going to the end. That end came suddenly in 1933. He’d been standing by the gate outside, as he always did before going to bed. He came in and went upstairs at about midnight, and within an hour he was dead.
In our hearts we all knew this would happen sometime, but when it did happen the shock, the pain and grief, were just the same. This is something we must all face at some time in our lives. I can only say that somehow we find some hidden strength in ourselves which makes us carry on.
I was, sooner than I ever thought, to need that strength once more. After Father died my Mother seemed to give up the struggle that she had partly hidden from us during the years he had been ill. Only she knew what they had gone through in those years. She died two years later, in 1935. They were, respectively, 58 and 55 years of age. That was almost sixty years ago. I do not think a single day has passed when I haven’t thought of something of them.
A Swansea Valley Man 
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