Fron Bache

Another bright, cool, breezy day, ideal washing weather.  As I was hanging out the washing just now, I could hear voices over the hedge in the graveyard next door.  A man and wife and their daughter.  They had come to tidy one of the graves and the little girl was asking questions.   'And she lived with Grandpa?' asked the girl.  'Yes, your grandmother,' said the father, implying to me at least that the grandmother had died before the girl was born.  When I was a child we would visit the family grave at Fron Bache in Llangollen at least twice a year, driving over in the autumn to tidy it for the winter and again in the spring to check that the winter hadn't been too hard on it.  We would spend a few moments tidying and cutting back the grass, perhaps righting the little pot.  My brother and I would have the job of replacing the lead letters that had fallen out; the O of Eyton, the family name I have inherited, the D of December.  Then we would have a pub lunch - the Hand, or the Britannia - and then visit cousin Arthur at Pen y Bedw.  He would be in the kitchen listening to Gardener's Question Time on Radio 4. We would stay for an hour or so before heading back to Liverpool.    Something of those Welsh Sundays has stayed with me, a day for family history and baking.   I thought of this house as the sort of Welsh cottage we would pass on our way home, the sort of place I would not want to leave.