My grandmother had the kind of face which I find almost impossible to describe. If I see her in my mind’s eye, she is bent and old, her mouth slightly sardonic after she had suffered the first of several strokes; a short dumpy woman, both hands swollen with rheumatism and legs misshapen with varicose veins, but her face – strong even at the end – was ever animated by the brightness of her eyes. They were sharp, brown and intelligent, sweeping at you under a frizz of grey hair, missing nothing. Around her neck she always wore a black velvet band, sometimes with a diamond clip, sometimes not, but I never remember her without thisremnant of Victorian fashion, and hardly a photograph exists without it. I suspect she must have been very vain of her neck and in photographs as a young woman you can see a firm chin, a wide humorous mouth, all the evidence of a strong face, full of character. She was small, neat, and in one profile she wears her hair close-cropped, again with the velvet neckband, and here she is full-cheeked and there is an imp of mischief which belongs to someone else. I don’t think she was ever pretty, there is too much chin for that, and even as a young woman it is the kind of face which stands out in a crowd because you sense there is something capable and reliable about it. There is not just the animation of the eyes, a natural shrewdness, but a steadiness too. She had, she used to say wryly, the kind of face that caused people to leave their children with her on trains. And yet, you would not call her plain. There is something too striking there.
The face I knew, however, was marked by life. Experience had riven it until it was homely, and it was at its best seated opposite me by the fireside when we were alone, with perhaps a treat in an unexpected tin box of Allenbury’s glistening blackcurrant pastilles, normally reserved to prevent coughs in chapel. These were the happiest moments in those early years and it was then that I got a sense of the past which never seems to be like anything I have read.
My grandmother’s family can be traced to the previous century, hill farmers all in that most beautiful but happily unknown of terrains, the hilly mountainous country between the bottom tip of the Rhondda and Aberdare valleys, just north of Pontypridd, at whose centre is the parish of Llanwynno. Here my most famous relative, the bard Glanffrwd, is buried; a Welsh poet and cleric whose rise from the obscurity of miner to Dean of St Asaph is a period Welsh success story, the stuff of legends. He was born in 1843 in a small thatched cottage in old Ynysybwl, the eldest of seven children, and his forebears were the descendants of lay brothers who lived at Mynachdy, a sheep farm supervised for the benefit of the monks at Margam Abbey. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the brothers lost their living but settled nearby, and one descendant – Glanffrwd’sgrandfather – prospered and became the owner of almost all the land he could see between Mountain Ash and Abercynon. His lease on the land was drawn up in the old-fashioned Welsh way, ‘to last while water
