Bronwen

By Philip Hughes

Although this is a work of fiction, it aims at re-examining the physical, emotional and other obstacles which confront any wartime child evacuee. The scene is set in a small mining village in South Wales to which pupils from a primary school in Birmingham are evacuated early in World War Two. Here evacuee Phil Hughes encounters great contrasts not only of a geographical but also of a linguistic and cultural nature. The preferred language of the family with which Phil is billeted is not English but Welsh, and both the Welsh language and its culture play an important role at his new school. There is no church in the village but four non-conformist Welsh-speaking chapels. Many other aspects of life differ from what the evacuees are accustomed to as they struggle to fit in.

 

Mrs Morgan already has three young children: two boys Dewi and Cennard, and a daughter Bronwen, with whom Phil soon forms a close relationship. Life is never easy, but there are compensations: a first cigarette, the first stirrings of sexuality, helping to catch a bunny for the pot, a visit from Special Branch, an unexploded bomb in the school playground and even the mysterious appearance of a ghost in a sun-lit garden. These are just a few of the high-points of Phil Hughes's years as an evacuee in Wales. But with his return to Birmingham, the close ties with the Morgan family soon withered away. So why was over seventy before he began to wrtie this autobiography? His memories of Bronwen are stirred by a sentence from a Bulgarian grammar: "Цветята, набрани за мен, вехнеха и умираха в ръцете ѝ." – 'The flowers she had picked for me wilted and died in her hands'.

 

First love can indeed be re-kindled in old age! 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Hewitt
• Release date: Jul 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201395391

Book preview

1 – Evacuee

I caught my first sight of Bronwen as the coach drew to a halt at the crossroads which marked the centre of the village of Bryn-y-Felin (there was no twee village green in these tiny Welsh mining villages, almost as if the existence of and the pastimes associated with village greens were anathema to the workaday world of such places).

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She was standing there with a group of other children. A girl of about the same age as me (nine or ten years old), with light brown hair (mine was ginger) and eyes which I did not notice at first (I thought they would be brown, like her hair) but which, when I got to look at them closer, in the sunlight, were of a most miraculous cornflower blue. The blue of the distant ocean in the sunshine of a summer’s day.

At first I thought this story would almost write itself once I had put her magical name to paper, but now it is clear to me that I will have to delve deep into the almost forgotten recesses of memory to paint the true picture of what happened all those years ago – and paint it I must, before I die and we are both forgotten.

At first Bronwen was just one of a group of inquisitive kids who stood watching us being decanted from the coach that had brought us to South Wales to escape the air raids in the Midlands that bright Sunday afternoon in June 1941, not long after the disaster of Dunkirk.

My father had been part of that disaster and we had had no news of his fate at the time I was evacuated. He was now probably dead or at best a prisoner of war in Germany, which at least meant he was unlikely to die in battle. It also meant that neither my mother nor myself or my elder brother Geoff would see him before the war ended, whenever that might be.

Dad had been a lance-corporal in the infantry and because of his recently-acquired single stripe he had been given a very special rearguard task by his sergeant, who had positioned him alone with a Browning machine gun behind a stack of sandbags in the middle of the street leading to the beaches where evacuation was already in full swing.    

Hold them off for as long as you can, Jack. Good luck!

For almost half an hour nothing happened. After hours of aerial strafing, it was uncannily quiet in the deserted town. That could only mean one thing. The Krauts had called off the Luftwaffe because their own infantry was already dangerously close to the planes’ targets. Good for the troops embarking, bad for my dad.

Dry-mouthed, his finger on the trigger, he lay there, flat on the ground behind his machine gun, waiting.

Listening.

He told us many years later that what he had expected to hear had been sporadic gunfire, or the grinding of tank tracks on the uneven road surface, the throbbing of powerful diesel engines, the sound of marching boots. But the first thing he actually heard was singing. Hundreds of human voices, louder even than the sound of their jackboots on the cobbles. He peeped over the sandbags and stared ahead down the long empty street. There was nobody in sight. Where the hell were they?

The singing grew louder, and he could hear the marching now. Hundreds of invisible, singing infantrymen marching in step. How weird was that? But where the hell were they? Then he suddenly realized that the troops would have come from the east of town. They were marching along a side street towards the main road to Paris, where he and his gun were positioned. The crossroads was about a hundred yards away. The singing grew even louder, and now at last he saw them, the first of them at least, swinging right into the street he was supposed to be defending. They were well within range – four abreast, their rifles shouldered, not unslung – not expecting any resistance.

They saw him, they saw the machine gun, yet they did not stop singing, they did not stop marching, they did not unsling their rifles or leap for cover. The men in the first few ranks began to wave – not the upswinging wave of greeting but the sideways, ‘for-Christ’s-sake-get-out-of-the-way!’ gesture of those who believe they are unstoppable, as indeed they were that day.

Dad jumped to his feet and ran.

"What would you have done?" he would ask curious neighbours in later years.

What he did not tell those curious neighbours was that he ran not towards the beaches and possible rescue but towards the oncoming German troops with his arms raised high above his head. I suppose he thought this was fair enough. Neither party had fired a shot, and he would certainly not have survived if he had. Perhaps he was expecting some kind of laughing reception along the lines of: "Tommy, for you zis voor iss ofer!"

It was not. He lived to fight again – and again, and again, having escaped from the loose captivity of that early part of the war. He wandered through France and neutral Spain all the way to Gibraltar, where his story was received with tight-

lipped incredulity by the army major who interrogated him after he had nearly been shot crawling under the barbed wire. My dad was a patriot all right. He was eventually re-united with his regiment (his sergeant was most surprised to see him). Dad later served with distinction in the Western Desert, Southern Italy and Germany – and he got home safely almost without a scratch. He even made it to sergeant.

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I still have the five medals he was awarded.

But I was not to know that on the day I arrived by coach at Bryn-y-Felin as an evacuee. Ten years old and homesick for the big city, unsure about what would happen next,

I suffered the most embarrassing disaster that could ever befall a young lad: I pooped in my pants. Luckily the amount extruded was small, and I cringed with embarrassment as I felt the small hard turd roll out of the leg of my short trousers onto the ground. My friend John, who was standing beside me, wrinkled his nose. He knew perfectly well what had happened, and anybody who noticed my red face would have known that something was amiss. But John said nothing, and within minutes we had been lined up and marched off to the village hall to be allocated to our host families.

My host was Mrs Catrin Morgan, a cheerful woman of about 40 with three children of her own, who lived at Number 12, Trem-y-Mynydd, which translates into English as Mountain View.

Come and meet your new brothers and sister! she cried, picking up my small suitcase, grabbing my hand and whisking me out of the village hall and down the road to my new provisional home.

As I only had one older brother and no sisters of my own, I didn’t know quite what to expect. I was apprehensive but intrigued.

Dewi was twelve years old. He seemed friendly enough, and shook my hand as his mother introduced us. Cennard was younger than me – perhaps nine years old – and very shy. The two lads responded with the traditional Welsh Hiya! But ten-year-old Bronwen, the girl who had first caught my attention on arrival, smiled, took my hand (without shaking it) and asked:

"Hylo. Bronwen ydy f’enw i – be’ ydy dy enw di?"

I knew from the rising intonation that the second part of what she had just said must be a question. But nothing had prepared me for this – a foreign language in my own country? But of course it was not my country – it was theirs.

She’s asking you your name, said Mrs Morgan with a smile. Then turning to her daughter she warned her: "Fydd rhaid iti siarad Saesneg efo dy frawd newydd, Bron. Dydy e ddim yn gallu siarad Cymraeg eto."

Bronwen smiled shyly and spoke to me in her best schoolroom English: Hello, new brother. What’s your name?

Philip, I replied. But you can call me Phil. Hello, Bronwen.

I had never heard the name before, but for me it held an as yet unknown magic. There are many Welsh girls’ names which contain the element ‘gwen’ or ‘wen’, which means white, fair – and also pure: Gwen itself and Blodwen, of course, Anwen, Aerwen, Arianwen, Brangwen, Branwen, Ceridwen, Dwynwen – the Welsh patron saint of lovers. The complete list goes on and on, and would easily fill half a page if I were looking for a page-filler.

Bronwen – white-breast – is also one of the Welsh words for ‘weasel’, presumably because of the animal’s colouration (the other Welsh word, ‘wenci’ means ‘white dog’), but if I later associated my young friend’s playful, mischievous nature with her namesake from the animal kingdom, it is only by virtue of hindsight, for – as Mrs Morgan had told her daughter – I spoke no Welsh in those distant days of wartime.

Go upstairs with Dewi now, said Mrs Morgan. He’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping. Take your suitcase up with you. We can unpack it later. You must be hungry after your long journey. Tea will be ready in a quarter of an hour. Just one thing, Philip. I’d better look after your ration book and your identity card.

Here they are, I pulled the card and the small buff ration book out of my inside jacket pocket and handed them over. As I did so, the ID card flapped open and a worn, creased, brown ten-shilling note fluttered to the floor. Mrs Morgan picked it up.

What’s this? she asked suspiciously.

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I felt myself blushing with embarrassment. Mum thought you might need it... for buying food and things...

Mrs Morgan smiled a grim smile. The first thing we’ll do after school on Monday, she said, is go down to the Post Office and open a savings account for you. Then you’ll have a little spending money whenever you need some.

I thanked her. Mrs Morgan was nobody’s fool, and a quick look at my clothes and shoes would have told her that ten shillings was a sacrifice my mother would have keenly felt. The few coppers in my trouser pocket were all the other wealth I had in the world. Even the thought of a savings account would have raised eyebrows in Smethwick, the part of Birmingham where we lived.

Tea that afternoon was a fairly modest affair: bread, margarine and slices of spam followed by home-made Welsh cakes, scones and jam. Most of the jams I had ever been offered at home had been red or brownish in colour. This jam was a yellowish green. I asked Mrs Morgan what it was.

"Eirin gwyrdd – I don’t know the English name, but the fruit is like a small green