As she recounted her story, my mother always returned to the day when her life changed for ever.
This is how 1941 begins for Mair. Back in Cardiff after a bleak Christmas break, she is glad to be back in the city. Her motherâs death a few years earlier has left a chilly atmosphere at home as family members struggle to come to terms with this untimely loss. A pall of grief still hangs over her father, Dada, and Aunty Lucyâs backhanded comments are becoming ever more caustic. In more normal times, the university term would start later in the month, but the war is playing havoc with scholastic seasons.
Britain has suffered months of aerial attack during the Battle of Britain, the German attempt to wipe out the RAF, and then the beginning of the Blitz. It has been exposed to months of carefully targeted bombardment. Dozens of cities have been bombed, tens of thousands of people killed, and many fear that itâs only a matter of time before the nation will be under German occupation.
The ten-hour air raid, during a full moon, begins in early evening, just after 6:35 p.m. Grangetown is the first area to be hit by a hundred German aircraft and bears the brunt of the attack, which continues for several hours before the planes head westwards. This isnât the first time that Cardiff is bombed, but itâs one of the heaviest nights of fire in the capital city. A chapel in Llandaff Cathedral is also hit. The bakery owned by the Hollyman family on the corner of Stockland Street and Corporation Road is bombed and thirty-two people are killed, including at least five members of the Hollyman family. This large group is taking shelter in a nearby cellar when the bomb falls, leaving an 8 ft pile of rubble. In nearby Blackstone Street, seven relatives who have been to a funeral earlier in the day are also killed during the strike. Another fifty people lose their lives in Riversideâs De Burgh Street. The toll is heavy. More than 427 people are seriously injured and nearly 350 homes are either destroyed or so severely damaged that they have to be demolished.
The planes then roar west, passing over Bridgend and the Garw Valley before discharging the rest of their load over Swansea. This town, over forty miles west of Cardiff, sees the most furious assaults, with much of the town centre turned into burning rubble.
As she walks to the lecture theatre the following morning, Mair sees the impact of the night terrors. There is debris everywhere.
In spite of the bombing, Cardiff is open for business. The university welcomes students and staff to a new term; shopkeepers greet their customers and the streets are full of pedestrians on their way to work.
This event still affects Mair, who is biting back tears as she tells the story. Even though it happened over seventy years ago, itâs still fresh enough to induce immediate grief. Her relationship with Helen barely went beyond the weekly routine of lectures, seminars and a few social visits, but the attachment is real enough to endure.
The year 1917 is one of revolution, war, secrecy and bloody mindedness. It is also the year of Mairâs birth. She is born on 17 October, a day which intersects with some of the yearâs most visceral events. On 15 October in Paris, dancer and socialite Mata Hari is shot by a French firing squad for spying for Germany. The evidence against her includes material gathered from a secret code breaking service run by British intelligence. The First World War is still raging, and on 17 October, pilots of the British Royal Flying Corps carry out their first bombing raid on German civilian targets, when two flights of de Havilland bombers attack the Burbach iron works and nearby railway lines near SaarbrĂŒcken. And on 25 October, exiled radical Vladimir Lenin takes over the leadership of the Bolshevik party, who then remove the provisional government from power and seize control of Russia. The ambitious Bolsheviks agree to a humiliating treaty with Germany, which enables the exhausted Russians to bow out of the war, by ceding vast tracts of land to the Germans. This in turn allows the German army to throw everything into its last attempt to win the war. They nearly succeed: but the following year, 1918, sees the final German capitulation. And in a quiet street in a distant Welsh valley, Mair Eluned Thomas is born. She is happily unaware that warfare with Germany and espionage will later dominate her life.
Her place of birth is 31 Albany Road, Pontycymer. This village lies at the head of the Garw Valley, one of the many in South Wales. Garw is a Welsh word meaning rough, even severe. Far from reflecting the cramped living conditions of its twentieth-century inhabitants, the word describes the rugged mountains and forests that dominate the valley. Unlike most of the other industrial valleys, it is more or less a cul-de-sac, except for a narrow lane which leads to the top of Blaengarw and on, treacherously, to the Rhondda and Afan valleys.
Like everywhere else in the region, coal is king; and its production employs thousands of men. It is a village, indeed a valley, of well-attended nonconformist Welsh and English-speaking chapels. It also boasts an abundance of burgeoning drinking houses with a different clientele. There are workmenâs halls, libraries, literary and music societies and, of course, eisteddfodau. These cultural festivals, entirely in Welsh, demand the highest standards from all participants, even though many of them are still only young children. From their earliest years, Garw Valley children will become familiar with poetry, music, literature and performance. But this is no monoculture.
The house of Mairâs birth sits at the top of a steep hill, connected to a cluster of large semi-detached houses. Opposite are terraced cottages, built for socially mobile coal miners who have gained various promotions in the nearby pit. But the right-hand side of the street is populated by teachers, solicitors and doctors. (Local residents still refer to these dwellings today as the doctorsâ houses, even though that class moved to greener and more affluent pastures a long time ago.)
Mair is the first child to Thomas Thomas and Agnes Thomas. Agnes has three sisters: Ellen, Janet and Edith. Thomas is from a larger family. He has three brothers: Benjamin, David and Evan, and three sisters: Jane, Julia and Lucy. Both families are affluent by the standards of this overwhelmingly working-class area. Both sets of grandparents have died by the time Mair is born.
Thomas Thomas is a winding engineer in the nearby Ffaldau Colliery; a position of senior management and well paid. Agnes is a seamstress and has owned a ladiesâ fashion shop in Pontycymer, where she sold her own handmade dresses, produced on her sewing machine. In 1921, a second child is added to the Thomas family, Beti.
Mairâs father ha...
