How Green Was My Valley

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Due to a tragic accident in the pit, Bronwen became a widow with 2 small children and Mama suggested that Huw moved in with Bronwen and helped support her and the kids financially. This is one that I’ve tried to read and failed at the first few pages – I wonder why as I should love it. I guess it's because talking about things - giving them words - sometimes destroys this weird illusion that they are more than just the words you give them. Huw has a temper on him and inflicts some damage on people, but that’s seen, I think, to not in the end help, as he’s still stuck where he started out, alone and looking back at the green grass of his youth, now obscured by slag heaps (this book was published in 1939, long before the horror of Aberfan; now the Valleys have been greened again by various initiatives, whether or not that will help the social and economic deprivation they have experienced). I remember my parents had a copy of it on their shelves decades ago, though I was never tempted to read it then, I might be now.

It's a bitter sweet little story which I can already tell isn't going to end especially happily, but I've fallen in love with the characters and the setting so that doesn't matter. The author had claimed that he based the book on his own personal experiences but this was found untrue after his death; Llewellyn was English-born and spent little time in Wales, though he was of Welsh descent. A good chicken and a noble piece of ham, with a little shoulder of lamb, small to have the least of grease, and then a paste of the roes of trout with cream, a bit of butter, and the yolk of egg, whipped tight and poured in when the chicken, proud with a stuffing of sage and thyme, has been elbowing the lamb and the ham in the earthenware pot until all three are tender as the heart of a mother.

Protagonists who assume new identities, often because they are transplanted into foreign cultures, are a recurring element in Llewellyn's novels, including a spy adventure that extends through several volumes. One by one, his brothers began to leave Wales, a sign of shrinking opportunities for young people in the country.

Ifor (pronounced eefor in the Welsh dialect)married the lovely Bronwen from the next valley,and they settled in a house just a few doors up from Mam and Dad (Gwilym and Beth). Dada is the undisputed figure of silent authority in the family who did not hide his fondness for his wife and children, especially Huw.

Try as you might to confine your reminiscences to a specific period in time, distant memories creep up on you and demand to be felt again. When a hard line is drawn and stubbornly kept to, business owners pay with reduced profit margin, workers pay with hungry children.

The 2 stars is really because I feel flat out terrible leaving just 1 star, so I rounded up from the barely 1. Some one once said, after seeing the beauty of Alaska, that he wished he had seen it as an old man, for it's magnificent beauty would surely spoil any scene he would ever see after.We meet Huw Morgan as a small boy, the youngest in his family, his brothers and sisters settling (or not) into their roles, and we follow him into his late teens; however, his story is being written from much later life, with the horror of a pit slag heap that’s slipped pressing and pressing onto the little house where he was raised and lives now. The family does well enough, with earnings used carefully, and difficult periods when there is conflict with mine owners or strike are tided over, help even extended to others in need in the village. It was only after I finished the novel that it occurred to me that I don’t really know what any of the Morgans are supposed to look like.