“Oh my bloody back!” Dad screamed as he hit the ground. He had lifted a suitcase into the boot of PT 872 the old black ford Prefect we called Peter that had been his dad’s, but twisted as he did so and pulled all the muscles down the left hand side of his back. He had already loaded LED 200, we called it Lady, Mum’s pea green mark 1 Zephyr that her dad had given her when he bought a new mark 2 Zodiac which we called Zoë. It was summer, July 1955, and I was eleven, twelve in less than a month. We were going to Wales camping, parents, myself and three older sisters. But it looked like it was off for a while.

Fortunately Mum, an SRN, had dad on the ground on his stomach, just where he had fallen on the driveway in front of the house, and mercilessly she walked up and down on his back for ten minutes. I can recall his screams as she did so as if it were yesterday, but our holiday was back on again. I have no memory of the journey but thankfully I travelled with Mum. We duly arrived at the soaked swamp called a camp site somewhere near Abersoch in north Wales. We pitched tents on the floating turf that moved in the wind on the mud and listened to Dad’s constant plaint of “Oh my bloody back,” for the entire time we were there. He was the only thing that could compete with the seagulls.

It never stopped raining and eventually we gave it up after four days having sprouted gills. The only thing good or bad about the entire four days that I can remember was fishing for brown trout with a wrinkled old Welshman called Yanto who was delighted to learn that my politics were liberal with a capital L, which seems strange now after all I was only eleven, it was years before I realised that Yanto was a use name for Evan. Yanto was brilliant, he seemed to be completely inured to the rain, I’m still not sure that he actually was aware that it was raining.

Under Yanto’s experienced eyes, we caught, gutted and fried the trout in lard, delicious, charred on the edges and dangerously hot. I can taste them still and feel my burnt lips. I travelled back to Scotland with Dad ‘Oh my bloody backing’ for over three hundred miles. I still don’t know why we went to Wales of all places. That is the last memory I have of spending any time at all with Dad. He’d been a serial adulterer since marriage, and after having lived in the same house with him and his mistress for six months whilst Dad alternated who he slept with trying to make his mind up whose bed he preferred Mum finally ran out of patience and divorced him shortly after that. He was born on Saint Valentine’s day, the fourteenth of February in 1913, so he may be still alive but probably not at a hundred and six.

Yanto was fascinating to me. He was a Welsh man whose native tongue was what he described as North Walean. I found out years later when I had learnt to speak South Walean, which I found similar to enough to Gaelic for me to get along with, that the speakers of the two main variants of Welsh, North and South Walean use English to deal with each other at the marts, or at least they did at Aberystwyth mart in the mid seventies.

My family were Gaelic speakers and there was an elusive familiarity to Yanto’s speech when he was speaking to other locals, some words I understood but the grammar was different. This was completely different from listening to Gwen my wife’s family who were Gaeltacht speakers from Donegal. With them I understood the grammar and could fill in the vocabulary if I tried hard enough, but North Walean, like its other modern Celtic language counterpart Breton, is sufficiently different to elude me now just as it did then.

I have a good radio and a decent laptop and spend most of my time listening to and watching both in my room these days. I listen to a lot of minority foreign channels and hear the various Celtic languages from time to time. You tube is good for Celtic music and dance too. I was born when Dad was thirty-one which makes me what seventy-five, though dates and ages are something that they tell me I usually mess up these days. Gwen was a handful of years older than I and has been gone getting on for ten years now, but we used to dance.

I had a fall the other day, and I hurt my back which is what brought back the memory I told you about, but I’m regularly told, at least I think I am, by my children and the staff here at the nursing home where I now live, most of what I remember these days never happened, but since most of what I wish to remember eludes me I just enjoy what I do remember whether it happened or no.

The kids tell me I had a stormy relationship and life with Gwen. Yes we surely had our moments, what couple doesn’t, but I don’t remember it like that, so either they didn’t see deeply enough into my relationship with their mum, or time is being kind to me. Life dealt us some serious blows over the years. Out living your children is never easy no what what age they are when they die, but to lose three as children is hard, so if it’s the latter the kindness is long over due, but maybe that never happened either.

SRN, State Registered Nurse, an older designation for what is now RGN, Registered General Nurse. Both terms apply to the UK Nursing register.

Mart, market.