Freedom in Wales

Peter Paterson, who died last week, was a political columnist for this magazine in 1970, and later a frequent contributor. This extract, from a piece published in The Spectator in 1983, describes his evacuation, in 1944, from Spurgeon’s Orphan Home, south London, to Cwmllynfell, South Wales:

Our trainload of orphans had arrived in 1944 in Port Talbot, fugitives from the German V-2 rockets, our minders having been promised that we should all be kept together in some Welsh version of the institution from which we had been evacuated.

But no one had told the local worthies who met the train of any such arrangement, and we were scattered by a fleet of cars to destinations all over the South Wales coalfield. Five of us ended up in a small village on the Glamorgan-Carmarthenshire border, under the shadow of the Black Mountains. Consuming a plate of ham and chips, surrounded by people jabbering away in a foreign language, and our heads full of stories from the Hotspur and Wizard, we tried to get our tongues around the inscription on our plates — ‘Cwmllynfell’, it said — and convinced ourselves that we had been kidnapped by the Germans.

One at a time, we were chosen to be billeted by the villagers who circled like horse dealers around us in what proved to be the miners’ welfare hall. Having unaccountably been rejected in this selection process, I was put into a car and driven to various houses, waiting each time while the Welsh family negotiated with each other. I was finally accepted by the Evans family, and walked up the clinker path to their wind-blown house, my knapsack slung behind and my gas mask and spare boots tethered around my neck.