Llangollen Stories

The only certain address was 1 Berwyn Street, David Jones’ home and possibly his greengrocer’s shop. A family memory restored; this shop had been pointed out to Dorothy and Gwynneth long before by William Eyton, after the family had moved on, but the location had been forgotten. The recovery of story, even in some way possession. And still a shop, empty but refurbished, clean of association; impossible to imagine this Welsh family living and working here. Family history as less a journey of names and dates and more a search for houses, graves, commercial premises.

The only other certain address we did not revisit. Pen y Bedw, the house on Birch Street where Arthur Thomas used to live, my mother’s cousin. Even after retirement, Arthur used to cycle down from the house every morning at 4am to work in the newsagent’s shop snuggled into the belly of the Royal Hotel, where Nana Jones and Gwynneth used to stay. It is now a smart coffee shop with lightweight metal chairs outside, the illusion of Italy.

Saltney on the other hand was unknown territory, a land on no known map. A strange turn from a familiar roundabout near Chester and the road ran away with us, through suburbia of expected hotels and giant redbrick houses; but under the railway the land seemed to sink towards the unseen river, a place eternally curving towards the water. A place indeed born from the water, a place of reclaimed land, ground hard-won from marsh and water. A border town, a town not water and not land, a town bilingual in street name, unable to decide whether it was English or Welsh, land or water, or perhaps proud of being both. A poor town of straight roads and decades of Council building from the 1920s onwards, a town without focus, without heart, long streets of hard concrete buildings softened by occupation. Here we rejoined the Lewises, Joseph Lewis being born here in 1815; but there was nothing here from before the twentieth century, and we felt that above ground and in solid buildings the trail was cold.