Dilys Paes

My Birth

Auntie Fran arrived on Saturday and to everyone’s amazement Mum went into labour and I was born on Sunday morning. I weighed 3 lbs 10 oz which in these ages was very small for a baby to have any realistic chance of surviving. Mum had very bad haemorrhaging and the doctor feared for her life, but having delivered me he bundled me into the living room and put me in Auntie Fran’s arms and said.” See what you can do with her”. Fran said that she willed me to live. Mum finally got through this, and Auntie Fran stayed on for the rest of the week looking after her sister and new baby. Bill was 8½ at the time and I remember him telling me I was so tiny he could hold me in one arm.

Move to Gaerwen

I don’t know how long we stayed in Llangefni, but we moved to Gaerwen, another place in Anglesey and there my sister Gwyneth was born a year and 10 months after my first birthday. I was born on 18 August 1929, Gwyneth was born on 15 June 1931, so we were very close.

I remember telling my mother when I was a teenager home from college one day, about a dream I had. This dream involved a man who I thought was Father Christmas, or somebody playing Father Christmas and I told my mother I could see this row of houses at the side of a country road and in front was an expansive green separating the road from the houses themselves, and further along from the houses were couple of little shops. 

Apparently when you got to the shop, you went up two steps to open the door, a bell rang and the first thing you saw in the shop were huge jars of sweets in a row right along the counter and they seemed very, very high up to me. Then a lady would come from the back of the shop. She seemed tall to me, always dressed in black. She had glasses and her hair was tightly drawn back from her face into a bun and she would ask me, in this dream, what did I want and I would say to her “Bara, os gwelwch yn dda”. That's Welsh for ‘Bread please’ and she would give me bread. From the shop I would go back home and then there was this man who represented Father Christmas, a lot of white hair, a ruddy complexion to his face, tall, well-built and he got hold of me hugged me and threw me in the air and caught me. When I told my mother she was absolutely amazed. She said, ‘What you're describing is where we lived in Gaerwen and that was a little shop we used to go to for bread and for sweets and you only spoke Welsh, and the lady would speak to you and you would answer. The man you're describing was your grandfather and the only time he came to visit us. This was the only time you ever saw him’, so I thought that was really quite amazing.

Move to Holywell

Well, we weren’t in Gaerwen for very long when we moved right across North Wales to the market town of Holywell and I can remember when we arrived there, Bill was told to look after the two of us and we went up the steps. I think we must have moved into a flat above a shop and, for some unknown reason, I had made my way out of the shop and I could hear children's voices. Just round the corner from a shop was a small road or path leading to a school and I remember going through the open gate and finding myself inside this building and two ladies came to speak to me. They asked me who I was and they spoke to me in English and I didn't know what they were saying, but in Welsh this lady asked me who I was and I told her my name. I couldn't tell her where I was living. I was four and a half at this time. In the meantime, it was discovered that I was missing … well, panic! There we were in this new place and didn't know where anything was, but somehow, they had got a policeman. I didn’t know several people were looking for me, and then somebody hit on the idea that I might have gone up to the school and that is where they found me.

School in Holywell

I started school and the headmistress who spoke to me was Mrs Amy Grafham Williams who later became Mrs Amy Williams JP and she was headmistress of the Infant School. My sister and younger brother Selwyn were still there when I did some part-time teaching for experience before I went to college to become a fully qualified teacher.

In Holywell, Dad’s musical abilities came to the full and he formed the Holywell Choral Society which was a mixed voice choir with about 120 voices, and my word could they sing. Often they couldn’t find anyone to look after us, and there was a limit to what our big brother Bill could do, so we would go to the practices with Mum and Dad. It was so wonderful to be sitting there, especially if the members of the choir passed sweets or bars of chocolate or something nice like that. I really enjoyed it. Dad was in charge of this choir for many, many years until eventually it was disbanded.  People got older and, with the War coming, people weren't really interested in singing and were busy doing their thing for the war.