He was on the phone to his sister and she asked him if he remembered what their paternal grandfather used to call bread and butter pudding. He said he didn’t and she told him. I couldn’t hear her voice very distinctly but it sounded like ‘Mrs Somebody’s Dunk’. He lived with them in his latter years. They talked about his wife who had died early, possibly as a result of epilepsy with which she was afflicted. He struggled with depression. Again family folklore has it that he’d been made ‘jumpy’ by the wartime bombing of Swansea. I think it was tricky for them all having him in their small house. He made toys out of wood for the children, including a doll’s house for his sister. He had to go to a daughter in the end when his sister reached puberty and needed a room to herself.
A windy morning but dry. The rain was torrential yesterday. It scares me, particularly driving over the mountains in it. It is elemental, mighty. I am made small.
