Tag Archives: Llanychaiarn Church

Weathering Storm Darragh

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by the Curious Scribbler

We all knew Storm Darragh was on its way, and when it arrived it certainly lived up to the Met Office predictions.  The wind roared from the small hours on Saturday morning and continued, varying only slightly in violence all through the day.  Violent rainstorms came and went, stinging the face as they were delivered horizontally by the wind.   Towards evening the direction veered a little and only then did my handsome thirty year old Nordmann fir, which had been tossing its boughs all day without breaking them, suddenly and catastrophically toppled into the road. It didn’t immediately inconvenience many motorists for the road was already blocked in three other places, two by floods and one by a fallen oak.

Farewell my Nordmann Fir

Possibly more surprising was how totally the widespread loss of electricity disrupts 21st century life.  When the power went down on Saturday morning we didn’t just lose heat and light.  The router stopped working, the internet disappeared and the phone, which is now delivered by the router rather than a copper wire, ceases to work too.  So we reached for our mobile phones only to find there was no signal, because the booster mast which delivers it was also lacking power.  Only by driving up the road to a different location was contact with the world restored via 4G.

Venturing into Aberystwyth we found the whole town without light except for a few emergency lights above the back doors into some of the bigger stores.  The traffic lights were off.  And absolutely every shop was closed.  Clusters of disconsolate students roamed around the closed convenience stores.  In yesteryear a few small shops where the shopkeeper lived on the premises would have been open.  But tills don’t work without electricity and cards cannot be read.  The cashless society is totally dependent of electricity.  Those of us who have lived here for many years have the resources to weather a power cut comfortably:  log burners, camping gas cylinders, candles and lamps.  We cook our meals, and play scrabble by firelight until power is restored.   The bedrooms do cool down rather.  Central heating requires electricity to circulate the water.  But for the all-electric home a power cut must be very bleak indeed.

Even bleaker is a flood.  Unusually, the Ystwyth seems to have flooded more severely than the Rheidol, where the flood-plain playing fields became merely rather wet.  The Ystwyth and the Paith, which drains into it, flooded spectacularly, creating a single sheet of water from Tanybwlch beach to to Gosen.  I have stolen Alan Chamberlain’s photo from a Facebook post.

Alan Chamberlain’s photo of the Tanybwlch flats on Saturday 7 December

By Saturday afternoon the roadworks at Gosen were underwater, the plastic barriers bobbing in the flood, the metal ones collapsed under the water.  The lovely old house, Tynlone, was flooded. It must be over 30 years since I’ve seen the river quite so  full.  The water receded overnight leaving the usual mire of silt.  Only the field closest to Tanybwlch beach, which really wants to become a saltmarsh, remained deeply flooded by Sunday evening.

Devastation at Gosen

The swollen River Ystwyth by Llanychaiarn Church

Highest road flooding I can remember

By Monday only the field closest to Tanybwlch beach, which really wants to become a saltmarsh, remained deeply flooded. The dog was pleased to walk the length of the strand.  There was less change here than I had expected, only in one place had a fresh load of beach pebbles been taken right over the bar to cascade into the river.  On the seaward side the Sea Sandwort  Honkenya peploides has taken a hammering, the mat of rhizomes and stolons which stabilize the sand has been much reduced and the big quarry stones arranged to protect the shore have moved even further down the beach.  At the south end the sea had left huge heaps of bladder wrack and laminaria, piled more than knee deep along the strand line.  Plenty of marine life had been scooped from the sea bottom by the violent waves.  Creatures seldom seen have been thrown up by this storm.  Another contributor to Facebook Ceredigion Birds and Wildlife has posted a selection of finds: lobster, crab and crayfish on the strandline at Aberaeron.  I particularly note the Sponge Crab Dromia vulgaris.  This animal is covered in coconut-coloured hairs except where it bright pink pincers protrude, as if it were wearing nail varnish.  It picks up sea sponges to wear on the shell like a cloak, using a pair of specially modified hind legs to do so.  I had no idea this species was native to our coast  – I thought it belonged in the Mediterranean.  But then the sea has been getting warmer, as well as the storms more violent.

Melissa Lilley posted this picture of a Sponge Crab among the debris washed up on Aberaeron North Beach

The sheep had very little space to graze, but rustic seat on the Tanybwlch strand proved stronger than it looks.

It has been a week of total calm since Monday and the clear-up is ongoing.  Restoring our phone and internet has been a long job; both the fallen trees on our road took down the lines with a vengeance, but it was encouraging to find that by Tuesday several vans of Openreach  engineers were tackling the job.  Today is  Thursday and  Letter from Aberystwyth can reach the world.

Remembering Kathleen ‘Kay’ Humphreys

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by the Curious Scribbler

When I got to know Kay Humphreys she was a tiny elderly lady living at the far end of the long low row of ancient cottages in the shade of a huge acacia tree at Pontllolwyn in Llanfarian.  There was just one chair for guests which could be reached with difficulty, for she lived a frugal life hemmed in by huge sloping stacks of weekly magazines, the Spectator, the New Statesman, The Week.  The cottage was very much unimproved, cluttered with the memorabilia of her long life.

Loves in her life included the big house, Aberllolwyn, (which had formerly belonged to her clergyman uncles Tom and Griff Humphreys, and which she always felt was really hers), and cats.    A rector’s daughter herself, she delighted in tormenting vicars with theological questions on the subject of cats’ souls, and whether she would meet her favourite cats in heaven.  One of these favourites was our cat, Kevin, a handsome un-neutered  tabby tom who in the 1990s often attended the services at Llanychaiarn Church, where she was a worshipper.   On Sundays when Kevin failed to put in an appearance, Kay would often appear at our door, imperiously asking ” Where is Kevin?”  Kevin became a beneficiary of her will – a legacy which he did not collect because he predeceased her.

In 2004 she endowed her own memorial bench outside the church.  Ever practical, she donated it while she could have the use of it, and on a chilly April morning, eighteen years ago today,  a party of relatives and villagers assembled around her as the Revd Hywel Jones dedicated the bench.

The dedication of the Bench on 3 April 2005

Kathleen Humphreys on her bench, with cousin Mary Ellis and niece Cathy McGregor

By this time in her life Kathleen Humphreys was best remembered for her long-running column in The Cambrian News, ” Kay’s Corner” a weekly opinion piece, which drew on a wide knowledge of folklore, gardening, theology and her own strong ideas.  She had always been a writer, and now, as I assemble her archive and diaries for donation to the National Library of Wales, one gets an insight into a remarkable woman.   She was born in 1916  into a clergy family and grew up at Llangan Rectory near Bridgend.  Her sixteen-year-old diary reveals a girl on the brink of adulthood, aware of male eyes upon her, and already sure that the life of a married woman is not for her.  Aged nineteen she was working in London, going to auditions, and working for Central Editing ( would this be the BBC?).  Her London diaries from the war years unfortunately do not survive.

Her big literary break came in 1959 when she published Days and Moments Quickly Flying under the pen name of Perry Madoc.  It is significant to remember how many women in the early 20th century adopted male cognomens to increase their chance of being taken seriously.  The manuscript had been first submitted under the name of “Pen Severn”.  Perry Madoc was published by Collins both here and in America and was very favourably reviewed in The Spectator, and compared with Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.   Its knowing portrayal of homosexual school teachers and vulnerable schoolboys would have perhaps been expected of a male author.

Kathleen Humphreys’ 1960s diaries reveal a woman who felt her career blighted by the influential Literary Advisor to Collins, Milton Waldeman. There is more than a suggestion that his rejection of her next manuscript was influenced by her rejection of his sexual advances.   She was no longer resident in London, having moved to Pontllolwyn to be near her uncles.  Two other novels survive in manuscript: The Ink Blot  ( which was rejected by Collins and by Gollancz 1960) and The Coal Scuttle Triptych ( rejected by Heinnemann 1961).  A later novel  The Washerwoman of Sevigny  was rejected by Hutchinson in 1989.  It may have been a disadvantage that she was no longer a face on the London scene, but she was certainly publishing articles and short stories in Punch,  in John O’London’s Weekly and in Argosy.  From the 1960s she was also a regular contributor to The Cambrian News.

All her life, Kathleen Humphreys needed to earn a living  to supplement her income as a writer, and did a number of jobs in Aberystwyth.  Her  Pontllolwyn diaries span fifty years 1953 to 2004,  and record the experiences of her daily round.  Her accounts include  Rosemary Christie, mother of the actress Julie Christie and mistress of Douglas Hague of the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historic Monuments, the Jervis family of Bryneithin, the geologist Nancy Kirk, Prof and Mrs Parrott, the Thomsons of Glanpaith, the Roberts of Crugiau, the Mirylees at Nanteos, the Condrys and the Chaters as well as many local neighbours.  She was active in the CPRW, the Cardiganshire Horticultural Society, the Ceredigion Antiquarians, and in art and pottery classes.  She never owned a car, and travelled everywhere on foot or by bus, chatting to all she met and often expressing her delight in the scenery, the wildflowers and the weather.

Her handwriting is hard to decipher, but the diaries are surely a treasure trove of local life, as well as  a signpost to a huge output of published writing hidden away in old newspapers and magazines.  I end with a small sample which I have transcribed, the diary entry for 18 July 1959.

Last night I wandered up to Aberllolwyn like a ghost, jumping down over the wall from the woods, now overgrown, and the back all high weeds smothering the wallflowers and sweet williams I had in the old basins and the flowers against the wall! It was exactly like a dream in the dusk with all silent and deserted. I felt so desolate and so acutely homesick I cried bitterly and rained down curses on Uncle Griff and his smug wife and their smug house and on Providence for losing me my home and my little cat.  In two months I have only seen him once, briefly, and then he looked scared, thin and ill. 

In vain I called him, and I sat on Uncle Tom’s seat in the field in despair.  On one last impulse I went down along the bottom of the orchard to the farm and there coming through the entrance to the Dingle from the farm was a glimmer and red and white.  My darling Ginger!  And in the trim, fat as butter and coat very sleek.  How pleased he was to see me, Kissing and rubbing my face with his nose.

By this time it was pitch dark, and warm, and I resolved to spend the night with him on the hay stack.  I climbed up a very steep ladder, Ginger clinging on and purring.  We settled down.  At first it was very cosy with heat rising from the rick but presently my temperature dropped and I got chilly.  I tried to arrange these angular blocks and fetched an old raincoat of Dai’s from below.  Ginger bore it all very well and when I was too fidgety stationed himself near, so I could hear him purring gently. 

Later there was a terrific row below and footsteps.  We were rather alarmed, me especially, but peeping over the top I saw it was Dai and Mrs Hughes with a torch.  What were they doing?  Extraordinary noises of clanging zinc.  They were arranging the fallen zinc sheet from the garden wall before the calf shed to keep the geese in.  And I had nearly settled in there with Ginger for the night!  Why put the geese there? 

The haystack very humid. At daybreak Ginger and I went down through the Dingle to the cottage and into bed.  It is wonderful to have that warm lump once again snuggled up on the bed covers and his purring and sonnerations.  At 2.30 I took him up to the farm and asked Mrs Hughes to give him milk in the cowshed, which she does, the part behind the stalls where the dogs can’t reach.  There  are several tins of catfood in the farm piling up  because no-one has seen Ginger for days and days.

Kathleen Anne Humphreys, Perry Madoc or Kathleen Hatling ( as she was published in Argosy 1944) deserves to be disambiguated and rediscovered.