“Jason the lion loved ice cream”

- Animal keeper Margaret Gutteridge

Margaret (right) (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Margaret

Margaret was introduced to Whitson Zoo by the lion that no-body wanted. Born in Goldcliff, Margaret was the daughter of a First World War veteran who became a steel worker at Lysaght’s.

“I went to St Joseph’s Convent and then college to do typing, book keeping and shorthand.” She learned to drive and was delivering bread around Goldcliff, Whitson and Nash when she encountered Olive Maybury’s Whitson Zoo and the loveable lion cub.

“He came from a children’s home in Chester. They didn’t want him so Mrs Maybury said, ‘All right, we’ll have him.’ He arrived with the children in their mini bus.” Margaret learned to bottle feed the cub - “he used to like an ice cream” - and was soon caring for other exotics.

There was the goat that climbed into a workman’s van: “She’d sat in the driving seat and wouldn’t get out! She was a terror, but she was gorgeous.” Then there were the two Himalayan bear cubs rescued from a Newport pet shop window after protests from the public.

The zoo closed in the 1980s and Jason joined the lions of Longleat. He fared better than the Himalayan bears which could not be re-homed. They were put to sleep and sold to a taxidermist from Dolgellau.

 

“Everybody knew everybody else.”

- Douglas Howells (Redwick)

Douglas (Emma Drabble)

“Redwick, it’s too posh now. Too many electric gates,” reckons Doug reflecting on how social change has affected the Levels.

Brought up in a village where family ties were strong, Doug remembers the days when his nan, Beatrice Parker, ran the village store.

“It was just a little country shop: sweets, tea, sugar, cakes, tomatoes from the greenhouse, a bit of fruit and potatoes. There was a counter on the left in the front room with a fridge and all the ice cream in. The shop was open all through the day. She’d sit in the back room and the bell would ring and she would go to the counter in the front room. It wasn’t very big - I don’t expect she made a lot.”

Doug’s father, railwayman John Howells, rose from signal man to fireman earning enough to buy a caravan for family holidays and a Sunbeam to tow it: “£125 for his car in 1957 - a lot of money then!”

Doug spent summer school holidays haymaking for the local farmer, and winters, when the reen by the house froze, skating on the ice - “no skates, just ordinary shoes, like.” Doug did his paper round from his nan’s shop: “People would be in their houses, their doors always open.”

 

“The church is dear to us”

- Nonagenarians Mary Hann and Ruth Richards

 

Mary Hahn (Emma Drabble)

 

Marshfield Church played an important part in the life of the community. “It was church three times a day on Sundays,” remembers Mary who taught at Sunday school and went on to become church organist. Ruth, meanwhile, served some 75 years in the choir while brother Doug has been singing with them since he was seven.

“The church is very dear to us,” explains Mary. “My husband and my brother are buried here; my mum and dad are buried here.” Their parents were William and Olive Richards. William was the gardener and Olive the cook for the Gunn family at Crag Hall House. “We were a poor family, five children.” There were summer outings to the sea wall, paddling at Peterstone beach and the occasional crisis such as the time when Ruth cut her toe on a piece of glass. “I can see Mother now, carrying Ruth in her arms to the road, when a baker’s van came along and took her up to the doctor’s.”

Their school days at Marshfield were comparatively uneventful until the dental service’s dreaded green van arrived. “They visited school every couple of months for extractions or fillings. You’d be notified you were on the list and you played hell because you dreaded that green van!”

 

“The Levels - a piece of land made by the sea”

- Neville Waters MBE

Neville Waters (Emma Drabble)

People talk of the Levels, but, as third generation farmer Neville Waters explains, the county of Gwent is home to three: “Wentlooge Level, Caldicott Level and, in the middle between the rivers Usk and Ebbw, the Mendalglef.”

Mendalglef, says Neville, has mostly disappeared. “There was a thousand acres or more of the Mendalglef, but the Newport docks covered it up pretty well.”

Farmed since Roman times, these alluvial plains have been enriched by the floodwaters of the Severn. When in 1941 Neville’s father put a piece of his grassland to the plough as part of the war effort the yield was over twice the national average: “I remember looking up at Father’s shoulder and there was the top of the wheat: a fantastic crop,” recalls Neville.

However, like the Dutch polders, most of this land lies below sea level and the price of fertility is the ever-present threat of flooding. “The Romans were the first to record building a sea wall here,” reports Neville. (The National Museum of Wales’ Goldcliff Stone, discovered in 1874, may commemorate the Roman sea wall.) And the battle to contain the sea has continued ever since. “Storms can make a huge difference. A breach, maybe only a few yards, and the water comes in like billy-o, as fast as a horse can run!”

 

“We have a good community here”

- Farmer Roley Price

Roley Price (Emma Drabble)

Roley and Ann have farmed at Channel View in Redwick for around half a century. “We take pride in the village,” says Roley. “It’s a good community,” adds Ann.

Roley was born here. After Trevor, his father, married Caerphilly Land Army girl Gwyneth Commerson the family took on a smallholding. They managed a small herd, baby Roley “popped in a handy cake tin as Mother milked the cows”, while Trevor drove the milk from neighbouring farms to Marshfield Dairy. There were eggs to be collected, cider apples to be bagged up for Bulmers in Hereford and even a pet donkey to teach Roley a lesson: “I put a thistle up her ass once and she kicked me!”

When his father fell ill 12-year-old Roley would milk the cows before school. Market days meant more time out of the classroom: “I was already working for the auctioneers in Newport at 13. I learned more than at school.”

Now the couple run their own 80-strong dairy herd. “There are six dairy farms within a three-mile radius of here.” Many still trade in the traditional way, buying on trust and meeting bills up to several thousand pounds when the money comes in. As Roley explains: “Your word has got to be good.”

 

Life on the Levels Interview:

Rowland Price, a dairy and sheep farmer from Redwick, talks about farming, orchards and cider making, SSSIs, sheep sales at Marshfield and saltmarsh sheep, pollution from steelworks.

“You have to be careful”

- Sailor Jim Worrington

Jim Worrington (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Jim Worrington

Jim Worrington sees the Levels from a different perspective when he and his wife are navigating their sailing boat down the estuary.

An experienced sailor, he’s a member and former commodore of the 50-year -old Newport Usk Mouth Sailing Club, originally Newport Sailing Club, and itself a member of the Bristol Channel Yachting Association. “We’ve done Ireland several times, went down to France one year; we do the Channel Islands, the Scillies, the south coast.”

In that time, he’s learned to treat the sea with respect. “On one occasion, we were off Flat Holm when we heard a person shouting for help.” It turned out to be a pair of exhausted canoeists on a charity row. “We towed them back to Barry. You’ve got to be careful, always get your weather first.”

Jim and a mate were themselves rescued at sea when their boat sank 20 miles off the Eddystone Lighthouse. “We got hit by lightning and the boat caught fire.” Luckily, they were picked up by a passing coaster.

But danger lurks even on land. Some years ago, Jim was trying to extricate a boat keel when he became trapped in the estuary mud. The Fire Brigade, which regularly practises rescues at the Sailing Club, pulled Jim to safety. “You have to be careful.”

 

“In the steelworks you had a job for life.”

- Tony and Chris George, steel workers (Llanwern)

Tony and Chris George (Nanette Hepburn)

Richard Thomas & Baldwins’ steelworks was the first oxygen-blown integrated steelworks in Britain when it opened in Llanwern in 1962. At its height, it employed thousands of workers, and was spread over several miles of the Levels.

“People said if you managed to get a job in the steelworks you had a job for life,” says Chris George. “In Tony’s case this was right.”

Tony had left school at 16. “I had a job at Llanwern in 1960. Chris and I married in 1963 and were allocated a bungalow in Tennyson Avenue.” There was a strong sense of community. “We knew everybody from the start of the village to the end of the road.”

A fence separated Tennyson Avenue (also known as ‘Managers’ Avenue, for many senior staff from the works were housed in the Avenue), from the Steelworks, the beating heart of industrial Newport. The stock yard lights were so bright you could read the evening Argus at midnight in the garden. And when the wind blew the wrong way, red dust rained down: “I had to wash Tony’s clothes every day and you couldn’t put the washing out.”

Work was plentiful. “There was Whiteheads (where Chris worked as a computer tape operator), Braithwaite’s, Stewart and Lloyds, Standard and Telephones, Monsanto, British Aluminium. By the time you were 19, you could have had three or four jobs,” says Tony.

It did not last. “We were producing material and then, eventually, other people came along and started making it cheaper. Then the industry closed up.” Now, says Tony, “we know hardly anybody here now.”

 

“It’s a throwaway society.”

- Tim Rooney, farrier (Marshfield)

 

Tim Rooney (Nanette Hepburn)

Brought up and schooled at Marshfield, Tim Rooney was, by his own admission, never happy in the classroom. “I wasn’t very keen on school, but I was always very keen on horses.”

Not surprising given his family background on the Levels. “In those days,” says Tim, “every farm would have a Point-to-Point horse” and local hunt masters like Lord Tredegar relied on a good supply of horses. Tim’s grandfather Gustavas, was a horse dealer and sold horses to the army. “He was still riding in his seventies.” Meanwhile Tim’s father, former soldier and Marshfield farmer ‘Guvo’, rode some 70 winners at Point-to-Point.

Tim started a shoeing business in 1972 when there were very few farriers around. There was no shortage of work. “We didn’t go out shoeing: a lot of hunt horses came to the forge.” Then there were the council workers who brought their hand tools in for sharpening or repair. “No mechanisation then. They don’t repair things now.” On one occasion Gypsy Tom Price arrived in a little van. “In the back was a Shetland pony!”

But now, he says, traffic deters owners riding their horses to the forge. “We go out to shoe virtually every horse: it suits us a lot more because the horses are quieter in their own environment.”

 

Life on the Levels Interview:

Tim, a farrier based in Marshfield, grew up on a dairy farm and played on the foreshore at the lighthouse as a child. He tells of Gypsy fortune tellers, buying and selling horses, beagle hunts and wildlife.

“Our life was the railways.”

- Terry Theobald, train driver (Magor)

Terry Theobald (Emma Drabble)

“My first memories are lying in bed at night at Rogiet. You could hear the steam train whistles and the tannoy echoing: ‘Brake van in number 8!’ The hustle and bustle would echo around the village. Wonderful.”

By the age of 15 Terry was a runner at Severn Tunnel Junction. It was 1972 and the Tunnel, finished in 1885, was still the world’s longest underwater structure. The goods marshalling yard on the Gwent side was vast and not without dangers: runners ran alongside moving wagons, shunting them down the slopes with long poles. “One guy here lost his legs doing it.”

Terry quit the railways for a while after trying to rescue a woman who fell from Cardiff platform: “I jumped on the track to pull her off, but I never quite got to her. She was run over by the train.” Eventually this modest hero returned to his railways and, like his grandfather before him, became a driver.

He’s witnessed much change on the Levels: “The people who used to live here can’t afford to anymore. They call that progress. Well, we all have an opinion on that!” But nothing alters those childhood memories: “New Year’s Eve in the marshalling yards was no different from any other working night except that at midnight all the drivers would blow the steam whistles. Wonderful.”

 

“If we don’t teach our children, they won’t teach anybody else.”

- Sue Waters, historian (Whitson)

Sue Waters (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Sue Waters

Sue Waters has a passion for the past: “I always used to listen to the old people. My father would say: ‘Oh, she’s got her ears flapping again!’ and he was right.”

Schooled at St Joseph’s convent when it was based at Tredegar House, Sue grew up black-berrying, trading orchard plums by the roadside (“tuppence a pound and we’d sell everything we’d got”) and secretly sampling the farmhouse cider when dispatched to bring a jug full to the supper table. “It was horrid!”

She moved into one of the oldest farmhouses on the Levels when she married David Waters. She remembers ‘casters’ like Bill England, Alf Stevens and Hubert Jones who, she thinks, did a better job of cleaning the reens than modern machinery; the Levels’ fodder trade that fed the pit ponies working the Valleys collieries; and all the landowners, from the monasteries and Eton College to Tredegar House estate and the steel works, that occupied the Levels.

She’s currently compiling her history of the Levels in the firm belief that the past can inform our futures: “I wasn’t interested in the past until my latter years. But then you lose someone who has passed their local knowledge down and you realise it’s the end of an era.”

 

Life on the Levels Interview:

Sue was born in Nash. After junior school she received Catholic secondary schooling based at Tredegar House and later married into a farming family. She describes the disappearance of houses and farmsteads as the power station is built, WWII and camps of soldiers.

“I remember the German bombers going over.”

- Stephanie Davies, farmer’s daughter (Rumney)

Stephanie Davies (Nanette Hepburn)

“We cycled or walked everywhere,” says Stephanie Davies of Upper Newton Farm as she recalls life on the Levels and the disruption that war brought.

Hand milking the Davies family’s dairy herd and running a milk round without electricity (power didn’t reach these parts until the 1950s) was hard enough. But managing the little farm after it took a direct hit from a German bomb didn’t make life easier. “One cow, she was blown out of the shed by the blast! They found her wandering up the next morning with the chain still round her neck. Alive!”

The nonagenarian farmer’s daughter remembers the itinerant reen cleaners who came to stay once a year: “We’d put a bed up for them in the barn. They were very strong men and they kept the reens clean with just a spade and a fork.”

She watched army lorries bringing unexploded ordnance onto the Levels (“they must have dumped them in the mud on what we called the lynches”) and generous GIs dishing out sweets. “We always did very well for food despite the rationing, but,” she admits, “it made such a difference to the work when we finally had the electricity.”

 

Life on the Levels Interview

Stephanie is the daughter of farmers from Rumney. She remembers the war and how it affected the area; her family home was bombed and they had to move out to other accommodation. She remembers the Home Guard on the seawall and many other fascinating details of this area.

“It was all coal.”

- Ray Evans, railway man (Magor)

Ray Evans (Emma Drabble)

Ray Evans started on the railways at 15, one of around 300 locomotive staff based at the Severn Tunnel junction. “Everybody worked on the railway virtually.”

Ray’s first job was knocker up. “The locomotive charge man would say ‘go and knock William Davis up at 25 Ifton Terrace, Rogiet’ and you’d ride the bike over there, knock the door and he’d go: ‘Alright’.” Ray rose through the ranks. Next stop? Engine cleaner: “You used oil and rag and you cleaned the paint of the locomotives.” Eventually Ray became a diesel engine driver, but not before a spell as fireman on the last of the steam-driven goods trains. The fireman’s job was tough. “You could move four or five tons of coal in a shift if you were going to London - hard work.”

Working on the Severn Tunnel freight trains Ray carried everything from race horses for the Chepstow Races, munitions for the Falkland and Iraq wars, and cars aboard the daily shuttle that preceded the opening of the road bridge. Then there were the ‘banker’ runs, assisting heavier steam freight through the Tunnel.

Above it was coal, the black gold that powered south Wales: “There was a colliery every two miles or so up the Valleys and you had to bring all that down.” In his time, he has witnessed all sorts of ‘special’ trains come through, including pigeons! “If there was a race, we would get pigeon specials come through with trains loaded up with racing pigeons. We would get the baskets off the train and then release them!”

 

Life on the Levels Interview:

Ray Evans is a retired train driver from Caerwent. He started as a fireman at the tail end of the steam age, before progressing to diesel engines right up until his retirement. He witnessed the giant marshalling yards at Rogiet and the busy Severn Tunnel Junction. In his spare time, he races pigeons from the club’s base at Portskewett.

“My father was an Italian prisoner of war.”

- Mike Mazzoleni, former Llanwern steel worker (Whitson)

 

Mike Mazzoleni (Emma Drabble)

 

▶ Watch interview with Mike Mazzoleni

“My father was an Italian prisoner of war and he was brought over to Llantarnam, a large Italian POW camp, after being captured in Europe somewhere. Every day the prisoners would be allocated to certain farms in this area. And after several appearances on Court Farm here in Whitson, they decided to keep him. So he never returned to Italy. And then that’s when he met my mother at the local dance down at the Farmer’s Arms in Goldcliff, and that’s how I came to be in Whitson today.”

Mike followed in his father’s footsteps by also working at Court Farm, Whitson, as a young man: “I’ve followed in his footsteps. I loved to work. I used to work on Court Farm… we could start baling at 8 o’clock in the evening. Oh my god it was hard work. I didn’t need anything to put me to sleep in those days, I was so tired. I had a job to climb the stairs… looking back on it, we had nothing, but god, I loved it.”

“All of a sudden in the 1950s they decided to build Llanwern [steelworks] and Court Farm was compulsory purchased… the saddest day of my life because they had an auction. I had to go back in the evening to open the gates… and it was silent. No cows, no chickens, and I cried like a baby.

“Strange thing is I started working at Llanwern. My dad made a few calls to some Italian friends in Newport, and I found my way into the steelworks.”

 

“I’d do anything to be outdoors.”

- Paul Cawley, small holder (Undy)

Paul Cawley (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Paul Cawley

Paul Cawley is a third generation ‘Leveller’. “I have never lost contact with the Moors,” explains Paul “My father-in-law, even though he worked down the steelworks for a time, also worked on a farm up at Pencoyd Castle.” Paul, has lived on the family smallholding near Magor since the 1960s.

He and his wife, Beverly, love life on the Levels. Both can recall the hazardous business of grazing cattle between the tides on Denny Island, out in the estuary. “You walked the cattle out and then stayed there with them for 12 hours!” explains Paul.

He treats the Severn with respect, especially when he’s out volunteering with Magor Marsh’s Wildlife Warriors. “We’ve got the second fastest tide in the world. If you’re in a tidal area, look at the little black line on the horizon. If that black line gets bigger in a couple of minutes, you run - the tides on the way back.”

As a game keeper Paul Cawley believes that the shooting lobby brings significant benefits to local nature (“there’s more wildlife on keepered shoots than on nature reserves”) and his work has afforded plenty of contact with the local wildlife from otter, hares, egrets, ravens and buzzards to the increasingly rare lapwing.

 

“Some things are worth more than money.”

- Martin Morgan, Black Rock Lave Net Heritage Fishery (Portskewett)

Martin Morgan (Nanette Hepburn)

Where Britain’s longest river, the Severn, meets the sea, there are four fisheries, explains life-long fisherman Martin Morgan: the Usk, Wye, Severn Estuary and Black Rock, site of the last seine and lave net fisheries.

These wild and dangerous waters have attracted some dedicated fisherman, Martin’s grandfather among them. Famed for his gull egg collecting exploits on Chepstow cliffs, fisherman ‘Nester’ William Morgan had a rivermark named after him. “Nester’s Rock is only about 18 inches high, but Nester was quite small!”

Then there were the two brothers who were carrying their father’s coffin to Portskewett church when a fish rose in a neighbouring salmon pool. “Bob looked at Pete, Pete looked at Bob. Then Pete ran back to the house, fetched his waders and net and picked the fish up!”

While fishing the estuary Martin has stumbled on ship wreck canon balls and mediaeval fishing baskets, known as kypes or putts, buried in the estuarine clay. He’s witnessed the last of the putchers, “conical willow and hazel baskets set facing the ebb tide for salmon,” the wreck of The John which ran aground on Gruggy Rocks in 1942 and more seals and porpoises that you can shake a net at.

▶ Read more about the lave net fishing at Black Rock…

 

Life on the Levels Interview:

Martin is from the Black Rock Lave Net Heritage Fishery Group. He talks about the history of Black Rock and its current difficulties.

“I’ve been involved with the history for over twenty years.”

- Marjorie Neal, local historian and farmer’s wife (Rumney)

 

Marjorie Neal (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Marjorie Neal

Living on the Levels has given Marjorie Neal an insight into the district’s past. As the local history group’s archivist, she’s drawn on her own family’s past. “I’m lucky really because branches of my family have been in Rumney for years.”

Farming families lead isolated lives – as a child “I didn’t have friends close by” - but she made the best of things, helping to bottle the farm milk, mastering her father’s Fergie during haymaking (“I remember driving the tractor from the age of eight)” or just watching waves breaking on the lynches beyond the sea wall.

War brought Land Girls to the farm and Americans to run the Rumney Sea Transport Stores: “It stored goods coming from America and goods and casualties - bodies - that were taken back.”

Listening to the Top Twenty on Radio Luxembourg (and being scolded for it by her grandparents) helped relieve the isolation until Peterstone opened a youth club. “I used to go down there on my bike a couple of nights a week.”

Sixty years on a family farm also helped her find forgotten field and reen names (Floker, Rhossoag Fawr and Search Light - “there was a search light on that field in the war”) and evidence of occupation from 2,000 years ago. “We’ve a collection of Roman pottery found on the foreshore.”

 

Life on the Levels Interview:

Marjorie reflects on childhood and adult life in Rumney, close to the sea wall, Peterstone Youth Club and WI, hay making, dairy farming, life during the war, Wharf committee, and sea levels.

“We had nothing but we were happy."

- Kath Johnson, farmer’s daughter

Kath Johnson (Emma Drabble)

Kath Johnson paints a graphic picture of life on the Levels: “It was more of a community then, wasn’t it? Everybody you saw, you knew.”

Her family led a make-do-and-mend existence interspersed with unexpected delights like listening to the roar of lions at night. “Mrs Maybury had Whitson Zoo. She was a lovely lady. If we had an animal die on the farm she gave it to these lions.”

When she passed the entrance exam to Chepstow Grammar Kath travelled to school in a neighbour’s stock truck. “Mr Jones put benches in the back of the van, because he also hauled calves to market in it”.

A family crisis put paid to her ambitions. “I wanted to be a policewoman, but Dad had a heart attack so I left school at 16 and I’ve been on the farm ever since.” She harbours no regrets, remembering family evenings playing cards by the light of the Tilly lamp, Monday’s wash day and Sunday’s bath nights, “me first, then my brothers, then uncle, Dad and finally Mum.” 

The land was mostly managed by hand, raking the reens, grafting garden roses onto hedgerow briars with raffia and clay, and catching eels with bean pole fishing rods. “How can I put it? We had nothing, but we were happy.”

 

Life on the Levels Interview:

Kath reflects on growing up on a farm in Goldcliff, childhood lessons around the reens and how they work, lost animals from Whitson Zoo, school time at Goldcliff and the village bobby, childhood games, farming, wildlife and otter hunting.

“I’m a Leveller.”

- John Southall, Land Drainage Team Leader, NRW (Coedkernew)

John Southall (Emma Drabble)

The Levels are unique. And there’s nowhere quite like it in the rest of the country, says John Southall, Land Drainage Team Leader of the NRW’s Internal Drainage Districts.

John is a child of the Levels, raised in Coedkernew, and now working to prevent the land slipping beneath the sea: “The only reason this place isn’t under water is because of the work we do, maintaining the network of ditches and reens and ordinary water courses.”

Landowners are responsible under the 1991 Land Drainage Act for looking after Llanalan, Winter’s Sewers, Earthen Pit, Well Reen, Saltsbarn, Wallsend, Mireland Pil and the host of other waterways that cross this land. Helping to ensure the water flows freely through its 169 sluices is the job of the NRW.

“The beauty of our drainage system is it’s all done by gravity,” explains John. “It’s no easy job. In winter, the water might flow one way, in summer the other. A sluice dropped in, say Pentcarn Lane, Duffryn, might cause a reen miles away in Peterstone to dry up.”

John oversees the business of mowing, mudding, dredging, de-silting and ‘keeching’ (mowing, de-silting and dredging at once) in a seven-year cycle which has, so far, prevented the Levels flooding. That means keeping the waterways “perfectly balanced” . . . and greeting any passing heron with the traditional mimic’s cry of Frank! Frank!

 

“We spent half our life on the Moors.”

- Iris Theobald and Ivy James, railway children (Rogiet)

Iris Theobald and Ivy James (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Ivy, Terry and Iris

George and Fanny Kibbey moved from Worcestershire to work on the Great Western Railway. As daughter Iris Theobald recalls: “Nearly every family had a man working on the railway.” Iris had four sisters: Ivy, Olive, May and Rose. Ivy (James) remembers the family receiving cheap coal. “The railway would dump a ton in the road and we’d to shovel it into the coal house.”

Their father drove steam engines on ‘double homes’ (staying one night away) and emergency stand-ins - “the call boy came knocking any time of the day or night to get him up.” The Royal Train, meanwhile, was sometimes parked close to the Severn Tunnel near Portskewett Station. “They said it was a secret, but we all knew.”

The railway sisters would roam the Levels. Iris: “The fields were just all wild flowers: we spent half our life on the Moors. There’d be cockling between the tides - you’d got to be careful - the tide comes in quickly” and perhaps a penny’s worth of ice cream in a glass on Sundays “shared because there was no money then”.

“We’d be down the moors, make a house in the woods, follow the fox hounds and red coats, or chat to the Gypsies with their brown and white horses and old-fashioned caravans.” When war came there was munition work, making blackout headlamp covers and, if you were lucky, dancing with GIs. It was, says Ivy, “ten time better than it is now.”

 

Life on the Levels Interview:

Iris and Ivy grew up in ‘railway’ town, Rogiet, where their father worked on steam trains. They reflect on the building of the M4, wartime fun, wildlife and the sea wall.

“In the old days you could see the horizon!"

- Howard Keyte (Porton)

Howard Keyte (Emma Drabble)

Howard’s cottage is just a few yards from the seawall. “When you’re sat by here at high tide on a rough day, the tide is about 10 feet above you then but we try not to think about that! You get used to it over the years, it is a lot safer now than it used to be. They did a lot in the sixties to improve it but you could see the horizon, in the old times.  If you got a good high tide coming over and washing down the bank, it would go through the kitchen and out through the front door then!”

His parents, Charles & Evelyn lived next door at Porton House where he grew up. “My grandfather came here to Porton first in 1906 but then my father moved up from Whitson to look after him. Father was a carpenter and wheelwright in Whitson in those days.”

Living so close to the seawall, the three generations of Kytes worked on the fishing ranks at Porton that once stretched out into the estuary catching the precious salmon: “There were three ranks there were, there was this one about 300 yards up, there’s one about a mile out in the channel, that was Black Rock, … that was hard work… and one at Redwick. When the tide was out we would empty the baskets, and collect the salmon and carry them in sacks over our shoulders. Then we would take them to the fishery at Goldcliff. He’d then send the fish off to Billingsgate market in London. But it’s all gone now.”

 
 
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