- 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.