“Everybody knew everybody else.”

- Douglas Howells (Redwick)

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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.”

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Life on the Levels

“We have a good community here”

- Farmer Roley Price

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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.”

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Life on the Levels

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.