Memories of Prep School in Ceredigion during WWII

I was sent to the boarding prep school, Holyrood School at Aber-mad, only four miles from home. My father dropped me at the top of the drive so I could walk down to the school alone, to demonstrate my supposed confidence (my trunk presumably being delivered separately). We were allowed home for two Saturday afternoons and one weekend a term. On balance, I think I probably quite enjoyed the school, or at least some aspects of it. Several of the teachers were eccentric wartime ‘dropouts’ (one disappeared suddenly, arrested as a deserter). The school had been evacuated from Brighton, and split into three, the other two smaller parts going to Lluest and Carrog a few miles away. 

Our headmaster was Levi Thomas Prosser Evans, a man of interesting ideas. In history lessons he would write battles and their dates in a spiral round the blackboard, saying that the harder it is to learn something the better you remember it – it certainly worked in my case. He had been injured in the First World War and apparently had skin grafted over his back; as a result he could not bend, and when he was refereeing rugby games and was knocked over, we had to help him to get up. He claimed that he could hop half as fast as a boy could run.  He preached the sermons in chapel, and one of his triumphs was to preach a boy into a faint. The miscreant had responded to an angry outburst from the matron “For two pins I’d leave”, by getting two pins and giving them to her. The sermon was on the subject of being rude to women, and when it finished and we stood up to sing the hymn, the miscreant fell down in a faint. 

By far the best teacher was Ruth Liefmann, a Jewish refugee from Germany, who apparently would have been a long-jumper in the 1936 Olympics but for her race. She had come over to the Chelsea Physical Training College, but then moved to lodge at Troed-y-rhiw, a farm across the valley from Aber-mad and taught us German, a remarkable initiative for the headmaster during the war. “Guten Morgen, Fräulein Liefmann” is remembered by every ex-pupil. We learnt to write Germanic script, which later came in very useful, as for my entrance scholarship exam to Bradfield College I wrote the German dictation in it and got full marks as, I learnt later, the examiner could not read it. As a botanist, having learnt German was an enormous benefit to me later. 

Some of the other teachers were very odd. I remember one who, when a boy said “Sir, you have odd socks on today”, looked down at his ankles, burst into tears and left the class. Another young man was teaching only for a short while and suddenly disappeared; we learnt later that he was an army deserter and had been tracked down. Another was haunted by his war experiences and told us horrific stories of the Germans sewing up the lips of prisoners. French and Latin teaching were, by contrast to German, abysmal. I do not remember any natural history teaching. The only book I remember in the school library though was The Advance of the Fungi  by E. C. Large, which I read and which had a lasting influence on me.

Rugby and cricket were the games, both of which bored me intensely (shinty, with home-made hockey sticks, was better), but a great advantage of the school was that one could go riding two or three afternoons a week instead of playing games. The school had eleven horses, from a Shetland pony up to a retired racehorse, and one graduated up them as one got bigger and better. In summer we often bathed in the river, naked, submerging when a train passed, sometimes curiously watched by one or two of the headmaster’s four daughters. We made rafts on the stream, and tickled for trout. A boy called Gollup found a Bronze Age axe mould in the stream, afterwards always referred to as “Gollup’s Find”. 

At home, a great friend was a Peter Sperring from Penparcau with whom I used to go butterfly hunting. My other playmates included some among the eleven children of the Walker family at the bottom of the road. They were Roman Catholics, and my mother forbade me to play there on days when the nuns visited “in case they convert you”. My father took me to Llanbadarn church on Sundays, where a vivid memory is of the elderly Mrs Powell of Nanteos who was deaf and sat at the back; at Holy Communion she would wait until everyone else had participated and returned to their seats and then she would walk slowly down the immense length of the nave and chancel with her antique brass ear-trumpet jangling loudly. 

Because of his polio, my father was not called up, and became a part-time air-raid warden for our part of Aberystwyth. Part of his job was to provide gasmasks and check the blackouts for the Trefechan area, but there were no air raids in the county and, apart from occasional mines washed up along the coast, no contact with enemy action. We would hear German bombers coming up over Cardigan Bay and turning inland at Aberystwyth to go and bomb Birmingham, and a few bombs were jettisoned in the countryside. There was a strange legend that Hitler had been in the Criccieth area or even at Aberystwyth university at some stage, and was very fond of the Welsh. For that reason he hated the satirical short story writer Caradoc Evans who lived out at New Cross; a bomb that was jettisoned near there was said to have been aimed at him. There is still a swastika graffiti on a beech tree trunk near New Cross on the former Nanteos estate. Who did it? 

Tan-y-bwlch beach near us was closed for a long time and used for training, as were the Ynys-las dunes. Professor Newton was organising research into the use of seaweeds for agar production, and my father was given a petrol allowance to go down to Cornwall to collect the relevant species. The material was kept for a time in our bath in seawater, and I vividly remember the bioluminescence in it. He had a makeshift laboratory in our loft, with little home-made balances hanging from the beams with which he measured the weight of the specimens during their drying. I have a vague recollection that he said it was top secret work, which was presumably why he did not do the work in the laboratory in the botany department. A by-product of the war was the Wardens’ Dramatic Society that gave performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, to which my father took me and of which he was very fond; the Society still exists.

We had a primitive air raid shelter dug into the bank behind the garage in the garden, covered with a sheet of corrugated iron, but we never had to use it. Windover [Arthur's home] was built on a slope, and under the front rooms of the house there was a tapering space deep enough at the front to stand up in. Before the front rooms were re-floored I used occasionally to clamber down there. My father kept a barrel of petrol there all through the war, in case we needed the car to escape from the Germans, and when at the end of the war my mother discovered that we had been living over this fire bomb for five years she understandably had a fit of hysterics.

At Miss Trotter’s school we knitted khaki scarves and gloves for the troops, gloves being done only by the cleverer girls. I was hopeless at scarves, the results having wavy edges and holes, so mine were allowed to get absurdly long before they were unpicked and started again.  We had on separate occasions two girl refugees from Birmingham at Windover. All I remember of them is that one regularly used to say: “I’m going to sulk”, and she would stand in the corner of the sitting room facing the wall with her hands behind her back. Neither lasted long with us.

At some time during the war my father bought for £100 Penyrhen-rhiw, a house near Ystumtuen, ten miles inland, with five acres of hill land. We used to spend a month or more there in the summer, my father going down to Aberystwyth once a week by bus to buy provisions (petrol  rationing making the car impractical). I kept an aquarium there, with water-spiders, Polynema natans (the underwater-swimming chalcid fly that parasitizes dragonfly eggs) and various water beetles. In a corner of the sitting room we nursed meadow pipits that had injured themselves on the telephone wires, something that happened surprisingly often then. 

My father had peat-cutting rights on a little bog a cross the road. One evening the kettle fell off the chain holding it over the fire, the burning peat exploded and we had to rush out as the room filled with steam and burning peat. It took days to clean up. A drain ran diagonally under the slates on the sitting room floor, and we used to lift the slates up to show the toads that lived there to our visitors. My father used to say that the presence of frogs on the well reservoir on the slope above the house showed that our drinking water was safe, though my mother was not so sure.

On one occasion a family of refugees from the bombing of Birmingham were brought to a disused lead miners’ house in the village. The following morning they all passed us going back up the road, shouting: “Bombs are better than that hovel, we’re going home!” and threw a loaf over the fence to us. We kept the house well into the 1950s, and then sold it to Ian Fleming-Williams, art master at Charterhouse School, whose family later became great friends

Arthur Chater

Many thanks to Arthur Chater, the botanist, for sharing his wartime memories with the project. These came via Helen Palmer at Archifdy Ceredigion Archives, where Mr Chater's recollections have recently been deposited.

"He Called Me His Girl" ~ Part two

The memories of the precious moments with Rosemary guided him through the waiting and training; the dream of returning to her. Writing from Abbey Lodge, Park Road London NW8 he describes the memories of one of their meetings to share the sunset:

 ‘I remember the evening in the headland [Borth] with the mist drifting past, blotting out the rest of the world, there was a beauty in its rawness and I shall always remember how thirsty I was and how I felt particularly ravenous eating the bread and butter you brought. Then after that we had the long walk up the hill, it really was lovely, finished with our goodnight embrace. I went in a dream up the rest of the hill as I rode down through the mist to the little church. I could just as easily have been on a magic carpet floating through the clouds. They are indeed beautiful memories and I am so happy that you are reliving them with me beside you in spirit...It looks like I won’t get any leave for another six weeks, so we shall have to hold our heads high and believe in each other through our letters…in my daydreams I envisage us meeting again in Clarach’.

 

Camping at Clarach

 Like many of his contemporaries, for one time only, he was able to return to Aberystwyth briefly to steal just a few days leave before being stationed back in London. Arriving back in Clarach, they camped and walked and cherished those precious moments.  The letters are painful to read; they bravely realized that the inevitable departure would have to be tolerated for an undetermined period of time before they could meet again. Life and the halcyon days of sunsets at Aberystwyth would never be the same. He voiced his unhappiness at the inevitable departure:

‘Leaving you at the platform at Borth felt terrible.  Just as though a beautiful dream had come to an end, only to discover that everything was very true, I was leaving you for a very long time. I have never felt so much like crying as I did when your form disappeared into the mist as the train left the platform, it focused me. Your love for me is really deep rooted but oh, the look on your face. I felt I was being so distant towards you, yet I wanted to be so very, very near to you- why was it not good weather?We have no need to say good bye, we will be together always.’

There was an understanding between them that after finishing his studies and graduating, Fred would want to continue to fly and travel. He was one of a few graduates chosen to be trained and try for his wings in north America. I am not sure why he was sent to Nova Scotia in Canada initially or why he left his studies early from Aberystywth. He still had a year to finish his degree. In his letters he mentions his dreams of being able to see the earth from above.  One of the letters from overseas described the exhilarating changes of the landscape and his new cultural experiences that would never have been available to a farmer’s boy from New Radnor. He compared and reflected upon this bizarre dual life and the opportunities that the war had brought.  

Letters describe his journey by boat across the Atlantic as if he were a geographer. They travelled in a flotilla. He articulates seeing the phosphorescence bloom on the sea from the ship; the stormy conditions that made most of the crew retire to their bunks and his optimism of achieving his dream; to see the earth from the view of a bird:

‘I am writing this well into the Atlantic, there has been a storm raging since we started. The wind is blowing at gale force and the ship, although quite big is tossing almost like a cork. Some of the boys are pretty ill and wishing we would be torpedoed…I like to sit up top all day watching the other ships all tossing together. The conditions are crowded, I spend a lot of time queuing in the canteen for chocolate, sweets and fruit. It is difficult to find somewhere to write, every niche on the ship seems occupied...It is a marvelous sight to see allied ships steaming in to the sunset; sunsets to rival an Aber sunset.’

Rosemary shares local news from Aberystwyth and his College. In a reply to her description about the news of the pier closing and the dances being moved to the examination hall in the Old College, Fred notes his surprise at the condition of the floor of the dance room and that the dancing would have been better than the ‘stuffy pier’ anyway. Later, in a letter when he was travelling (November 1941; it is unclear where Fred was, as letters were opened and inspected and they were discouraged to add dates to letters) he was eager to keep the connection between them, he penned: 

'Please go on describing Borth and its surroundings in its different moods. To me here under the shimmering haze [I believe he had been transported to America by then]  it instills a freshness one can lose so easily. Your descriptions are so vivid, you gave me a complete picture of Borth in it’s Autumn coat, a picture which makes my heart swell with pride of the land to which I belong.’
 

He had previously described to Rosemary that he yearned to travel and grasped the unique opportunity to train for his wings in the United States.  His main goal though was to fly; he admitted, that the task of winning the war was the secondary aim.  Departure was now certain after all the months of waiting and marching along the Embankment. In a short note from London, before he was sent to Canada, he then travelled by train to Alabama, USA to start the serious training and embracing the new skills of learning to fly:

‘The deed’s done. I am now an airman, my uniform was issued today… we have started to wear khakis [dull tropical uniform] I think we are the first to come in uniform. When we arrived it was Armistice Day so we marched, 200 of us… people seemed to be impressed by the way we swing our arms. The streets were crowded, every vantage point from the tall buildings seemed to be occupied with people.’ 

After a short spell in Alabama, Fred moved and was stationed in Florida. Again, it is unclear why he was moved to other barracks. The envelopes and paper, once in America, Arcadia, South Florida and Canada, were written on paper with a letterhead embossed gold insignia; Rosemary received sweetheart brooches from him. She exchanged postal gifts, sending him poems and a tiny sprig of cherished edelweiss she had collected from Switzerland, gathered from the mountains from a pre-war holiday as a child with her parents. Is this why she used to sing Edelweiss to me as a lullaby at bedtime?

His correspondence is filled with descriptions of dances and his new experiences and music fills the letters. He enthusiastically compares the dances in Canada, Alabama and Florida to Wales; he describes the thrill of learning the jitterbug, enjoying the quality and abundance of food; the free and easy lifestyle afforded by the British airmen, but always making sure to let her know that Rosemary was ‘his girl’. His letters reiterated this:

‘the girls here aren’t as sincere as you, Rosemary…The girls are impatient to do their boogy-woogie and jitterbug; waltzes seem rather irksome to them…' and later, ‘It hurts me terribly to think how much I am enjoying myself  here and there you are stuck in Borth having the dullest of times.’

The later letters are filled with elation of being in the air and the final letter describes sorties and the skills he had to prove before gaining his wings. They are joyful and confirmed that he was now fulfilled after the very long wait, but still mindful to remember that Rosemary was still studying in her final year in Borth, and encourages her to focus on her studies.

 ‘I do wish I could have been on the castle grounds with you, viewing Pen Dinas, Consti and Clarach cliff and of course, Venus’.

They both agreed to look in the sky for Venus. My mother continued to do this in later life but never explained why.
      
Fred was then transferred to his final air base, in order to complete further training at an airbase at Arcadia in south Florida, USA. He described flying over the flat muddy landscape of pools and seeing the shadow of his plane on the earth below, reflected in the everglades. A mixture of joy and sorrow fills his letters; he yearns to see Rosemary again, asking for her patience and apologising for his uncontained enthusiasm.  

 ‘We had a lecture today on the geography of north America and we had a large map up in front of us. It was the first time I think I really realised that I was at the very moment on a spot in the south-east corner of the continent and that I was really separated from you by sea. During the week when we were confined to barracks we might be anywhere on earth, even in England, but when we get out at weekends, we soon discover that we are in a land different from England in many ways.’

 ‘I had a taste of life about which I had heard so much.  Just after posting last week’s letter, I got picked up by a family who already had two of our boys with them and after having tea, we spent the better half of the night honky-tonking…I suppose it is similar to our road houses, a few miles out of town, where people spend the evening drinking and dancing. Music is provided  by a glorified radiogram, like the one in that terrible amusement place in Terrace Road opposite the Coliseum… The dancing was terrible with everyone, taking just any sort of steps. It was a long way from the King’s Hall with Evered Davies Band and you.’

His final letter to Rosemary contains the description of him gaining his wings as a ‘red letter day.’ But he goes on to write from US Army Corps, Maxwell Field, Alabama:

‘but it started badly, by losing your edelweiss you sent to me and I had a really terrible feeling, that my heart had been emptied of something, or if I had been holding you and you had suddenly been wrenched from me. The edelweiss held such a lot of sentimental value..I am always yours, Cheerio my dearest.

 

Fred reading a letter from his parents

The day Fred gained his wings, and completed his first solo flight, he took part in the traditional ceremony which was to dunk newbie pilots in a swimming pool by fellow air cadets - one might describe it as ‘high jinks’.  Fred was a poor swimmer, he suffered cramp and was unable to get to the surface in time. He drowned in seconds in an unnecessary ceremony which resulted in the tragic loss of a promising life.

As I dug deeper in to the Quality Street box, I found that it  was separated with trays that had held the layers of chocolates and under the lower canopies were  the condolence letters from Rosemary’s family and friends. It made for a heart-wrenching read. Ben Bowen from the Geography Department, Aberystwyth University wrote:

‘We looked upon his absence while serving with the forces as a mere interlude, we eagerly awaited his return …when the war was over.  He showed great promise.’

The news was broken to Rosemary, ‘his girl’, like many other young women experienced at the time, in a formal letter from Fred’s parents from New Radnor. They suggested that they meet briefly in Owen’s Café in Aberystwyth, [now Tesco Express] if she wished.  Her parents travelled down from Lancashire for this emotionally charged meeting. It will have been the first time her parents had  travelled to mid-Wales.  After the brief visit, she wrote again to Fred’s family:

“I wonder if you noticed that there was an extra place at the table on Saturday and I should like to think that Fred was there, pleased to know that we had all met.”

It was Rosemary’s final year of teacher training in Borth. Condolence letters were also sent from her parents to ‘Dear Duck, duck,’ urging her to put her head down and complete her studies.  

Twenty-six uniformed RAF cadets acted as guard of honor at Fred’s funeral, he was buried in Arcadia. The Rector (Frank Brunton, Christ Episcopal Church) described the ceremony to his parents:

'The day was beautiful;  Florida was at its hottest.  The coffin was a myriad of flowers and at the committal the guards of honour; 26 boys in uniform  came up to the coffin and saluted. They stood rigidly at attention through the service with their eyes shut and the tears running down their faces and I had difficulty controlling my own voice.'

His colleague in a letter to Fred’s parents, bravely described his friend and the tragic accident:

'the untimely death has aroused great distress in his squadron, and has hit his friends hard… he was a true example of the best ‘Britisher’, always ready to help us and was often good-humurly (sic) scoffed at, for being the one who complained the least, about any injustice done to us by authorities.'

The Tampa Morning Tribune report on Fred's death

 

Rosemary completed her studies, trained as a PE teacher, returned to Lancashire and started a job as Lead Physical Education Organiser for Preston schools in her county town in Lancashire. Haunted by the needless, tragic death of her first true love, she was determined to leave a legacy to ensure that every child in the Preston Borough would learn to swim whilst at primary school.  She wrote to Fred’s parents in response to the letter with the news of his death:

‘How proud you must be to know he made his solo flight.  To me it means he reached his goal, it is now is up to me to achieve mine and to prove that I too, could never let him down. Today I have made a vow that I shall work to the upmost of my ability to become a competent life-saver. I do not like swimming very much but I will conquer my fear so that perhaps one day I can prevent the suffering of so many parents, wives and sweethearts.’

Rosemary ensured that I too learnt to swim as early as possible; it remains one of my passions to this day. I had no idea of this back-story. Later Rosemary married a veterinary surgeon (my father) and was to lead a very rich and fulfilled life. Rosemary and my father visited Fred’s parents in New Radnor once again, when my father was working in Whitchurch at his first Veterinary appointment.

This innocent sweet box, stashed away in the wardrobe opened up a moment in time; a longing, thwarted aspirations and deep love – two souls separated by 4,260 miles with no knowledge of when they would meet again.  I replaced the letters and ephemera and closed the lid on this sweet box; its story is now told.

This story that could so easily have been lost in time like many already have. It describes the influence that Ceredigion had on two young people. A love of Aberystwyth, the Welsh countryside, hiraeth and how this impacted on a girl of nineteen and a boy of eighteen. 

In 1997 I chose to join my husband who had gained a post in the same University as Fred attended. Rosemary was delighted that another generation would experience this special place over fifty years later. I became the connection to wax lyrical about ‘kicking the bar’, her love of Aberystwyth and Borth sunsets. Among her artefacts I also found poems that she had written to Fred, drawings of Borth and the RAF sweetheart brooches he had sent to her.

My mother travelled to Wales to visit us and stay in our home many times but she declined the invitation to visit Clarach – it was too painful for her, she wished to keep that memory of wartime Clarach private.  Rosemary passed away Rosemary passed away on the 15th September 2019.

 

Mum and me in Aberaeron

 

Blog by Alison Pierse

Images (c.) of Alison Pierse/the Lloyd family

"He Called Me His Girl" ~ Part One

“I feel as if I am walking on the top of the world, I have received two grand letters from you, enough to make a man happy, time and time again.”

This is the love story of an Aberystwyth student, captured in time; extracts from personal letters from family correspondence during World War II, written by airman 1418101 No3 Squadron,  Alfred T Lloyd known as Fred.

Alfred’s rather solemn photo was always on my mother’s dressing table next to a beautiful photographic portrait of my father smoking a pipe when he was about 25.  It always intrigued me that she kept this image of this dashingly handsome, blonde, Anglo-Saxon gentleman next to Dad’s photo; after all, she loved my father dearly, they had a good marriage. Where, when, what and why was there this  emotional pull? Why was my father happy about this?  Dad and her were happy and they had a strong friendship, but of course I only observed this from a child’s perspective.

Image of Fred Lloyd on my mother’s dressing table

 

In 2019, after my mother’s death, I was tasked to look for the essential and other important documents that solicitors request at these stressful times. Tucked away in the bottom of a wardrobe, amongst her everyday clothes, stiletto shoes and not so everyday crocodile skin handbags from the 60s, was a gold and turquoise cardboard Quality Street box; it could have so easily been thrown out. Intrigued, I opened the box to find love letters, photographs, condolence letters from her parents, his parents, aunts and the head of Aberystwyth University Geography Department, together with newspaper clippings about Fred from a United States newspaper, The Tampa Morning Tribune.  What I had stumbled upon was a time capsule linked to this blonde gentleman in the photograph on the dressing table; it swallowed me whole and was to take me along a path I hadn’t anticipated. 

My mother wasn’t secretive about the relationship with Fred, I knew who he was; but when questioned she would just smile and say, ‘I was his girl’.  The box of correspondence including the letters from Fred completed the circle and intrigue of my mother’s story of love and loss; a pain which she had been locked away from the family for 78 years. I am really not sure if members of the family or her friends knew about him or this intense friendship; perhaps she had confided in my sister, with whom she was close to. I was the last od her children to be born with two older siblings.

People say that you only really get to know your parents after their passing. A wake is the time that families and friends share those stories. To me she was just Mum, the carer, provider, highly practical and stoic. My mother was ninety-eight when she passed away, she had outlived many of her friends therefore I didn’t experience this privilege of gathering stories but I had made some audio recordings of her talking about her life during the war on one of my visits.  

I never saw my mother dance or teach; such secrets remained with her until the close of her passing. I always also thought it odd that I grew up in a house void of music, just Radio Four; friend’s houses always had music. Reading these letters revealed a surprising side to my mother; a happy and carefree girl, very conscientious, a hard worker and a poet!   

During the latter months of grief after my mother’s death, I steadily worked through about fifty of Fred’s letters; they were beautifully hand-written with fountain pen and on both sides of tiny sheets of writing paper.  He regales his experiences and is careful to ask her how she was coping with her studies. He describes his life, his hopes and his dreams to her. The most common day he writes on is a Sunday. The early letters from Radnorshire describe the busy working farm; the latter letters were only written when he had a bit of leave between training for flight school.  This intense and profound spotlight during wartime has helped me piece together and realise why my mother was how she was in so many respects.  Not the stoic matriarchal woman I knew.

Let me set the scene. It was 1940, Fred was eighteen and in his second year of studies in Geography and French at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (Coll).  Rosemary Hall, my mother, was an evacuee undergraduate student from Chelsea Physical Education College, London and living in Borth; she had just turned 19. This is when they met. Fred departed early from the university to join the air force with the dream of wanting to learn to fly. His father had been a community Watchman, logging and tracking the flights and planes over the mountains on the sorties to Dublin.

Rosemary describes Fred as extremely bright; he matriculated with 98% from school; she spoke of him with great love and wistfulness.  He was a humble farmer’s lad from New Radnor; he liked the nightlife of Aberystwyth; his letters are full of memories of Rosemary and him enjoying the popular big band music of the time. They had originally met at a dance at the King’s Hall on Aberystwyth promenade. She told me before her death that she was attracted to him because he was a good dancer. She thought that he had learnt to dance in the village hall in Radnor.  They liked to waltz, foxtrot and quickstep. His latter letters indicate that he wanted to learn the Rumba and Tango so he could dance closer to her. Dancing was the fashion and a way of meeting and getting close to the opposite sex.  I can picture the scene from a Hollywood movie of the time, like Brief Encounter. That frisson of a moment; a precious jewel; the keepsake that he was to take with him when he left Aberystwyth for voluntary active service.

Just like the scenes in movies; the band played; they glanced at each other from across the dance floor; she was swept away – the perfect romance. He had previously already spotted her; she had caught his eye earlier as he explained in a letter:

‘I first saw you from my bedroom window (8 Vulcan St),  you were downstairs walking on the street,  I then saw you from one door of the Kings’ Hall and you were at the other. I remember that look on your face, I can always see it…the way you seemed to walk, impressed a picture on my mind’… I then briefly saw the back of you walking up Great Darkgate Street’…‘I hoped to see you again the week after at the Coll dance…’

Rosemary and the girl students’ of the PE College were under strict control in the Grand Hotel, Borth; she describes of her frustration and discomfort of being shut in to the hotel, in a letter written to Fred who had by then departed from Aberystwyth and was in London. He comforts her by writing back:

 ‘I should think the Grand Hotel does get to seem a bit like a nunnery, it does seem ridiculous that you should be kept under so much…there is always the same trouble in the girl’s hostel in Aber...I really can’t understand them barring you from Coll dances…Have the (University) women got control? They know they don’t have a chance at the dance if the ‘Borth girls’ are allowed in.’

His letters describe the weight of the guilt he felt from leaving his family to tend the farm at Radnor whilst he studied at college; he knew that he was privileged to have such an opportunity:

“I feel ashamed of myself when I come home and see my mother working like a slave after I have been leading a life of comparative idleness in Aber.  I spend most of my time there [in Radnor]  doing manual work – Here I am totally living a different life from yours. You wouldn’t recognise me. I wear rather old clothes smeared with patches of oil and mud, a dilapidated trilby or in the summer, a tatty straw hat.’

He talks of heavy labour, keeping the tractor running and maintaining the vehicles on the farm:

‘Someone has to do the hard dirty work, it makes one thankful for one’s own food and other things…but people pay no thought of the amount of work needed to produce them.’

His early letters describe his modest home life in some detail, his farming life of his early teens:

‘…scything thistles, harvesting oats and breaking in ponies… this is the country I have lived the whole of my life, I can remember of which I know as well as the back of my hand.’ 

He sends her a postcard of the hill that he climbs above Knowle Farm where he wrote his letters to her. He and his younger brother broke in a Welsh cob and would ride the hills during the small windows of free time in the farming calendar:

‘Below me is a flat valley, a mosaic of different coloured fields studied with pieces of woodland. Beyond are the Black Hills more undulating and at a distance I can see the Clee Hills.’

Was Fred aclimatising Rosemary to what their life together would be like if they stayed together? He was aware that she was from the Fylde, Blackpool. She had all the entertainment one could ever want and within easy access. During his university holidays he wrote letters to Rosemary from his walks up on the hills, overlooking Hereford and across to the Malverns. Correspondence was the umbilicalcord to each other. Fred clearly missed his home life, and latterly his country and ‘his girl’. Further letters describe his life, preparing Rosemary for the country life with no sparkly dance halls, Big Bands and bright lights.

Before being transported to his first barracks, he was isolated in Radnorshire to ride out a bout of the measles, like so many locals at that time. This prevented him from seeing Rosemary before being stationed for pre-training and fitness. He wasn’t aware of where he would be transported. They all just had to wait. Due to his illness  he mentions his father giving him lighter duties on the farm with the added bonus of being able to write to her more often:

 ‘I could not read your letter because I was already working driving the tractor. It seemed to burn a hole right through my pocket, I had to start reading whilst driving along, the noise of the machine sank to the background and I felt as if I were riding through the air, so wonderful did your words sound.’

That treasured childhood, nestled in the hills, gave him the experience of seeing the landscape from above. Was this why he also had the desire of wanting to meet Rosemary on that headland, high above Clarach to catch the sunset, watch the sea from the high point, as if in an aircraft? The desire for flying was so strong in him, he writes in one letter from The Knowle, Radnor, before leaving his home pastures:

‘Tomorrow I am entering on a new life, the one which has really been my dream since I saw my first aeroplane.’

Rosemary was an impressionable girl; evacuated from London, she lived with the staff and students at the Grand Hotel at Borth; her room faced the sea. She talked longingly of the spectacular sunsets from her bedroom window, sitting on the roof balcony in her smalls and the walks to the peak of the hill [now the memorial at Upper Borth] where she and Fred had met regularly. It was the rule at the time that male University students could only meet the opposite sex within a certain radius away from campus; there must have been a lot of long walks.

 

Camping near Clarach – the mid way point between Aberystwyth and Borth. Fred on the right

 
Both staff and students were evacuated for the duration of the war; many students were never to see their London college buildings as they spent the whole three years of study in Borth. They arrived and left by train, departing from the wind swept Borth station; a long thin platform overlooked by straw coloured marram grass, looking out on to the vast peat bog. Often this outlook that could be seen from the rear of the Grand Hotel was enveloped in sea fret hugging the bog. Students were transported weekly in an old charabanc to Aberystwyth for special Saturday classes at the Edward Davies Building (now the School of Art) in order to use the university’s Chemistry Department for their anatomy lessons.  Since week-ends were the only time the laboratories were available to them; the Chelsea girls were only allowed to enter from the rear of the building, of course! Intense classes were given in the morning but once endured, they had Saturday afternoon and evening free to look at the shops and have baked beans on toast in the local cafes and watch the RAF trainees march the promenade.

The evacuation of these modern girl’s brought their modern ways to Borth.  I imagine that they turned the local boy’s heads, with their perfectly coiffured hair, seeming highly sophisticated to local eyes, lipstick and nylons and wearing fashionably adapted back seamed stockings drawn with eyeliner all the way up the back of their legs. What a spectacle they must have been; kitted out in their tailored PE divided shorts and blazers; wearing their gowns in winter over their divided skirts; their heavy Lodencloth capes tightly wrapped about their person, protecting them from the horizontal sea winds, as they gaily walked down Borth High Street to attend lectures in the Memorial Hall, or spend their pocket money on ‘the best donuts I have ever tasted’. 

 

Rosemary pictured on the left in her academic gown outside the Grand Hotel

The girls were kept very busy, their physical games and life saving classes were taught around the tides; the only free space that changed rapidly. All their lessons, regardless of weather were outside on the sands when it was low tide, battling the wind.  Each day they drew out the lacrosse and hockey pitches with a cricket stump between their knees. They snatched precious days out on Constitution Hill, Cwm Woods and Clarach Bay; camping with their chums or cycling up the hills to meet by the Memorial. In an early letter before Fred left Aberystwyth, written from Vulcan Street, Fred first describes his love for Rosemary:

 ‘No person has ever occupied my mind so much as you are. I find thoughts of you running through my head all through the day, all combined with wonderful memories of our times together’.

He was clearly smitten.  Waiting in a ‘holding barracks’ in St John’s Wood before being stationed elsewhere in London he wrote and reflected upon his new temporary life, so different to his life in mid-Wales:

‘It is quite different awaking to the shout of the corporals, the buzz of many voices in a long cry, to the low of a cow and the clucking of hens in Radnor.'

Like many others, Fred had a long wait before his transportation and new adventure. He was billeted in London for months, in three different living quarters. His letters explain that he felt quite out of place in the big city; while his peers’ families lived close by and they could drop home for a few hours if they so wished. The inconvenience and great distance from New Radnor was understood as part of the process and the honor to be part of the air force. It gave him time to reflect on what he would be leaving behind – his girl.

 ‘Sitting by the river [Thames] is a nice spot. But it would be so much better if you were here with me; I can feel your presence… I can imagine Cwm Woods just turning into many variegated colours- a sight to feast upon…I am sitting on the train, in the carriage, opposite me, is a picture of Aber, how I do miss it’.

Weeks passed by while the trainees were occupied by parade marching along the London Embankment in order to gain fitness in preparation for pilot training. Fred underwent rigorous psychometric tests; polished buttons, (they tarnish quickly) wrote letters and attended to his duties. It was clear the troops were bored and were rarely allowed out of the barracks. He later wrote that he had been confused by the London underground, but was getting a little bit more acquainted with the city and relished that he was allowed out between 5.30-10pm. None of his squadron had any idea when they would be seconded; they just had to wait and keep fit. The letters are full of desperation for some leave so he could return to see Rosemary and meet up with her before being stationed abroad. The train ride to Wales was just too far to make the journey as the leave was a day or so.

 “I have bought a postcard of the view of Borth, I think of the new view of this earth, from the lofty heights I hope to reach. I see nice fluffy clouds and think of the time when I shall be able to gamble in and out of them.’

He wrote with excitement: ‘Yesterday I had my psychological test, I think I am booked for a bomber.’ 

 

Blog by Alison Pierse 

Images (c.) of Alison Pierse/the Lloyd family