They moved into a house on Victoria Street, next to the Co-op, and had three children: the two boys, quickly, first my father Emyr, then my Uncle Tudor, then my Aunty Mair, three years later. I still have a photograph of Will with Mair – at Southerndown again. They are both eating ice-cream. She is wearing a pink ruched bathing suit with a frill around her bottom and he has rolled up his trousers to just below the knee and he is actually wearing a knotted handkerchief on his head. I never knew people really did that till I saw that picture of him. He is holding her hand. He looks happy. He does not look like someone who wants for anything. ‘It is enough for me,’ he seems to be saying with his sunburned face and his big smile, ‘to be standing here on the beach at Southerndown in the sunshine with my baby daughter eating ice-cream.’

He worked at the marshalling yard, and at some point he bought the four-room house on Commercial Hill, the one I visited as a child when Agnes was still living there, and people have told me that when he talked about his life at that time he spoke of good suppers and sweet bathed babies and the peace and quiet of the evening. It gave him joy, he used to say, to walk down the high pavements of the sloping streets and feel the mountain in his back and the closeness of the houses in their long staggered rows, the lighted windows of the shops. He never understood why anyone wouldn’t want to live their whole life there. He could not think of a better place on earth.

And then the day came when he was promoted at the marshalling yard and he was sent off in the evening to the Red Cow for an hour because Agnes and the children were getting a party ready for him – sandwiches and paper decorations and a cake with candles on it because even though it wasn’t his birthday the children begged for candles and Agnes laughed and said, Oh all right then, we can have candles. It was supposed to be a surprise but he knew what they were up to. Mair had spent most of the day behind the settee with a bottle of glue and a pair of scissors and a packet of crêpe paper. All afternoon he’d heard the sound of her trying to be quiet. The boys had shut themselves in the back with Agnes and for hours there’d been a clatter of pans and spoons and jolly shrieks and shouts.