Joe Bloggs

Or as we used to sing at the tops of our voices:

'We come along on Saturday morning
Greeting everybody with a smile.
We come along on Saturday morning
Knowing it's well worth while.

We come along on Saturday morning
Greeting everybody with a smile.
Smile!
Smile!!
Greeting everybody with a smile.'

And then settle down to a morning of combined cowboys and horseplay and tribal score-settling. The crew from Copperworks and New Dock always vastly outmuscled anything we could produce. And Felinfoel was itself a divided force anyway, so there was no real hope but camouflage for the few of us who used to make the trip from Llethri Road. We survived.

The library was an important bit of the childhood saturday in the industrial Welsh past, at one time. Along with the Odeon  in the morning, then rissole and chips at the Savoy, then Frost's comic and toy stall on the market, and Hodges' model shop in Market Street with its spitfires,  and model aeroplane 'dope'. The incredibly opulent sports shop in Stepney Street with its arrows, fishing rods, footballs and airguns with their gleaming walnut stocks. And its high wooden racks and display cases and counters. Apart from being a train driver or fireman or spy or fighter pilot or outside half for Wales, or Davy Crockett, being a shop assistant among such wonders would have been one dream career.
For a particular kind of Llanelli teenage bargain book hunter, there was the 'Refugee Aid' bookshop in Llanelli House, the decaying C18th architectural masterpiece at the heart of the old town This book cave stank so much of mildew you could almost see the fungal spores drifting through the air like pipe smoke in a pirate tavern, and the two little old ladies knitting among a pile of damp cardboard boxes might have been its blousy barmaids.

Which particular refugees we were aiding by buying one book for every three we stole, we never knew.
There were strange and expensive books there which must have come from defunct country house libraries and middle class Great Depression bankruptcies. The story of the book was as much in its appearance and smell as in the words. Great rusting tomes of Caryle's pernicious and unreadable essays, church editions of The Pilgrim's Progress, with brass corners and sunday school lesson plans in a special appendix. History was very near in those books even if the original homes of the books were beyond my experience. But so were copies of the mad, banned Beat poets and Williams Burroughs from god knows what trendy Llanelli avant-garde cellarites. Here was another Llanelli I knew just as little about.
The imposing stone battlements of the town library opposite were quite different. Since I was little, my father had taken me with him to replenish his weekly ration of Zane Gray, and I'd got used to the place. And rather liked its grown up waxy meaty smell of stout leather municipal bindings and polished wood shelves. I liked the high toplit ceiling with its pigeons and, when I was only 8, the fact that I could go in to a huge stone building, and  take away expensive books, and that the adults around weren't trying to stop me, but were actually at my beck and call.
I definitely liked the record library when I was older, and heard things courtesy of the Llanelli ratepayer, with a dash of teenage random dumb luck choice, which I might never have heard otherwise, and which have served me very well down the years. Likewise the books.
Then off to the rugby for a 3 oclock kick off against Neath or Richmond or Cross Keys, to watch the brilliant Phil Bennet do things with space and time and a rugby ball which have never been seen since, and which he seldom approached in his televised career, and the laws of which are only now being truly investigated by scientists in a massive hole in the ground in Switzerland. After attempting to imitate him through the exiting multitudes in the cinder crunchy Stradey carpark, it was home for tea after a perfect Saturday afternoon.

I remember this simple lane, with its stream on one side, as a fabulous green palace filled with nuts in autumn, with masses of bluebells in spring. We used to climb one of the big trees and sit in it for hours. Apparently, there used to be a woman who lived in one of the more modest cottages up there, who appears in one census as a ‘pauper’. And then when you got to the top of the tunnel of trees, and through the rusting black iron wicket gate on the old right of way. There were the brambles on one side and gorse on the other, and the path going straight up to Cribyn Farm – and the much more fascinating one dipping down and over the stream via two great flat stones, and up again to where the carpark opposite the community centre is now.
Then it was just fields. But the real kick was from turning upstream into the huge great green, clean cathedral of trees on either steep mossy ferny bank. Which is still there, only deprived for some municipal reason of its river, and so now has to make do with piles of fly-tipped rubbish.
 It does seem obvious why the Baptist Revival was so popular hereabouts during the time when the temples of industrialisation were making many places was very black and smoky. I remember being very young and being carried/dragged by – I think – my sister and cousins across those stepping stones with the water splashing underneath, and assuming that this was the very stream from ‘Gi ceffyl bach, yn carrio ni'n dau.’ You know the bit: ‘Dwr yn yr afon, a’r cerrig yn slip..’ These were the very stones, my mother knew them, and was singing about them.
They were certainly ‘slip’.