I went to Ebbw Vale primary School, during my time there I met my first friend Robert, we used to do everything together. Robert live down the road from my family we played in the street after school, with our toys and really enjoyed playing tag, hide and seek and biff-bat (which we usually had a competition to who can last the longest in keeping his ball hitting the bat.

At the age of 8 going on 9 Germany went to war with the UK. Children from all over the coasts of England started arriving in the countryside of Wales, as Germany attacked the East coast first. My village took in some of these evacuees, they stayed at the houses of my school mates. One stayed at my house they were the same age as a Doreen. Her name was Josephine, the two of them became good friends. Josephine started Ebbw Vale Scholl in the September of 1938 with Doreen, I was in year 4 and Llewellyn had just left Ebbw Vale and was about to start at Ebbw Fawr Learning Secondary. I know this sound like a lot of hassle for my parents with 4 lots of school supplies to buy, luckily, we didn’t have a school uniform so there wasn’t anything that need to be brought as the schools supplied all things the children needed.

As young children we always played in the large field at the centre of Bedwelty with loads of other children from the surrounding schools and some children from surrounding villages. With the evacuated children from England, the children from Bedwelty and the surrounding villages there was over 600 children all piled in to 3 schools, Ebbw Vale, Bedwelty Christian School and Ebbw Fawr Learning Secondary. Some of the older children (14-16 years old) don’t go to school, they have jobs but still hang around at the field after work when possible after all they are still children. When a big enough crowd had gathered at the field we all played together it usually ended up being a game of football, even if there was no ball to play with us kids used a tin can that once stored beans.

One day in the early winter, when I was Nine just before my Tenth birthday, I helped Dad chop and gather some wood for the coal fire, a wood splitter flew through the air and landed in my left eye. I lost the eye in this accident and then had it replaced with a porcelain disc with a replica eye painted on it. It was hard for my mum and dad to get the prosthetic eye, as there was no financial assistance to help with our health care. Until they were able to afford the porcelain eye I had to wear an eye patch, so I didn’t freak out the children at school with just my empty socket. Most health treatment for anyone who didn’t have insurance from their employer either needed to save or raise the money somehow. I knew someone who managed to get their treatment money for the local community.

At school we had all the usual subjects, my favourite subject was English, Robert’s was Math. Even though Ebbw Vale is a Welsh school we got reprimanded for speaking Cymraeg (Welsh). Usually a repremand was a ruler inscriped with WN which stands for Welsh Not, it was to be handed to every student that was caught speaking welsh by a teacher and the student that was in possesion on the Welsh Not recieved a punishment from a cane or a slipper, at the end of the day or even lesson. This was to discourage other students from speaking Cymraeg, as english was the prefered medium of instruction.

When the evacuees joined Ebbw Vale School we started to learn about their life in England. It wasn’t much different than the life in Wales but most of them lived in cities and towns, where most of Monmouthshire was still mostly countryside with farms and crop fields, although there were small villages too. Ebbw Vale was the biggest of the 3 villages of Monmouthshire with Glamorgan second and Aberfan is the smallest. The town that is in Monmouthshire is where the secondary school is located, as it was the logical place to situate it. As each of the student bodies at all the primary schools can attend. Even though some of the older student didn’t attend the secondary school it was still quite busy.