Here Be Ogres Rhondda Stories edition by Edward Rees Literature Fiction eBooks
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Old maps had drawings of dragons and sea-serpents on the outer, unexplored areas of the world, sometimes with the words, “Here be dragons”. Ogres, however, lay in wait for Junior School children entering schools in the 1920s.
This book, written by an 82-year-old man brought up in the Valley, shows the life of two Rhondda boys born in 1920. In the first fifteen stories they are schoolboys aged between six and eleven; in a further fifteen tales they are eight to ten years older and working in a colliery, the story-teller as a lampman and his friend as a hewer of coal.
The book provides a detailed picture of their lives in a unique place, the Rhondda Valleys, at a unique time, the Depression years between the two great wars of the Twentieth Century. The reader looks at Rhondda streets, houses, gardens and gullies - the dirt lanes where roaming sheep and children abounded, into classrooms, chapels, shops and cafes, pubs and a Conservative club full of near-communists, workmen’s institutes, dance-halls, parks and playgrounds, a football game and a cricket match, street games, a tug-of-war contest between teams of Catholics and Protestants, a Quaker meeting-hall, a bowling-green, a mountainside golf course constructed by out-of-work miners, cinemas and Bracchi shops.
The boys encounter brutal teachers, angry neighbours, a burglar, ministers and deacons, a medium, a future-telling spirit and even the Devil himself, the coolest missionary to evade the cooking-pot, Great War heroes – one a fugitive, the other a would-be suicide, various shopkeepers, café-owners, groundsmen and other natural enemies of young boys, particularly the local bobby and his superiors, and even an aggressive scavenging sheep.
They play outside a working slaughterhouse, create a street-cart spectacle, disrupt an adult séance, try to steal fruit from a garden, subvert a school Nativity play, entrance a club concert audience of miners, enliven a cricket-match, endure a school swimming-lesson on a freezing May morning, serve as a suicide’s assistants, shock a chapel congregation with shrill whistling and a clockwork mouse, insult a preacher, and shoot a cheating café-owner in his allotment.
Their friends include a juvenile kleptomaniac, a pint-sized sceptic, an adept bully, a fiendishly clever and outdoing little girl and another with sharp and eager teeth. They are assisted or obstructed by memorable adults of different kinds.
The young miners, happy bachelors that they are, just about manage to cope with fond but suspicious fiancées, each with a will of iron and a disconcerting inclination towards matrimony. They engage in a battle of wits with a dry Italian café-owner, his fictional duck and his precociously attractive fifteen-year-old niece. They clash with a sly police constable, a jealously pugnacious suitor, a greedy bookie, a victim of their mild practical joke, an unscrupulous chapel minister, an enemy scornful of their newfound dancing skills, a formidable market greengrocer, an officious park-keeper, an angry, jealous workmate spoiling for a fight, and an old professional boxer, skilled and without scruples.
Their friends and acquaintances encounter a penny-pinching colliery official, the stubborn father of a girlfriend, a callous pit manager, a drunken heckler in a fair, a war widow who sends a white feather to a war hero, poverty that denies two children’s hope of a visit from Father Christmas, the resourcefulness of a coach-load of single-minded schizophrenics, and the menace of a murderous, mocking German sniper.
Poverty is not funny, but when you don’t know or care that you are poor you grab the opportunities for fun, killing time pleasurably without the adult’s awareness that time is killing you. These events are told joyfully, with tongue in cheek and without a hint of regret. Rhondda people, and readers not lucky enough to have been raised there, will, I am sure, enjoy these memories, real and imagined.
Here Be Ogres Rhondda Stories edition by Edward Rees Literature Fiction eBooks
A wonderful autobiography of a man growing up in the Rhondda in the 1930s. The book is full of fantastic stories and the people with whom he grew up and helped form him. Edward Rees is quite a character. These stories are a bit different from the other story that made the Rhondda famous only this one might be titled "How Black Was My Valley."Product details
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Here Be Ogres Rhondda Stories edition by Edward Rees Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
A wonderful autobiography of a man growing up in the Rhondda in the 1930s. The book is full of fantastic stories and the people with whom he grew up and helped form him. Edward Rees is quite a character. These stories are a bit different from the other story that made the Rhondda famous only this one might be titled "How Black Was My Valley."
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