The Day I Buried My Shoes and Dug a Hole of Lies

Photo by James Xander on Unsplash Growing up in Port Tennant, Swansea, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we didn’t have GPS, mobile phones, or anxious parents tracking our every move. We had the sun, our wits (questionable), and the occasional shouting match from Mam to remind us it was time to come home. But the truth is, we often didn’t come home. Not when we were supposed to. It got to the point where Mam had to call the police more than once to report us missing. In reality, we were usually off having adventures: intensely local, scruffy-kneed adventures around Wern Fawr Road and beyond, and we simply forgot what time it was. Sometimes we ended up down at Swansea Bay, sometimes on the Bank behind our street, and once even at the Carbon Black factory, which, when the wind was in the wrong direction, would dust our neighbourhood with black grime. One of us, either David or Peter, memory blurs here, came home covered in soot from head to toe, looking like something that had crawled…