East View And Munich

A Memory of Bargoed.

I lived at East View, Number 31 with Edgar and Myfannwy Howells from 1955 onwards. They were my aunt and Uncle. They looked after me when my parents died when I was 5 years of age. East View was a great street to be brought up in. Parents didn`t want kids in their homes during daytime. They were too busy cleaning coal dust. We were right in front of about 9 cooling towers, Most were wooded, but one or two were concrete. The power house for the colliery was huge and very noisy on occasions when it released excess blast!! We played down the banking, near the railway and down Angel Lane. Kids I remember were, Colin Chatfied, Paul Gifford, David Ashford, George, Brian and Alan Whitcombe and their sister Rosie. Billy Boy?, David Gough, Ronald and Kenny Fairfax, Dai Hoskins, Sharon Griffiths, Arthur and Paul Patterson, and there were many more. East View was honeypot for fun and mayhem. Kids from all over Bargoed came down there. My father Edgar had a furniture removal business and he was a well respected man in the town. The town was a busy place. Lots of shops and stores, almost like a city to us kids. I lived there until I went to college in London. In 1994 I discovered that the parents that had died when I was 5 years of age, had actually adopted me. That inspired me to do family searches and I found out that I had a German father who was a P.O.W. and my mother was an Austrian cook who came to Britain in 1938. They were both married with families in Romania and Austria but obviously fell in love while they were together in Essex. I was put up for adoption and spent the first 5 years of my life at Walton-on-the-Naze, until they both died. I have discovered who my father was, although I never met him, and I am in good contact with the remains of his familiy who live in Munich.

---

---