Gazzis Pontnewydd
A Memory of Cwmbran.
Feeling a bit nostalgic, I browsed some sites showing my old primary school, my home town and village of Pontnewydd and found this site with a memory of Gazzis ice cream parlour in Pontnewydd. I remember my father treating us to an ice cream there after we had waited patiently as he had a shave in the barber shop on New Street on a Saturday morning.
Sair Mann
Added
14 February 2015
#337354
#337354
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Living on the end of the street, our garden driveway ran alongside the railway line with nothing but a narrow grass banking between the two. Not even a fence acted as a safety barrier for a family of 5 children. We played on the line, we picked blackberries along the side of the railway , between our house and the town centre bridge, jumping off the line out of the way of the trains when they came.
My school, Maindy infants and juniors were accessed regularly by crossing the line and jumping down over the school wall or squeezing through a gap in the school fence.
My grandparents lived in Tynewydd Road on the opposite side of the railway and we took the short cut across the line and out through the gate of the old goods yard to visit them, often returning in the dark. We knew every step by heart.
The railway line, the old goods yard and the grass bankings was the playground for all the local children and many of our games were both daring and dangerous. In Harold Street ( nicknamed ' the second street'), we played a game called ' kick the can', which literally involved the child who was ' on it' kicking a drinks can as hard and as far as possible ( often across the railway line) and then having to retrieve it a quickly as possible while all his or her playmates hid between the garages or in the allotments until they could run out and ' kick the can't before getting caught.
A more dangerous game involved shimmying on our bellies along a thick branch that overhung the railway from the grass bank on Harrold Street. Once you were level with the line, the idea was to wrap your arms and legs around the branch until a train passed underneath and hang on for dear life as the branch bounced up and down . I did it just one time and thought I was going to die. Nobody did die.
Years later, after getting married, we bought our first house in Stanley place and lived there for 4 years our two young sons. Although happy to ' come home', I was grateful that by then the railway line was by then disused and a much safer place for my own boys to play and go Blackberry picking.