When our gran came to Gabalfa from the docks to see us on Saturday afternoons to bring caraway seed cake and my cousin Richard's old shirts, with the collars and cuffs turned, and Richard's old socks, with the holes in the heels darned - I never felt too proud to enjoy the fact that my gran had worked so hard to give me some comforts. Years later, when my life was taking form and I was enticed by the possibility of life, and my gran was dying in hospital, surrounded by her family, my aunt who had taken my sister in when she was little suggested that I go to the hospital...... I hesitated. I was not brave enough to face death. She went surrounded by loved ones, but I wasn't there. I've regretted it ever since.
Talking about regrets, I left home when I was sixteen, after the umpteenth row with my father and the last straw that broke the camel's back : I could take his anger and violence no more. "You drove my mother mad, but you're not driving me mad !" I said and brandished the breadknife at him. Of course, drunk as usual, he lunged angrily towards me, so I had no option but to throw the knife away before any harm could occur, and he beat me to a pulp. What few things I had I put in my suitcase, and as I was doming down the stairs bloody but not bow'd he threatened, "Leave this house now, and you never return!"
But like all family rows, wounds heal and life goes on.
It's not the leaving home I regret, but my virtual abandonment of my young sister. I knew that my father loved her and would never harm her, but, at the same time, I was not there for her when I should have been. Happily, the marriage she made when they were sixteen and seventeen has been a lifelong happiness, marred by tragedy, but bonded by deeply felt love and respect for each other.
I saw her and my father when I visited my mother at the hospital, but to be frank, my teenage years were wild and volatile and undisciplined and unpredictable. There were years where a big gap occurred before my sister and I established the bonds of siblings , largely because I lived away from Cardiff when there were no mobile phones and no internet. But, thankfully, she and her husband and their children came to visit me often, and so over the years we have never lost our closeness.
One cousin, the younger son of my mother's twin sister remains close to us because he was like a younger brother and we looked after him when he was little. But all other cousins are spread wide afield, in Australia, New Zealand, Bristol, and Penarth, which may just as well be another continent as far as our proximity is concerned.
There are many cousins on my father's side of the family. We used to see them at funerals, but that was about all. One became famous as a gymnast, winning a bronze medal at Helsinki, and she has worked tirelessly with the handicapped most of her adult life.