Déjà vu

I recently had a vacation in mid Wales, quite near the small coastal town of Tywyn. I was last there over 70 years ago.

At the age of 4 and then 5 the family had two vacations there. I traveled with my grandmother by rail and my parents traveled from London on a Vesper. (For Vesper – death trap on two wheels - see an example in the film: Roman Holiday). The very large Holiday Fellowship Guesthouse on the seafront used to organize walks each day, and one day we visited some scary waterfalls with what appeared to my young eyes some very flimsy wooden bridges over them. I can remember that vividly, and also the concert the house put on each week – basically an amateur talent show. I sang “Me and My Teddy Bear” the first year, and then in my best Cockney accent “Maybe It’s because I’m a Londoner” the second. I was no doubt a right precocious brat. Before I parted company with that kind of vacation in my mid-teens I had graduated to reciting my own humorous verse and doing conjuring tricks - badly.

The final things I can remember about Tywyn were fortifications on the beach – huge stones and barbed wire at the sea edge, which didn’t make for very successful paddling. For all these years I believed they were left over from the war in case the Germans came around into the Irish Sea and invaded from the West Coast of Wales.

So – I was surprised how much I remembered. From the visit this year the waterfalls turned out to be the Dolgoch Falls and we climbed higher and higher as the younger generation and three dogs led the way. I may have been smaller on my first visit, but they were just as large and impressive today.

As for the fortifications to repel a German invasion – now there was just five miles of sandy coastline with not a bit of barbed wire in sight. But you would expect that today. But an internet check showed these beaches were never expecting invasion, but rather were used in massive training exercises for the Normandy landings. Some bits had obviously still been in place all those years ago for my youthful memory to cling onto. So that is over 70 years of misconception put to rest. It was rather satisfying really.