A once thriving town centre razed to the ground on the last of the night raids, watched by the west end population as it burned.
Hello and greetings from my long-ago days of boyhood, when machinery mechanics roamed the land fixing diggers, bulldozers, tipper trucks, tractors and anything else wot’ needed fixin’.
I was born in 1943 in West Cross, a few miles round the sweep of the bay from a town centre the Luftwaffe had already flattened. Forty acres of it, razed on the last of the night raids while the west end watched it burn.
Why Swansea? In the battle for the Atlantic it was one of the most important ports in Britain. Five docks, a vast railway goods yard, and a town to demoralise. As a schoolboy visiting an aunt in Danygraig I’d pass the Monkey Bridge: 465 feet long, four feet wide, thirty feet up, running over the railway lines onto the Prince of Wales Dock. Armed sentries had guarded it in the war. By my time they were long gone. I never did cross it.
Where the High Street had been there was only carnage, and in time the new Kingsway. But for a mechanically minded boy it was the start of something. I made friends with the digger and crane drivers home from the war to rebuild the place. It was the time of Meccano, Dinky toys and model aircraft, a time of renewal, and I made the most of it.
