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My mother's mother and my mother's step-father lived here. I've made a yellow dot where I think the little house still stands. The map is an ancient Ordnance Survey.
Raymond Terrace perched along the edge of a ridge looking down on the River Taff, which in the 1950s still flowed black or very dark grey with coal dust which was carried as a heavy sediment towards Cardiff.
Behind the house, and across the valley beyond the river, ran railways that carried coal night and day.
To the north, high above Pontypridd we would gaze towards Doctor Price's sham castle which stood above the chain foundry where the workers subscribed to his upkeep.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Price_(physician)
I would wake in the night and hear the clinking of coal wagons being shunted in a yard close by to the west. And in the background was another sound, the endless roar of the river tumbling over the weir.
Treforest was a foreign country for me, coming from a small rural town where most people had country accents to visit the smokey valleys where voices were louder and sentences intoned quite musically.
My sister Sally and I stayed here just before my second sister V was born. And we had a playful cousin here, Diane, who was cared for by our grandparents until her mum, one of thousands of G.I. brides I guess, was able to re-possess her in 1957. I can vividly remember returning to Malmesbury and being introduced to the newborn V in the tiny sitting room at 35 Horsefair in Malmesbury.
There is a picture of myself with Diane playing in Malmesbury Abbey churchyard ... maybe 1950, possibly 1951 ...
A little to the north of Raymond Terrace, John Street was the terminating point of a trolley bus that ran from Treforest to Pontypridd and Cilfynydd. I took it for granted, not realizing that such a service was a rarity.
New book looks at Pontypridd's trolleybus system, which operated from 1930 to 1957 - Wales Online
... to be continued ... possibly, maybe ...
