My First Plant

My home town, Swansea in South Wales, was badly bombed during the Second World War, in fact it was bombed forty-four times and most brutally in February 1941 when three days of continuous bombardment reduced it to a desert of ruins. Swansea was for centuries a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution and an important seaport and so the target of the bombing was the docklands that shipped coal and steel to the rest of Britain and the World.  However in those terrible days and nights it was the city centre and residential areas that took the brunt of the attack, leaving it a burnt out core and leaving 219  dead and 260 seriously injured.

My mother and me standing in a bomb site around 1949.

This was the world that I was born into at the end of the war in 1945.  Life in those post-war years was very austere, I realize that now, but as a child it was all that I knew and was excited as I saw the  rebuilding of the town around me. I had no idea of the losses that the town had taken and was delighted at the newness of the reborn city centre.  The highlight of my week was going to town to spend my pocket money and it was on one of these trips that I first encountered a new, very smart florist, it seemed then to by the most luxurious thing imaginable, filled with colour and fragrance. There were flowers and plants that were on the whole very familiar, but on one occasion I found  something extraordinarily exotic, something I had only seen on television, something that was definitely not local, it was a cactus! I had to have it, of course, and the tiny plant in an equally tiny pot was carried home with pride. My parents were horrified at the cost of this little treasure, but allowed me to place it in the living room window. But with little encouragement from them, I allowed this plant to go the way of so many houseplants, it became "wallpaper", disappearing from my everyday consciousness  and slowly became a desiccated shell.