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This story is submitted by Brian Smith and is added to the site with his permission.

My father wanted to join the navy but with his experience as a plumber and in the gas board, he was in a reserved occupation and they wouldn’t let him go. He actually went down to Portsmouth and filled all the forms in to get in the navy, but because of his job they wouldn’t let him go. His father was a builder, came from Abergavenny, and of course he was experienced in structures and a plumber and gas and things like that so he ended up in the ARP and when buildings were blown to pieces his team went out and looked at all the carnage and collected bodies and things like that. Very often he told me things about one or two bombs which dropped in our village. There’s a river going right through our village the Sirhowy River, it goes right down through Risca to Alcan where the steelworks is. And when the Germans had command of the skies they would come over to try and find the Alcan steelworks and try and drop their bombs on it. So to find it they would follow the Sirhowy river but it was so well camouflaged that they passed it and would carry on up the river until they would realise they were running short of fuel so they would drop their bombs and make their way back to Germany. So they dropped two bombs on Cwmfelinfach, and they dropped three bombs in Ynysddu. It must have been daytime because my mother was standing on the doorstep of Alexandra, number 12 Alexandra, talking to her next door neighbour Mrs. Hoddinott who also had a babe in arms, my brother, who’s 11 years older than me was a babe in arms. They’d just stopped talking, said goodbye and shut the door..and these three bombs dropped in the pit just the other side of the Sirhowy River, they didn’t explode, but the force of them hitting the pit threw up all rocks and boulders and smashed the windows of the houses, and hit the front door where my mother had been standing, so she was saved by just a couple of minutes. My father was called and said he was sure there were more than two bombs there, and there were. If they’d have gone off they’d have blown Alexandra to pieces like.

He told me about other scenes when he went down to Cwmfelin….there’s a gap there now ….two houses don’t exist because they were blown up by the bomb. When he was digging away there was a young little boy in there who was a little bit mentally retarded and all they could see was his little bottom sticking up out of the rubble …they dug him out and he was still alive but all the rest of the family was killed like. He trained his best to do something in the war after being rejected….he went to Newport and saw terrible things, it was all things you see when bombs cause the damage with the humans. My mother, she was a dressmaker, she managed during the war and struggled on, when my brother was four or five, she would take the lining of a coat out and make little shirts. It was make do and mend. My mother was called Mabel, she was from Ebbw Vale, and dad was called Edward, but nickname of Ted.

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