of north-west Wales and close up the house in Hampstead. It appeared to Bronwen Astor at the time like an awfully big adventure, but later she came to see 1939 as a pivotal moment in her childhood, the end of an age of innocence and plenty and the start of a period when she was continually without the things and people she needed to sustain her.
At the age of seven Bronwen had been invited by a school friend to a birthday party in Bishops Avenue, a leafy street of very large houses in Hampstead, known today as ‘Millionaires’ Row’. ‘Until then I had thought that our house was big, but this was so much bigger than anything I had seen,’ she recalls. ‘It even had a swimming pool, all the things you were supposed to want. Immediately I felt very uncomfortable there. It seemed so cold and unwelcoming.’
She joined in with a game of hide and seek in the garden but ‘I was suddenly aware that I was standing totally alone. Everyone had disappeared and a voice spoke to me and said, “None of this matters. None of these things. Only love matters.”’ It was, as she now describes it, ‘a flash of understanding, that the beautiful house, the lovely garden were not as important as what I had experienced, love. There was a tension in this family that I had felt. It was not a happy home.’
She did not mention the experience to anyone. ‘I knew it was God because it was said with such authority. My father would say prayers at night and I think he probably had a mystical streak. We would go to church on Sundays, where my mother would enjoy singing the hymns, but it never occurred to me to mention it to either of them. I thought it was something that happened to everyone. I wasn’t frightened, but reassured. It highlighted love for me as the most important thing, as my lodestar.’
Sixty plus years on, without any independent confirmation, it is impossible to verify the details of this incident. However, its broader significance is all too clear. Though she didn’t know it at the time, this was the start of what Bronwen later came to map as her spiritual journey and the first glimpse, however fleeting, of a capacity within her to experience and react to feelings, tensions, fears or pain in a physical way.
The land of my fathers? My fathers can keep it.
Attributed to Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
The old Dr Williams’ School building has the look of a neglected North Country nunnery, its wide gables sagging down over grey stone walls blackened with age, its windows positioned high off the ground to shut out the prying eyes of the world. Next to the road out of Dolgellau to Barmouth and the North, it is now part of a local sixth-form college, but a weather-beaten plaque over the main entrance recalls its history. ENDOWED OUT OF THE FUNDS OF THE TRUST FOUNDED IN I716 BY THE REVD DANIEL WILLIAMS DD, ERECTED BY PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION IN 1878.Williams, a wealthy Welsh Presbyterian minister, had wanted to promote primary education in Wales, but once the state took over such provision in the early 1870s, his trustees had redirected their funds to secondary education and established Dr Williams’ School.
Today there may be new tenants and the Welsh Dolgellau has replaced the Anglicised Dolgelley (or Doll-jelly, as the boarders here in the 1930s and 1940s called their host town), but the bleak backdrop to Dr Williams’ has altered little over the centuries. The Wnion river flows into the Mawddach, which widens as it leaves its mountainous hinterland and sweeps out towards the Irish Sea and the sandy beaches of Barmouth and Fairbourne. On both sides of the estuary are rolling hills dotted with isolated farms. Towering above everything else is the vast, bleak, greyish-green lump of Cader Idris, its peak shaped like a horse’s saddle.
For some, notably the eighteenth-century painter Richard Wilson, this was a lyrical and romantic landscape to be celebrated, but after the familiar, crowded, urban environment of Hampstead, with its trees, buses and tamed Heath, north-west Wales must have seemed an alien territory to nine-year-old Bronwen Pugh. This empty and usually rain-swept wilderness was a day’s journey by train from London. A specially designated coach for Dr Williams’ girls took her, chaperoned by her older sister Gwyneth, now one of the seniors at the school, plus other boarders, from the capital up to Ruabon Junction, over the border from Shrewsbury, where they changed on to a now abandoned branch line which snaked through the mountains before descending to the coast via Dolgellau. At the station – now a second-hand clothes shop – they were met and then marched uphill the mile or so to the school building. Trunks had been sent on ahead. Each girl brought only a small overnight bag. It was a spartan start to a spartan life.
The Pughs were remarkably relaxed about their young daughters undertaking what to any parent today would seem an epic and dangerous voyage. At least Bronwen had an older sister with her who knew the ropes. When Ann first went to the school, her mother accompanied her for just half the journey and then left her in the care of the guard. Independence was learnt at an early age. Parental visits to the school were permitted just once a-term and often only their mother came. During the war years, even these dried up. Though Kathleen Pugh had initially put up some opposition to shipping her daughters off to north-west Wales – she would have preferred a more standard girls’ boarding school at Felixstowe – she bowed to her husband’s wishes and the couple, as ever, presented a united front.
The distance from London was so great that any term-time trips back to the capital were out of the question. During the war years Wales was Bronwen’s principal home. Though her father had drilled her Welsh roots into her, young Bronwen had little other experience of the country than that gleaned over a Hampstead breakfast table. Family holidays, in deference to her mother’s wishes, had been taken on farms in Suffolk or at Bognor with Bella Wells.
To describe Dr Williams’ as ‘home’ would be to create a false impression of comfort. It was cold, often damp and the food was no better than adequate. Wartime shortages meant a restricted and meagre diet in the communal dining room. ‘On Fridays, the cook would always produce something the girls called “lucky dip”,’ recalls Margaret Braund, a member of staff from 1944 to 1948. ‘It was basically bread and butter pudding but with whatever else was left over and lying round the kitchen – bits of sandwich, sausages, even a nail once, I think. They hated it and it was truly awful.’
Each day pupils changed seats and eventually table to a predetermined pattern to ensure that they all mixed, under strict supervision. ‘It was regimented,’ Ann recalls, ‘but for me at least it afforded a sense of confidence because you always knew what was going to happen.’ Boarders slept in six- or seven-girl dormitories-or ‘dorm-ies’ – and were again regularly moved round to prevent schoolgirl crushes. Some of the seniors were housed off site in Pen-y-Coed, a building halfway up the hill that faces the school. It was also home to the younger members of staff and therefore had a more relaxed atmosphere.
Sickness was dealt with robustly – a good gargle of Dettol was regarded as enough to put most ailments right. Morning bell rang at seven. There was a quick wash in cold water, with baths strictly by rota once a week. And then on with the uniform. For summer there was a navy tunic, a green and white striped blazer, with green poplin blouse and straw hat; for winter, the same blazer but a green viyella blouse and navy blue velour hat. (The straw hats reputedly were excellent for sifting for gold in the streams around Dolgellau, home then to one of Britain’s few gold mines.) At the weekend it was a thick velvet or shantung green dress, depending on the season.
The Pughs were all put in Cader house, one of the six groupings into which the 300 or so pupils were divided. There were rules, with order marks for good behaviour contributing to honours for one’s house. And there was little indulgence. ‘No magazines or comic papers are to be sent to girls at school,’ stipulated a set of rules sent to the Pughs in 1939, ‘with the exception of the Girl’s Own paper and Riding and Zoo. Permission must be obtained from the headmistress for any other magazine which parents may think suitable.’
