Wandering
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"We would be off first thing in the morning and back in the evening without a care." Catherine remembers walking everywhere with friends in her childhood.
Transcript
"Neither my mother or father spoke Welsh, so it was only my brother and I, and we didn't speak Welsh with each other at all. But my parents believed that the Welsh medium offered better education than the English schools.
I went to Pontygwaith school at the time, but I lived in Tylorstown, so I'd have to walk over the mountain and back again to school.
One of my good friends in my form lived at the top of the village and I would visit her, but nobody lived in the same street as us, or the next one.
I had another friend who lived in Ferndale, which is about a mile and a half away, but she lived at the far end of the village - nearly two miles away. I would walk to see her, and we may decide to go to the swimming in the pool in Ystrad. So off we'd go, over the mountain, past Penrhys, swim for a couple of hours, perhaps we'd have a game of badminton before we'd walk back home.
We were forever wandering around, especially to visit friends. We felt a lot safer and really didn't worry about dangers. We would be off first thing in the morning and back in the evening without a care. I enjoyed walking, and it was such a big feature of life in the valleys, and the views are so wonderful."
