ABC Wednesday - M

There was only one place I could possibly use for the letter M and that's Mumbles, village of my birth and home of my heart.

It's said that the name Mumbles comes from the French word 'mammelles' meaning breasts. It's claimed that the Normans sailing into the bay gave it that name because the two islands - that you can't see clearly in the above photo! - looked like breasts. (That's the French for you.)

Mumbles is a suburb of Swansea these days but once it was an independent village with a thriving oyster industry and in Victorian times became a popular holiday destination. On the edge of the Gower peninsula it's still popular with tourists and, it's said, that there is once again a thriving but secret oyster farming project in existence ...

When I was a child Mumbles was a village in a truer sense of the word than it is today. Everyone knew everyone else - and their business. Today the boundaries of many of the surrounding villages have, with the creeping in of new housing estates, blurred into a more amorphous blob.

Here you've got George (much younger!) and me on Mumbles hill with the village immediately below and behind us.
Both my great-uncle and later, when he retired from his job as an insurance man, my grandfather worked on Mumbles Pier, my uncle on the skee rolls and my grandfather in the kiosk entrance to the pier itself. Naturally the pier played a large role in my growing-up.

As a child I was scared to walk on its wooden slats but my Auntie Gay assured me that 'the pier could hold the Queen Mary' (the liner that was). I wasn't wholly convinced but conquered my fear, although to this day it's a major plucking-up-the-courage job if I'm to walk from the pier along the small bridge to the lifeboat house.

The last time we went on the pier, last year, it was in a state of disrepair and parts were sectioned off as unsafe. Now the entire pier is closed until a plan has been agreed/money has been found for its renovation.
I hope it can be saved. Mumbles wouldn't be the same without the pier.

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