Free Everything I Have Always Forgotten by Owain Hughes

adult who needed to learn the ropes. She had already fed the cows and mucked out the cowshed and washed it down with disinfectant. My hands were neither large enough, nor strong enough, to be much use in milking, but I learned quickly, and proudly milked two whole cows by myself, while she did the other six and lots of other things besides.
    We went inside for breakfast and after that she showed me how to churn the milk to make butter. She made most of her milk into butter because it was not worth the trouble of carrying her very few gallons to Parc, to be picked up by the farmer there and taken down to be then picked up by the dairy to be bottled. These were still the days before milk coolers (she had no electricity) and pasteurization. Thus, she sold whatever small amount of milk had been ordered, the rest went to making butter. With fewer and fewer farms still making butter, hers sold well.
    She had a large wooden barrel with a crank handle on a cradle. She poured the milk in and then started to turn the crank. I remember marvelling at those strong arms going round and round for what seemed like hours on end. She told me to try, but I could last only a few minutes before giving up in exhaustion. When she was satisfied with the consistency, she would pour off the whey, which some customers even preferred to whole milk (I suppose this buttermilk is more like low-fat milk) and put the butter into moulds and stamped them with her butter stamp in the form of a thistle. I was used to eating shop-bought butter which came from New Zealand at the time, it was bright yellow with food colouring rather than natural carotene, while the butter made by Mrs Lloyd Williams was pure white, white as lard or shortening. She did not salt it as the Bretons do, to help in preserving it and there were beads of sweated water on the surface.
    Father, when he was lucky enough to buy a pound of her butter, would salt it himself… as for hers, the demand was such that she never had to worry about conserving it without refrigeration. By now, most of her clients had electricity and refrigerators and could thus keep the unsalted butter for weeks.
    Of course, one problem in the equation that had been dealt with from time immemorial, was that there were no telephones in the Croesor Valley. She could not call clients to say the butter or the milk was ready, nor could they enquire. The only method of communication was to ‘stop by’, which, if she was not too busy, entailed a cup of tea and the local news. Indeed, when my Parents wanted to invite a guest from the mountains to dinner, they had to send a telegram to the Post Office in Garreg and hope that someone would walk down the two or three miles from where they lived and then back up again, dropping off urgent messages such as telegrams on the way. If the telegram required a response, then the recipient would have to walk down to the Post Office where there was a telephone box and there they could make the call to us, accepting or declining. It was a most laborious form of bush telegraph. A few people now had cars, and that made the trip much easier, but ownership of a car entailed a good deal of community service as well… as in: “We’ll be needing your car to take Gran to the doctor next Tuesday.” Wealth had its concomitant responsibilities.
    The alternative to staying with Mrs Lloyd-Williams or in a local hotel was less appealing, because it bore with it far more solicitous care than I was accustomed to, besides more rules. That was going to stay with Uncles and Aunts. They all lived in England and their spouses had normal jobs such as banking or farming. I never went to stay with Mother’s Brother until much later. He was a brilliant eccentric whose letters to The Times were regularly published. He was a pioneer in ecological farming and used some of the very first solar panels in Britain. His four children were younger than we and his beautiful Spanish wife (who had