Chapter 6: Gwenllian

Gwenllian Morgan was an ordinary looking young girl who grew up in Llanrumney, one of the less salubrious suburbs of Cardiff. Her first name was always shortened to Gwennie, and then usually lengthened again to Little Gwennie. Her school achievements were neither more nor less than were expected from a child with her background, and she duly left school in 2005 at sixteen years old and was lucky enough to find work in a shop, serving customers with bread and cakes over the counter.

The back store-room of the shop was kept clean and tidy, and stock was carried in from the vans and on into the shop by another unremarkable youngster, a boy called Nathan who lived a few streets away from Gwennie.

Inevitably Nathan and Gwennie were thrown together, and together they discovered cigarettes and sex and alcohol, though not necessarily in that order.

As everybody in both families had come to expect, they married, and it was considered a stylish wedding by the standards of the area, in that Gwennie was not pregnant on her wedding day. A seven day long orgy of sex and alcohol on their honeymoon in Porthcawl, some thirty-five miles away from their homes, soon changed that and Gwennie had little Nicola a few days before her nineteenth birthday.

The realities of life intervened then and Gwennie’s existence was one long round of washing, cleaning and cooking for some years after the baby arrived. For some reason, perhaps not unconnected with a secret visit to the doctor, there was no brother or sister for Nicola in the first few years. After that the few physical attractions Gwennie had had to offer were lost in a mountain of fat induced by regular large doses of fish and chips, or the Cardiff speciality, curry with half-and-half (half rice, half chips). Sex was a rare activity in the household and nobody really missed it; Gwennie because she was too fat to enjoy it, and Nathan because he found her obesity rather off-putting. As he remarked to a work-mate on one occasion, “I’d need a step ladder to get on top of her.”

Nicola was twelve and had been getting glowing school reports for some time when Nathan was coming home from the pub drunk, and walked under a bus. “He stepped straight out without looking,” said an eye-witness, and there was Gwennie, thirty-one years old and widowed with a child still at school.

Times became hard for the mother and daughter, and Gwennie lost weight, mostly because she was starving herself to feed her daughter. The school reports went from glowing to positively ecstatic as Nicola spent her time studying with little or no interruption. She cared nothing for boys, fashion, pop music, or any of the other distractions her class-mates spent their time on.

Eventually, with some arm twisting by the school, it was made possible for her to stay on at school until she was eighteen, and then she achieved what had never been done from her school, and was generally considered virtually impossible for a slum child; she won a full scholarship to go to Oxford University.