The green hills of Lansdown look down on our Somerset prefab, and somewhere beyond them are the imagined blue-tinted hills of the Welsh border. When the summer holidays come we get on the train for Newport, wait for the valleys bus outside Newport station, and an hour later we are staring at the culinary treasure trove that is Auntie Eileen's larder in Talywain. "Talywain, Oh Talywain!" as the poets of tomorrow will one day say. Whisper that name in prefab number twenty-four and toes start to tingle, pulses quicken, and heads turn giddy at the thought of double servings of bread and butter! "It is no accident" (to use Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic's favourite phrase) that both 'Holiday' and 'Talywain' are three-syllable words. Better-off kids whose parents could afford to pay for a holiday (and who ended up being booted out of Weymouth boarding houses at half past nine on rain swept mornings and told not to return until tea-time) must have raged with fury at the thought of our lingering in bed in Talywain and gazing out at the hill sides. No singing in riverside pubs for them , no passing the ball up and down Pontypool's famous rugby pitch, no throwing stones down disused mine shafts and holding one's breath as they send echos down towards the centre of the earth, no late-night tales of the ghost dogs that roamed down Monmouthshire's country lanes at dusk!
'Italians in the rain' (who turned out not to be Italian at all) were always singing arias from Verdi operas while digging holes in the roads and pavements of Talywain. The holiday excitement did not stop when you went indoors. Once the thrill of the journey from Somerset and the anticipation of what was in store reached such a crescendo of expectancy that I was unable to do what was discretely called my 'number two'. "Has he been yet?" my cousin kept on saying. Determined to bring about what is now called 'closure' on my embarrassing predicament I marched into the lavatory (never call it "the toilet" said the son of the slick salesman who lives in the corner prefab), dramatically slammed the door shut, and simulated momentous success and supreme relief with an emphatic pull of the chain and an ear-piercing shout of: "And about time!"
This cunning stratagem might have worked in sleepy Somerset, but in the high-oxygen terrain of the South Wales valleys they know their Von Clausewitz to their finger tips. My cousin had placed his ear against the lavatory door. "He didn't go, Auntie!" he shouted out in triumph as he raced into the sitting-room. "He just pretended!"

"That is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again." (A.E. Housman - 1859-1936.)