This is the first volume of my autobiography covering the years 1950 to 1968, when I left Pontardawe Grammar School. The book opens with an extensive and rigorously authentic genealogy going back to the mid fourth century in one branch of the family, and genealogy of all the other branches. The book is interwoven with some of my poetry in both languages and is a unique account of Pontardawe Grammar School in the nineteen sixties. The prose is interwoven with poetry, which is the distilled wisdom of any People. The volume is eighteen years a growing in the village of Craig Cefn Parc and the small farm of “Pant y Bedw”. I have packed as many memories as I can into the book, and also accompanied the memories with contemporary history, the dangerous sixties of the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war, which contrasted so strongly with the life of the farm, the village and the schools: Craig Cefn Parc Primary school and Pontardawe Grammar School. I plan volume two from late 1968 to 1986, when I left for IBM in the Hudson Valley of New York State.
The photographs were prepared from my originals by Alina Hachikyan, B.A.