David Thomas Williams was born in the Rhymney Valley in 1933. He is very much a family man and many of his poems reflect this. Humorous, nostalgic and serious this collection offers something for everyone.
About the Author: I am trying hard to put together a few words in praise of poetry out of the Rhymney Valley. It is very difficult, I might say, for me to tell the reader that the Rhymney Valley was a very welcome place to live in when coal pits drew a picture of hob nailed boots, a tommy box, a jack of water and the sound of the pit hooter that was heard in the early hours of each morning. In the youthful years of growing up an alternative to digging coal was the open space of the country side and I worked on the farm, an estate in Warwick, and walked young bulls and looked after pigs and fed them and did the cleaning out and the painful squeezing of the ring into the noses of a litter of weaner pigs. A busy time for a youngster just out of the Valleys of Wales . National Service call up, at a time when young men were called to serve in the forces in the Korean War. Korea was a long way from home, some six weeks sailing away on the HMS Dunera. The country was torn apart by war between the North Koreans and the South Koreans and it was said the hills of Korea if flattened out would be enough to cover the whole world. United Nations Soldiers had to make the best out of a bad situation. Remember that song, Climb Every Mountain, sung by Julie Andrews? To climb every mountain in Korea would have been a nightmare and an unwelcome dream. The only wound I suffered was to have my tooth pulled out by an Army Dr. and the legacy of Malaria. Take tablets Dai was the answer. Looking back of having more teeth pulled in the years that followed my getting older by the minute, Mcutchins of Bargoed were butchers compared to the treatment the Army gave to soldiers. Laugh and the world will laugh at you, sometimes not with you but most times people want to laugh and enjoy life and the best things in life are very welcome. The most precious and best is to be comforted by your mother, never ever believe you can go through life without her, as for my own and at eighty three I still want her to hug me, and that was denied me when only a child, which may have had something to do with poetry of a sort. Which may also, at this time of my life, have compelled me to tell others what I have written, in a funny way, with regard to being raised in the Rhymney Valley and showered with laughter and many times anger and not to forget coal dust from the coal mines and the noise of trams clanging against one another.