Bronwen Hugil and Flora Fowles

FLORA: I was born and bred in Aberdyfii and brought up here and never left. Why would you, living in a place like Aberdyfi? I married a local fellow, Cyril. His family had the bakery shop in the village; we married in St. Peter’s Church and, in those days, the church was always full.

BRONWEN: I came here with my brother when I was four years old. My dad came here as a booking clerk for the railway. I, like Flora, stayed in the village. I worked as a waitress, which I absolutely adored, at The Green Café with Mrs. Reese. And there I met my husband, Stan. The Outward Bound instructors used to come in for their cup of coffee in the morning, and that was it! So I married him in 1953, and we had our two boys.

Flora and I are now the two eldest people in the village – I’m 93 and Flora’s 91.

On flooding:

FLORA: Now then, it’s got to be, well, I think Winifred would be about 17, probably when it flooded up in Penhelig, by Nantiesyn, back in the 1950s.

BRONWEN: Yes, at the bottom of Nantiesyn.

FLORA: There’s a big well there and that flooded the lodge. There were four cottages in the lodge and Cyril, my husband, and my brother Clifford, helped this young lady, Winifred, who was there with her companion. In those days, they had a companion.

FLORA: And she was trying to come through the flood. And Cyril and Clifford just happened to be there, and so they carried her through. The flooding must have lasted for a week, just in that area.

BRONWEN: I remember the flooding in the square.

FLORA: Oh, coming down from Copperhill Street?

BRONWEN: Yes, and the sea coming in. Where this new shop is now – next door to the ice cream shop – Isabel’s, I was working there in the late 1960s when it was a shoe shop, and I went into work and I could hear slish-sloshing in the cellar. And it was all the shoes – the boxes of shoes floating and knocking together!

BRONWEN: But the flooding in the square would also be from the little brook here at the top of Copperhill Street by my house. It was also coming into the house. It only lasted a couple of days, thank goodness. Yes, it would be high tides and the rainfall that caused flooding in Aberdyfi. The last time there was flooding with this little brook was only a couple of years ago, and it came down like a river.

FLORA: You know, that’s the only actual flooding where people couldn’t get through that I can remember in all of those years. I do remember when we had a very, very bad winter – because we used to have bad wintersin those days – and the road being blocked between Aberdyfi and Tywyn.

BRONWEN: Oh, that was the snow.

FLORA: Yes, with the snow. And you couldn’t get to Tywyn unless you walked along the beach.

BRONWEN: That’s how the milk came.

FLORA: Yes, they brought it along the beach from Tywyn. In about 1963 or 1964, there was a very heavy, heavy snow and it lasted for quite a while.

BRONWEN: Oh, and the river froze.

FLORA: Yes!

BRONWEN: I remember Ronald Pugh, my brother and the boys walked out onto the ice on the river. And I remember Jack Pugh shouting at Ronald, “Come back here! Come back here! If you don’t come back, I’ll kill you!”

FLORA: That was 1963. A very heavy, very bad winter. That was one of the worst winters.

BRONWEN: That was when the ice floes came down the river.