I grew up in a house built overlooking the sea and across the sea, the mountains of central Wales. On a clear day, we could see the great castles of Criccieth and Harlech.

To the left was the highest mountain in England and Wales, Snowdon. On a clear day you could see the smoke of the narrow-track railway engine that chuffed it’s way to the summit.
It’s not that Wales has many clear days but when they appear you understand why most of the world is disadvantaged. They don’t live in Wales.

But even without clear days, the sea below the house was beautiful in all its moods. Some times the sea was somber and threatening. At others shadows scudded across the deep green of the waves. At still others the green disappeared into the mist of the rain and gave a feeling of infinite expanse.

Behind the house across the road, the land rose into a small rocky hill of grass, yellow gorse and lichen-covered grey rocks. It was our playground: Creigiau Yokehouse.

On the summit was a small stone tower built in Napoleonic days as one of the coastal warning stations. A beacon lit in a brazier warned the next tower down the coast, and the next thereafter of impending French invasion. Now the brazier is gone but we could climb into the space behind the battlements using metal rungs secured in the stones. It was our ‘castle.

’There were few children in our group of houses and, if I think back, I can count less than ten … of my age only four. We hung out together and played among those rocks.

That hill was the scene of many battles in my youth: between dashing cowboys and sly Indians, between Flash Gordon’s spaceship crew and alien populations who could fade into rock faces, and between the Allies and the Nazis. We didn’t differentiate: each battle had good guys and bad and our ‘castle’ could be converted from western frontier fort, to spaceship, to a British tank, at a switch of the imagination.

I remember one day when the boys were chasing the girls that I began to wonder about girls. It was Shiela Cornfield who first kissed me. She had blond hair and was a visitor. A popular song of the time began, “I remember the Cornfields,” and even though today I can still sing that first line, I don’t think I ever knew any others. Nothing came of that kiss but I have remembered it for sixty years. Odd!

Margaret Richards was the friend who was closest to my age. She was particularly attractive because her father was a soldier serving in North Africa. She never kissed me nor I her.

The time was during World War II.

That meant no road signs and no maps. There were land girls in uniform helping on the farms, army camps scattered around, a naval hospital close-by, and just three miles away a prisoner-of-war camp.

The prisoners were Italians. Most had been farmers conscripted into Mussolini’s army. They were not dedicated soldiers so they were allowed out on work detail. Our neighbor hired one to keep her large garden in impeccable shape. He arrived by army truck each morning and spent the day cutting lawns and hedges, weeding, and planting, while I hung over the fence and watched. At breaks he would drink his tea and practice his English on me. I was very sorry when one day he didn’t come again. However, because of him I started collecting foreign coins and I still have the bronzed Italian 5-lira coin that he gave me.

“In a House Overlooking the Sea," John Graham, A biography to be published.

Contact John Graham fior pre-publication information and samples.