A poet looks back on her school on the west coast of Wales, and Mr Griffiths who was its head but also its heart

I was six when we followed my father’s work to Wales. Before we got there, my parents talked about forests and mountains; I pictured the Start-Rite kids marching between dark pinewoods down their shoebox label.

In the event, I wasn’t far wrong. Aberystwyth, on the country’s rocky west coast, is indeed, as the tourist board slogan used to say, “Where the mountains meet the sea”. In the mid-twentieth century, the Forestry Commission had carpeted the uplands with conifers, in whose penumbra only large raptors, buzzards and red kites survived. On rainy days our new surroundings looked quite as louring and Nordic as any fairy-tale forest. My parents’ expectations, on the other hand, were completely confounded. It quickly became apparent that they’d moved to another country without realising it. Wales differed not just in feel, but literally nationally, from the many places in England where they’d already lived. So that the position we now occupied was a sort of cross between coloniser and exile.

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