Book story

I’m delighted at this charity shop find. I know the story well but somehow never got the book.


Joint author Ann Rumsey comes from farming family in the same Welsh border valley that I do. She’s only a few years older than me but I never knew her then. She wasn’t there. As a young child she contracted TB (bovine tuberculosis, always spoken of in hushed voices) and was duly sent to an isolation hospital in South Wales - Craig y Nos sanatorium perched above the Swansea valley.  Visiting involved a long, tedious journey by public transport; many child patients grew up with very little family contact.* The hospital, with the staff and fellow patients, became their world, for better or worse.


Fast forward several years and I’m at London university. I make friends with a geography student named Liz and she asks me if I would like to go to Iceland with her during the summer vac. (She’s sweet on a boy who’s going there to study a glacier and she hopes to muscle in on his expedition.) I say yes, having been abroad only once, briefly, to Paris.


In the summer, prior to my departure, I accompany my mother to pay a call on her friend Mrs Ramsey to buy some eggs. We chat over a cup of tea in the farm kitchen and she asks me if I have any plans for the vacation. Yes, I tell her, rather smugly, I’m off to Iceland! Oh, my daughter’s there, working for the British ambassador – you must look her up, she says. (Well, who knew?)


A few weeks late I travel to Newcastle where Liz lives and then on to Glasgow where we catch a plane to Reykjavik. We hitchhike north, camping overnight, to a remote and chilly glacial valley. (The boyfriend too has cooled off which doesn’t help.)


Three gruelling weeks later, after an emergency exit due to unseasonal snow, we return to Reykjavik. Our money gone, we seek out the British embassy (just a large house in a residential district) in the hope of finding Ann.


Ann and her friend Lindy give us a warm welcome. They’re employed to cook and clean but the family are away so we have the run of the embassy and can sleep there too. Next day we all go horse riding.  But the ambassador returns: Liz and I have to be hidden in a unused lumber room. Ann and Lindy keep us supplied with titbits from the  ambassadorial dinner party taking place below. The next day we say goodbye and catch our plane.
 
Subsequently our paths diverged and Ann and I lost touch. But that’s not the end of the story. In 2009 or thereabouts, I visited the Wellcome Collection in London, a new museum about the history of medicine. I picked up some leaflets and on the long train journey back to West Wales I started to peruse them. One explained the Welcome Trust’s  remit to offer professional help and support to amateurs who wanted to research a subject of medical interest. A few examples of such projects were given. One had been done by a woman who came from a remote Welsh valley but had spent her childhood in a TB hospital. Could that possibly be Ann? I wondered.


Back home I emailed the Trust with my query and within a short space of time I had an email from Ann herself. I learnt that after Iceland she had gone on to become a journalist on a major northern newspaper and had then gone to art college.  She had travelled widely, studied in America, married, and now lived in Scotland. She had devoted much time and energy to her Craig-y-nos project, gathering photographs and reminiscences from patents, staff and relatives via telephone, email, a website and social media. She had arranged social gatherings too. Reunions took place. A great deal of emotion came to the surface, long buried without anyone to share it with. Some memories were harrowing, some affectionate. It’s all in this book.


I should say that Ann has many other strings to her bow. She’s an early adopter of new technology and is now using AI in her art work. She’s also a blipper – Libra.  I think it may even be through Ann that I discovered Blipfoto many years ago. I actually appear in one her blips! And yet we still haven't met in person since we were in our twenties, in Reykjavik. How crazy is that?


* Ann dedicated the book to her mother "who never missed a visit in four years"

More about the project:
https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/wales/archive/bbc-mid-wales-abercraf-craig-y-nos-tb-sanatorium.pdf