by John Graham

Created on: August 12, 2008   Last Updated: September 21, 2008

The time was 1938. The location was North Wales. War was imminent.

My father's retirement from the senior ranks of the Metropolitan Police in London had just come and he had decided to remove his young family as far from the Nazi planes as he could. He moved far west to Wales, my Mother's country.

Outside of the market town of Pwllheli, my father bought a house that had a large plot of natural hill descending towards the sea about a mile away. Farmland surrounded us.

He first built an air raid shelter dug deep in the rocky earth with rock steps descending. The shelter was lined with concrete and covered with concrete roof a foot-thick. On top of this my father built a rock garden with flowers for my mother. We used the shelter several times during the war but later it became a hatchery for baby chickens and a winter storage place for potatoes. I 2007 it still existed.

Then my father planned his garden, sketching it out on many sheets of paper, knowing that, because of the war, we should be as self-supporting as possible. This was to be a vegetable and fruit garden with perhaps hens.

The driveway to the house sloped only gently, so this was immediately dug and tilled to provide vegetable beds. My mother was allowed a strip of lawn along the drive and a few flowers around the two large trees where vegetables might be difficult.

Then he attacked the hillside in front of the house. This dropped approximately thirty feet so it had to be terraced. Unfortunately, at the time it was rough grass with rocks sticking out of it.

It took them a year of full-time labor to terrace the land into five levels connected by stepped pathways. My father had grown up on a farm high on the hillsides of England and had worked for a time in a lead mine. He'd even been trained at one time to construct freestanding stonewalls, so creating a terraced garden was like unto revisiting his youth.

First, he dug and prised rocks loose with a long crowbar, stacking some of them into walls and steps while laying smaller ones on paths. Others were moved for walls. For the terraces, earth had to be dug from one level and carted to higher ones. There was plenty of work.

For the carting, my mother was brought into the labor after she had cared for two young children. My parents had a heavy metal wheelbarrow, which, loaded with rocks or soil, must have weighed a ton. My mother was roped to the front and my father struggled with the two handles behind. It was one of my earliest and most telling memories. Together

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