In David’s own words, written for a magazine just before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. “I was born in 1930 in a small village on the hillside above the mining town of Aberdare. My father was a miner, and by the time I was three, my Welsh-speaking parents had gathered enough money to get a mortgage on a £90 terraced house with a view over the mountain separating Aberdare from the Rhondda valley. We had two rooms downstairs and access to the two rooms upstairs was by a steep, narrow stone staircase in the wall behind the chimney. The only source of water was a tap by the front door. There was a toilet at the top of the steep back garden, which was up the steps to which we carried buckets of water. There was electricity downstairs, but it was only six years before we decided to sell the house that we found the wires had just been concreted into the wall. All cooking was done on a large coal stove beside the stairs. Free coal was a miner's perk, and piles were dropped in the street outside our houses for us to carry indoors. I attended the local school at the end of the street. We learned to write in trays of sand. By the time I started to do sums, I was using a pencil. I was used to getting them all right, but one day, they came back with crosses rather than ticks. I was incensed and told my teacher she was a "cheeky so and so." My parents were summoned to the school, and I was in deep trouble for that. There was a Welsh chapel in our street. I used to attend Sunday school there, but my mother had always been a church-goer, so as soon as I was old enough, I went to the church of Wales, called St James, at the bottom of the hill and joined the choir and eventually became head choirboy. This gave me the musical training to play trombone in our village band, which practised in the chapel (in 1946, we came second in the National Eisteddfod) Our valley was wider than many of the mining valleys, and at the top of the hill was a farm. The farmer used to deliver milk in the town. At weekends, I used to go in the cart with him, and as soon as we got there, he would retire to the pub, and I would run around with all the milk. It prepared me for later in life when I was a student at the LSE, and I delivered milk to high-rise flats in the East End. I decided I wanted to be a farmer and had a small allotment in the village, which I proudly kept weed-free. I worked on the farm whenever I could, sometimes milking the cows. I got into trouble for feeding the pigs just before they went to market. We were not troubled by bombs during the war, but we could see Swansea blazing above the mountain, and at one point, someone rang the church bells, which at that time signalled an invasion. By then, I was in grammar school. We local boys used the buildings in the morning, and evacuees from Ilford used them in the afternoon. It was the late fifties before we got water up to the top of the garden, and my parents by then had built an extension kitchen, although the cooking was still done on a coal fire, and my father washed in a bath in the kitchen after work. In the 70s, my sister, who was a teacher, had a new bathroom and kitchen built, which, together with a proper staircase and central heating, made it a cosy home. But I still have happy memories of the old cottage.”