‘We never went without water during droughts because we had our fresh spring.…’

Hazel remembers droughts in the 1950s and having no water for her younger, baby sister’s feed. As they lived by the woods, Hazel recalls using the spring in the woods; taking bottles up to the woods as a ten year old. Hazel’s sister was fed using the water she had retrieved. If the council –supplied water ever dried up she would return to the fresh spring. Hazel’s sister is now 57 and in good health.

My name is Mrs. Waddingham. Hazel Waddingham. I’m from South Wales and I can go back with the drought to the nineteen fifties when we didn’t have no water from anywhere. So I had a little sister. She was, I think it was three months, three and a half months old and we didn’t have no water to make her feed. As they hadn’t come around with supplying our water so we lived by a woods which call like a Barry woods because there’s a river going down and we used to go and play in it and we had this fresh water spring and then we went up there with bottles, about six of us, all children kids. What was I? I think I was about ten and a half and we filled the bottles from the fresh spring and we took it home and my mam made bottles for my baby sister, my sister, not my baby, until we could get fresh water off the council. And then they turned it on in the evening, which wasn’t no good for the babies because once my father had told them about the spring to go up it was quite a convoy then, all going up with bottles so they could get water for their baby’s cow’s milk, the cow and gate sorry. The cow and gate milk. And then they’d boil it and make the babies their bottles and that. And then later in the evening then the council came round and they had a big tank on the back of a lorry and then you had to go out with jugs, bottles or buckets for the toilet and they had a tap on the container and then we had our water from them but if we ever came out then we couldn’t get no water we always went up to the big spring up in the woods close by where we lived. And well we got wetter would more than the bottle could full, playing around. But, yes, that’s we never went without water because we had our fresh spring and there was quite a few babies in the street and in the estate next door and my dad said we’ll go up Cyncofe road, which it was called at the time, well it still is and the spring is up by there he said, and it’s safe for you to give to your babies and that’s what we did then. It wasn’t in bottles like, if you’ve got a drought now, the council come round and give you six bottles of water but then the council come around with a tank on the back of the lorry so you had to wait for that because there was nowhere else for you to go for water. So, as I said, yes, and in the summer it’s lovely and cold you know, really refreshing it is. So that’s what we done and my sister’s still here. She’s fifty seven now so it must’ve been alright water [laughter]