- Marjorie Neal, local historian and farmer’s wife (Rumney)
Marjorie Neal (Emma Drabble)
▶ Watch interview with Marjorie Neal
Living on the Levels has given Marjorie Neal an insight into the district’s past. As the local history group’s archivist, she’s drawn on her own family’s past. “I’m lucky really because branches of my family have been in Rumney for years.”
Farming families lead isolated lives – as a child “I didn’t have friends close by” - but she made the best of things, helping to bottle the farm milk, mastering her father’s Fergie during haymaking (“I remember driving the tractor from the age of eight)” or just watching waves breaking on the lynches beyond the sea wall.
War brought Land Girls to the farm and Americans to run the Rumney Sea Transport Stores: “It stored goods coming from America and goods and casualties - bodies - that were taken back.”
Listening to the Top Twenty on Radio Luxembourg (and being scolded for it by her grandparents) helped relieve the isolation until Peterstone opened a youth club. “I used to go down there on my bike a couple of nights a week.”
Sixty years on a family farm also helped her find forgotten field and reen names (Floker, Rhossoag Fawr and Search Light - “there was a search light on that field in the war”) and evidence of occupation from 2,000 years ago. “We’ve a collection of Roman pottery found on the foreshore.”
Life on the Levels Interview:
Marjorie reflects on childhood and adult life in Rumney, close to the sea wall, Peterstone Youth Club and WI, hay making, dairy farming, life during the war, Wharf committee, and sea levels.