User:Sog1970/ HowTo:Order a Bride

"...and don't you forget where you come from!"

As farewell words went, Simon's mother's were less maternal than most and no more likely to be listened to. Would he ever be able to forget where he came from? The three pints of Guiness consumed in the bar of Manchester's Oxford Road station had helped, but hadn't entirely erased his memory. Simon had spent his early childhood in a Llangrybbi - a community almost small enough to count its population on the fingers of one hand, even without the extra digits God and in-breeding had provided so many of them with. The bank's foreclosure on his father's small hill-farm had meant a move closer to Wrexham, the local large town, and to a council-house a third the size of the old farmhouse. More particularly, it had meant re-settling in Pentre Ffylth, a pit village without a pit, built at the top of a small mountain around a toxic tar-pond in which toddlers fought the slowly-dissolving ducks for crusts kindly provided by pensioners.