Welsh Journals

Gower Cobbler by H. R. PERKINS HE LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE the popular image of an old salt an elderly, heavily built man, grey-haired, grey-bearded, blue-eyed, wearing invariably a thick woollen jersey and dark trousers. Merely to see him brought visions of voyages before the mast, of gales and shipwrecks, coral reefs and blue waters, the song of wind in the rigging, and the deep, rolling chorus of sea shanties. In fact, he had never been upon the sea nor, to our surprise, did he appear ever to have been in it. His good-natured amuse- ment that my brother and I seized every opportunity of rushing down to the shore to bathe was matched by our astonishment that he should never have done so. But didn't you ever bathe when you were a boy, Mr. Jones ? The blue eyes twinkled. No o he said, no-never took much count o' bathing He sat for most of the day on his bench in the lean-to of a small cottage which he shared with a widowed sister. In one corner of his workshop lay a heaped pile of boots. None were labelled. He seemed able to assign ownership by recognition, assisted by an occasional cryptic chalk mark. Priority of repair was regulated by his simple practice of tossing all incoming foot- wear on top of the pile and drawing those nearest to his hand from the bottom. The boots were all of the same pattern, hard, stiff, iron-tipped, well suited to tramping the clods behind plough or harrow, or treading the stony paths of the cliffs. Sometimes an interloper would find its way into the pile-a flimsy, high-buttoned, black boot, sent perhaps by some domestic servant up at the Castle The cobbler would hold it up between a disdainful finger and thumb, not because of disapproval of this evidence of feminine vanity but in scorn of the material of which it was made. He himself, he often assured us, never used any but the best leather obtainable. He had no machine and his tools were few and simple. They included several old table knives, ground down to the necessary shapes, and a large, smooth stone with a saucer-shaped top. This was an aid to the hammering of a piece of leather to the required curve. It had been used for the same purpose, he told us, by his father, who had brought it home from the beach where he had found it. The leather was sent from Swansea. In days past, he went there once a year on foot with his father to arrange the supply. Now he no longer did so. Indeed, as far as we could gather, he had not been outside the village for twenty years or more. Nor