MORNING SERIAL.

Byline: By George Brinley Evans

Those years in London had made an indelible mark. Routine to some is an irritant but to her it was the beginning and the end. She believed that if everyone knew where everything was it would go a long way to making them feel safe and happy.

After each meal the table was cleared, everything put by, no clutter. They burnt the best anthracite nine feet coal on the kitchen fire and its warm red flameless heat shone in the black lead-polished bars of the grate, causing them to glow and reflect onto the stainless steel fender and making it into a place you wanted to be. There were four wooden kitchen chairs, a kitchen table and one high-backed kitchen chair that had been their great grandmother's along with the dresser.

Above the fireplace was the mantelshelf and on it a pair of brass candlesticks, a pair of vases, one each side of a large, wood-framed mirror. Next to the back door there was a bosh - a square, stoneware sink - and a draining board. Facing you as you came in through the back door was a print of Constable's The Cornfield and when the sun was in the right position, shining in through the fanlight, the beautiful image of the boy drinking from the stream, the barking dog, the flock of sheep and the reaper with his scythe in the golden field, would camera out through the kitchen window onto the backyard wall. The reflection lasted only a short time and only at certain times of the year, when the sun was low in the sky at breakfast time.

The middle room had a mahogany dining table, four matching leather-seated and leather- backed chairs, with two matching carver chairs. It also held a mahogany sideboard with a large fitted mirror. On the walls hung a gallery of large family portrait photographs, his father in the uniform of a private in the Welch Regiment, their grandmother, grandfather and their youngest daughter Sally, Lala.

There was one of his sister, his brother and himself sitting on an artificial rock in a Swansea studio. On the chimney breast was a portrait of their mother, father and David as a baby.

In the front room, the parlour, was a brocade-covered three piece, the christening table, a brass fender with high stepping horses, and a fire screen with brass fire irons. Two sets of prints of the work of Canova on the walls and, later, he thought he knew what had attracted her to the classicism of Canova. Clean lines, the women beautiful but not littered with bows and pearls, it would have appealed to the suffragette in her. And he'd have bet there wasn't another house in the valley that had a print showing Pauline Bonaparte reclining as Venus, hanging on the wall of their best room.

In one corner a tall, narrow wooden stand and on it an Art Nouveau figure of a dancing girl, she and her flowing dress were fashioned from fine, misty blue glass. His mother's mark was on everything, there was no doubting whose house it was.

In her forties she was still small, prim and neat and enjoyed her trips to Neath once a month on a Wednesday. On these excursions she always wore a jacket and skirt, a small hat, gloves and a Burberry top coat, a costume tailored for her by Morley Jones of Queen Street.

Continues tomorrow