We bought the playing field in the thirties. At first they thought of having the field where the Garage is but there was no grant unless the field was big enough to have a football pitch and a place for the children to play, they also tried to buy the field where the school is but Mr. Haigh would not sell.
The playing field committee worked very hard, they had carnivals every summer and there was always a village queen and with the visiting queens we had about ten in the procession and it was nice to see all the village turning out and from the Ynys and other places as well. We had a concert on the Friday before the Carnival and Sybil Throndyke was supposed to be there once but she did not feel well and she sent her sister to crown the Queen. The money was very hard to get as the people were very poor and most of the money was collected with people going round with boxes and it would be good for the young people today to know how hard it was then to pay for the playing field.
Mrs. Chambers helped a lot with the Carnivals, she was Mrs. Unwins mother, and they lived at Edryn then and her son John joined in when he was on holiday. There was a lot of young people from Wigan there in Summer as well, they called themselves the Talsarnau Club. I think they used to meet in Wigan during the winter and when they came in Summer they joined with us locals and they had a treassure hunt and quite a few other things. The ones I remember most at the Carnival were Eric Mayer, Taylor and Denning, I very often think of them as they dressed up for the carnival, they had gone to a lot of trouble to bring clothes with them and then they would play soccer with us and we had to play rugby with them on the sand near Clogwyn Melyn.
We played football then in the field near Fron Yw. I can remember in the twenties a crowd of men went down to the traeth to `tryfera' and the river was then near the rocks the other side of Clogwyn Melyn and they crossed the river in a wide part where it was not very deep and made their way to fish in a channel where the river had been, when they looked round the tide was coming in fast and they ran towards Portmeirion, or Aber Ia as it was then called, and they walked all the way on the Penrhyn side and William Rowlands picked them up in his old Ford by the Powder Works and when they came to the village they were a sorry sight in their clothes as the tide had taken their dry clothes as they had changed near the river and Griffith John lost a gold watch he had in his waistcoat pocket.
I remember us going down once to fish near Borth y Gest and Evie, Tynbryn, caught a big turbot, or as one of the old sailors said it was a John Dory, the same family. Evie was in the water just up to his waist and he could feel something under his feet and as he he had the harpoon with him I gave him a hand to take it out of the water. That was not the end of the story though, as he took it up to the quarry where he worked at the time, and raffled it and he hid it behind his tool box where they kept the powder for blasting, and when he went to fetch it for the raffle winner it was not there, someone had played a trick on him. The John Dory weighed 14.5 lbs.
Mrs. Evan Williams, kept the Post Office when we were children and Evan Llewelyn, the son, took over from her. My mother used to talk about the village pump but I dont think she could remember it and I'm sure it was what her mother had told her, it was the other side of the road from the Church where the parking now is and the women used to wash their clothes there.