Firebug | Fireman Sam

A Welsh Family - Introduction

   I was born to Gina and Gareth Griffiths when they were in their early thirties. I was their first daughter. My mother had a small baking business, which involved sweet treats like brownies and cupcakes. It was just like the café I own today but with a little delivery system, and significantly less fish. My father would occasionally assist, particularly with the delivery part of it, but for the most part he spent his days on the Pontypandy Rowing Team, being the captain of it. He was an avid Yachtsman. Nowadays, people don't know this about him, that or they simply don't remember it. His main job is driving a steam train up and down the mountains.
   We lived in a small house in a little Welsh coastal village, which people would know in today's world as one of the most accident prone villages in the world - Pontypandy.
   At the time of my birth, there was quite a significant difference between the number of fires and emergencies per month in comparison to today. Some months were totally silent, but most had about two max. Very rarely did it exceed that limit. If you count things like house cats stuck in trees or wells (believe me, it happens) then there would still be about four or five in a month. You can count any cat related incident, because those creatures are truly wild. Pontypandy just used to be your average village.
   I wasn't even born in Pontypandy. Most children whose parents planned to raise them here weren't actually born here unless their parents had decided to go with a home birth, which is more common than you'd think. Pontypandy has no hospitals nor doctors' offices, and the nearest one is in Newtown, the neighbouring village, which could be worse but it's still quite a distance. It is quite ridiculous. To this day it hasn't changed, and I fail to see why. But in all fairness, very rarely are people in such dire conditions that they need to actually be taken to a hospital. Most of the time the local nurse and/or doctor can get you the help you need. You just call them if you think you have a problem. I'll tell you about our current nurse later!
  I was born outside of Pontypandy, but I was still raised here.
  My mother and father say they doted on me a lot as an infant. They also say I was fairly quiet, that I wasn't too fussy after getting to four months old, but I have my doubts. Although apparently I just never slept most nights. Most of the time I wouldn't really cry, but I was just wide awake and fidgety.
   I was born three months before my cousin, Liam. I was supposed to be born a month before him, but I must have had other plans. Liam was born on time, I was not. My grandmother was delighted to have two new grandbabies close in age. And I'm sure our parents were happy that their child already had a friend. I vaguely remember rubbing it in Liam's face that I was meant to be just a bit older than him, but instead was born three months before him.
As it would be when ever you're having a kid, but especially when you're a first time parent, and I will tell you this from experience, names for the little one are usually pretty difficult to come up with. I have heard of some babies who leave the hospital nameless. My parents did a lot of planning when it came to my name. They didn't find out about my sex until my birth, so they cycled through some names for either a boy or a girl.
They soon nailed it down to one name for each. Once the decision was made, there was no debating it. Their first proper decision was their final decision.
If I was a girl, they would call me Bronwyn. If I was a boy, Seren. A girl I was born, and Bronwyn they named me.
   Though Seren is a gender neutral name. I suppose they must have just really wanted to name their little one Bronwyn and held onto that 50% chance that they would be able to. I fail to understand any other explanation, because it would have been so much easier to pick Seren and have it not matter. But I don't mind. I love my name. Wouldn't change it for anything. 
I'm very thankful that I was brought up in Wales being called Bronwyn, because there was a very small chance that my name would have been butchered by teachers during my school life. I did have the odd teacher from another country, either the USA or England now that I'm thinking of it, who pronounced the 'wyn' like 'wine'. I have heard many a horror stories from people who have  ethnic names but grew up in areas where their name was incredibly uncommon, like Irish kids called Aoife or Caoimhe or Eoin or Odhrán who grew up outside of the Celtic regions and had their names horribly mispronounced by teachers their whole life. I bet a few of you reading this butchered one of those, huh?
My father says I have brilliant green eyes. I have very wavy light blonde hair. He says I have plump pink lips. I have a button nose and chubby, dimpled cheeks, and when I smile, eyes squint as though I am looking up at the sun. I have always been quiet. All throughout my life, I have struggled to raise my voice. When I was a baby, my crying was supposedly more of a whimpering. I have a naturally soft and quiet voice. Being as soft-spoken as I am and always have been, part of my first impression on new people is to do with the assumption that I'm shy. This would have been accurate between the ages of seven and fifteen, but nowadays I talk a lot. Like I mentioned earlier, I work at a café, so it is a fairly big part of my job to talk to people. My only complaint about my voice is that people tend to ask me to speak up, even if my volume would be my average, or occasionally even louder than that. It was normally teachers. People describe me as a chipper, chatty woman. In a positive way, of course. Or at least, I would hope so.
    Because my parents were both married, going the traditional way, which was for my mother to take my father's surname 'Griffiths', I was born as Bronwyn Griffiths. Well, I was actually Bronwyn Gwyneira-Alys Griffiths, but I don't find too many people talk about middle names. So most people would have just known me as Bronwyn Griffiths. I don't know how much more Celtic a name can get. Though I love my middle name too, especially the little nickanme, Eira. If I ever have more children, if I ever have another girl, I would definitely name her Eira.