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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: David Ferrero
Oral history recording with David Ferrero. Recorded as part of the Italian Memories in Wales project (2008-10), delivered by ACLI-ENAIP and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
00:00:23 David was born on 12th July 1946 on the farm he lives on now Fodol Newydd, Bangor. His Welsh grandfather had a small farm and was a cobbler. He visited his paternal (Italian) gradparents’ farmland which was divided into half acre strips or less between the siblings. They grew peaches and apples, and made hay with the grass to cart back home. The land was quarter of a mile from the house in the village and was divided by markers at the end. There was no Estate, the land belonged to the families.
00:06:10 He describes the town. Mostly people worked in factories; they weren’t far from Turin, where Fiat was. They would start factory work around seven and return at four and then work on the land in the evening. They would sell some of the produce on the side of the road. He remembers once the community getting together to bring a thrashing machine to thrash the corn.
00:11:40 David remembers his grandmother as very old, always in dark clothes, she kept the house and went out to the fields. In the village there was a big concrete trough, water would run continuously from the mountain down the slope and they would wash their clothes there. He describes the food- spaghetti, broths, salamis, rabbits; they would rear rabbits and guinea pigs where the cows were kept. He goes on to describe where his father lived in detail; where they slept, kept animals etc..
00:19:04 His father’s history is a little vague. He used to ride racing bikes, in the winter he raced on skis, probably working the land as well. He was called up to the army around 1941 and went to North Africa as a dispatch rider. The Italians surrendered to Montgomery and he was brought to Wales. At the end of the Battle of El Alamein he was captured and transported to Scotland, then on to the Llyn peninsula, in Sarne. There was a camp there and whilst they were there they were distributed around farms in the area; they weren’t locked in the camp and were reasonably free.
00:26:12 His father worked for a Mr. Jones, using an old tractor with iron wheels to plough. The land in the Llyn peninsula is fertile and easy plough. The farmer wasn’t always there, work was separated between the workers- milking, feeding cattle, harvesting. There were no combine harvesters, corn would be thrashed. The farm produced a little of everything. David believes that the prisoners had to go back to the camp at night which was nearby. He got on well with the Welsh- some of the Welsh workers became jealous as his father could generally fix anything. His father got on well with the farmer and got work after the war to run a farm for him for three or four years.
00:33:20 The farm his father ran was near Aberdaeron. He did go back to Italy after the war but soon returned to Wales as he had met David’s mother in a farm he was working for. He worked in a foundry in Gloucester, then asked for a transfer to Bangor foundry and lived at Fodol Newydd. David’s father had very good English and understood a lot of Welsh; there wasn’t a big Italian community around so he learnt the language quickly.
00:43:31 There was a lot of Italian food in the house when he grew up but he doesn’t consider his upbringing as different to anybody else’s. David spoke Welsh with his mother and English with his father. Most of his time growing up was spent in the farm in Werne; he talks of the house and farm there. His father was one of the first in the area to make silage- he dug a hole in the sloping field and kept the silage there with one end open to get it out. He then brought a crop loader that would lift up the cut grass and dump it in a trailer. He says that this was the start of modern farming. His father was keen on modern equipment- they were one of the first to have a disc mower and muck spreader which everybody wanted to borrow.