Cyril Jones

Musings of a Middleton Boy: Growing Up on the Gower Coast Cyril Jones

Musings of a Middleton Boy is a unique and introspective collection of true stories, told by a farm-worker's son who was raised in the 1940s and 1950s in a ruggedly beautiful coastal area of rural southwest Wales. Cyril Jones was born early in the Second World War in the parish of Rhossili, the jewel of the Gower Peninsula, which became Britain's first declared Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in 1956. Growing up in a farm-worker's thatched cottage, without electricity, plumbing or telephone, Jones's life was not without hardship, challenge, joy or adventure. Jones shares his bittersweet memories from his early childhood to the end of his teenage years, and his impressions of his parents' backbreaking struggle to raise their children in a condemned cottage owned by a feudal landlord. In a compelling series of independent coming-of-age stories interlaced with irony and humour, Jones delivers a captivating glimpse into rural life during a period of dramatic political, technological and social change.