Robert Williams was the last man to be born on Bardsey.

This year he and his wife Doris will celebrate 50 years of married life with a trip to the island, if all goes well. He's nearly blind now, and sadly he will only get a partial view of his old home.

Aged 77 and living in Wrexham, he was brought into the world on a stormy night - with his father as midwife. Women were normally taken to Aberdaron on the mainland before the birth, but heavy storms kept his mother Jane on the island.

A neighbour from Carreg Farm was enlisted to serve as midwife, but the occasion proved too much for her - so Bob's father William Hugh came to the rescue as the storm raged around them.

Although he now lives on the other side of Wales, near the English border, he still feels half-rooted in his old home. To accentuate this duality, he's known as Gwyndon in Llŷn, while in Wrexham he's called Bob.

He was born in 1929 at Nant Farm, one of five children. He remembers playing happily for hours with his siblings - Gwilym, Hugh, Guto and Mary. They'd play in the fields or along the shore, collecting firewood or helping their parents with the churning.

One of his chores was to run along to Mrs Murray Williams the schoolteacher, where he'd collect the weather forecast scrawled on a piece of paper after she'd listened to it on the radio - the only one on the island.

"We were very happy - it was an ideal place for children because we didn't know any other sort of life, though it must have been terrible for teenagers," says Bob.

He has few memories of those times. He remembers a pianola at the school, and the skin of a huge snake on the classroom wall.

"It must have been an anaconda or something because there were no snakes on the island," he says. There were no rats either - but there were mice, and they were extra large, he seems to remember.

He recalls saying Bible verses in chapel with the grown-ups towering above him and the minister looming like a giant in the pulpit. There was no established home for the minister - he went from hearth to hearth, sleeping where there was a bed for him.

There were three lighthousemen, says Bob, and they gave all the children a gift at Christmas.

But life on the island was very harsh and took a heavy toll on its occupants, who eked out a living by farming and fishing.

The story continues.