First memories: static traffic in narrow Bridge Street in the centre of Cardiff. It was where my life began. I was staying with a woman in a flat. She was caring for me while my mother was working. "That is a traffic jam," she said. Her name has long gone. Years later her unmarried daughter had a baby.She was a plump, plain young woman. "Why don't you marry the man?" my mother asked. "He's married already," she replied.

Bridge Street, where my mother managed a cake shop, was lively and bustling,full of light and crowds until late on a Saturday night. My parents would get their Sunday joint, waiting in a crowded butcher's shop with others to bid on the remaining meat, which would be sold at any price in the days before widespread refrigeration.

There was often a Salvation Army band playing hymns, and women in uniform collecting funds from the working class who really could not afford to donate.

My mother would put me in a pram outside the shop in busy Bridge Street.She said she or my father used to rush me outside when they saw me waking up, as I was then invariably contented; but if I awoke inside the house, I would bawl my head off.

I did not like the then fashionable carraway seed cake. My Aunt Maude, elder sister of my mother, Gladys Mary, used to make it in her house, also in Bridge Street. The carraway seeds looked like dead ants. I used to eat a piece for politeness' sake, forcing it down, but I never had seconds.

I had my revenge on ants. I would sit for hours in summer outside an ants' nest, with a hammer in my hand, dispatching every ant that emerged. My parents were bemused but allowed me to carry on. It kept me quiet, the only sound regular thumps on the ground.

At one end of Bridge Street was a bridge over the black waters of the Glamorgan canal, which should have been preserved as a national treasure, despite forlorn reminders of Saturday night brief encounters that floated in the black, coal-dust waters.

At the other end was another bridge over an equally black looking feeder, which skirted indoor public baths that had three pools - for men, for women and a mixed. A family named Williams, no relation, kept a general dealer's shop on the corner near the feeder. Every member of the family seemed to have bad eyesight and they wore thick glasses, but that did not stop a son in the family riding a Harley Davidson, which was our envy.

I saw the older Mr Williams ask a newspaper seller who had come into the shop for change. The old man was giving the newspaper seller half crowns, thinking they were pennies. I was appalled at the dishonesty of the seller, but too young and too timid to make a protest.

Bridge Street was like an umbilical cord, always drawing me back. It was narrow, but full of small and interesting shops. There were second hand book shops, which always had copies of nature magazines, suitably airbrushed. They attracted older men in mackintoshes whose interest in nudism as a way of healthy life must have been minimal. A woman managing one shop told one of the mackintoshed brigade buying a nature magazine that she also had some publications which she kept under the counter. He seemed embarrassed.

I started collecting books. The man who ran one shop observed that although I bought I rarely returned the books in part exchange. He urged me to bring them back but I was reluctant to do so; I fell in love with their glossy covers, compact appearance and contents, in particular the Pocketbooks produced for American servicemen.

As an adult I retained my affection for the area, which throbbed with life, with a pub in almost every street. One of the last small businesses, in adjacent Mary Ann Street, before redevelopment, was a man's hairdresser run by a friendly Greek Cypriot named Chris. It was a thriving business at one stage, with Chris employing two of his fellow countrymen and a young Welsh apprentice from Mountain Ash. At the slightest excuse - a birthday, an anniversary - they would pull out a bottle of Cyprus sherry and offer drinks all around.

And it was there that I witnessed a classic Tom Jones story when the boy from Ponty had just had a song in the Top Ten for the first time...

Glyn Williams - Perth, Australia - December 2006