Letter from Doc Penfro

Julie Brominicks 

‘I came to Wales because it was one of very few places I could get my hands on some uranium’ Fabio tells me, a few minutes into my second lift of the day (Andy, a postie from Corris, having already delivered me to Machynlleth.) Actually, Fabio stopped because he thought I was a lollipop lady.

I am bound for Doc Penfro where I’m doing a fundraiser at Cwtch Coffee Shop and Art Gallery, which is located in a building the landlady has decided to sell. Mike Ó Duibhir and Keo Kille-Martinson, who care about their customers and visiting musicians and artists, have been asked to buy up or leave. Being generous people, they’re broke, but what they do have is community. 

Hitching is community too. Connection and conversation. Fabio is driving from Bangor to Abertawe to collect stuff from his ex-girlfriend’s house. I’m his first hitcher, he’s my first nuclear chemist. I ask how the toxic waste from Trawsfynydd and Yr Wylfa is doing at Sellafield. ‘The sludge bombs’ he says, ‘were because of the Welsh miners’ strike. Sellafield workers stopped in solidarity. Spent fuel-rods were received in the ponds once a week and then they’d get sorted. But after more than one week, the rods are no longer robust, so the metal degraded and formed sludge, resulting in complex contamination. It was open to air and seagulls…’ he shakes his head. ‘It was poorly managed. Now it’s in managed decline.’ I had really meant the rest, the most, of the waste. 

We agree the need to ditch fossil fuels is desperate and that energy-efficiency the preferred route to decarbonisation. Given it’s not happening, Fabio’s contribution to the climate crisis is nuclear. Not in my name, but he’s nice and he’s driving, and I relate to his urge to do something. 

As we chat and rain slakes Cymru, we overshoot where I should have got out, and wind up in Abertawe where it’s lashing it down. But here’s Kevin, an electrician on his way to watch the rugby, who drops me at Cross Hands. I barely have time to raise my thumb before Kath pulls up and takes me to Caerfyrddin, which I leave just as quickly with Bee, who’s en route to a spa day in Lydstep. My last hero is Ryan from the Rhondda who’s into Arthurian legend. Such a kindness of strangers! Despite the overshoot I arrive with five and a half hours to spare. 

In theory I have time to explore. In reality I have a deadline and spend most of the afternoon in Y Cerrig Glas writing about somewhere else. Which is unfair on Doc Penfro but true to form in my case. I’ve walked through here twice in a heatwave too frazzled to stop. And then discovered Cwtch Coffee Shop, from which I have never really escaped. 

It’s a kind of vortex. Mike (and lovely Keo who I won’t meet till later), the culture connoisseurs at the wheel. I already know Mike. He wanted to play the piano, had a toy one, but his dad threw it out. He is intense! And animated! His words tumble out in a stream! Whenever I leave Cwtch Coffee Shop I am never quite sure what happened. The rest of Doc Penfro is a mystery. 

So I follow a handwritten sign to St Govan’s Shopping Centre, for beans on toast in Cookies Cakes and Bakes. ‘It’s a bit thing’ says Gareth, when I comment that the brick shopping centre, with its community furniture stores, and old rugs taped to the floors – even compared to the empty high street – is quiet. ‘No one knows we’re here.’ 

Annie, who’s called in for a chat, can see what I’m thinking and says there’s a lot more to the place than meets the eye. Her little boy helps feed the animals at The Reptile Shop and kids love ‘Warhammer and stuff’ at the Pokemon Shop I wish I’d made time for.

Doc Penfro. Pembroke Dock, was a military town developed to defend the Royal Navy Docks established in 1814. Five royal yachts, vessels and warships were built before the Docks closed in 1926, leaving colossal stone buildings and walls, and notwithstanding a subsequent period as an RAF flying-boat base, a town full of unemployed people. 

But even accounting for the rugby, where is everyone? Y Cerrig Glas has emptied too. I close my laptop. Head to the dock. A Martello tower obscures my view of the Irish Ferry, which has come in early according to the man burning something noxious in a barrel quite close to a gas bottle, who says he’s going to concrete the yard.

The Maritime Museum is empty save for a woman busy with Welsh on Duolingo, and Chris Ballam, who shows me the self-righting self-draining lifeboat built in 1908 that he and a team are restoring. ‘I used to make harpsichords and clavichords,’ he says, and now I see the wooden boat does resemble a large musical instrument.  

The ferry looks timid in the grey sea. A winter wind is whipping up a smell of dead leaves. Buddleia dies over garrison walls. I get excited looking at the ferry, and the tug churning up the cold water. And now, I see rising above the straight empty streets and terrible walls, rows of sea-bright terraced houses and flats, and remember I’ve slept on Tony’s sofa in one, and how spic and span and lovely it was with that view, after a gig at Cwtch Coffee Shop, Tony being one of the crew. Cwtch Coffee is where I head now after catching the second half of the rugby. 

What is it about this place? I’ve done a music and prose show here twice with a friend, and Mike really ha-ha-ha laughing, really heartily, throwing his head back, really listening and laughing at the back. And the audience are like family! Everyone active, involved. Tonight, someone does the slides. Someone else washes the glasses. Someone offers lifts. Community, is what it is.   

Cwtch Coffee’s gofundme page can be found here.