No. 20 Commercial Row sits midway along the thoroughfare so aptly named 'Commercial Row' in Pembroke Dock's hey-day. In 1842 my paternal great-grand-parents, Peter and Anne David came by pony from their native Laugharne to set up business as tailors in this Georgian boom-town property.

The row of homes was one of the town's earliest. From 1818 to 1830 speculative builders had developed the street, plot by plot. Benefiting from their proximity to the Royal Dockyard itself and the newly built Market Place, its residents promptly turned their 'front rooms' into shops and pubs. At number 20, evidence of these conversions remain in the form of ceiling cornices which end halfway along walls, blocked-up doorways and hidden hearths.

In 1889, Peter David died and the youngest of his six children, William, inherited the business. By this time tailoring was slowly giving way to the sale of tobacco and the shop became known as 'The Smokery'. William had married Alice-Jane, a member of the old Pembroke Dock Hancock and Mules families. When widowed in 1914 she continued the business, but in 1920 handed it over to their son, Walter Eric, who had returned from service in the First World War. Known to family and friends as 'Boyo', he was my father. He married Barbara Davies, great-grand-daughter of farmers who had crossed the water from Rosemarket to work at the Dockyard in its very earliest days.

Widowed in 1965, Barbara, with a succession of wonderful lady assistants, carried on the business of 'David's Tobacconist's'. However, acknowledging supermarket competition, declining smoking habits and her own advancing years, 134 years of continuous trading at 20 Commercial Row were to end. On Saturday, March 26, 1976, at 4 pm, Mrs. David closed the shop doors for the last time.

The property is still owned and used by our family. It is where I was brought up and where my children spent many happy hours with their grandparents . . . but not only parents and grandparents. We all sense and still enjoy the aura of its age, the quiet presence of ancestors, of family long past but remaining somehow, very present.

Ann Dureau, née David