In My Wildest Dreams (12 page)

There were bonuses from this association, however, for in the summer of 1941 my mother announced that we were going on a holiday on a farm. A
holiday
!
A farm
!

It transpired that only Roy and I were going. She was remaining behind to help her friend with his war effort. We were excited enough, however, to be deposited at a staunch stone house a few miles up the valley from Newport, which might have as well been a different country. It was owned by a couple, elderly and miserly, who obviously viewed two young lads as a welcome addition to both their income and their work force. We were set cleaning out pigsties and cowsheds and, more painfully, picking thorns and thistles out of cut corn, peeling vegetables and sweeping out the local church where the farmer's wife changed the altar flowers. One day we all went to try and sell all the potatoes that the farmer had been ordered to grow by the Government and we could not find a taker. In the end they were more or less given away to a fish and chip shop at Bedwas Colliery. On the way back the farmer and his wife went into a house and had supper with the people there. We were left outside sitting with the horse and cart for about three hours. On another occasion they parked me with the horse outside a public house, and when they came out to feed the horse they forgot all about me. Roy was climbing about inside a barn when a huge wooden beam fell on his head, knocking him cold; another day he had to be transported to the doctor's because he had eaten so many apples. Jim, who was without doubt financing the holiday, must have laughed the special laugh of those who have taken revenge.

He turned up at the farm with our mother and we went for a walk up the local green mountain. They left us sitting in the ferns and the sun and walked off, far far away, up the next slope, arms about each other.

'Look at that!' my brother said with indignant astonishment. 'He'll be trying to kiss her next!'

We watched minutely and saw the two distant, but distinct, figures slip down into the heather. 'He's got her down!' said my brother hoarsely. 'He's got our mam down!' He started up. 'We'd better go and get her.'

But I was older. 'Maybe she won't want to,' I said sullenly.

How long the affair went on, I don't know. I think it was about eighteen months.

Then our mother became ill. It dragged on over two years, gradually diminishing the already spare woman. One day, Mrs Vokes, a fat and jovial neighbour, looked in at our back kitchen window when mother was having a strip wash at the sink. 'There's not much of you, Dolly, is there!' she bellowed through the pane. Well, soon there was even less. When she was within a few months of her death she arranged to meet her lover Jim but then was too weak to keep the appointment. She sent me instead to their trysting place, near the bridge across the Ebbw, but 1 couldn't find him. Later lying white on the sofa in our sitting room, she sent me with a note. 'He gets on the bus behind Newport Station,' she instructed. She told me the number of the bus and the time to be there. Presumably by now his petrol supply had run out. When I got to the place and saw that he had already boarded the bus, I stood on the pavement and waved the envelope at him. He stared for a moment, then with a curl of his fleshy red lip he turned away and opened out his newspaper to block me from his view. I waited until the bus had gone; then I went home and told my mother. She seemed very upset in a thoughtful way.

Things come back over the years, like strange birds flying home; there are threads and coincidences, and my life has been woven with them. One summer's afternoon many years later I was playing in a cricket match just outside London. I was fielding and during one of those intervals which cricket affords, I fell to conversing with the umpire. He had a rich Welsh accent and 1 discovered that he came from the same valley village as my mother's gentleman Jim of long before. I had remembered the man's surname (I still do) and I asked the umpire if he knew the family. He knew them well, especially Jim, who was late and un-lamented. 'A real old bastard,' was the umpire's verdict. 'Absolute swine with the women, too.'

In the spring of 1943 my father returned from sea for the last time. In his hideously optimistic way he attempted to gain entry into the barred family home by playing on my mother's sympathies. He brought a homeless cabin boy with him by night and calling up operatically pleaded that neither of them had anywhere to go. 'Go and find somewhere then!' shouted my mother before slamming her window.

They trooped away. He found lodgings by the docks and returned most days during this leave with tales of chickens running loose in the house, an outbreak of Oriental plague and finally the harrowing death of the cabin boy, none of which my mother believed for a moment.

Now I find it very difficult to understand how she could be so hard to him. True, he had been no great husband, but few men are. He had drunk and gone to whist drives (once hunting for our non-existent money boxes to do so) and he was a gifted liar. But he was the same age as I am now, as I write this in my house; he had no home to which he could go. At sea he faced the most awful of dangers. German submarines were sinking flocks of helpless merchant ships, not to mention the normal hardships of the life, and when he came back he had nowhere. I find this very difficult to understand, although now it does not matter.

On this final leave there was some sort of half-reconciliation and she promised that after the next voyage she would think seriously about having him back. I remember even now the clumsy wetness of his last kiss, so beery that it made us turn our faces away, before he went out, his kitbag over his shoulder.

He sent a letter from Freetown, Sierra Leone, and a week later – the worst week of the war for merchant shipping losses – his vessel, the
Empire Whale,
was torpedoed in the Atlantic and he was drowned. On the Merchant Navy Memorial at Tower Hill in London, among the many thousands of others, his name is on the list of fifty men, from master to apprentice, who went down on that vessel. I have taken each of my children to see it for that is all there is left.

I first suspected his death when the local soothsayer (the lady who had warned about the 'grave' in the front garden) came to the house and had whispers with my mother. 'Illness or Hitler?' she enquired dramatically.

That evening when Roy and I were in bed my mother came into the room and said curiously: 'I've got some bad news for you, Les. Your father has been lost at sea. The ship was sunk.' My first reaction was annoyance that she should have thought that only
I
would be sorry. What about my brother? We had both been brought up to regard our father as a devil who turned up between voyages. When I was not much younger I had recited an evening prayer: 'God bless Mam, God bless Roy, God bless me, God bless the cat, and everybody else – and make Dad's ship sink.'

It horrifies me now but it
was
my prayer and on that day in March 1943 it was answered in full. The following morning the insurance man was around early and counting out bank notes across the Egyptian table cloth. There was over a hundred pounds. I sat on the table with my brother and touched the notes. We had never seen so much money in our lives. My mother seemed to think it was a fair exchange for a husband.

To me, at twelve, my life appeared both secure and happy. Number 39 Maesglas Avenue was a small council-built fortress keeping at bay the perils and ills of the world. A little more money was available now, my father having proved a better source of income dead than alive. There was a war widow's pension, my mother was working and the marvellous insurance money was banked against a rainy day. We bought a two-bar electric fire and a whistling kettle. The fire was placed on the table, with the wire running down from the central and only light, and we would sit on the Egyptian cloth and warm ourselves by it. We also cooked toast on its red bars. To my mother's immense satisfaction the kettle whistled so loudly that all the immediate neighbours could hear it.

Roy had begun his war work. At the bottom of the street, lined along the shops on the Cardiff road, appeared a convoy of ugly vehicles, each with a great oily boiler and chimney on its back. Their function was to provide a smokescreen for the engine sheds at the back of our houses and each evening at dusk they spewed out wide spasms of oily smoke. They were operated by permanently black-faced soldiers and my brother's war work was to run and get relays of fish and chips for these men. He used to come home worn out, with his face like a minstrel, eyes bright in the black and with a pocket full of pennies.

Apart from games with Chubber, riding our imaginary horses around the Woods (whose pond had been fortuitously enlarged by the addition of a crater from a German landmine), I spent much time at home. I read books and newspapers and listened avidly to the radio. 'Monday night and eight o'clock, oh can't you hear the chimes?' went the chorus. I can hear them, now. 'Settle by the fireside, look at your
Radio Times.
For
Monday Night at Eight
is on the air.' Would I be able to spot the week's deliberate mistake? Another favourite was introduced by the sound of rushing vehicles, the calling of a news vendor . . . 'In Town Tonight . . . In Town Tonight.' The important voice of the announcer would say: 'Once more we stop the mighty roar of London's traffic to bring you some of the interesting people who are – In Town Tonight!' And on would come a fisherman or a clockmaker or a man who had once been to Tibet, or perhaps someone who could play the spoons. Simple magic, but magic just the same. I imagined that they actually stopped the traffic for each programme.

Every variety act I knew because
Music Hall
was broadcast on Saturdays. There was Afrique who did impersonations, many of which, of course, you could not fully appreciate because you couldn't see him. There was Suzzette Tarri, a gentle and gossipy comedienne, and Jeanne de Casalis, Mrs Feather as she was called, who was posher. Two Ton Tessie O'Shea was another, and Ethel Revnell and Gracie West. Whatever happened to funny ladies?

The funniest lady to me was a man, Arthur Lucan, the knobby, bulbous-nosed Old Mother Riley, whose daughter Kitty was his real-life wife. 'Oh Mrs Stonochy!' Mother Riley used to howl, rolling up her sleeves preparing for an Irish fight. When they came to the Empire in Newport the street and those around were besieged with people trying to get into the theatre.

My mother, who sat the other side of the fireplace on those nights of radio entertainment (we shared the cat, passing it to each other at intervals), preferred the singers, Ann Ziegler, Webster Booth ('When I'm calling you . . . ooo . . . ooo'), Richard Tauber and a roving tenor called the Vagabond Lover who not only sang but managed to give the impression of travelling throughout some rural and peaceful country. He sang: 'I'm only a roving vagabond, so goodnight pretty maiden goodnight . . .' We once had an argument across the fireplace as to why he was called 'glover' a mishearing on our part. My mother said it was his name, like V Glover, and I said it was a man who travelled about making gloves. We had a sudden and squally row about it. She said that I thought I knew everything, just because I always had my head in a book. She was so angry that she got up from the chair and threw the cat at me.

It was astonishing that this set life, so ordinary and so seemingly secure, should have ended so abruptly. But it did. In the space of twenty-four hours all was changed. My mother had been ill for over a year, not desperately, but with spasms of pain, days in bed and two operations. After the second surgery I lied about my age and managed to get into the hospital to see her. She was lying, like a corpse already, but she whispered proudly to me that they had put five hundred pounds worth of radium into her. She was ever impressed by money.

After three years in the Wolf Cubs (rising to senior sixer, the highest rank I have ever achieved in anything) I transferred to the Boy Scouts. My departure from the cubs was marred by an occurrence at the home of the Cub mistress. Her name was Miss Rabbit and she had a parrot (although it may have been Miss Parrot and she had a rabbit), and she also had a monkey. One day she took the Cub pack to her house to visit the monkey and it bit me. In my anguish I gave it a kick up the arse and all bedlam broke loose. I was stripped of my stripes and went into the Scouts with no great regrets.

At my first Scout meeting, I stood at the back behind the veterans, as we lustily sang: 'We're the Seventh Newport Scouting Boys, From the town of Newport Mon!'

It was a stirring boast to the tune of the US Marines song 'To the Shores of Tripoli'. Joy flowed through me when a weekend camp was announced. A camp! I had never camped in anything but our air raid shelter. I rushed home, clutching a list of required equipment including an axe and my personal food rations. My mother was lying on our sofa. If I had not been so excited, or perhaps if I had been a little older, I might have seen that she was wasting away. She scarcely had the strength to prop herself up on her elbows. She looked at the list of rations – a square of butter, a piece of cheese, a few ounces of sugar – and she sent me with my ration book to the shops to get these.

I took one of my father's old chipping hammers instead of an axe. These hammers had two edges to the head, each shaped like the bow of a ship. Their function was to chip away deposits from the inside of marine boilers. He would never need to use one again. I took also some ship's biscuits which he had brought me home; square and solid as rock, they were intended as provisions for lifeboats. Even with strong teeth it would take up to one hour to eat one biscuit. Sometimes we used to smash them up with the chipping hammer.

On the Saturday morning I set out with the rest of the Scouts for the camping ground. It could not have been too distant because we walked, pulling a trek cart loaded with tents and other equipment, singing our brave Marine song as we marched. There seemed to be lots of hills and the cart was heavy to heave. Then it came on to rain. Apart from me everyone had some protection. With clever thinking, the Scoutmaster halted the march and instructed me to sit under the trek cart, where I remained until the shower finished. Unfortunately I had sat on a patch of wet tar and as I rose it tore the seat out of my flimsy trousers. They managed to unstick this from the road and the resourceful Scoutmaster sewed the piece on again, at least after a fashion, before we proceeded.