by David Nobbs
And what a family it was. Lying in her hospital bed, eyes closed, pretending to sleep, Kate was astonished by the clarity of her memory of that delightful period in her life, her pre-war childhood in that chatty, cheery, narrow, huddled town, alive with the lilt of Welsh talk, seasoned by the tang of the sea, resonant with music, awash with cockles, a town crowded on to a piece of land a little too small for it, a town that lay between heaven and hell and introduced Kate to both those concepts. Kate’s heaven was the coast, and the Mumbles train, the oldest passenger railway service in the world, which chugged hourly to Oystermouth round Swansea Bay, which has been compared, somewhat fancifully, to the Bay of Naples. Kate’s hell was the valleys, the mines, the slag-heaps, the strong men and the strong drink and the bare, black, brooding hills.
What fun they had enjoyed, in their smart new three-storey gabled terraced house on the edge of the spreading town. How could they have had such fun in a house where no swear-word was ever uttered, no sexual function was ever mentioned, no naked thigh was ever seen, no alcohol was ever consumed unless you’d fainted first, no naughty joke was ever heard, no food was ever praised, and laverbread was eaten every morning? But what fun they had, except on Sundays. What charades they played, what quizzes they held in the cheery back room with the armchairs drawn up higgledy-piggledy round the cramped little coal fire, the sombre knitted texts on the walls, the shiny mahogany dining table.
When they had visitors they sat in the front room, the best room, the parlour, with its bay window, there’s posh. But the room never breathed, however early you lit the fire. However hard you tried, life never came to it.
Happy innocent times. Did Kate linger on these pleasant memories? No, gentle reader, she did not. So eager was she to relive the excitements of her first love that she fast-forwarded through these happy days, the sooner to get to Gwyn, even though this would also take her all too soon to the cruel moment when her innocence was shattered for ever.
Linger a while, Kate, please. Relive again those trips on the Mumbles train, fifteen carriages on bank holidays, three thousand people clinging to it, and all of them wearing hats. The carriages on the lower decks were like cattle trucks, but the top decks were open to the soft winds and the engine’s soot. Great flocks of wading birds fed on the Swansea mud at low tide. Kate remembered wondering what it would be like to be a little bird, a turnstone, perhaps, or a shy sandpiper.
Linger a while, Kate, on the walk from the terminus at Oystermouth, the painful walk in your corset, bodice and tight-fitting pleated blouses that your mother made so lovingly in imitation of the fashions of the day, so that you might hold your head up high, and the corset was so tight that you had to hold your head up high. Linger as you climb the hill, past the castle, and drop down into the gentle curve of Langland Bay and the long, rolling waves.
Remember Swansea beach in those days, the crowded beach by the Slip, the pretty Swansea girls with lips as soft as Welsh rain and hats with brims so wide that the sun could never spoil the milk of their complexions, the smart young men in their best jackets and their bowlers and trilbies, the little boys in sailor suits, and not a naked leg to be seen. Remember the refreshment stall under the awning, the bathing machines for the very bold, no bathing on Sundays if you please, the big striped helter-skelter, the blind men begging, the fortune-teller, the one-armed juggler, the drunk sandwichman advertising a temperance hotel in Llansamlet, the vitality of a vanished world. Ride again down the helter-skelter (you only did it once, you weren’t allowed to really, you were middle class, you lived off Walter Road, in the sober suburbs on the hill, this bursting beach was almost out of bounds altogether).
But no, Kate didn’t linger. She hurtled on through the barley-sugar hospital night. She barely paused to recall the excitement of the first motorised bus service to Gower, in 1910, when she was eleven and beginning to be looked at by boys. The vehicles were Dennis’s, and they chugged all the way to wild Rhossili. One day, many decades and almost as many husbands later, Kate would call her home Rhossili Cottage, but now she had little interest in Rhossili, she was too eager to rush towards Gwyn.
Fast she sped past the chapel, three times a day every Sunday, the Reverend Aneurin Parkhouse sounding off in his sonorous, treacly voice, rich with intimations of impending doom, heavy with warnings about sin, warnings which Kate was not to heed. It was there that she discovered to her horror that she had no religious feelings whatsoever. The distant, almost inaccessible heaven and the ever-present, almost unavoidable hell of the Reverend Aneurin Parkhouse were as nothing compared to the heaven of Gower and the hell of the dark valleys.
At last she paused, to remember a morning in the breakfast room of 16 Eaton Crescent. It was a large, dark room with just one window near the back. There was a large table covered in a thick, dark red cloth. No breakfast was ever eaten in the breakfast room, and Kate had no idea why it was called the breakfast room. At some stage, she couldn’t remember when, a portrait of Lloyd George was placed on the wall above the table. Later, when he was known to have been a womaniser, the portrait was turned to face the wall, so that its bare back could serve as an Awful Warning.
The breakfast room also contained the most lovely thing in the whole of Kate’s pre-war, pre-Gwyn world, and that was the rocking chair. Kate would often sit there, rocking gently, dreaming of foreign places and dragons and princesses and untamed Arab horses which she tamed because nobody else was brave enough. But lately she had dreamt more and more about boys. She was fourteen now, after all, and her legs were developing nicely, and she had seen a boy in Walter Road, oh such a boy. She knew his name. He was Gwyn Jones, son of Bryn Jones, one of the Joneses of Jones and Jones, a Swansea department store second only to the great Ben Evans emporium itself. Ah, so that is why she has lingered on this memory, you shrewdly observe.
John Thomas Thomas came into the breakfast room as she was dreaming of Gwyn. He said, ‘I want to speak with you, Kate,’ in a serious but not unkind tone, but it was his headmaster voice, and so she stopped rocking. ‘Mrs Evans Sunday School tells me you ask her questions. She told me some of the questions that you have asked.’
Kate had asked, ‘What are people who don’t believe in God called?’ There had been a gasp at this boldness. ‘English,’ Willie Jenkins had said, and been slapped for his patriotism. ‘What happens to people who don’t believe in God?’ she had persisted. ‘They seek the consolation of the Devil and fall into Swansea Harbor in their cups and drown like Eli Watkins,’ Mrs Evans had said. ‘Why were all the miracles in the Holy Land and none in Swansea?’ she had asked. ‘Because Jesus wasn’t Welsh,’ had been the swift retort of Mrs Evans Sunday School.
‘Why do you ask all these questions?’ John Thomas Thomas asked.
In later years Kate’s quick wit would be known from Penance to Niederlander-ob-der-Kummel, but she could never have thought more quickly or more successfully than in that pre-war breakfast room in Swansea.
‘I think it’s our duty to ourselves to ask questions,’ she said. ‘I think the only way we can be certain of anything is by asking questions and getting the right answers. If we don’t ask questions, we start to take our faith for granted and it becomes valueless.’
John Thomas Thomas looked at his daughter and tried to hide his amazement and pride. Just the suspicion of a smile passed across his serene face, and Kate felt awful about deceiving him.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Well spoken, Kate Thomas.’
Kate asked no more questions in Sunday School and a more intelligent woman than Mrs Evans would have realised the significance of this and spoken of it to John Thomas Thomas. Atheism was consigned to a secret corner of Kate’s being, along with whether it was natural to grow hair at the top of your legs and bleed horribly and feel awful every month. These last points worried her so much that she plucked up courage and asked her mother about them. Bronwen Thomas explained the facts of life to her simply and without embarrassment.
It was on a Sunday, of all days,
on a solemn, silent Sunday, that the greatest event in Kate’s fifteen-year-old life occurred. Gwyn Jones spoke to her for the first time. It happened outside the chapel. The world was wearing its Sunday best, and the weather was fair. Gwyn’s first remark, it must be admitted, wasn’t one of great originality. It was, ‘You’re Kate Thomas, aren’t you?’ But it had one real virtue as an introductory remark to a girl whose knees were collapsing and whose insides were squirming like a trapped jellyfish. It was an easy remark to which to reply. ‘Yes, I am,’ said Kate.
Gwyn Jones’s next remark again failed to ignite any conversational sparks, but had the virtue of impeccable accuracy. ‘I’m Gwyn Jones,’ he said.
This provided Kate with an altogether more challenging test. She almost said ‘I know,’ which would have mortified her, then narrowly rejected ‘Are you?’ which would have been very silly, since there would have been no reason for him to say ‘I’m Gwyn Jones’ if he wasn’t, and she knew he was anyway. In the end she settled on a response that was admirably safe, while again giving no hint of the wit that was to come. ‘Oh,’ she said.
And then John Thomas Thomas and her mother Bronwen and all the clan were upon them, and seven-year-old Oliver said to Gwyn, ‘I’m Oliver. What’s your name?’ and Gwyn said, ‘Gwyn,’ and Oliver said, ‘I’m going to drive the Mumbles train when I grow up. What are you going to do?’ and Gwyn Jones said, ‘I am grown up, Oliver, and I’m going to work in my father’s store,’ and five-year-old Bernard said, ‘Are you really grown up? Golly,’ and Oliver said, ‘What are you going to be in the store, Gwyn?’ and Gwyn said, ‘Oh, you know, I’m going to own it, and that sort of thing,’ and John Thomas Thomas said, ‘Well, we must get home. Goodbye, Gwyn Jones.’
As they walked up Walter Road, a bus passed them with a gas balloon strapped to its top. The children had never seen such a thing before. John Thomas Thomas explained that it was because of the war.
Some children didn’t care about the war and it didn’t seem to make much difference to your life when you were sailing your model boat on Brynmill Pond, but Kate hated the thought of it and didn’t want to read about it. She knew it was all something to do with a place called Serbia, which was a very dangerous place, but however it was explained, and clever though she was, she never could grasp why it was necessary to kill so many people. Most people thought that it was a good thing, as the Hun had to be smashed.
That Christmas John Thomas Thomas got braces from Kate, and Oliver and Bernard got socks, and her mother got wool, and her sisters got gloves, and none of them suspected that the reason for Kate’s choice of presents was that they enabled her to go to different departments in Jones and Jones, and gave her a chance of encountering Gwyn.
Jones and Jones was a wonderful shop, a four-storey palace where the change whizzed around on overhead wires, and porters helped ladies to step down from their carriages, very necessary, for the poor things could hardly move in all the corsets and bodices that imprisoned their straining flesh. It was a cornucopia of socks and shoes and shirts and skirts and beds and saucepans and china and beds and braces and bloomers and mirrors and sheets and pillows and beds. Kate looked at the beds and wondered what sort of bed she and Gwyn would have when they got married.
‘Hello, Kate. Thinking of buying a bed, are you?’
Oh, the humiliation. The bad luck that he should come across her here. Oh, the shaming blush that set her pretty face on fire. She could feel the shame still in Ward 3C of Whetstone General Hospital.
‘I’m off in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’
‘With you?’ asked our heroine, and blushed still more at this extreme stupidity.
‘No,’ he said. ‘With the Mayor and his Corporation. Why do you sound surprised? You’re the prettiest girl in Swansea.’
‘What?’ gasped the prettiest girl in Swansea.
‘Well, are you coming or not?’ asked Gwyn Jones.
‘Oh yes,’ said Kate hurriedly.
They walked up Walter Road to the Uplands and then to Cwmdonkin Park. Kate was terrified that she would see a member of her family. It ruined the walk. He was so good-looking, five foot ten or so and well built, dark, really you could almost have taken him for an Italian, and instead of walking proudly at his side she was scurrying along like a frightened rabbit.
When they reached the park she felt safer. They sat on a bench, near the top of the steep park, looking down over the slate roofs to the oily glistening sea.
Gwyn Jones lit a cigarette. He smoked a whole cigarette, and he was only seventeen!
‘Have one,’ he said.
‘Oh no, I couldn’t,’ said Kate.
‘Go on.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I promised my father not to.’
‘Are you frightened of your father?’
‘No. I respect him.’
Gwyn Jones nodded, as if taking a piece of vital information on board.
‘Do you like thrushes?’ he asked.
‘Why do you ask that?’ asked Kate.
‘Because there’s one over there, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say,’ he admitted.
Kate laughed.
‘You have a lovely laugh, Kate,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
The thrush flew away. A blackbird landed on the expanse of grass in front of them and held its head sideways, listening for worms. Kate expected to be asked ‘Do you like blackbirds?’ but Gwyn Jones was a more resourceful conversationalist than she had supposed, and he asked, ‘What do you want out of life?’
‘Everything,’ she said.
‘Oh good,’ he said. ‘I was terrified you’d say “I don’t know”.’
‘I never say I don’t know,’ she said, ‘even when I don’t know.’
‘Good for you,’ said Gwyn Jones. ‘Do you like liquorice?’
‘No.’
‘Pity. I’ve got some.’
‘I could learn to like it.’
Gwyn Jones lit a second cigarette. What manliness. And Kate learned, with astonishing rapidity, to like liquorice. And the sky darkened, and the first drops of rain began to fall, and Kate shivered, and Gwyn Jones put his arm round her, and kissed her, and he smelt of cigarette smoke.
‘Did you enjoy that?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You smell of smoke.’
‘Have you had more enjoyable kisses?’
‘Of course not, Gwyn. I would never let any boy except you kiss me.’
She blushed again, shamingly, to her roots. She felt so angry with herself that she wanted to cry. The rain began in earnest, and Gwyn Jones walked her swiftly down the hill, through the Uplands, and down the snicket that led to the back gate of her house. The gate was set in a high wall. She stood under the wall where she couldn’t be seen even from an upstairs window, and let him kiss her once, then tossed her head like a thoroughbred and slipped through the gate into the little neat unlovely back garden, and was halfway along the wet red-tiled path edged with stones before she realised that she hadn’t arranged to see him again.
Through the big window at the back of the dining-cum-living-room she could see the whole family at lunch. She was late. She entered the room, trying to look calm, trying not to look bedraggled. The children looked at her wide-eyed. None of them had ever been late for lunch before.
‘You’re late,’ said her father.
‘You’re wet,’ said her mother.
‘You’ve been smoking,’ said her father.
‘No!’ said Kate.
‘Don’t lie to me. You smell of smoke,’ said her father.
‘I’m not lying,’ she said coldly. She could never have believed, until that moment, that she could have spoken coldly to her father.
‘Why do you smell of smoke if you haven’t been smoking?’ asked her father.
The children stared at her, hardly daring to breathe.
She couldn’t say ‘Because Gwyn Jones kissed me, and
he’d been smoking’ or ‘When Gwyn and I have children, I will never accuse them wrongly’. So she said nothing.
‘Go to your room,’ said John Thomas Thomas.
Her mother looked as if she wanted to intervene, but said nothing. The children’s eyes grew wider. The fish-cakes (it was a Friday) grew colder.
She went to her room, her simple room on the second storey, linoleum on the floor, an iron bedstead, a stag at bay in a glen as wet as this wet Friday, and more knitted texts. She flung herself on her bed, and sobbed.
Our Heroine Wronged!
She would soon get over that, but . . .
A Hero Is Knocked Off His Pedestal!
That would take longer. Barely half an hour before his accusation she had refused to smoke because she respected him. Virtue Is Unrewarded, a sentiment which did not feature in any of the tapestry texts.
She got up off the bed, tossed her head angrily, and thought, To hell with virtue, then.
She looked at herself long and hard in the mirror. She saw high cheekbones, a straight nose with flared nostrils, a dimpled chin, big brown eyes, a fine if pale complexion and a wide mouth with full lips, and she thought, I really do believe that if I was a boy I wouldn’t find it unpleasant to kiss that, and that cheered her up no end.
But she was still angry with her father, and when Enid came up to say that she could come down, she said, ‘No, thank you. Tell him I prefer my own company,’ and Enid almost fainted.
Later that day, when she did at last come down to an unusually silent house, she sought confirmation of her beauty. She sought it wisely. She didn’t ask her parents, who might have wondered why she was asking. She didn’t ask her sisters, who might have been beastly. She didn’t ask Bernard, who might have been honest. She asked Oliver. She cornered him in the front hall, by the grandfather clock, and she summoned him into the cold parlour. He followed eagerly, tickled pink by her secretiveness.
