Dream On

by Dai Smith

  Contents

  Title Page

  In Dreams

  Obit. Page

  Never Felt More

  A Life of Riley

  Sweets and Treats

  Show Time

  Who Whom

  All Frittered Away

  Filthy, Gone

  A Talking Point

  No Photographs Of Crazy Horse

  One

  Shadow Play

  Two

  His Old Man Said

  Three

  Double Negative

  Birth Certificate(s)

  Copyright

  Dream On

  Dai Smith

  In dreams I walk with you

  In dreams I talk to you

  In dreams you’re mine, all of the time

  We’re together in dreams

  In dreams

  * * * * *

  Only in dreams

  (It only happens in dreams)

  In beautiful dreams

  Roy Orbison (1936 – 1988)

  “In Dreams”, 1963

  Obit. Page

  Obituaries had been commissioned. Some had even been written, and filed. An admirer had sent him one, updated to take account of his soon-expected death. He held it in his hands, and shrugged as he read it over again. Not for its accuracy – it was accurate enough as these things went – but for its banality, and not of the prose but of the life, his own, which it so scrupulously recorded. It even had a headline on the typescript, though doubtless the eventual newspaper would economise on that. It read: “A Life in Politics: A Politic Life”.

  He could feel, with an immediacy he no longer expected to hurt, the pain of the omission of the definer he would have wanted. It should have been, of course it should, “A Political Life.” Two missing letters, and an epithet that damned rather than lauded. Well, that was how he felt about it. Others, accordingly, saw it differently, welcomed the judicious balance of the adjective they felt to be, even in political terms, the better one. Certainly, like his life, the more politic one.

  It would make a half-page spread in the national broadsheets. Decent enough, and with a photograph, one of the early ones with his hair fashionably long, and perhaps his fist raised in mid-80s anger, one of the action shots Billy Maddox had taken during the Miners’ Strike. Or perhaps that would not be politic enough. There was the usual Obit. Opening to set the scene:

  A political career that opened with much promise ended, if not with major practical achievements undertaken in office, then with superlative accomplishments recorded in his chosen literary forms: the essay and the biographical study.

  How easily, though, it all read like someone else’s life. Anyone else’s life in its inability to evoke anything more than dates and offices held and ideas proposed. Most of the barebone facts were tabulated in a detached endnote.

  Born in 1944. School in the Valley and then in Birmingham from 1956 when his father gained a Headship.

  Oxford, and then that surprising nomination for the Party when local squabbles and factions let a young, dark-horse but native-born, academic through a crowded field and on to election in 1970. The rest, looking back on it forty years later, was a blur. Junior office at Trade and promotion in Defence when the Party came to power and the despond years that followed that first promising decade. He considered that he had been happy despite the waiting-room feel of the politics themselves, and despite, too, being overtaken and quickly sidelined by others more ruthless than him, when a return to government eventually came. He had led a life free from Westminster’s too frequent family mishaps and his books and pamphlets and biographies had been carefully chiselled and respectfully received, even in the academia he had deserted, for the insights which his political practice had brought to them. On the Obit. page they were duly listed and respectfully weighed. It was for what, he reflected, he would be best remembered.

  There had been such a lot of downtime in Westminster. Time to think as well as to write. The fashion had been for hefty double-decker biographies, story-time narratives with the happy endings of definitive footnotes or, at least, fulsome acknowledgements and learned bibliographies. Jenkins on Asquith. Foot on Bevan. Always the Leaders. Never the Led. History, he considered increasingly, as it was sieved not how it had been lived. Instead he listened to Voices Off. He talked to those who Also Served. He contemplated a Culture for a Society. Over the years a trilogy of studies emerged. He turned to the Obit. proof to check if it had expressed more than a titular sense of them:

  His first book, Vox Pop: A Vocal Culture (1981), was an examination of the rhetoric and oratory of industrial South Wales – its excess, some in his Party were already concluding – through speech, accent, gesture and effect, but it slipped, intriguingly and often infuriatingly, into riffs on singing, choral and solo, onto disquisitions on humour on stage and in literature, through the roar of crowd behaviour to the antiphony of reserved silence in reading rooms and the cacophony of saloon bars. It met with a mixed reception but won a Welsh Arts Council Prize. Out of office and buffeted by the internal strife of the Foot and Kinnock years – he was a steadfast supporter of both – he wrote the biographical sketches published in book form as Acolytes and Assassins (1988). Here the intention, not always successfully achieved, was to throw light on major political or union careers by illuminating those who waited in the shadows, ready to assist or, as his provocative title indicated, to assassinate. So, instead of, say a portrait of that Colossus, Nye Bevan, we had a brilliant sketch of his Famulus, Bevan’s fixer and confidante, the diminutive and destructive (of others) Archie Lush. The spotlight was turned, for the once powerful Communist Party, not on the ebullient and engaging Arthur Horner, President of the South Wales Miners’ Federation in 1936, but on the apparatchiks who always placed Party diktat before proletarian DNA. Then he swung to the right to put the egregious George Thomas, the ludicrously self-christened Viscount Tonypandy, in his sights: “of this Tartuffe, a study in sentiment and narcissism, let us say the Sunday School superintendent was always more cross bencher than cross dresser for in this, too, he had the courage of every conviction but his own.” Many found the acid of such “truth-telling”, if that is what it was, too scalding an element for their own political health at the hustings. Even his obituary of Will Paynter, that tough intellectualised comrade who had succeeded his own mentor, Horner, as General Secretary of the NUM in 1959, had not resisted the temptation to speculate on exactly what a CP political commissar would have done in Spain in 1937. At the fever-point pitch of the Miners’ Strike this had not pleased the cheerleaders of 1984. Yet, in his final foray into this field, after Tony Blair had overlooked him for any kind of office in 1997, he wrote lightly and sunnily of those whom he had directly served for thirty years. Epiphanies appeared to muted acclaim in 2001, but we can now see it bears a classic status. Here, “The Terraces”, as he calls them, echoing the writer Gwyn Thomas, are laid before us as a landscape, one humanly fabricated and artfully framed by and for a people who had, he claims, once created a past fit for whatever future they might inhabit. How does he do this? By a set of interlocking cameos that take us from “The Value of Allotments: The Alloting of Values” to “The Cooked Dinner: Civilisation after the Club” and “Standing not Sitting: Philosophy on the Bob Bank”. All linear lines and flat planes were rejected by this prismatic writing, a form that gave a crystalline light and a receding depth to the pastimes and dreams, but ones lived and relished, of a people he clearly feared were being bypassed by a more brutalist history and that history’s political helpmeets, even those from within the ranks of Labour.

  He let the obituary he would not live to see in print slip from his fingers onto the duvet. Not quite what he had meant his writing to say. But close enough, and praising enough, not to be be
grudged. He resolved, again, to stop being grudging. It was, none of it was, anybody’s fault. Not even his own. He would, without a grudge, accept the praise and accolades it helped them to give him. Particularly the family he had nurtured, and had, he knew, despite all, neglected more than he would have wished. They didn’t seem to notice; perhaps they didn’t feel it. He didn’t know. They didn’t say.

  His son, who had developed an irksome habit of patting his hand as he sat propped up in bed so that he might look out of the picture window and over the Valley, kept telling him what “A Great Life” he’d had and how he would “not be forgotten”. He smiled and nodded, politic as ever, even managing a whispery “Thank you, love” when his daughter, on the other side of the bed, reminded him how much he was “Loved by Everybody”. It was true, he thought, that his wife whom he’d met at Oxford had, in her own patrician way, “loved” him and he’d sorrowed over her early death in the car smash she’d had with her parents when on holiday in Italy. He’d stayed home that summer on constituency work, intending to join them later. She had never felt “At Home” in the Valley and had never hidden her disdain, her fear perhaps, of its inhabitants. Ironically, the sympathy he garnered with the death of the woman his supporters had privately called “The Duchess” strengthened his control of the local party. He steered a middle course and, by the end, this end as he might now put it, he was consulted on all sides for his political nous, his historical grip and his experienced counsel. Oh, and for the colour copy his reminiscence of the Party’s greats gave to journalists. He was restored. One of them. One of us. Ours.

  Yet none of this was why he had come back for selection. And stayed as the elected member. He could barely explain it to himself sometimes. Yet he knew that there had been deep inside him political idealism, and an allied will to serve. He knew this to be true of himself even then. In his father’s telling, the people of the Valley, his Valley, from which he had been wrenched so young, were mythic, generation by generation, and heroic, deed by deed. If it was an absurd generalisation, it was also vividly true. It had been bred into his political bone and so vitally that he had, and did always, feel it an honour to be elected to serve. But it was not that particular igniting spark which still flickered inside, and did not die even if he was dying and she was long gone. His thoughts were a junction box of random signals. Perhaps it was the morphine. Perhaps it was a dream. He half-smiled, ruefully, remembering a train journey he’d taken across country, to the west and some political function or other, just before the cancer had struck, less than a year ago. He had looked up at the information streamed up in electronic tickertape capitals at the end of the carriage, like a miniature mobile Times Square, he’d thought, as it ticked off the station stops to come, and what precautions you needed to take on arriving and alighting. Alighting. What a pompous, no pretentious, word. He had said it to himself, almost aloud, and, bored as dusk draped the crawling train, had looked up again at the flashcard red letters of information flowing left to right in their rectangular black box. Only this last time, the electrical charges had malfunctioned, had dropped letters and left spaces, and displayed, as the train pulled into the platform, in an illuminated reiteration of desire and warning, one he knew he had to heed:

  personal be take their

  longings with you personal be

  take their longings with you

  * * * * *

  He had been twelve years old, sat on one of the back seats of the upstairs of a municipal double-decker bus. The bus, one of a fleet, swayed up the Valley from the grammar school, dropping pupils off at each of the straggling townships it touched. Every seat was taken. Downstairs, two or three prefects pretended to keep order, and everywhere there was noise and the deep, damp smell of sodden wool and the wet leather of satchels. Outside it rained as it seemed only to rain here. Swathes of wind-blown rain ballooning down from the mountains which hemmed them in and funnelled the rain into the streets. Rain tamping down onto the pavements. Rain bouncing off the roof of the bus and smacking against the window panes which steamed up inside, and outside turned the raindrops into never-ending rivulets which streamed drop by beaded drop into silvery snail trains. It was a cold rain. It swept in from the open platform at the back of the bus and carried its damp aftershock upstairs and into the soaked moquette seats. The caps of the boys and their black gabardine raincoats were heavy with rain and the girls, barelegged and hatless, shivered in their pixie-hooded lovat-green mackintoshes. He had looked out of the window where, even at four o’clock, the lights were on in the shop windows and the few cars there were about stared back, with their headlamps unblinking warnings, out of the gloom. He had never felt more at one with everything. This was where he was and should always be.

  One of the prefects, in the casual sports coats they were allowed to wear in the Sixth Form in place of their blazered uniform, came rattling up the iron-rimmed stairs and stood at the top. At the bottom was another prefect. The one at the top said, “Right, now. One. Two. Three”, and waved his arms whilst the one at the bottom began to sing. Then the whole bus, from top to bottom, began to sing, and some stood in the aisles as the bus seemed to half topple around a bend and up and over a steep hill, and some fell onto one another, satchels and caps scattering, laughing and singing and stamping all at the same time, singing, never happier, the Blues that they would never feel more, and as if this moment could be held, forever.

  And he looked to the back of the bus, all singing the lyric and shouting the refrain, and he saw the girl, his age, sitting, not singing, on the long seat across the aisle, at the back of the bus, and he saw her wet, plastered, black gloss of hair cut to frame her face with its shining eyes above her wet and reddened cheeks and as he did, stopping to sing the song that still rang all around him, unsmiling she looked straight back at him.

  That was why, he knew, he had come back, and why he stayed and why, never known or spoken to or seen again, she would always be there. And there she would remain, loved and unknown, so long as hearts could still tell minds that they had “never felt more”.

  Never Felt More

  Well, I never felt more like singin’ the blues

  ’cause I never thought that I’d ever lose

  Your love, dear, why’d you do me this way?

  Well, I never felt more like cryin’ all night

  ’cause everythin’s wrong, and nothin’ ain’t right

  Without you, you got me singin’ the blues.

  The moon and stars no longer shine

  The dream is gone I thought was mine

  There’s nothin’ left for me to do

  But cry-y-y-y over you (cry over you)

  Well, I never felt more like runnin’ away

  But why should I go ’cause I couldn’t stay

  Without you, you got me singin’ the blues.

  In 1956 Guy Mitchell was at Number One in the hit parade for ten consecutive weeks with “Singin’ the Blues”.

  A Life of Riley

  She was born in the cottage hospital within a few hours of my own birth there at the very end of the Second World War. Or World War Two, as we quickly said so matter-of-factly, as if a Third was just around the corner. Terrible as it was to have already had two in the space of four decades, or two generations, there was an odd comfort in being able to enumerate them. We were domesticating the beasts by numbering them in turn. I say “We” because that is how we referred to ourselves, whether individually or together. The last, or current war, did not, of course, encompass directly our junior part in all this as the children of the “We”. Not in terms of the conflict, at least, but inescapably as the generational fall-out of wars that were fought and endured, home and abroad, by parents and grandparents. Children can be victims even if they are not killed or wounded. Perhaps we were maimed inside. Certainly hurt in ways not wholly imaginable since. And as Number Three never came along in the manner we once envisaged, we, the protected and saved ones, were also the first-in-line in all other ways.
I mean that our absorption of passing life as we grew was constantly affected, in tone and perspective, by the otherness of the connected lives of all those senior and antecedent to us. By their treatment of us, sweet and threatening, private and public, turn and turnabout. By their stories. By their moods. By their scars. By their dreams. What we knew inwardly was more than what we saw. And what we saw was invariably damage. Amongst the ruins of such lives we all danced.

  So what I saw, but without knowing, when I knew her in the first, and only, decade of our life together, was a life which I would come to learn was shaped by more than the local circumstances and time of her birth. I could not know that then. I was also a child, and so a victim. The mode of a victim is silence and a child’s voice is prattle. The eyes are a different thing though. What I know now as I think back over that childhood is that our lives were formed less by the endlessly fresh discoveries of one thing after another which children must make, and much more by having to absorb, without apparent resistance, the dead weight of lives soaked in their own unwanted experience. Lives which had led to us. We would be spared war but not the consequences of war. That single fact permeated and tethered our lives.

  * * * * *

  The day Theresa Riley and I were born, our fathers were still in action across the Rhine. It was the least hazardous river crossing they had had to make since they had dog-fought on from the Normandy beachheads the previous June. Or so my father told me. They were, with the war’s final outcome in sight, due for leave, but denied it, until the simultaneous event of our births and a lull in the last push of the British Army had moved them up the queue. They were both bombardiers, made up lance corporals in the Royal Artillery, enlisted in the same regiment and thereafter drawn together more by the war, and its myriad unwanted ties, into an acknowledged friendship, than by any prior fact of being near-neighbours in their terraced row houses before the war had plucked them out of the Valley. It was, in a grim paradox, the War that had made them into friends, for they had little else in common before that. Neither occupation nor religion nor politics nor pursuits nor nationality united them.