These were the few things I gleaned about my father's boyhood because we were not what you would call a close family. I never met any of his other brothers or sisters apart from the youngest, Christopher, who appeared when I was in an orphanage and tried to get me out.
My mother had also fallen out with her family and never saw them although there was a shadowy episode once, just before the war, which was like a short story. She had taken my younger brother Roy and myself to Barry, but instead of going to the beach we went to some gardens overlooking the Bristol Channel. There sat an old man leaning on a stick, staring towards the ships on the flat sea. To our astonishment my mother crept up on this stranger from behind. We had the odd idea she might be going to rob him and we stood expectantly. Instead she curled her arms around his neck and kissed him thoroughly. 'It's me, Dad! Dolly!' she cried. 'Oh, it's you Dolly' he said calmly. 'Come back have you?' Roy and I were dispatched to the sands but she remained talking to the old man for a long time. When we finally walked away from the place she was quite wet-eyed. 'That,' she said having failed to introduce us, 'was my father.' She had not seen him for many years and, as far as I know, she never saw him again.
There were twelve offspring from her parents but, apart from her younger sister, Iris, whose husband was Bert, a soldier who eventually fell into the Newport dry dock, we knew none of them. Once, just after she had ambushed her father, she took us to a street in Barry where one of her sisters lived. She had not seen her since she was a girl. 'Hello, Doll,' said the sister flatly. 'What is it you want?' There was a short conversation, as unfathomable as it was uncomfortable, on the doorstep and we went away, again for ever.
If my mother's relatives remained anonymous then my father's brothers and sisters were familiar only from stories and photographs. There were pictures of Eisteddfod outings by the Barry Choir, each lady in black and wearing a flower, each gentleman throttled by a wide, white collar and topped by a proper hat. That was Auntie Her, that was Uncle Him; each one pointed out and possibly an anecdote related. There were also many pictures of dogs, including some taken over the years of Lady, my Uncle Jack's pet which was like a pig. Hugely obese and horribly pink, it was so engulfed in fat that when it descended to the floor from the sofa it rolled over like dough. Jack loved Lady – whom he inaccurately called his 'pup' – and on occasions took her down to the Institute where he played billiards. He never took Kate because he said that the only females allowed were bitches.
A family photograph that never failed to impress me was of my Uncle Leslie, after whom I was was named. He had been a sportsman, excelling in rugby and cricket (he married a Sussex cricketer's daughter but I don't remember her name and now there is no one to ask) and attained fame as a Welsh schoolboy international soccer goalkeeper. He had thought of turning professional with Cardiff City but instead joined the East African Police Force which my grandfather thought was safer. In the photograph he stands crossed-armed in goalkeeper's jersey at the apex of the Kenya International Team. Every other player is a black man. Leslie died in the late nineteen-thirties of peritonitis somewhere in the African bush. I once met a man on a ship who had known him out there but he could not remember much about him except that he had been good in goal.
There really is no one I know to ask, even if I wished to do so. These two large families totalling twenty-five children have vanished. No one ever told anyone anything. Nice old Uncle Jack, a silvery man and decent, spent his waning years working in the Cardiff office of his brother-in-law, Uncle Chris. We were not often in contact but one day I telephoned and during the general conversation asked how Jack was.
'Jack? . . . Oh, Jack, he's gone.' I was told.
'But it's only four o'clock,' I said. 'You let him go home early, I suppose.'
'No, not gone home . . .' A pause. 'Although I suppose you could put it like that.'
An unpleasant notion settled in me. 'Well, where is he gone?'
Just gone . . . you know, well actually he's dead.'
'Dead? Jesus Christ! When?'
'Oh, months ago now. Months . . . let me see, when did Jack die? We must have forgotten to tell you.'
This was not unique in our family. My elder brother Lindon died in hospital in Tokyo while I was staying in the hotel almost next door. I knew nothing about it until a year later when it was passingly mentioned in a rare family letter. My second brother's daughter was brutally murdered and I knew nothing of that either; not for years.
For a long time, I must confess, I have been party to this conspiracy of silent Thomases. I subscribe to it heartily and I truly hope the other unknown aunts, uncles, and what must be a multitude of children, and their children, continue to keep our family secret.
Only with my younger brother Roy have I retained any sort of relationship and contact. When he was nine and I was twelve our parents died within six months of each other and we were uprooted from our poor but secure home and put into the howling corridors of an orphanage. He unknowingly escaped by being lent to foster parents and I lost him for almost two years, having no idea where he had been sent. He had a habit of writing his initials. In the parish church at Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire you can still see the letters he carved in the woodwork while he was supposed to have been pumping the organ. Once, when we were in our early teens, living together again, and I felt responsible for him, I was standing on a railway station and saw his monogram outlined in the soot underneath the footbridge. When I upbraided him for this he protested: 'I had to hang by one hand to do that.'
He always wanted to be a sailor and he started by going up and down the Thames on an outings boat. He wrote and told me he was the mate, but it turned out there were only him and the captain aboard. Now he voyages on a different but equally concise course, an eternal circumference around Australia, where he has lived for more than twenty years. Last year I was in Sydney and we arranged to have a night out together. He telephoned my room from the hotel lobby and I told him to come to the fourth floor. The room was directly opposite the lift and seeking to amuse him, for I had not seen him for three years, I stood at the open door wearing a dressing gown and with a tin waste-paper basket over my head. I heard the lift door open and the exclamations of surprise as the passengers got out. My brother, who had paused to get some cigarettes, was not among them.
Quite recently the compiler of one of those odd but apparently fascinating books of lists included my name in a section uncompromisingly headed: 'Ten Famous British Bastards'. The selection was headed by William the Conqueror (who may have been a bastard but was scarcely British) and I was in excellent company throughout. The distinction was, however, undeserved (the researcher, I was told, had mixed up 'orphans' with 'bastards'!) for when I was born on March 22nd, 1931, my parents had been married almost twenty years and had two other sons, Lindon, who was eighteen, and Harold who was fifteen. My younger brother Roy was born two years and eleven months later and his bawling from the open front door of the little brick house in Milner Street provided me with my first graspable memory. I was trundling along the street on my coloured tricycle with a companion called Georgie who enquired about the screams. 'I've got a new baby brother,' I boasted.
'We're going to have a baby soon,' Georgie replied jealously. 'We might even have two.'
'You can't,' I asserted. 'The doctor hasn't got any left.' He looked discomfited and I sought to cheer him up with some sensational information. 'When I was in the doctor's house before I was born,' I confided. 'I looked out of the window and I saw the moon fall down.'
This early foray into fantasy was witnessed by Silvia, the daughter of our landlady, Mrs Jenkins. She returned from the past only a short while ago, a commodious Welsh lady who approached while I was engaged in the hazardous occupation of signing books in a Newport shop. Although I had not seen her since childhood I knew at once who she was. 'Oh Leslie,' she said, full of Welsh accusation and sentiment. 'Why didn't you come and see my mam before she died?'
Fumbling for an excuse, I w
as taken by surprise when she leaned across the table and embraced me powerfully. We lost our balance, clutched at each other as both we and the stacks of books began to topple. We ended amid the debris of everything I had ever written. We picked the books up together, kissed emotionally again, and I haven't seen her since.
Jinka, the name I gave to Mrs Jenkins, and her daughter, who I called Siv, had taken us in when we had nowhere else to go. Jinka was my godmother and it was in her house that I experienced my first whiff of eroticism when playing houses behind the sofa with a little plump girl who had come to look after me when my mother was out. We had a wonderfully emotive roll around in that warm tight space and I was only three.
In one corner of our room was a loudspeaker from Rediffusion, simply a square piece of plywood with a central panel, presumably an extension from the landlady's wireless set. It played a song called 'Looky, Looky, Looky, Here Comes Cooky', to which I could sing and dance. Sometimes I would stand and stare up at the piece of wood, daring it to play my song.
Jim and Dolly Thomas had gone to live in Newport in the years after the First World War. My father had served in the Royal Artillery and received several wounds, one of them when his own gun carriage ran over his foot. Nobody realised why he was making such a fuss, or perhaps there was a noisy barrage from the German lines, but it was some time before they realised what had happened and backed the horses up to release his toes. The battery was due to move its position in the line and my limping parent was left in charge of a horse which had a like impediment. Off went the other men, horses, and guns into the Flanders dust, leaving Gunner Thomas trudging a great way to the rear. He and the horse limped along together, a picture I can imagine fondly, until eventually they came upon a Frenchman leaning on a gate. My father paused to pass the time of day and the Frenchman admired the horse. He was of the opinion that it might yet recover sufficiently to be useful as transport. Otherwise it would be useful on a plate. A simple bargain was struck and my father continued limping on alone until, at evening, he reached the place where his battery was encamped. 'Where's that horse, Thomas?' demanded the sergeant.
'Gone, sarge, gone for ever,' answered Gunner Thomas. 'I thought you said he was lame?'
'That horse was lame.'
'Sarge, there was a German shell landed a hundred and fifty yards away,' related my father sorrowfully. 'And off that horse went. It would have won the Derby.'
'It was a mare,' said the sergeant, loaded with suspicion.
'All right, then,' said the Old Man. 'The Oaks.'
He fought throughout that awful war, then in the Spanish Civil War – on the opposite side to my elder brother – and finally died in the bowels of a torpedoed ship in 1943. When he was in France in 1917 he received the worrying news that his wife had fled Wales and was in Birmingham with a man who played the cello in a picture palace. Father returned home on leave and, with my shocked grandparents, journeyed to the English city where they sat in the cinema watching the man scrape at his cello.
As a serving soldier my father was incensed that, quite apart from anything else, this person was not opposing the Germans in the trenches. His anger was as much martial as marital.
He strode from his seat and put his twin points of view to the cellist. Something of a fracas ensued which I like to think may have been complementary to some silent slapstick fisticuffs on the screen. The reason that the cellist was not on active service became apparent at once because he raised an artificial leg, which he had unstrapped during his work, and struck my father a felling blow on the temple. Gunner Thomas had travelled from the hell of the battlefield to be sorely wounded in the orchestra pit of a Birmingham cinema.
In any event he won back his wife because my mother's recollections of the war were predictably melodramatic. 'When your brother Hally was a tiny, tiny baby,' she recalled by the fireside one night. 'He was screaming his head off in the early hours of the morning. There was I, all alone, your dad away at the fighting, and I couldn't stand it any longer. I threw that baby down the bottom of the bed. Then I saw a vision, yes a vision, of Jim Thomas standing straight in his uniform at the foot of the bed, holding up his hand and saying to me: "Steady, Dolly, steady. Don't throw the baby about like that! I'll be coming home soon."'
Generally, however, it was my father who had the visions. They usually occurred shortly after closing time.
I have often wondered what those two people, my mother and my father, were really like. Physically, he was thin and I believe quite tall (it is difficult to remember people's heights from your childhood), a spare and sinewy man hardened by a life of shovelling coal into the boilers of ships pitching on the world's oceans. He had low eyebrows, little other hair, and a bit of a hook at the end of his nose, so that I recall him as looking quite fierce. He had a habit of talking out of the corner of his mouth as if passing on confidential information. His hands were like nuts and bolts and he had tattoos hidden among the hair of his forearms. When ashore he wore a trilby hat and a white silk scarf with which my mother several times tried to throttle him.
'You old soak!' she used to shout. For some reason, in my childish manner, I imagined that the scarf was called a 'soak' and I thought so for many years.
Dolly was tiny, with a bird's bright eyes. I have two photographs of her, one taken as a young woman with an elegant profile and a mass of lovely hair done like a cottage loaf; the other is with Roy and me and must have been taken only months before her death. Perhaps she knew it would be the final picture for she had expended the money to go to a photographer's studio in Newport. We two little boys are in our best suits, our mother wearing a flowered blouse stands between us. Her eyes gleam fiercely.
Do I remember them only as caricatures now, plucking from the past only the things they did and said that were noteworthy enough to remain in my boy's memory? Perhaps it is true that you only really get to know your parents when you have grown up and by that time mine were dead. Over the years I have met a good many people who knew my father, mostly men who had sailed with him, and they invariably have some legend to relate. 'Nothing was too hot or too heavy for Jim Thomas to handle,' one old shipmate told me. And as the others always did he smiled at the memory. Apart from my mother I have never found anyone who would say a bad word about him.
She saw him in a lesser light. Sometimes when he rolled home awash with beer she would not let him into the house so he would break some windows and all the neighbours would peer into the street to see what was going on. It was always enjoyable to hear a fight happening somewhere else. During the war when the windows had once more been damaged by Dad, I told my Cub mistress that a small German bomb which had landed in the garden was to blame. Since the windows of the neighbours' houses had remained intact she must have wondered just how small the bomb was. She was a nice young woman. We had to call her Akala but her name was really Miss Rabbit.
Also, I think, my mother must have resented deeply the decline in our social standards from whatever they had been. Even when we moved from the two rented rooms in Milner Street to a council house with a view, boasting a pebbledash facade and a bathroom, she felt the relegation. And to think,' she sniffed, 'that we once-upon-a-time had a motorbike and sidecar.'
There were always, of course, the possibilities presented by my father's life insurance for the sea was ever a perilous business. There was one notable false alarm. During the Spanish Civil War he was a member of the crew of a ship which was bombed in Barcelona harbour and sent to the bottom with all hands. It was an unusual thrill to hear 'David James Thomas, Stoker' listed as dead on the wireless. As it turned out he was the only survivor. He had been, unofficially I imagine, ashore when the dive bomber dropped a single high explosive down the funnel of the vessel and blew it to bits. When he came home he told the emotive tale: 'All bits and pieces floating on the water,' he said. 'And there . . . bobbing about among it all was the cabin boy's hat . . . Ah, he was a good lad too . . .'
My brother Lindon, who was also gun-run
ning to one combatant or the other in Spain, returned home trembling from the experience. He had seen his friend killed by soldiers guarding the ship when he and a fellow officer had gone on shore to give some food to famished children. When he and Dad eventually exchanged reminiscences at home it became apparent that something was amiss. What was my father doing in such and such a place in November? After all the other side was occupying it then. Carefully they examined their adventures and concluded they had been running guns and other supplies to opposite sides.
A family of sailors is rarely together. I never remember a time when we were all in one house, which was just as well because there would only have been further arguments. My second brother Harold, known as Hally, was also at sea as an apprentice and Lin was already a junior officer. The old man remained deep in the stokehold.
Our move to the council house had at least given us something at which to look. It was on the eastern side of Newport, on a long-backed hill, with the roofs of the other, lower, streets serrated beneath our very feet and behind us the first green fields of the countryside. There was a lady called Auntie Blodwyn, although she was not truly a relative, who lived at the foot of the hill, next to Newport County football ground. One day her chimney caught fire and brought a match to a standstill. Several of the spectators came and demonstrated outside her gate, but others were quick to offer congratulations and say that it was the best thing that had happened that afternoon. Newport were never very inspiring or even aspiring. Just after the war they lost 13–1 to Newcastle United. My sister-in-law, Mary, told me that she had private information that the goalkeeper was in no way to blame. I remember her saying it because it was the day I nearly killed myself when I demolished her old chimney. It was over a ruined outhouse in her back garden and, aged fourteen then, I stood on the wall and, with a sledge-hammer, knocked the bricks away from under my own feet. The heavy chimney, followed by the whole building, collapsed. Fortunately I fell on top.
In My Wildest Dreams Page 4
