Money in the nineteenth-thirties was so scarce as to be a novelty. On my sixth birthday I went to school and rashly boasted that I was having a party. Nobody in those days, in that area, had birthday parties. The eyes of my classmates glowed. The lie, once told, was difficult to retract and with abandon I compounded it by going around the infant class and choosing who was to come to the party and who was not; that fiendish sadism peculiar to small children: 'You can come, and you, but you can't, nor you . . .' The lucky party-goers were given instructions to appear at five o'clock at our front door in their best clothes, and bringing with them a plate, knife, fork, spoon and cup and saucer.
Now I was really in it. As the school clock hours went by I desperately tried to think up a plan. I dared not tell my mother about my birthday party because we hardly had enough to put on our own plates. When I got home I found I had a birthday present, a bar of chocolate. That was a start anyway. I hung about outside the house until my five or six favoured guests arrived and, somewhat to their surprise, I announced that since it was a nice day for March we were going to have the party out of doors. They sat down on the path and the front door step and I gave them each a square of chocolate and a cup of water. My powers of persuasion must have been immense because, not withstanding the paucity of the feast, I promised them organised games to follow and suggested that it was in order to sing 'Happy Birthday To You'.
They did, the tinny voices attracting my mother who came to the door as they got to 'Happy birthday, dear Leslie, Happy birthday to you!'
She sent them off home and then sat in the front room howling into her hands while I stood mystified. Only a few years ago, just before they demolished the houses, I climbed the hill to Maple Avenue again. On the step of Number 16 was a toddler, sitting, apparently stunned as toddlers often do, staring into space. He looked like somebody left over from that party so many years ago.
Not having very much is a great provoker of envy. The boy next door had found sixpence and the story spread with the speed of jealousy around the neighbourhood children. The green eye flickered within me when he showed the little silver coin and told me, and a number of others assembled, how he proposed to expend this wealth. When I next went shopping for my mother, across a muddy quarry to a low street where the crouching corner shop showed its lights, I fell to temptation and shame which I have never forgotten. The shop was kept by a kindly and confused man who would even give credit. My mother once sent me to him with a list of groceries and instructions that the fact that we had no money to pay should be concealed until the ultimate moment, when the purchases were already, so to speak, in the bag. I was very worried about this but I carried out the plan only to be confronted with his aghast face when the credit was suggested. 'I can't do that, sonny' he said. 'I'd have to ask the missus.' The missus it turned out was in another shop several miles away and I was dispatched there on foot, with a medallion of his as a token to show that I had already seen the husband. I cannot remember whether we got our groceries, to be paid for next week, but whether we did or not the man's kindliness was ill-repaid by the small boy who again approached his crowded counter having just seen that desirable sixpence lying in his neighbour's hand.
As I stood there waiting to be served, while the shopkeeper was getting confused by the demands of half a dozen people, I became aware that on the counter, its milled edge shining at the level of my eyes, was a half-a-crown. It was grand larceny. I had never seen so much stray money, so temptingly close. Before I realised what I was about my hand snaked up and into my pocket thudded the heavy coin. I left the shop, having calmly made my purchases and preserved a criminally straight face while the poor man searched pathetically for the lost money. Mean and triumphant I went home, pausing only to boast to the boy next door that I had found five times as much as his miserable sixpence. The loot sat on my hand, a silver miracle. Like a cat my mother pounced on it.
'Where did yon find this?' she asked, giving me the credit of having come by it honestly or needing, at least, to keep her own conscience clear.
'In the quarry,' I answered. 'It was just lying there.'
'Oh good,' she breathed. 'That's a prayer answered for a start.' To my chagrin she relieved me of the coin. 'If nobody comes for it,' she said fixing me in the eye, 'I'll give you a penny next week.'
This, it appears, could be labelled the early criminal part of my life, because before long I stole something else. This time it was a vegetable marrow.
On my way to school I had spied this large and lush green object, lurking below its leaves, at the foot of somebody's garden. I had no idea what it was but it looked good enough to eat. After a couple of days I took a kitchen knife to school and on my way home I cut it and staggered the rest of the way, running with it in my arms like a big green baby. My mother, however, was less than pleased. 'I can't cook that!' she protested. 'We don't like it. Where did you get it?'
This time the quarry was out. I confessed. She bore it back to the owner. After that I had to make a long detour to and from school to avoid the scene of the crime but, even so, I saw the woman waving her fist at me in the distance. I did not steal anything else after that. Nothing large anyway.
As it was, I thought the police had tracked me down. On top of the hill where we lived there was no road, only a footpath so if a policeman appeared then everyone knew that he was on his way to one of the neighbouring houses and observed him spitefully. Shortly after the larceny of the marrow I was digging in the patch of ground next to our front door when a constable appeared, black and lofty on the horizon, and strode purposefully towards our house. Some little girls, who had recently heard me use some bad language and threatened to report me, were playing by the path and the policeman paused and asked them something. Skinny arms went eagerly out and accusing fingers pointed towards me. No, I thought, no . . . surely not . . . not the police! All I had said was 'bugger'.
Not daring to look up I counted every footfall as he approached. I could feel my small body shaking. Nearer and nearer . . . and then he turned into our house.
'Hello, sonny,' said the policeman. 'Is your mam in?'
Struck speechless, I led him towards the door. Should I make a run for it now? Fancy ruining my life for a marrow . . . Or perhaps it was because of the half-a-crown . . . or the swearing. My guilty past closed in.
'Mrs Thomas?' said the officer when my mother appeared. I stood slightly behind him rolling my eyes and shaking my head to prevent her shopping me.
'Is anyone dead?' she asked with almost dramatic hope. 'An accident is it? An explosion?'
'No, no,' he said, at once both a disappointment and an assurance. 'Not dead, drunk. Your husband, I think.' He looked down at his notebook. 'David James Thomas. Drunk and incapable.' He looked up with some sort of interest. 'Got out of the train at Newport station . . .'
'On the wrong side,' she finished for him. She nodded sad confirmation. 'He's done it before,' she sighed. 'When he came back from burying his father. Where is he now?'
'In the cells,' he replied dramatically. I had heard about the cells. Letting out a toddler's cry of anguish I set off down the hill weeping and shouting. 'My daddy's in the cells! My daddy's in the cells!' Before my mother and the policeman could catch me everybody in the district knew. They would have known anyway because it was in the South Wales Argus that night. 'Drunken man fell from train,' it said. The old man cut the piece out and used to keep it in his wallet.
On this occasion I went with my mother to court although all I remember is her having to pay the two shilling fine and muttering 'Bunny rabbits' as she looked for the money in her purse. The kindly court officer collecting the cash enquired what the phrase meant. 'I always say "Bunny rabbits" because it saves me swearing,' my mother explained piously. At that moment my father, ashen-faced, was brought out to freedom. 'Bloody bunny rabbits,' cursed my mother.
The previous time he had left the train on the opposite side to the platform was as my mother had told the policeman, after my gr
andfather's funeral. On that occasion some concerned people had hauled him up and sent him home in a taxi. I remember him now, standing by my bedside, getting undressed, festooned with long underpants (my mother refused to sleep with him) and looking very bruised and sad.
'Did you cry?' I enquired.
'Oh no,' he boasted thoughtfully. 'Not when I fell out of the train, not at the cemetery either.' His testicles were hanging like prunes from a hole in his pants. 'No, men don't cry, son. Not even over somebody dead. Worry is what men do. Worry.'
Throughout his life he collected a formidable catalogue of injuries and tales through a combination of inebriation and transportation. Not only did he plummet from trains but from other vehicles, and from the platform of a bus that was going over a bridge, ending up strung across the parapet wall, and God knows how many times he had fallen into docks throughout the world. Once he came home plastered, literally, his ribs all caved in and bandages around his shoulders. He took his shirt off and walked around for a bit like this and my mother pretended not to notice. Eventually she said: 'Missed the ship again, did you?' He had. Apparently by several feet.
He was, nevertheless, spontaneously good-hearted. His second weakness was whist drives at which he frequently won prizes. If he were in some port in another part of the country he would send the prizes home. One evening he was in Swansea, just before Christmas, and he won a goose at whist. Full of good-will and undoubtedly spirits, he wrapped the goose up, took it to the post office and dispatched it home. It arrived several days after the holiday on a bike, stinking to hell, with a green-faced postman propelling it.
It would not be too difficult to deduce that my mother was long-suffering. The uncertainties of her life are endorsed for me in a single cameo. After being for months on the dole and then having, for his customary reason, failed to sail on a ship he was supposed to join, my father finally got himself a berth on a vessel leaving Newport for some place so distant that it even pleased my mother. There was a chance he might be gone for two years. Her anxiety was two-rooted: she wanted him to go away and some money to come in. They had spent a long time rowing miserably, calling each other 'wet-weeks', a recurring insult, a combination of malice and meteorology. Now he was leaving, his kitbag packed, the first week's allotment money only seven days away.
When he left the house she even went so far as to kiss him. She went up to the bathroom and watched him trudging down the hill and up again with his kitbag on his shoulder; like a lookout Indian she observed him waiting at the distant bus stop and eventually boarding the bus. She came down and sat quiet for a long time, studying the clock. Eventually she gave me the final two pennies from her purse, and instructed me to go to Mrs so-and-so's house about a mile away, and ask if they would mind telephoning the dock gates to make sure my father's ship had actually sailed. She explained to me that she was too ashamed to go to the telephone herself. I had the name of the vessel written on a piece of paper and the woman with the telephone, grumbling about the imposition, made the call and told me to tell my mother that the ship had left. I returned happily with the news and had just related it to my relieved mother when the smile dropped like a stone from her lips and she pointed in disbelief out of the window. There he was, in the distance, kitbag on his shoulder and on his way home. There had, he said, been some sort of misunderstanding . . .
Despite it all she managed to make a home for us in that boxy council house on the hill. It had an iron boiler in the narrow back kitchen, which was at the front of the house (rumour had it that the builder had read the plans upside down) and in this she used to wash the clothes and cook steamed puddings in pillowcases. We had a wooden three-piece suite with brown corduroy cushions, in the living room, a relic, I imagine, of more affluent days. The settee and two chairs could be transformed into a ship or an outpost when my mother was out. My brother Roy and I played many games in that room, spoiled once when he attempted to make a campfire with some books under the wooden table. We managed to put out the flames before the whole interior was ablaze but there was smoke still pouring from the windows when she got off the remote bus.
Our house on the rise was clearly visible from that bus stop even though, up and down hill, it was a quarter of an hour's walk away. Trouble, in either direction, could be seen from afar, and sometimes the agony and uncertainty seemed far longer than fifteen minutes. The smoke puffing out like a signal was not the first, nor the last, of these distant shocks. Once, in summer, she perceived that we had pitched a white tent at the front of the house and, as she panted home, her suspicions hardened to the certainty that the tent was formed from two Witney blankets, prized possessions, given to her years before and which had never known a bed. In those days good things were often stored away unused.
Roy was more adventurous than me. I would stay at home and read while he set off, in the family manner, to other places. Lin and Hally were away at sea and we rarely saw them. My only memory of Hally from those days was when it was suggested that he should shin up the lamp posts in Milner Street to afix flags and banners during the Silver Jubilee celebrations of King George the Fifth and Queen Mary. Since he was a seafarer, it was calculated that he ought to find it easy, but he made the excuse that he could only climb up things like that when he was at sea and the ship was rocking on the waves. Lin, who was working his way up the decks, had interludes when he returned from voyages, went out to dances and brought girls home. These young ladies often used to make a fuss of me and let me sit on their laps with my head on their chests so I really looked forward to his return from a trip. One of his ex-girlfriends who lived quite near once gave me an old piano, in a spirit of vengeance perhaps. I could only have been seven or eight at the time and I was trying to make arrangements to move it from her house to mine, but my mother found out and told the girl we didn't want it.
Lin used to study with matchsticks on the table, calculating winds and currents for his exams. He had an amiable Latin-looking friend called Guy Hodges, who I can picture clearly even now. He had a concise moustache which he called his 'little bit of dog' and he could draw adventurous pictures of ships and storms and could also play the mandolin. During the war my brother went to visit him and found that both he and his brother Eric had been lost at sea. My brother cried bitterly and I have never forgotten the brothers' names, although I never even met Eric.
When Lin had gone back to sea I would sit studying matchstick winds and currents just as I had seen him do. My mother was both proud and worried. She did not want her younger sons to go away. Then I began to draw sea gulls, sunsets and steamers bedecked with funnels. 'Ah,' she said in an attempt at re-routing my life's course. 'You'll be a draughtsman when you grow up. Now that's a nice job.'
Thereafter, for some years in fact, I imagined a draughtsman was somebody who poled a raft down a river, a wet and perilous living. I even used to have nightmares about it. When, eventually, I realised that a draughtsman was someone who drew lines on paper, usually in the sanctuary of an office, I found the image more becoming, but at fourteen I went to technical school and quickly discovered it was not my future. My drawing was surrealistically inaccurate and scarred with erasures, my calculations wild; and when it came to practical applications such as brick-laying, mine were the walls which fell down.
So keen was my mother to keep her sons home by the fireside that she even refused to let us go on one of Campbell's Paddle Steamers that used to sail out of Newport on Bristol Channel pleasure trips. She feared, once we'd got the salt in our noses, we might acquire a taste for the life. So places like the exotic-sounding Weston-super-Mare, of which we heard from our more travelled acquaintances, remained beyond our horizon.
In fact we scarcely went anywhere. The hill of houses, the quarry and its grey-green fields at the back, the cold old pond where we tried to fish and ventured for a muddy paddle in summertime, and occasional trips into the town where the tramcars sizzled along their steel rails, were the stuff of our world. My Sunday school teacher, apparently
seized by some temporary missionary zeal, promised to take the class into Newport to show us the sort of blinds and awnings used in the Bible lands, a sort of holy journey. When she failed to fulfil this pledge, and the summer was going by, I asked her when we were actually going and she replied lamely that the blinds of the shop she had been thinking about had caught fire and it was no more. The adventure was off. That night I lay awake with disappointment.
Our great journey of the year was a day at Barry Island. Money was put away in preparation for this trip and the weather became the subject of prayers. Everybody in the street went in what was strangely called a charabanc. Once my mother, having put the fare money into the kitty throughout the year, found when the day dawned, that she did not have another halfpenny to take with us, nothing even for a cup of tea or an ice cream and certainly nothing for a bucket and spade. She went to bed and sulked the night before and she had a good cry the next morning. The shining charabanc arrived for the twenty-mile trip to bliss. The neighbours began to tumble joyfully aboard. 'Dolly Thomas is missing!' somebody shouted. They saw my wistful brother and I watching. 'Where's your mam?' someone demanded. "Aving an 'owl,' I replied. 'We're not coming'
Determined neighbours disembarked and a delegation climbed to our front bedroom to plead with my mother who at first hid under the bedclothes. When she emerged they argued that they did not have much money either, although they had more than us. Roy and I had followed the deputation and added our pleas, promising faithfully that we would not ask for impossible dreams like buckets and spades. Reluctantly she got out of bed and made some jam sandwiches. We went to Barry Island and sat on the sand eating the bread and jam. The sun beamed and the fairground blared blatantly behind us. But there was no charge for the sea and the sand so we had quite a good day.
In My Wildest Dreams Page 5
