The noise of the sideshow barkers and the music of the roundabouts must have been as thoroughly tantalising for our mother as for us, for she had a dire weakness for fairgrounds. Once, when the August fair was in Newport, in Belle Vue Park, she found the temptation of the airship game too much to withstand. The silvery airship, alight with coloured bulbs, cruised raucously in a long parabola, lighting up various Christian and surnames as it went. If it stopped at Bessie Brown, and you had purchased a ticket with 'Bessie Brown' on it, you were the winner. It was getting towards the end of the evening and mother was almost out of money.
'I know "Frank Davies" is going to come up next time,' she informed me. 'I just know it.' She challenged me with her bright green eyes. She wanted support.
'How much have we got, Mum?' I enquired.
'Just the bus fares.' Defiance lit her face. 'What do you think?'
'Put it on Frank Davies then.' I shrugged.
She did and we watched the glittering airship float around, finally coming to rest on 'Bertie Jones'. Defeated, downcast, we stumbled from the fairground. She had already transferred the blame and she refused to speak to me. As we reached the road, with a long trudge home ahead of us, it began to rain. It thickened and teemed. Heads down the woman and two little boys ploughed through it.
'It's your fault!' she shouted at me, her face streaming. 'You made me do it!' She pointed at Roy, a shivering figure soaked through his skinny clothes. He told me that he had done a wee in his trousers so he was wet both inside and out. 'Look at him!' she bellowed. 'Look – sopping he is. And you know he's got a bad chest! I could murder you!'
She gave me a slap on the back of the head which set me bawling. The buses went by tantalisingly, their passengers dry, smug and staring through the yellow windows at the stumbling trio in the downpour. Mother stopped abruptly. 'Les,' she ordered. 'Go and ask the conductor if he'll come up to the house for the fare. I've got some in the teapot. It's not far from the stop, after all.'
'He won't do that . . .' I began to argue. Her streaming face was turned to me again. This time she was all broken up. 'Go on,' she pleaded. 'There's a good boy. Roy will get pneumonia.'
I chased after the bus which was at the stop but it started away again while I was still framing my unusual request to the conductor. I turned back disconsolately. We continued to walk. The rain stopped but the wind seeped through our wet garments. 'You're never going to the fair again,' said my mother darkly. At that moment I was not all that sorry.
Often she was a sweet and loving woman but she needed someone to take, or at least share, blame for the multiplying viscissitudes of her life and I was the obvious choice. One evening my brother and I were playing a game in our small living room which involved jumping over a rope tied between chairs. It was bedtime, but we begged for 'one more go' and the final jump ended with Roy howling on the floor with a broken arm.
A neighbour with a motorbike (the only vehicle in the district) was summoned and he took Roy on his pillion to hospital. They tied him on with a rope and instructed him to hang on with his good arm. It was not far anyhow. My mother, roundly blaming me for the mishap, followed by bus. Tearfully I went to bed and lay awake wondering if you could die from a broken arm (then I'd really be for it) until they returned after several hours, all talking quite cheerfully. 'What will be, will be,' quoted the motor-cycling neighbour as he left. Before she went to bed my mother came into the room. I pretended to be tight asleep. She bent over and kissed me and said: 'I'm sorry.'
Roy's plastered arm provided us with a useful excuse for coming home from school early. He had just started at the local infants' department and my mother asked if he could leave early each afternoon to prevent his arm being jostled by the other children. It was agreed and I was given charge of escorting him home. On the first day, having left the classroom ten minutes before the close, we were confronted by the daunting iron gates (the school, notwithstanding, was of wood) which were powerfully locked and were not due to be opened by the caretaker until going-home time. Nothing was going to hinder our privilege, however, and we decided to climb the gates. This was difficult enough for me, for they were high and topped with spikes, but for Roy with his heavy and useless arm, it was much worse. I got halfway and helped him up the initial stage. Then I climbed higher and assisted him again. With difficulty and danger I climbed over the spikes at the top and urged him to do likewise. I half dropped, half fell, but triumphantly landed only to hear a dreadful squawk from above. Roy was dangling there, one of the spikes having gone up the leg of his short trousers and emerged at the seat. His arms, the good one and the plastered one, were waving horribly, his knees pedalling like fury, and his face was a mask of fright. As he wriggled I heard the rip of his trousers.
In a panic I rushed to the caretaker's house and hammered on the door. The man, an indolent person, appeared in his carpet slippers. 'My little brother's hanging on the gates!' I cried.
'Let 'im,' replied the man unfeelingly. 'It's not four o'clock yet.'
I went back to Roy. His face was like milk.
'He says he can't get you down until four o'clock,' I called up.
'My trucks is ripping!' he cried.
The man, having been troubled by conscience I suppose, emerged shuffling in his carpet slippers, but wearing his official peaked cap with its Newport Corporation badge. He stared up at the stuck boy.
'Shouldn't be up there in the first place,' he said.
Children were emerging from the school now, rushing shouting to the gate. As if my brother was not impaled overhead, the caretaker unlocked the gate and swung it open, swinging Roy with it. The children were naturally entranced at the spectacle and, as the trousers ripped again, gathered to see what the final outcome might be. Roy was howling despairingly. The caretaker, at a miserable pace, went for a ladder and, in a scene not unlike the Descent from the Cross, unhooked the sobbing brother and brought him down.
We went home, he with his trousers asunder. My mother said it would be a terrible job to sew them together again.
II
It was rarely that my mother enjoyed the luxury of her problems striking one at a time. In the middle of one sharp winter, with the Welsh wind whistling across the houses and the hills, she found herself with two seriously sick children. When I was eight my legs began aching and have, more or less, gone on doing so ever since. I was stumbling in pain about the room while she tried to coax me to the kitchen with the blatant lie that there was a sixpence lying unattended on the floor. Eventually she was convinced enough to invest five shillings in a doctor who earned his fee by diagnosing rheumatic fever. Roy, who was five, not to be outdone, promptly got pneumonia.
With a siege-like spirit, Dolly Thomas concentrated her resources. Two mattresses were brought down and placed on the floor in the alcoves each side of the fire grate. There my brother and I lay for several winter weeks, with the weather howling outside the iron-framed council house windows, and the coal fire luminous in the grate. It was quite a luxurious way of being ill. We had a battery wireless set and we listened to the daytime programmes, music, talks and the news, and, when we were feeling better, put together our own radio programmes in which I did most things, including the singing. Roy was relegated to reading the weather forecasts and imitating the pips before the six o'clock bulletin. It was amazingly instructive, far better than the infantile lessons at the infants' school where my brother had been rightly offended to have to hang his coat on a peg decorated with a rose ('R is for Rose and R is for Roy'). Mine was a leek.
We learned for the first time of someone troublesome called Hitler and of places called Austria and Danzig. We inserted them in our own news broadcasts, transmitted with the aid of an empty Fry's cocoa tin on a length of cord. Austria we naturally confused with Australia and we interrupted normal programmes to announce the German invasion of the latter. Mr Chamberlain we called Mr Chamberpot, then invariably fell about our beds laughing: My brother tore a page from the Daily Herald, which the
man next door used to pass on to us when he had finished with it, and fashioned a trumpet to accompany Donald Peers (a thinly disguised me) in song. We heard that Donald Peers, a popular performer, came from Newport and we were astonished and impressed. Radio Luxembourg-was awaited keenly, especially Salty Sam the Sailorman who used to extol health salts and tell an acquiescent boy and girl to go and find a pebble and whoever brought the biggest could choose the day's story. In imagination I pictured myself staggering along that mystic beach with a huge boulder on my shoulder, and I often wondered what the little girl was like; me and her on the beach when old Salty Sam had gone home to his cottage or sailed out fishing. There was ample time for fiction in my bed by the fireside.
With this advertisement used to go a ditty: 'I'm Salty Sam the sailorman . . . I sail the ocean blue,' which we would lustily accompany. Roy's pneumonia made him a bit husky at first but his voice got stronger as his health improved. We also used to sing, two pale faces in the flickering firelight: 'We are the Ovaltinees, happy girls and boys.' We were ever optimistic.
It was my mother, I realise now, who had to get out of the house. At first she never went beyond the door and, for someone who had known the bright lights of Barry and Birmingham and enjoyed her dreams in the cinema, it must have been an imprisonment. Eventually she broke. She shouted at us for something and then her expression fell as she saw our apologetic faces one each side of the grate. That afternoon she got a girl to come in for a couple of hours and just went for a walk around Newport, not a voluptuous occupation. She promised to bring presents back for us and she did. Lack of funds limited the nature of the gifts but she had been touring Newport market and returned with a dozen old copies of Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories periodical which she gave to my brother and a huge, wonderful glossy book of unending interest which was for me. It was called 'The Littlewood's Catalogue'. I remember the sleek feel of its great bulk as she laid it on the bed. It was like a large woman wearing silk. The catalogue was a couple of years old, she explained, but you could still buy the same things by paying so much a week. Its glossy cover glowed in the firelight. I opened the pages and was lost to the world.
Ever since I could read, I had been prey to the desire evoked by advertisements in the People, the only newspaper we took regularly and that on account of the astrological assertions of Edward Lyndoe, who unfailingly forecast an improved future for my mother, which, considering her usual circumstances, was not difficult. She always referred to him as 'old Lyndoe' as if he were a friend, which I suppose he was in a way. I always felt her faith misplaced because none of the promises seemed to happen. Indeed, my mother recorded a distinct loss when prompted by Mr Lyndoe's forecast: 'There will be no war – the stars are against it.' She made instant bets of several shillings to this effect. The date was Sunday, September 3rd, 1939, the day war was declared.
The advertisements in the People, however, enslaved me with their fair words. Double your strength in three weeks; Grow your own raspberries; Make costly jewellery AT HOME; There is BIG money in pigeons; and other such pledges, some promising YOUR Money RETURNED if not satisfied. Imagine someone not being satisfied with his pigeons or his raspberries. There were also drawings of mighty ladies clamped in corsets, looking like the armoured horses of medieval knights. Sunday was a day of guilty thrills.
Now there was placed before me this compendium. It was as if someone had revealed the secrets of life. You could have anything, absolutely anything, it appeared, and pay for it at two shillings a week, or even less. It was not merely the pages that opened in my rheumaticky fingers, it was a whole new, bright and patently attainable world.
It was not only the glistening toys, red kiddie-cars, triangles with bells, fire engines, soldiers in forts, animals on wooden farms, skates, guns, scale models and jigsaws, but a far wider enchantment. Lawn mowers, green and powerful, hunched on the verdant frontages of long lush houses with red roofs; a real working, squirting hose, with a pond and statue in the background; picnic hampers cluttered with pies, thermos flasks for instant refreshment, collapsible ironing boards, electric fires, comfortably folded blankets and sheets, unending carpets, plush chairs, kitchen gadgets, and . . . oh, my God, there she was again . . . in her corsets! Not only her, but several softly coloured pages of her wanton sisters, posing in their peachy bloomers, elastic straining at waist and knee, or garments open to upward draughts and enticingly called French knickers. What did Directoire mean? And what of those things like tureens which well-fed looking ladies had strapped to their chests? That was intriguing because our mother was thin all the way down, but I had noticed that other boys' mams were bulging above the waist. Petticoats there were also, hemmed with looping lace and those corsets again, some bent like tin around the thighs, some, locked with a spanner it seemed, from which the female form might explode at any moment. Guiltily I wished that my mother was a bigger woman. There were so many things I wanted to know. How did these amazing Amazons go to the lav? Did they creak as they crouched?
'What you looking at?' enquired my brother from across the fireplace after I had been studying the catalogue for several days. He had finished Sunny Stories.
'Nothing for you,' I said with the brusqueness of the secret sinner.
'That book's got bloomers,' he confided archly. 'With ladies inside them. I had a decko when you was asleep. They're not as good as our mam's, though.'
Indeed they were not. For someone who had hardly two pennies to make a clink, Dolly Thomas had the most wonderful silks and fripperies, drawers full of them in the palest of hues with lavish lace and unscrupulous fancy embroider. She had long lovely nighties and silk pyjamas with flopping leg bottoms, negligees that might have graced a window in Paris. And she wore them, too. Where they had originated is anyone's guess – perhaps from her flappier days in Birmingham. All I know is this thin, anxious, hard-pressed, emotional, loving and impoverished lady went to her solitary bed in our council house each night, with all the allure of a favoured duchess.
On the back cover of our blue school exercise books was a map of the entire known world. Arranged about its edges were the words: Fifty Miles Around Newport. The circumference of my home town was the first geographical fact that ever impressed itself upon me. It encompassed a good deal more than my entire world. The rest of the earth was merely composed of wriggly and possibly untrustworthy lines on the flap of the book. Cardiff was distant, Bristol beyond the sea; London might as well have been Babylon.
The fifty-mile circle encompassed a gritty town, no stranger to distress, whose history included notable Chartist Riots but little else to excite mankind. Its major son of fame (apart from Donald Peers) was W.H. Davies, who composed the lines: 'Ah, but this life's so full of care, we have not time to stand and stare.' No one seemed quite sure where he was born, least of all himself. They found the street but Davies, when asked, was uncertain of the house. When he died they put a plaque on the wall recording his birth but it turned out to be the wrong place.
Coal travelled from the Welsh valleys to be loaded aboard ships at the docks, which ran along a district called Pill. The ships sailed away and then eagerly returned for more. Goaldust lay in ledges and littered the narrow streets. Smoke from the steel works, the other great employer, billowed gloomily over the dead-eyed river.
Pill was a forbidden city to us. My mother said we must never venture there for it was mysterious, full of nameless alarms and, what was more, rough. Pill sounded short and threatening, especially to my mother with her past social standing and her hopes for the future. 'It's wicked,' she warned. 'Never go down there.'
She was apt to deliver one-sentence sermons which somehow left their message. When I came home from school one day and said: 'Oh, fuck', she took on a stunned aspect and said: 'That is the Devil's personal word—you could drop dead!' I never said it again until I was in the army.
Pill seemed almost orientally attractive but, being timid, I more or less obeyed her, although I have no doubt my more daring younger brother
knew its ways fairly well. Once, impetuously, I ventured into this casbah wearing my Wolf Cub uniform and hiked right through its sin-strewn streets without anything untoward happening to me. One of its major lures was a cinema called the Gem where the entrance price was a penny. The combination of excitement and economy was powerful. Clutching my brother's hand I took him there, or more probably he took me. We sat on splinter-ridden benches while the silent doings featured in The Mark of Zorro flickered like bats across the well-darned screen. There were several fights among attending children, and a full-grown woman stood up shouting filth at the pounding pianist and violently hoofed the door as she went out. Eventually a patently important man in a bow tie and frock coat imposed himself between the projector and the screen. Throwing his arms sideways he bawled: 'Stop pictures! Stop orchestra!' The pianist, glancing around to see who else might be playing, stopped in mid-clatter. 'Right-o,' volleyed the man. 'It 'as come to the management's notice that you kids 'ave been bringing fleas into the Gem. I'm up 'ere to tell you that you bring the buggers in – then you'll take the buggers out!'
After this brief and obviously heartfelt decision the pianist began to wobble again on the keys and Zorro rode again across the stretched and grubby sheet. A man wrote to me recently from the same building. It is now an office block.
My mother was mortified when she heard of our visit to Pill, but hygiene quickly replaced wrath and she avidly searched our heads. She loved the cinema especially films featuring Edward G. Robinson of the rubber scowl. She went to see Brother Orchid four times. After our adventure at the Gem she announced that a new picture palace was opening in Newport, the Maindee Supper Cinema, a sophisticated place where, she asserted, you could eat off trays during the performance. Unfortunately, she had misread it. It was only the Maindee Super Cinema.
In My Wildest Dreams Page 6
