When I was eight I was allowed to go on the bus to the Odeon Saturday Morning Club, a hell-on-earth of screaming, rampaging kids where I relished every moment. The first film I believe I ever saw was a Popeye cartoon and one of its images kept itself locked in my memory for years. Popeye and Olive Oyl were walking down a street of mean houses, he just like my father, whom he somewhat resembled, holding his sailor's kitbag. At the bottom of the street, a poetic detail in the corner of the screen, some matchstick children were playing ring-a-roses around a lamp post, its circular light beaming down upon them. I recently passed a television shop and there, on a screen in the window, was that same scene. I remembered it perfectly.
Sometimes on Saturday afternoons my mother would take Roy and me to the cinema. We usually had to see what she wanted to see, which often meant some weepy love story or, yet again, Edward G. Robinson, who like Popeye had an odd, squashed likeness to my father. The images that come from those remote afternoons at the pictures are, however, not always those from the screen. They are of leaving, at five o'clock in winter, to the lights of the town reflected on rainy roads, of tram cars clanking and of the prospect of going home to tea.
There were times, although they became fewer, when my parents declared some sort of armistice and we briefly became the sort of family that I read about in 'Sunny Stories'. They were so unusual as to be noteworthy.
My mother was one day at her washing board, looking out the misted window over the rooftops to the town beyond, wistfully, perhaps, or it may have just been the vapour from the steaming tub. One of my playmates had acquired a set of miniature blue dungarees, bib and brace, brass buckles and all, and I wanted a similar set. To my surprised satisfaction my mother did not come back with the usual riposte that we did not have enough money. Yes, I would have them. Just like that! Yes, my father was coming home from sea and he would buy me a pair of dungarees on his return. He was due in dock on the following day. And – on Friday night we would be going to the Empire and on Saturday to Barry Island.
The Empire! Barry Island! My cup was full. Even now I can see us, all four holding hands, at the bus stop waiting to go on the first part of that magic journey. I stand there, hugging myself with happiness, for I loved the stage lights, the funny men and even the singers and dancers at the Empire. And tomorrow . . . tomorrow . . .
We sat in the gods, gazing down at the iridescent stage. The number of the act used to go up formed by light bulbs at the wings, in the interval a curtain, thick as a wall, would descend, hung with advertisements for the attractions and businesses of Newport. It is hard to describe that delight. I cannot now recall what variety of acts were on stage that night, although this may have been the occasion when, to my guilt, surprise and pleasure, a lady standing at the back of a finale tableaux suddenly allowed the gauze covering her front to fall and reveal two marble-white and marble-hard objects which I thought for a moment might be spinning tops. It was only when the curtain had dropped, and the vision vanished, that I realised that I had glimpsed something that was to hold a lasting interest for me.
It must have been at this same period of their armistice when my parents went dancing together and took us with them. We went to a place which had the sniff of romance, the Newport Labour Hall. Roy and I sat on hoop-backed chairs, our eyes becoming clotted with chalk dust, as the dancers swooped and skidded around the floor in a swirling anti-clockwise haze. The fact that my mother was being flung backwards (it was the era of the Argentinian tango) by an utter stranger disturbed me a little. My father, meanwhile, swooped pan-faced across the boards with the dash of a marauder.
'Why is our dad doing it by himself?' enquired my brother. Like me, he must have thought dancing was an odd way to spend an evening, especially since the entrance fee was ninepence.
We had a good back view of our distant parent. Apparently alone, he was flicking his feet this way and that, sending up puffs of chalk, bending almost to the floor. Eventually he spun, kicked sideways, and zoomed towards us, clutching to him one of the smallest women I had ever seen, or have seen to this day. Whether he sought to impress his sons, I do not know, but as the appropriate beat of the tango occurred he arrived in our proximity, threw her backwards across his knee and her head tipped, like someone slaughtered. Then with a devilish grin he whirled her away.
'I could see right down inside her,' sniffed my brother.
The news that war had been declared was given to me by a boy with a stutter. 'W . . . w . . . w . . . ar,' he said as I was going up the street. We had moved in the spring of 1939 to a district called Maesglas, at the Welsh end of Newport, bordering on the ebony River Ebbw and rising meadows. Maesglas means 'green fields', but to its inhabitants and those in other council estates, it was known as Moscow.
On that first Sunday morning in September I had been sent, in the crucial few minutes before the fateful eleven o'clock speech of Neville Chamberlain, to the greengrocer's shop at the bottom of the street. My mother, as convinced as Edward Lyndoe that there would be no war, had decided that life should go on as usual, so I was sent for the vegetables. While the man was putting the muddy potatoes and carrots in a bag, so the announcement of hostilities was coming over the wireless in the back room of his shop. I could not hear what was being said but the greengrocer was clearly disturbed. 'We're for it now,' he confided in me. He turned to weigh the potatoes. Believing firmly in Lyndoe, I remained unworried and stood whistling through my teeth as any eight-year-old boy can and does. Abruptly, the anguished greengrocer turned and gave me the most frightful whack around the ear with an earth-bound potato. 'Stop that whistling, boy!' he shouted into my upset face. 'I can't stand you whistling, boy! It will all have to stop soon!'
He was right, in a way, because one of the first edicts to come from the British Government at the outset of the noisiest period in history was the banning of noises. There were to be no whistles, hooters nor, eventually, tolling bells, either.
After the boy with the stutter had filled in the details of the Prime Minister's speech for me in the street, I went into our end-terrace house, with its pebble-dash, red bricks and lingering single dog rose over the path and found my mother more disgusted with Edward Lyndoe than with Hitler. Her soothsayer, blindly believed every week in the pages of the People newspaper, had been found to be a false prophet. At first, she was inclined to put the blame on Chamberlain rather than Lyndoe. But in the end it sank in; not only had she lost faith and face, but also her housekeeping money, because she had backed his forecast with the same misplaced intuition that had led her to wager on Frank Davies on the fairground airship. Somewhere there was a streak of recklessness.
The war, contrary to most expectations, brought few immediate sensations. In fact there was a widespread feeling of being short-changed. Most people had forecast heavy bombing, and possibly a gas attack, within hours. My father returned from sea a few nights after the declaration, this being a time of truce for my parents. The final truce, as it happened, because they soon launched into a period of bitter hostility that made the first year of the greater conflict appear even more placid. My mother, looking quite mystic, carried a candle because the blackout curtains were not drawn across the window when my father arrived. Within a moment a policeman and an officious air raid warden were pounding at the door demanding to know why we were signalling to enemy bombers. There were none within several hundred miles at that time and, seeing that my father was a sailor home from the sea, they said they would not press charges but that we would have to blow the candle out. When they had fussed off, my father, holding forth in the dark while my mother hoisted the blackout blinds, announced that, if he had only had two white feathers on him, he would have presented one each to the policeman and the air raid warden.
He was ever caustic about what he considered to be the cowardice of the civilian services, particularly the police force, for which he had little time, although its members sometimes had time for him. His own activities ashore during the first two years of the w
ar were, perhaps needless to say, not without drama. After being torpedoed twice in the open sea and surviving in a lifeboat, he returned home one black night, breathing bravery and brandy. Deciding that my mother might think twice about letting him into the house, he chose to drop into the air raid shelter in the garden to await daylight. There were four feet of water in the shelter and, stepping into the void beyond the door, he plunged right into it. After cheating the Atlantic he came close to drowning on dry land. There was also a period when he worked ashore, on Newport Docks, although it was brief. He wept openly with other men at being rendered virtually homeless by the destruction of the Dock Hotel by German bombers. 'Wanton,' he muttered, damp-faced as he viewed the wreckage. 'Wanton.'
One night when he was working on the docks he somehow came into possession of a couple of dozen kippers and bore these home at dawn as a triumphant addition to our rations. My mother, for once, was pleased, but worried about the police. To spread the good fortune, or perhaps the evidence, she distributed some of the fish to neighbours. At teatime that day she watched trembling from the window as a constable slowly strode the length of Maesglas Avenue, sniffing the aroma of grilling and frying kippers. But no arrests were made.
During this early wartime period, my father also provided sacks to be used as sandbags for bolstering the defences of our air raid shelter. He did nothing, despite my mother's scolding, to help fill them with earth. That was left to me.
Not that I minded. The air raid shelter was my pride. In my eagerness to get on with the fight against Nazism, I had dug a hole fifteen yards from the back door at the bottom of our garden, by the boarded fence that divided us from the Great Western Railway engine repair sheds. My mother told me where to dig because she had read in the paper that Anderson shelters, corrugated iron huts half-interred in the earth, were to be situated fifteen yards from the place of exit from the house. It was a warm autumn and I was only eight. Nevertheless, I was very determined and I dug and dug until I had a suitable hole. Every afternoon when I returned from school, and every Saturday and Sunday, I made that hole wider and bigger. Eagerly I awaited the arrival of the air raid shelter. We would be the best-protected family in Maesglas. Hitler could do his worst.
When the men arrived with the curved and shining metal panels that were to be bolted together to form our refuge, they said that the hole was in the wrong place. My mother had mixed it up. The shelter had to be established fifteen feet, not yards, from the back door. I set about digging another hole.
Some workmen arrived to complete the job but I still had to fill in the first hole. Then came the satisfaction of piling earth on the naked corrugated iron shelter, filling the flour sacks that my father magicked from the docks, fitting the floorboards and witnessing the delivery of the wood and wire bunks. We had a little table and an oil lamp, a ladder to step down and a wooden door, like a bastion, to pull over the hole. It was wonderful, a home from home, deep in the ground; on fine nights my brother and I camped out in there.
Whether the sight of my labour, or my mother's scorn, was too much for him, I do not know, but my father quickly returned to the sea. His excuse was that his chest ached on land and he breathed better in the stokehold. I missed hearing the wheezings, gurglings and hissings within his body as he lay next to me in bed at night. Sometimes, if you listened carefully, you could imagine they were playing a tune.
On our air raid shelter I planted vegetables and flowers, a multiple achievement since it provided us with produce and decoration and camouflaged our hide-out from German reconnaisance aircraft. Mr Coles next door had a wonderful shelter, all lined and padded, with proper beds and even folding chairs and a wireless set. His son, who was called Flare, used to boast about their air raid shelter (which was fifteen yards from the back door at the bottom of the garden near the fence with the engine sheds). I was jealous, but pleased when Mr Coles gave me some strawberry plants and I put them on top of the shelter. In the hot summer of 1940, while Britain stood alone and aeroplanes battled in the sky, we had a splendid crop of strawberries.
Enthusiastically horticultural, I dug the entire back garden to grow potatoes, lettuces, carrots and onions. Somehow I felt that the injunction to 'Dig For Victory' on the Government advertisement hoardings was addressed specifically to me. I even set to work on the patch of front garden behind our ragged but sweet-smelling privet hedge, trimming the dog rose and cosseting the irises, which were our only flowers. I dug a rectangular flower bed at the centre of the patchy grass and was very proud of it until Mrs Holtom, a local fortune-teller, walked past and pronounced that it looked like a grave. She told my mother to instruct me to make it a different shape. I did. The resulting cross was apparently even less acceptable, and I could not manage a circle. 'You'll have a death in the family,' warned Mrs Holtom, looking grimly over the gate. 'Just mark my words.'
I don't know how accurate her prognostications were as a rule, but this time she was right. Twice.
III
Although the red-roofed houses of Maesglas were tightly regimented around its streets, pastures were visible enough in the distance, lying aslant the hill that led up to a better class of district called the Gaer. My mother had taken a job cleaning one of the houses there and, by standing on the summit of our air raid shelter, I could see her walking home, come down over the fields in her red coat, bright as a ladybird.
The countryside was at our doorstep, beyond the inky River Ebbw that curled through Tredegar Park; vales and big trees, a handsome enough landscape that I appreciate today on occasions when I drive through it. Predictably, though, our world ended at the bottom of the street. Our games, our gossip, our hearth and our homes were all contained in that space. Our rural activities were confined to the Woods, a small unkempt valley with a few gritty trees and a tangled, smelly pond. In winter this froze thickly and in summer became a bottle-green cauldron of newts, tadpoles and, in due time, frogs. Every child in the district used it as a tom-tiddler's ground and was familiar with every inch of its rough covering. Yet I remember saying to my best friend, Chubber, at the start of the August holidays: 'Let's spend all the time exploring the Woods, so's we know every bit of it.' Our horizons, like our ambitions, were not large. At its western boundary Maesglas was half-circled by the River Ebbw which descended almost solid with coal dust from the colleries in Ebbw Vale. The damp powder lay in heavy layers lining the river's banks, the texture of sand, its particles glistening like diamonds in sunshine. Sometimes we would collect a bucketful of Ebbw coal, as it was known, for the fire, drying it into blocks first or just sprinkling it over the heavier coal. Occasionally men with barrows would sell it around the streets and there was a near-deadly rivalry between the several families who made their living this way. Fights with fists and weapons took place on the jet banks of the river, men and boys rolling fiercely in the coal dust over which they fought.
South of the district, unrolling straight and flat to the Bristol Channel, was a vivid green marsh, cut with ditches and drainage channels that we called reens. A cobbled road led from the working men's institute, the last outpost of Maesglas, down towards Newport Docks. Directly across the bright marsh you could see big ships looking as if they were afloat on grass.
At the other extreme of our street the main road went towards Cardiff. There was a line of shops, which once provided fortuitous pickings when most of their windows were blown out by a German landmine in 1940. People went there in the early hours of the morning to inspect the damage and came back laden with all sorts of groceries, cigarettes and bottled beer which they had found lying around. They said they had just been tidying up. A little apart from this shopping parade, across the road, like a stronghold set on a small hillock, was Shepherd's Fish and Chips, where the juvenile population each evening formed a struggling mass in the narrow alley outside its doors, waiting for the moment when Mr Shepherd would open them and let the howling mob in. You had to take your own newspaper because it was in short supply and there was little fish to be h
ad once the war had really got under way. Most of the children in that area were brought up on Shepherd's chips. The shop was still there when I last looked.
So, also, was the doctor. Only a year or two ago, Dr Galloway Smith was still practising from his surgery on the end of the shops, as he had been forty years before. In those former days he was looked upon with awe for he was the only man for miles around who had a car. His surgery was the last place to which I went in Maesglas – with my brother for a quick medical before we were sent off to Dr Barnardo's Homes. Although to us he had seemed a stern and forbidding man, people respected him and even loved him because he had served them so long.
On that recent return I walked up Maesglas Avenue, where we had lived at Number 39. The old houses had been demolished to make way for new. (The next day I found that the houses at Somerton, at the far end of Newport, were also knocked down; Newport Council was pulverising my memories.) Across the street from the site of our former home, in one of the new, neat houses, was Fred Martin, a lovely white-haired man in his eighties. Very Welsh and very articulate, with a great gentleness about him that I remembered from long ago, he told me how the houses had been demolished.
'I sat at the window,' he related, 'watching them, the demolition gang. Waiting for the moment when our old castle would go. We'd lived in that house since 1927 and I wanted to see it fall down. They were going along the street with a big metal ball on a crane banging every house to the ground. I waited until they got to ours, watching, see. Then Beryl called me from the back kitchen and I went out to see what she wanted, just for a minute. When I came back they'd done it! It was vanished!'
He had been a docker and part-time fireman in the war. He was also a bit of a poet. He told me that once when my elder brother and his wife had quarrelled, and Mary was staying in our house, Lindon used to sleep in his house next door, lying, unknown to his wife, a six-inch wall away from her. 'People don't know what romance is these days,' said Fred, shaking his head.
In My Wildest Dreams Page 7
