In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  We had other familiar itinerants. Nocka, the ice cream man, whose full name was Nockavelh. He was Italian, we all thought, until Italy entered the war against us. Harmless Neopolitan cafes had their windows smashed in Newport and frightened Italian people were rounded up by the police. Nocka appeared as usual on the Sunday in his curly-painted van with the words 'Maltese Nationality. Loyal British Subject' large upon its sides.

  There was also a man who sold greengrocery from a cart drawn by a dozy horse. The man was very lively and popular and when Pill, where he lived, was bombed, the story came back that he had been killed. An immediate collection was made around the houses and the money dispatched to his widow. Then, it transpired, that there had been some misinformation. It was his horse who was blown up. The man was all right. He kept the money, though, and said it was to help him buy another horse.

  Although the dock area was thoroughly bombed the remainder of Newport escaped comparatively lightly from the German air raids of 1940 and '41. My mother – who had been to Birmingham on a mysterious visit – graphically described the terrible scenes there and said they were pumping lime down into the debris because some of the corpses would never be brought up. She had been to Birmingham once or twice before the war on anonymous visits and on one occasion an unexplained lady, about the age of my elder brothers, appeared to stay with us for a few days. We called her Auntie Daisy. I often wondered who she was.

  One night the Germans dropped some landmines on Newport. They drifted down lightly on parachutes and then exploded resoundingly. Hally, my second brother, was home from sea, where, God knows, it was dangerous enough, but the air raids unnerved him. Roy and I lay on the air raid shelter bunks, peering over the edges with wonder, while our elder brother lay flat on the floor with his hands clamped over the back of his head, which, he explained breathlessly between detonations, was the prescribed way to lie while under attack. This was an attractive novelty and we were eager to try it. There was, however, only room on the floor for him, and he told us to get back in our bunks. I don't know where my mother was on this occasion, possibly making a cup of tea, or doing her make-up so she would look decent in death. She was particular about such things.

  Hally, in fairness, had been under weeks of stress at sea. He had been bombed and torpedoed and was then discharged as unfit and told to get a civilian job ashore. So, in the midst of a war that was growing more violent and threatening by the day, he found himself as a door-to-door salesman of Kleen-e-zee brushes.

  He used to bring home samples, brushes of every use and size; brushes for cleaning shoes and sinks, for brushing your hair or your clothes; thin, flat, wide and fat; some hard as a bed of nails, some soft as our cat. We had more brushes for things than anyone in Newport. He became embarrassed by this peaceful occupation, and, in the end, he just disappeared, vanished, true to the family tradition. No more was heard until the postman brought an inauspicious parcel containing his clothes. There was no note, no explanation whatever. My mother thought he was dead and somebody had kindly sent his trousers home. Eventually Hally himself arrived in Royal Air Force uniform. That, as far as I recall, did not last long either. Knowing he was an experienced sailor they put him on a rescue launch used to pick up ditched airmen from the sea. The first time he went out on a mission a loitering enemy fighter machine-gunned the boat. After that he went to live in Birmingham.

  One night German planes over Newport scattered a pointless white powder. At dawn it looked as if there had been an out-of-season snow-storm. The authorities were convinced initially that it was a poison gas attack and everyone had to wear their gasmasks. Then a van with a loudspeaker came up the street giving orders that housewives had to scrub down the pavement outside their houses. It was a curious sight, my mother and all her neighbours right to the far end of Maesglas Avenue, swishing with water and brushing brooms. They made jokes and laughed about it, especially when one simple woman came out to do the job still wearing her gasmask.

  Then there was a tragedy that touched many of us. At the top of Dock Street was a stamp dealer's shop owned by a family called Phillips. We went there with our pennies and twopences to buy British Colonials or the new issues of Free France and Free Holland or stamps with President Roosevelt or Hitler on the front. One night a German bomber, disabled by anti-aircraft fire and losing height, fouled the wire of a barrage balloon and fell to the ground. It landed on top of the house where the Phillips family lived on a hill and set fire to it. The husband and wife escaped by the traditional method of climbing down from their bedroom on a sheet. The young son went back into the blazing building to find his sister and both died. A rumour went around that the garden was littered with foreign stamps and there was a rush of boys to see if it was true. All that could be seen was the blackened shell of the house and the pathetic sheet hanging from the window.

  IV

  Season followed season in those boyhood streets. Our Moscow had its own enclosed calendar of dates, times for certain things and times for others. After the army had marched through and the main bombing had finished, the war seemed only to flicker on the skyline of a world governed by days off from school (we had a holiday for Empire Day and for both St George's and St David's Days, straddled as we were between England and Wales or, as some would have it, in Occupied Wales); by the ripening of conkers; by Christmas, a season commenced as early as we dared, even in November, when we would go to front doors, pipe out the first line of 'While Shepherds Watched' and bang demandingly on the knocker; by the summer holidays, long and seemingly ever sunlit. Bonfire night had been extinguished by the war. I can never recall, either at school or out of it, playing organised sports. In a land of rugby I knew only that it was performed with a wedge-shaped ball; my brother Hally bought me a soccer ball and with the first wild kick I smashed one of our windows. Any boxing was done with bare fists behind the school lavs, and although my mother bought us what she called 'cricket shirts' I had no notion of how the game was played.

  Our games were street games. Gritty nights chasing around lamp posts, cowboys and Indians and occasionally English and Germans. We stalked newts and frogs, lying on our bellies by the turgid pond, and sometimes a child would acquire a tortoise and everyone would troop to stare at its tardy but majestic progress across the street. There were few motor vehicles, but if a car or a van, or better still something substantial like a coal lorry, did come up Maesglas Avenue, we would sit in hushed, engrossed lines along the gutter as the tortoise negotiated a perilous journey.

  There was also a season for roller skates, which my mother discouraged after a neighbour's boy called Sidney broke his leg outside our gate; and there was a marbles season. Is there anything so memorable from boyhood as the coloured lights and glassy, globular feel of a marble? We called the pastime 'alleys' and it gave me the first of the several nicknames of my life – Fudge. We had just moved to Maesglas, that very day, and Flare, the boy next door, was playing alleys with Chubber in the gutter when I came from our gate and alleged that Flare was 'fudging' – cheating by moving his hand forward to gain distance. To 'fudge' had been the local verb on the far side of the town, but provoked instant hilarity here and it thereafter became my appellation. I was Fudge Thomas and my brother was Little Fudge.

  For a few weeks every year, in early summer, the rage of the street was 'Fota-a-go'. The fota in question was a photo, a cigarette card, showing some notable person, event, invention or butterfly. A lick down the sticky back meant that they could be fixed in coarse-papered albums obtainable from Craven 'A' or Capstan or the manufacturers of Woodbines, the most popular smoke in the district. My mother disdained smoking Woodbines, preferring the select-sounding, but equally economical, Park Drive. The loose cigarette cards were used as currency during the 'Fota-a-go' season. Along the pavements were chalked areas, like small hop-scotch patterns, each square bearing a number. The proprietor of the stall, marked out in front of his own house, would sit in the gutter shouting 'Fota-a-go . . . Your mother won't know!' With
in each square was placed some minor treasure, a pencil, a tin whistle, a small toy, a book, a comic paper, or even a penny, and, on payment of a cigarette card to the stallholder, the gambler could try and push a flat stone or a disc of some sort into the square, thus gaining a prize. The appendage 'Your mother won't know' was often apt since, to boost their stall's attraction, the proprietors frequently used to purloin the personal property of parents to be used as prizes. (Another fragmentary cry, like the beginning of a fairground ditty, comes to mind: 'Ask your mother for ninepence to see the lady bare!')

  One dusty day my mother appeared unexpectedly to find that my brother, who had a rival establishment to mine, had on offer as prizes most of the contents of her meagre jewel box, together with a pair of colourful garters which might well have been able to tell an exotic story.

  These stalls were a singular sight, stretching the length of Maesglas Avenue, with just as many in neighbouring streets, each with its wailing stallholders touting for custom. Since almost every child had an enterprise, they had to become each other's clients, leaving their own ventures in charge of a brother or sister and strolling along, as though in some bazaar, to see what wares others were risking. If something particularly sought after, or illicitly gained, was on display then there would be a rush of would-be players to that particular stall. When cigarette cards became scarce because of wartime paper restrictions, an added commercial element was introduced and the stake became a halfpenny or a penny. Naturally the value of the prizes had to be increased accordingly and a large, coal-faced docker once knocked on our door demanding the return of his watch. My brother, howling that he had won it fair and square, had to surrender it.

  Life was narrow, but we did not know it was narrow and neither did we care. Our days seemed full enough. We had the comfort, comedy and companionship that only street-livers know. My son, Matthew, has lived the thirteen years of his life in country houses, with all the neighbours beyond trees or fields. I have often thought how much he would have enjoyed my childhood; the knocking on doors and running away, the games of tag in the dusk, the swapping of comics, running the gauntlet of an evening of swishing rain to a house up the street. By this time the comics of my father's day, the Gem and the Magnet, had given way to the coloured lures of the Dandy, the 'Beano', the Knock-out and the hilarious Chips Own. Pansy Potter, the Strongman's Daughter, Our Ernie (whose father always said 'Daft I call it') and Desperate Dan (known to us as 'Desperated Dan') were our weekly companions. I was reading Desperate Dan while walking from Sunday school one afternoon in 1941 when a boy told me that the Germans had invaded Russia.

  This must have been a rare lapse on my part (not to mention on Hitler's) for I had heard nothing about it and yet I retained a keen interest in the news of the distant war. Indeed, I had changed my weekly comic for War Illustrated, a red-black-and-white journal notable for heralding forthcoming military triumphs which turned out to be crushing defeats. Less than a month before Dunkirk, its cover photograph featured British troops disembarking in France, displaying the traditional optimistic thumbs and announcing that they were on their way to Victory. Four issues later those same troops were shown being ferried back to England, beaten and bewildered but still with that everlasting thumb in the air. Many years after, while I was researching for my novel The Dearest and the Best, I was astonished to find a complete set of War Illustrated covering 1939 to 1940 in the second-hand bookshop that quaintly part-occupies the buffet at Yeovil Junction station in Somerset. I bought the lot. Some of the covers I recognised. The magazine even smelled the same. In The Dearest and the Best I made use of my thoughts on the thumbs-up habit of the British servicemen (Churchill is persuaded to outmode it by raising two fingers in a Victory-V sign), as I had done previously in my first novel The Virgin Soldiers:

  Why did they do it always? Off they went again in the next war, those proud, confident, mistaken digits. Thumbs up on the troopships, thumbs up in the tail turret of the bomber, thumbs up on the Arctic convoy. That's right, lads, just show we're not down-hearted. Come on now, you on the stretchers, thumbs up all those who've still got 'em. Thumbs up! Thumbs up!

  Avid listening to the wireless meant that I usually knew what was happening in the war rather better than my mother. One night, whistles began blowing among the houses.

  'Fire-bombs,' I said when she woke me to ask what they meant. We opened the curtains to see the wooden fence along the backs of the gardens blazing red and yellow. Fred Martin from next door and some other men put sandbags on the sizzling bombs and put the flames out with stirrup pumps. One night, in December 1941, I was again awakened by my mother calling up the stairs that it was on the wireless that Japan had bombed American ships and the United States was at war.

  'It means we're going to win,' I remember replying. Many years later I read that Churchill's comment had been the same.

  Now and again my father would come home from sea with gifts. By this time he and my mother were legally separated and I suppose the presents were in the hope that she would soften and allow him to stay. A Chinese coffee set and a Japanese tea set were already delicately in place in our Welsh dresser, alongside the family library which consisted of Murder in the Mews, a lachrymose story called Wops the Waif and Old Moore's Almanac. To these gifts was added a many-coloured Egyptian table cloth, its camels and palms lending an exotic air to the council house's small room, and my mother's pride, its new three-piece suite. I was sitting on this table cloth when my father came home one day. (My brother and I habitually sat on the table. I would often squat, cross-legged under the single central bulb, to read my library books, and there we did our cutting-out-and-sticking-into-scrapbooks and played with my lead soldiers.) For days my mother had been busy instilling into us the necessity of our best behaviour when the old man returned from his voyage, presumably so that he could see that we were being properly brought up. We were, however, still permitted to sit on the table while he told us of his adventures in the exposed Atlantic and the icy perils of the Arctic convoys. In the middle of his narrative I let off. I quickly apologised. 'What did you do?' asked my mother who had not heard. 'I'm sorry,' I repeated in what I imagined was a well-behaved voice. 'I've just flarted.'

  My father's gifts were always keenly awaited. He brought a tin machine-gun for me from America and a tank for Roy, then a pocket-watch which I used to show off at school and which, in the absence of a chain, dangled from a bootlace. Some presents were less easy to accommodate. He took us to Newport market after returning from one trip and recklessly purchased six newly born chicks. With much excitement we bore these home in a cardboard box. My mother liked them but was worried about feeding and the fact that we did not have a hen.

  One by one the chicks died. The last one went while she tried to warm it in her own bed.

  It was Wops the Waif followed by Murder in the Mews that began my life of reading, indeed my education, for I have had little other. Even today I find anything but the most basic mathematics beyond me, I know no sciences, nor any languages, and it was years before I was relatively certain what an adverb was.

  Wops was a pathetic little fellow who dragged himself around the darkness and dirt of London's Victorian East End. He was always good for a cry. My mother and I had dampened many of the book's pages. Roy was persuaded to try it, but after a couple of minutes he closed the covers and said it was too miserable for him and embarked on a journey to the lighthouse, six miles distant, somewhere I had never ventured. He has, in latter years, when perhaps we have both imbibed a little too much, been heard to accuse me of having all the advantages of education. He, as a sailor, has continued his connection with lighthouses. 'If only I'd read that Wops book,' he once bemoaned as we sat in a bar. 'There's no knowing what I might have done.'

  Murder in the Mews terrified me. I sat by our fire, in one of the armchairs of the three-piece suite – with Tussy our black and white puffy cat on my lap, daring myself to go on for another page as though physically creeping through the murdero
us mews itself, squinting at the shadows of our familiar room.

  My mother's taste in literature and music was 'anything light', which included, oddly, murder mysteries and Handel's Messiah.

  'Something light for my Mam,' I would tell the library lady when I went to change my books. Usually she would send me home with Ethel M. Dell or someone similarly romantic but once, perhaps as a joke, she gave me Das Kapital which my mother said she couldn't understand for the life of her. The Newport library was in Dock Street, a sooty stone building that also housed the town museum and reading room. In the days of unemployment I had gone there with my father and hung about aimlessly while he stood up and read the newspapers. They were arranged around the wall so that the men, and they were only read by men, would have to stand and would not get too comfortable and spend all day in there. Once when I was six or seven, and getting restive, the old man had the brainwave of taking me upstairs to the museum. At once I was spellbound. Right inside the door was a stuffed eagle, so fierce of eye, bent of beak and wide of wing that he looked set to fly straight out into Dock Street. He had a rabbit in his talons, a drama in a glass case. From that day I used to stand and study him for hours, sometimes fancying I saw him move. One night I had a dream in which the eagle let go of the rabbit with one claw and scratched his head.

  I had never seen a real live wild animal in my life (even the rabbits of my experience were dead and bloody and selling at ninepence in the market). Once at Barry Island my father had taken me to view a dead whale which was being exhibited. My old man tapped it, put his ear close as if he expected an echo and concluded it was made of wood, and I was inclined to agree with him.

  In the Newport Museum there were also other stuffed and encased animals, with lambent eyes and bared teeth; foxes and otters and a nice badger whose stuffing was bulging out at the back. There were also beautiful model ships with miniature lifeboats, ropes, rigging and crewmen. In one corner there was a statue of the Boy David showing all he had.