by William Pitt
Later when I grew to know things, I realized that if Phil McCann was deep down among anything it was more likely to be somebody's bedclothes than Bristol Channel mud. But she waited for him, sometimes keeping the light bleakly on till daybreak, screwed up in painful half-sleep, and always pitifully glad to see him when he arrived, fussing about making tea and grilling bacon and scolding me, saying it was time I was in bed because I was only a little child. This would be three or four in the morning. I had sat up all night because it had never occurred to her, until then, to tell me to go to bed. How I hated him even then. I was always so tired.
My mother and her sisters were all Welsh girls, of course, but unusually tall and stately, each with fine long hair mantling their backs or piled high above their faces. Each walked with her ovalled chest pushed forward in the manner of the distant Edwardians so that when they processed down Dock Street, as they sometimes did, the whole clutch of them, they looked like a flotilla of ships' figureheads. Even when they were all married-off they would still meet regularly at their father's shop and float down the street, making short squeaky calls to each other as they voyaged, laughing shrilly, or trying to compose their faces after some shared joke. Newport men would stand in the doorway of The Donkeyman Hotel and make jocular but complimentary remarks about the seven beautiful sisters, saying it was a shame the age of the bustle had gone because they would have suited the girls.
In those days, of course, Newport was a coaling town and the sisters were for ever wiping smuts of dust from each other as they walked towards the little black park that squatted forlornly among the dingy streets at the docks. At some sort of sensed signal they would stop and gather about each other wiping off grains of Ebbw Vale Number Six with lace handkerchiefs and spit. The clouds that puffed up from the loading ships at the wharves hung over the streets like gunpowder after a battle. Rain would force it to the pavements and smear the windows of the houses. The rivers, the Usk and the Ebbw, floated on cradles of coal.
There were always ships at the end of our street. The terrace houses stretched down to the dockside where they fused in a conglomeration of masts and funnels like some sort of fairground. The view was as natural to me as a child as factory chimneys or rising fields would have been to other children. Before the war all the ships would be lit at night with globular lights like big stars and I would lean from my bedroom window and watch them.
In that street husbands used to straggle up from the Newport docks, coal-faced like miners, the dust falling from their trousers and even trickling from their ears. On Fridays they would get drunk as they got paid.
'Who's that who's fallen down by the lamp, Arthur?' my mother would say, only half interested, trying to see from
the window and through the only good privet hedge between the Cardiff Road and the Bristol Channel. 'Mr Griffiths or Mr Jenkins?'
Seeing men, their faces as black as gunners, lying in the gutter on Friday was no phenomenon. Children would sometimes gather around them and poke them with their toes, as though they were dead animals. Once the lump had been identified the interest was in witnessing the appropriate wife, summoned by the street grapevine, come to claim her man. I once saw Mrs Richards, a lard-coloured woman who for some reason always wore a black skullcap, arrive up the street to get a bundle she understood was her husband, only to find on arrival that it was Mr Jenkins. 'That pig,' she snorted, rolling him back into the gutter and going back to her house.
Most of the women were heavy and capable enough, or had sufficient bite in their voices, to either drag or rouse the men from their stupor. They looked strong but they didn't live long. Six women in our length of terrace died in their forties.
Mrs Figaro, who lived next door to us, was not only foreign but thin and weak as well. Her husband Will had brought her home like a prize from the Spanish Civil War. His name was Llewellyn but in her early days in the street she couldn't say it, so she called herself Mrs Figaro, which I suppose must have been her unmarried name, and it stuck. When he came home from the docks and fell down somewhere by the way, all the children in the street would rush to get there, because Mrs Figaro put on a show of weeping and wailing such as none of us had ever heard.
She was eloquent in her tears, to our delight actually lying across the prostrate body, crying, pleading, praying, beating him with her small olive fists, letting her long black hair fall across his uncaring back. Then she would offer us a halfpenny each if we would help her to get him to the house and Mr Llewellyn would be borne down the street to number twelve by twenty triumphant children, the weeping wife holding his unconscious head as though fearful it might topple off. Other children ran alongside screaming and hooting as he was taken home.
These were the men who stayed in the houses in the street. The others, who went to sea, came home infrequently but, usually, with equal spectacle. There was a ship's cook at the end of the terrace who would break nearly all the windows in his house, and some of those next door, to announce to his family and neighbours that he was safe home again. He spent all his leaves putting glass back in the windows. Mr Evans, across the road, used to play his accordion on his doorstep when he arrived in the middle of the night, and Mr Finnegan, an Irishman, would shin up the street lamp outside his wife's bedroom and try to look through the window, attempting to catch her with somebody else. Everybody knew he did this. My mother would say casually to my father: 'Mr Finnegan's home, Phil. I can see him up the lamp trying to look through Amy's window.'
There was the odd tragedy. Mr Owen, a donkeyman and a rare considerate husband for those parts, returned one night during the war and, not wishing to wake his family, stepped into the air raid shelter to sleep, not knowing that during his voyage the shelter had filled with water. The poor donkeyman was found floating and drowned the next day.
'You're not going to sea, Arthur,' my mother said when we had the news of this mishap. 'It's too perilous.' The fact that Mr Owen had survived mines and submarines in the Atlantic only to be drowned outside his own back door did not occur to her. She always said I must not go to sea. She did not even like me going to the docks to see the ships, or cycling down to the lighthouse to look at the immense Channel. 'The salt will give you catarrh, Arthur,' she told me. ‘Your father's got catarrh from too much salt and the sea is so wet.' She would gaze at me with embarrassing concern, rock her head and mutter: 'Don't ever go foreign, boy. It's no good to anybody going to those parts.'
Not that I had felt any urge to go to sea. As a boy I liked to watch it from the anchorage of dry land, and I would go with the others in the street to see the ships, like helpless babies being led from the port to the open channel by the Newport tugs.
'If you want to travel, ‘she would suggest as a compromise, 'join the Company.' The Company was Great Western Railway. That's how she used to think, poor cow. But I suppose waiting for Phil McCann to come home year after year must have taken its toll. Besides which my sister Audrey, who had been confirmed in Christ and was a Sunday School teacher, had joined the Women's Air Force and when she came home on her first leave screamed dramatically from the top of our stairs: 'Where's my arse-holing toothbrush?' My mother had to cling to something.
Sometimes I used to think it must be Clemmie, Clementine, whom my father had failed to furgle. She was jolly and laughing and she used to snap the men's braces and put her hands in their trouser pockets, but she used to blush sometimes too, when someone made some untoward remark about God, or someone similar, and this made me think that beneath it all she was basically very good. Floss was going quietly but surely to fat; Ramona going at about the same pace and equal certainty to madness. Peggy went white and silent when my father appeared in a room and Nardine became flushed and chatty. Daisy always kissed him twice. The husbands all thought they knew who was the odd aunt out, their own wife, but each one, in his heart, doubted his judgement. Uncle Cess tried many times to get my father drunk, so he would tell him, but it was always my father who carried the sodden Cess home to his wife,
returning at an early hour of the morning. I always thought that apart from my father and the particular aunt, my mother was the only one with the answer. And, for their separate reasons, none of them ever told.
It was Uncle Lewis who finally did for him. But for Uncle Lewis it was finally. His deathbed was in the Cardiff Marine Hospital, because he was one of the original Cape Homers and he was allowed to die in there. There was the customary phalanx of family around his pillows, sniffing, scraping their feet and looking at their watches as though there were a sweepstake on the time he would depart. His wife, Floss, was mumbling her grief into her scarf. Then my father burst in, new suit, trilby hat, smile; the harbour breeze still on his face.
Bouncing up to the candle-faced man in the bed he roared tactlessly: 'Anything you'll be wanting then, Lewis?'
'A decent burial,' stumbled my uncle, evoking a lost howl from Floss. 'And to shake your hand, Phil, that's all. I've been waiting for you, brother.'
He had too. My father strode up like some smartie getting a prize, hand shooting out briskly at the fading Lewis, whose poor paw trembled from beneath the Cardiff Marine Hospital bed covers. And (God be thanked, at least, for this sweet memory) into the bastard's healthy palm the dying man triumphantly pressed a turd he had been secreting in his bed.
A full, felicitous, and final grin, speared my uncle's face for a moment before jealous death wiped it off. My father stood suddenly drained and dreadful, transfixed by that brown, cemented handclasp, as though the death had been passed on to him like some disease. Auntie Floss flung herself in furious weeping across the corpse's bony knees, gathering them to her like someone collecting sticks. Never the most practical of people, my mother tentatively offered Phil the use of a small blue-embroidered handkerchief into which she had been gently crying, making little nervous wiping hints with it as she proffered it. This typical idiocy ignited my father and he furiously pulled his fingers from the chocolate shake. Hideously he began to berate the grey and moribund shell of Lewis propped up on its final pillows. A doctor came along and, showing no surprise whatever at the situation, told my father to cut the shouting.
‘This is a dead man,' he said as though making a difficult diagnosis. 'He cannot answer back.'
'He's bloody well said enough!' hooted my father, holding that shitty dread hand out before him.
Three
In my, fifteenth year I became very frightened because I believed that Mr Winston Churchill, our popular prime minister, had personally sanctioned my execution and was dispatching a firing squad to Newport to carry out the deed. Today any lad of comparable age who thought he was imminently due for a similar end would be thought strange, if not entirely mad. But children are more difficult to fool now and in wartime at least three horrible things happened every day before breakfast. We heard about them on the radio. It was an odd and terrifying time and large and small disasters occurred everywhere. Bombs fell on the streets and ordinary people went out of their houses and never went back again. There were known to be spies everywhere (you were not allowed to tell anyone the time or lend them your bicycle) and the firing squads were busy shooting those who were apprehended. In any case it was my father who told me they were coming to execute me and if a boy cannot believe his father, who is there to believe?
'Sabotaging one of His Majesty's balloons!' he howled, after the police had been around to tell him what had happened. 'Leaving this town wide open to German air attack. Hitler must be pleased with you.' The next day he told me that Mr Churchill had written a nice letter to him at the docks (so my mother would not know) and had regretfully said that I had to be done away with. He said I ought to stay in my room and pray as much as possible and that I should on no account tell anybody that I was to be executed because it would only give the family a bad name. This, coming on top of the discovery that I was wearing my sister's knickers at school was almost more than my sanity could stand.
The saddest thought was that it was my own junior patriotism and my first clash with uncharted love and sex that brought on the tragedy. The barrage balloon, which arrived in Newport Park just after the war began, floated for days like a happy watchful elephant, silver above our dusty street, quite often above our very roof, in the prevailing South Wales wind. In my boyish way I came to be very fond of it (something I tried eventually, but in vain, to put forward in mitigation to the police and to my father) for it seemed to be the most peaceful and jolly weapon of war ever devised. When the sun shone it always had a smile on its fat face. We had a whole herd of them flying above the town, our silver guardians against the German bombers, keeping those devils so high they couldn't actually see where they were dropping their high explosive. Once, at school, I wrote a kindly poem about it (called 'My Chubby Friend') which my teacher read aloud to the class in a nasty derisory way and had all the other children rupturing themselves laughing over it. I found it difficult to get understanding anywhere.
But I found understanding in the park, at the barrage balloon site. The balloon looked big, calm and benevolent and tending it must have been the most agreeable way of fighting a war against Oppression. The young airmen in the unit looked after their silver bundle, blowing it up like children, letting it down, flying it, mooring it, generally tending to its wants; they kept the winch to which it was tethered in good order, painted their huts and latrines and planted geraniums and strawberries in their garden. They played tennis on the municipal courts in the park, and sometimes went on the swings in the playground with some of the older schoolgirls of the locality.
One day I saw some of the airmen, and the airwomen who were conveniently billeted alongside them, swimming in the black River Ebbw, shouting and laughing in the water under the coal-rooted trees. I was sitting openly on the bank, watching them, when one of the larky men pulled down the front of a young airwoman's bathing costume. In a blinding moment I saw the forbidden puddings, exposed, huge, luscious. (My father had said that if a boy under eighteen saw a naked woman he would turn to stone, and although I didn't believe him, I thought just then that this was happening).
The airwoman had huge ripe things. Memory may have inflated them over the years, but I don't think I have, even now, ever seen bigger. She shrieked a laugh and in an impromptu moment grabbed two handfuls of muddy Ebbw coal-dust from the bank and slapped them to her exposed front. It was my first erotic experience. Thinking about it that night (and many nights after) I wondered that she had not simply pulled up the front of her swimming costume again. Then I knew nothing about the strange perversity of women. But she was certainly big. So was Rose, for that matter, and the other girls there too. I think it might have been because they were specially chosen to help with pulling down the balloon in difficult windy weather.
In the evenings I was often in the park, by the thick inky river, watching the barrage balloon lying puffed out on the grass or floating happily miles up in the vacant late sky. It occurred to me that if the war went on long enough for me to become involved I would ask to go into the barrage balloon service, for what I saw I liked.
Sailors from our street kept on being drowned and the war in the municipal park seemed an attractive alternative, what with the swimming and one thing and another.
But patriotic I was. Wearing my scout uniform and with my stout scout pole in a military position I would stand, unrequested, for hours guarding our local doctor's car. People stared at me from buses and bikes, but I put on a stern face indicating that I alone knew the national importance of my duty. But one evening I heard the doctor's wife shout clearly from the house: ‘Glynn! There's that mentally defective boy standing by your car again.'
This discouraged me somewhat from the self-imposed duty and I therefore transferred my decent enthusiasm to the park and the barrage balloon unit, and every evening I would run, walk and eventually stagger on innumerable half-mile journeys to the fish and chip shop on behalf of the balloon men and women. To do this I had to run the gauntlet of an army smoke-screen platoon which used to park i
ts trucks along the main road with the duty of belching oily clouds over the town and the docks, thus further confusing the German bombers, already bemused by the barrage balloons.
It was, as can be imagined, a nasty, greasy job, manning the smoke screen trucks and I suppose they had selected a certain rough type of person to do it. Which is why I had to run the gauntlet with the fish and chips, for the smoke screen men would grab at my scout's shorts, pinch me and pull at my lanyard and my woggle, and try to steal the airmen's supper.
I was always terrified of that frantic run I was forced to make, but it had to be done for there was only the most circuitous of detours which would have rendered the fish and chips cold by the time I reached the park. So I had to brave it, head down, heart beating ribs, thin legs going like a frightened flamingo. The smoky men always made some sort of attack. It was usually less savage when they were attending to the burners which sent out the foul fumes, so I tried to time my run when they were thus occupied. Sometimes I got through with little hurt or annoyance and my cargo intact, but at others I was near to tears, clutching the almost empty wrapping of the South Wales Argus and, like as not, half a piece of hot cod fillet stuffed with boorish malevolence down my young trousers.
My scout shirt and neckerchief became so thick with grease that I was ashamed to show them to my mother and I was admonished at the scout meetings as the grubbiest boy in the troop. I told no one of my evening errands but, after the more desperate runs I would sit panting, and imagine with deadly satisfaction that I would one day be found expired in that spot of a junior heart attack, and that then the whole story would come out. It would be in the Argus and my father would tell everyone that I was a good boy after all.
The barrage balloon crew were occasionally grateful, sometimes less so, especially when their supper had been drastically mauled by the smoke men. I was thanked and rebuked in almost equal portions. For my trouble, they gave me a few pence which I put away, intending to make a major contribution to Newport's Buy-a-Bomber Week Fund.
