Senor Nice: Straight Life From Wales to South America

by Howard Marks

  ‘Henry Morgan.’

  This was encouraging. ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Who was he then?’

  ‘He was a no-good criminal that lived there ages ago. They killed him and put his body in the cells under the hall. But people kept hearing his screams, so they chopped his body into little pieces and hid the bits in different parts of the walls. But he still haunts the place and sometimes rides his horse at midnight across the rugby field next door. I’ve seen him lots of times.’

  ‘Thanks for your help.’

  We drove another hundred yards down Ball Road. Next to a rugby pitch was a magnificent old pub. A sign showed it was the headquarters of Llanrhumney Rugby Club. We parked and walked into a huge cold bar called Morgan’s Room. A new pool table dominated, while an old minstrels’ gallery served as a lounge bar. Next to the minstrels’ gallery was a skittle alley. A barman covered with tattoos came over to serve us.

  ‘A pint of best bitter, please, and what do you want, Marty?’

  ‘A cup of tea, please.’

  ‘We don’t do tea or coffee here.’

  ‘A Diet Coke then, please, or some other diet fizzy drink.’

  ‘We don’t have any of that either.’

  ‘Pineapple juice?’

  ‘Nor that. You want something non-alcoholic do you?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Well there’s not much call for that round here. I can get you a small bottle of tomato juice, if you like, but I don’t think it’s fizzy.’

  ‘That will do. Do you have anything to eat?’

  ‘Plain or cheese and onion?’

  Grabbing our crisps and drinks, we sat on stools at the bar. There were two other customers, who glared at us continually. Braving the hostility, I asked the barman, ‘Was Henry Morgan the pirate born here?’

  ‘No idea; I’ve only been here a few years. But some odd people like you do come here looking for him; and I know the previous landlord used to sell Captain Morgan rum.’

  We took a walk outside and found a curiously wrought stone which had apparently been uncovered during recent building work. Sculptures of exotic foliage, resembling both marijuana and banana leaves, adorned the surface. We spent a few minutes arguing about which plant’s leaves the carvings actually depicted but agreed the leaves were definitely tropical and had probably been brought from the Caribbean by Henry Morgan.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, Marty. I don’t want to keep Bernie waiting longer any than necessary. It will be dark soon.’

  Henry Morgan, son of a scullery maid and a gentleman farmer, was born in 1635 at Llanrhymney Hall. He spent most of his childhood on a farm in Princetown, a small village lying between Merthyr Tydfil and Tredegar, and later moved to his family’s estate in Pencarn. An energetic and ambitious young man, Henry embraced pleasure and detested any claims to the moral high ground, especially those made by bigoted Puritans or the Roman Catholic Church. Seeking adventure, fame and fortune, he went to Bristol and spent his time there gambling, brawling and getting into trouble. Sailors were scarce, and if there weren’t enough volunteers, the press gangs went to work. There was also great demand for British labour in the plantations of the colonies, much of which was satisfied by indentured servants. Most of these were offenders sentenced to penal servitude overseas, but some were tricked into indentured service by the promise of retirement in a tropical paradise. Whether as an indentured servant or the victim of a press gang, records show that on 3 May 1655 Henry boarded a ship bound for the West Indies.

  The road from Tredegar House to Cwmaman wound through valleys that during my childhood had throbbed with coal mines, rain-drenched rugby games, male voice choirs, chapels and pubs. There was little left to remind me of those days – just the rain. Following Bernie’s instructions, we arrived at the Falcon, which resembled a Swiss ski lodge with its views of mountains, cascading waterfalls and a furiously flowing river. All that was missing was the snow.

  ‘All right, butt?’ Bernie, a gentle mountain of a man covered with tattoos, climbed off his Harley Davidson.

  ‘Fine thanks, Bernie. You?’

  ‘Excellent, butt. Excellent.’

  ‘It’s good to see you, Bernie. This is a nice spot.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it. Is it all right if you stay here tonight? I would put you up in my place, but I’ve got Dave Courtney, Charlie Breaker and that lot coming down sometime tonight or tomorrow morning. I’d better keep them under wraps in my place. Don’t want to frighten the locals too much, do we?

  ‘No problem, Bernie. Do the rooms have phones? I’ve no signal on my mobile.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s not really a hotel; it’s the Falcon, like. But you can get a signal just up the hill.’

  Marty and I checked into the Falcon. In the crowded bar Bernie and I discussed terms for doing the show. A date was set. I brought up the subject of Henry Morgan.

  ‘Is Tredegar House heavily guarded?’

  ‘I don’t know, Bernie. It didn’t appear to be. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, I’m sure that a lot of people, like you, would rather see a bit more respect given to the old boy’s picture. I think it would look great in the Valley Commandos’ headquarters, for example. There’s no shortage of pirate lovers there.’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Bernie?’

  ‘Nothing at all, butt. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Do you know Blackwood, Bernie?’

  ‘Well, aye, of course I do. It’s just over the hill.’

  ‘Do you know anyone from there?’

  ‘Loads. There’s one for a start. Old Emrys in the corner there. He’s a Blackwood boy, bred and buttered. Come and join us, Emrys.’ He brought his pint to our table.

  ‘What do you know about Henry Morgan, Emrys?’

  ‘Only that his family home is in Blackwood. The house used to be a farm called Plas Newydd. A few years ago it changed into a pub. It’s called the Monkey Tree now. They do a nice Sunday lunch there, I’m told.’

  ‘Was Henry Morgan born there?’

  ‘I haven’t heard that, no. But they say he brought the monkey tree there from Jamaica or somewhere. It’s still right in front of the pub. Huge, it is. Amazing how long trees live, isn’t it? They also say that Mary Morgan’s ghost still haunts the place. Quite a few of the boys from Blackwood have seen her.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘You’ve got me there. I think his sister, was it? I’m not sure. Bernie, any chance you can buy me a pint? I’ll pay you back tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a pint, Emrys,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. You won’t have to pay me back.’

  The next morning Marty and I drove back to Cardiff, where we had arranged to pick up Leroy, who was busy in the City Arms trying to find his long-lost family. ‘Shit, mon. Everybody a say no Tiger Bay no dyah agen.’

  The Welsh shipping boom began in my grandfather’s day in the 1880s as a result of the worldwide demand for Welsh anthracite coal, the best fuel for the ships, factories and railways of the new steam revolution. Cardiff, gateway to the South Wales valleys thick with coalfields and iron mills, was the hub of this maritime expansion. The city briefly became the greatest shipping centre in the world and the site of its only coal exchange, where international prices were fixed by a coal cartel. During the first quarter of the twentieth century people from all over the world were drawn to Cardiff by the work available but the sailors remained chiefly Welsh. The area straddling the docks that housed the seamen between voyages was known as Tiger Bay, the first multiracial community in Britain. Most immigrants were Chinese or Jamaican. As a child, I remember exploring the streets of Tiger Bay, eating my first ever Chinese meal at a restaurant named Dai Hong, and gazing transfixed at groups of Jamaicans playing craps in the street, New Orleans style. Now the streets of houses had been knocked down and replaced with glass and chrome monstrosities peppered with the usual inner-city paraphernalia of shopping malls and expensive coffee bars. The old docks had been converted into marinas of middle-clas
s doll’s houses. No wonder Leroy couldn’t find his family.

  ‘They’re probably around somewhere,’ I said, trying to lift Leroy’s mood, ‘in the suburbs or in little towns up the valleys.’

  ‘Aright. Mi wi come down de agen. Now mi afi go back a London. Mi afi work a night move club tonight as security.’

  Marty and I went for a stroll around what was now called Cardiff Bay. Nothing was the same. Even nostalgia refused to return.

  During the late 1920s, my father, at the age of sixteen, joined the Reardon Smith Line as an apprentice. It was the largest and longest-lasting of Cardiff’s great shipping lines, founded by Irishman Sir William Reardon (O’Riordean) Smith. Within ten years, my father had become the Merchant Navy’s youngest captain, and during the Second World War he served as a fleet commodore. I was born the day the war finished, but because of his continuing commitments overseas, I did not see my father until I was two years old. As a reward for his distinguished service, he was allowed to take my mother and me on his subsequent voyages.

  My first memories of foreign places were of travelling through first the Suez and then the Panama canals. I was three years old, and my father had been appointed captain of the SS Bradburn, a merchant vessel circumnavigating the planet, picking up and discharging cargo wherever it could. I have often wondered why the two canals seared themselves on my memory cells while the other wonders of the world, such as Mount Fuji, the Rock of Gibraltar, ranges of floating icebergs and smoking volcanoes, just passed me by. I think it was due to being in a large vessel moving at what appeared to be a fast speed just inches away from the land.

  The idea of linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas was first mooted during the time of the pharaohs, who ordered the digging of a canal through the eastern branch of the Nile Delta. Preventing the canal filling with sand proved to be too difficult. Later the Greeks, followed by the Romans, re-excavated it several times but each time it fell into neglect. The canal was again cleared after the Arab conquest of Egypt. Work continued for scores of years but eventually the canal was again abandoned to the sand. During the mid-nineteenth century the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps signed a contract with the Egyptian government to dig a new canal via Suez. France was then at the height of its power, churning out the world’s best engineers, architects and scientists. The canal took just over ten years to construct.

  Measuring just over a hundred miles, it is easily the longest canal in the world without locks, has several passing bays, and can be widened and deepened when necessary. Apart from the sensation of the ship’s apparently rapid progress, my only memories of the journey through the canal are of gazing at a boring flat sandy landscape and being annoyed with my mother for insisting I wear a vest in the stifling heat.

  My recollections of the Panama Canal are far more stimulating. I remember big noisy cranes and derricks, colourful, lush and lively landscapes and cascades of water pouring in and out of enormous locks. Why does it need locks? Like the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal links sea level to sea level. While striving to work out the puzzle of these locks, as well as come to terms with the ever-increasing links in my mind between Wales and the Americas, the fated coincidence happened.

  ‘Could I speak to Howard Marks, please?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘It’s Jeanette Hyde here, Howard, from the Observer travel section. We would like to send you on a trip again.’ I’d done a few gigs for the Observer and they were always welcome.

  ‘Excellent. Where did you have in mind?’

  ‘Somewhere in South America – Brazil, Panama or Argentina. Take your pick.’

  This was wonderful. Here was the opportunity to follow up my current obsessions with Latin American connections and Welsh rogues. I could research my ancestry as well as recapture my childhood. Brazil was tempting, but a visit there could wait a while; it had been Portuguese and, as far as I knew then, had no strong connections with Wales. Choosing between Panama and Argentina was tricky. I wanted to go to both immediately. It was a toss-up.

  ‘OK, I’ll go to Panama.’

  Within a week I received my itinerary, and my heart fell. I called Jeanette. ‘Jeanette, there’s no way I can do this trip. I have to change planes at Miami.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘If I ever set foot in America, I’ll be banged up forever.’

  ‘Really! I thought you had served your sentence.’

  ‘Yes, I have, but I’m classified as an aggravated felon, which means I must never enter America, even to change planes. If I do, I am committing an imprisonable offence. Besides, despite having been deported, I am still on parole. Although the US authorities can’t enforce parole conditions outside their territory, if I turn up there and they find out I have taken drugs or associated with criminals since my release, I will have to serve the rest of my prison sentence, eighteen and a half years.’

  ‘I see. I’ll find an alternative route. It’s difficult because there are no direct flights to Panama from Europe. You might have to change in a South or Central American country or the Caribbean.’

  ‘No worries, Jeanette. I can live with that.’

  A return ticket arrived in the post. I was changing planes in Jamaica. Fantastic! It was only an overnight stop each way, but it would be long enough to get a taste of rum, an earful of reggae and a lungful of reefer. And it was Henry Morgan’s favourite place in the world.

  I called Leroy to give him my good news. ‘Hey, Leroy, it looks like I’m going to Jamaica next week.’

  ‘Yo na go widout mi, mon. Da place wi eat yo alive.’

  ‘I’m only transiting there, Leroy, on the way to and from Panama.’

  ‘Shit! Hail up Manuel fi mi.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Noriega, mon. Yo nu remember im ina Yankee prison?’

  I had indeed forgotten the last Panamanian I had met was General Noriega. We were companion inmates of Miami Metropolitan Correctional Center, and our 3.30 a.m. rude awakenings by US marshals to shackle and take us to court sometimes coincided. Trained by former CIA chief George Bush (the old one), Noriega had switched loyalties and begun selling arms to Cuba and trafficking drugs with Colombian cartels. For the first time, the United States adopted the now familiar policy of invading an entire country to capture one opponent. Just months before I met Noriega, the USA had killed thousands of Panamanian nationals and dumped them in mass graves, burned residential neighbourhoods, crushed families in their cars with tanks, and left tens of thousands impoverished and homeless. As a result, Manuel Noriega became the first leader of a country to declare war on the United States since the Second World War.

  I was looking forward to my first transatlantic flight since being deported from America, my first visit to Jamaica and my first visit to Panama for over fifty years. I had recently rented myself a bedsit in London’s Shepherd’s Bush in an attempt to have a life separate from my failing marriage and to lessen the impact of its perpetual emotional and financial haemorrhages. Bedsits are the homes I like best and the rooms, including prison cells, in which I have written most. My books, my sounds, my decks, my drugs and the kettle were close, begging to be used twenty-four hours a day.

  I carefully packed, wondered whether I should hide a small piece of Nepalese hashish, decided against it, and scrupulously checked the suitcase to remove all evidence of my habit: no cigarette papers, no clothes with joint burns and no ripped-up pieces of cardboard from which roaches had been fashioned. I threw in a few guidebooks to Central America and the Caribbean, a toilet bag of creams to prevent me burning and itching, my laptop connections and peripherals, and a random selection of shorts, sandals and summer clothes. I locked the door, took the tube to Paddington, tried unsuccessfully again to smoke at the sushi bar, and caught a mid-afternoon Heathrow Express.

  I was eager to be off but my excitement swiftly evaporated when I read the notice in bold type on the airline ticket given to me at Terminal Three’s Jamaican Airlines check-in desk: ‘YOU CAN HELP. Report drug smuggli
ng to U.S. Customs 1-800-etc.’ Why, I wondered, should anyone flying non-stop direct from the United Kingdom to Jamaica be requested to consider, let alone blindly assist, enforcing another country’s disastrous prohibition policies? But at least the Jamaicans hadn’t bothered to reveal the full telephone number. They probably knew that a few dozen goats were more effective and cheaper than US Air Force helicopters in discovering marijuana plantations.

  At the security gates passengers were asked to hand in their cigarette lighters. Whether they were considered capable of being used as weapons or whether the airline simply wished to ensure that no one infringed the strict no-smoking rule was not made clear. Every seat was occupied and I was next to a couple of Jamaican children. One of them started playing a game on her mobile phone. A flight attendant asked her to turn it off, reducing her to tears. I wondered how human beings could even consider flying through space at 500 miles per hour in 500 tons of steel machinery which could be disabled by a mere text message.

  After twelve hours of sleep, nicotine deprivation and a pathetically small ration of red wine, we landed at Montego Bay. Immigration was friendly but slow. We waited several hours for officials to put meaningless stamps on scraps of paper. Their uniformed colleagues smoked and gazed blankly at the sea of surprisingly contented and patient faces. Everyone was delighted to be here. I was given a six-month visa. I was already beginning to regret I would be there for just one day.

  The Observer had booked me into a hotel on Treasure Beach, a two-hour drive away. The smiling, dreadlocked hotel driver picked me out immediately, bundled me into the back of the car, and drove like the clappers through the pitch-black Jamaican night.

  Swarms of vehicles zigzagged chaotically through laneless streets and alleyways. Laws, a highway code and other means of avoiding danger were entirely absent. ‘Drive on the left-hand side of the road’ obviously meant do so eventually, that is, make one’s way towards the left side. One-way street signs merely suggested that most vehicles should go in the same direction. Driving straight towards or into oncoming traffic was strongly encouraged. Unlit vehicles, arms gesturing randomly out of their windows, tore madly in any direction, emitting clouds of dense black fumes. Drivers changed lanes without slowing or looking, and scraped the road with capsizing bodywork, sending showers of sparks on to pavements crammed with sleeping, eating, TV-watching and trading communities, where the odd death or amputation was not a hindrance to business. People, donkeys and dogs reluctantly ambled off the road, avoiding injury at the last possible moment courtesy of screeching, corroded brakes.