In My Wildest Dreams (11 page)

Eventually the old man's concerned countenance appeared. 'Dadda!' I called in an echoing whisper. The other faces remained looking up at me. 'Dadda, I can't find my winkle anywhere!'

My father said it was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him when sober, worse even than the occasion when a teaspoon, which I had quietly dropped down the back of his shirt, fell out of his trouser leg in the street.

When I was old enough to belong to the library a new world opened for me. I read my first 'William' book and went around for days wearing a bemused grin because I had discovered something wonderful. After that I read them all. I would go home clutching the book preciously, peeping into it on the bus or walking along the street. In the house I would wriggle deeply into the armchair and enjoy the luxury of beginning. I imagined myself with the urchin William, Henry, Douglas and Ginger, roaming an idyllic boys' countryside populated with tramps and hay ricks, with Jumble the dog and occasionally Violet Elizabeth Bott, who always threatened to be sick. Many years later, when I was a journalist, I went to see Richmal Crompton, who wrote the stories, a frail and dreamy old lady, who gave me a cup of tea and sent me away with copies of her books for my own children. Whether they read them I don't know. Times had moved. Perhaps the enchantment had grown cold.

One day my mother brought a pile of Sexton Blake detective magazines back from the house where she worked as a cleaner. She had been engrossed in one of them as she came home over the sloping fields and had tripped, hurting her leg. She limped the rest of the way, still reading. I was supposed to be deep in extra studies for the entrance examination for Belle Vue Central School. But the lure of Sexton Blake proved irresistible and I spent a furtive evening immediately before the exam reading the adventures, my homework put aside. When, pessimistically, I opened the English examination paper the next morning the first sentence I saw was: 'Write a Detective Story'. Never having heard of plagiarism, I invented my own detective and lent to him an abbreviated form of the mystery which I had read the previous evening. I passed the examination and started at the Belle Vue School in the following September.

My new status delighted my mother for I had to wear a
cap.
And I was going to learn
French}.
'There's posh!' she enthused. 'Now there's something to tell.' She did. Every neighbour and anyone else who was unguarded enough to let her begin. When they first took her off to hospital she told the ambulance men all about it.

Because of the war the original Belle Vue had become a lire station and its pupils and staff moved to join another school on Stow Hill close by where I was, according to legend, born. The work was difficult and the staff heavy-handed. Anyone who was late was automatically caned. Standing in a long line of outstretched hands was an almost daily experience for me after my mother became ill, because I used to get up, make her a cup of tea, get Roy's breakfast and my own, light the fire and then miss the bus.

French I enjoyed, partly because of the plump, perfumed lady who taught it. She wore brown suits, vividly tight around the bum, and had a handsome, wobbling bosom, encased in silk and smelling like heaven. I was so besotted with her that on one occasion I failed to close my eyes when reciting a verb, and my glazed devotion was rewarded by a bang around the ear from a hand like a piece of wood.

My entanglement with the language has remained primitive. For six seaside summers in the nineteen-seventies we lived as a family at Barcares, near Perpignan in south-western France. My exotic French was accepted by the Catalan people of that corner, whose version of the language, fortunately, differs considerably from the rest of France. Some of them thought I was from Britanny.

In that region was a Frenchman called Glovis whose use of my native language was as battered as mine of his. Some evenings beside the harbour we would drink a pastis or so and, when the time was ripe, he would invariably reveal that he was a leader of the Resistance during the war. After a third or fourth pastis I was content to sit back in the warm dusk and listen to his oft-repeated exploits. The Resistance members, he said, still kept in touch and helped each other in all manner of ways.

I was taking my children on the night-sleeper to Paris from Narbonne and I mentioned this to Clovis. He puffed his cheeks out over the cloudy liquid in his glass. 'If you 'ave trouble,' he said. 'Etienne is the master of the station. Etienne was a member of Group X. The Resistance, you know.' We raised a glass to Etienne, Group X and the Resistance. Glovis looked over one shoulder and then the other in that deeply furtive way only Frenchmen can achieve. 'I will tell you, because you are my friend,' he whispered. We had another pastis and he told me. 'If there is trouble, you go to Etienne and you say – The moon is high tonight.'

I was aware of my eyebrows rising. But pastis is a wonderful aid to belief. 'The moon is high,' I repeated also looking over both shoulders.

'La lune est haute,'
he recited and I whispered it several times.

'Etienne will reply – The sea is quiet,' promised Clovis.

I swallowed. 'The sea is quiet.'

'La mer est calme.'

'La mer est calme.'
We raised our glasses.

On the following evening I took the children to Narbonne. The car was being temperamental and we were further delayed by a small landslide en route, so we were late arriving at the station. To my dismay I saw that the entire station car park had been dug up and there was a dormant yellow bulldozer poised ready to take a further bite the following morning. I had to park at once or we would miss the train. The minutes were going by. I was very agitated. A man with a peaked cap strolled from the station. Etienne! Yes, monsieur, he said, he was indeed Etienne.

'La lune est haute,'
I suggested timidly.

He stared and looked over each shoulder.
'La mer est calme,'
he replied. 'Group X?'

'Clovis,' I nodded.

'Bon, bon.
What can I do for you, mon ami?'

In a moment the car was parked in his private layby, the train was delayed long enough for us to climb comfortably aboard and find our sleepers. Etienne saluted from the platform as we chuffed away. Long live the Resistance!

Newport, however, was a long way in distance and in time from Narbonne. Roy and I had to eat ignominious free school dinners while others paid fivepence for theirs. Then a doctor decided that I was too thin and needed more fresh air. I was therefore, a further indignity, sent to the Open Air School in Tredegar Park, where lessons were informal and in the afternoon the pupils lay on camp beds in the sunshine alongside the sooty River Ebbw. The soldiers had all gone (in fact they had been to France and returned home defeated) and were replaced by a jovial barrage balloon tended by some air force men and women who seemed to live a life of private domesticity in the park. They were always laughing and having cups of tea, their balloon either tethered to the ground like some giant pet or on duty up in the sky. When I lay on my camp bed in the afternoons I could watch the silver balloon floating far up in the Welsh firmament.

In the summer of 1940, when every man was needed in the defence of his country, there was still unemployment and men were hanging around outside pubs and lined up in the library reading room. But as the demand for munitions was harnessed, so jobs became more available and Dolly Thomas found herself in the blue overalls and jaunty cap of a Royal Ordnance Factory.

This was the last happy time of her life. Through the years she had attempted all sorts of employment in a brave effort to supplement a sparse and uncertain income. She had polished people's homes and she had cleaned the local school at Maesglas. Roy and I would stay behind after lessons and help her put the chairs on top of the desks in the classrooms. We had unauthorised peeps into the staff room and into the headmaster's office. Roy wanted to hide his cane but I said that he would soon realise who had done it. We persuaded our classmates to put their chairs on the desks before leaving, until a malicious teacher vetoed the idea by saying that it was the charwoman's job to do that.

After cleaning the school from end to end during one holiday, our mother tottered home exhausted and coated with chalk dust. She dropped into a chair and announced that she was finished. From now on she would make toffee apples.

This seemed to us a brilliant idea. The ingredients were bought (it must have been in the days before sugar rationing) and our back kitchen was piled with green apples and redolent with sticky odours.

At first it seemed as if the venture would be blessed with success. Saucepans wobbled on the gas cooker and the boiler (which she also used for washing the clothes) steamed energetically, the toffee jelled and Roy and I helped by splitting up bits of wood and using them as sticks for the toffee apples. Children congregated at the back door clutching their pennies. It was our part of the operation which scuppered it. Some child complained of a mouthful of splinters and then a man with a stern sort of cap and an official black book appeared and told my mother she mustn't do it. She had broken more regulations than Hitler.

Downcast she dowsed the gas and the boiler and let the last consignment of toffee apples go free. The remainder we ate. With a thin sigh, Mum sat down but she was not defeated for long. She went back to cleaning the school until the Christmas holidays and then she became a postman.

Throughout her life I doubt if she ever weighed more than seven and a half stone, but the festive season saw her humping a bulging brown bag of letters and parcels along our street. It was fortunate that she had contrived to get herself consigned to home territory for the neighbours gave her cups of tea and she was able to dash into our house to give us a quick meal between deliveries. On Christmas Day as she walked her round she was given a drink at almost every house. Before she was halfway up Maesglas Avenue, she was staggering about on her spindly legs giving away letters and parcels indiscriminately. Neighbours were going up and down the street exchanging misdirected mail in the most friendly and seasonal manner. Dolly Thomas came home, cooked the Christmas chicken with the giblets still inside and then fell asleep in the armchair.

She tried taking lodgers. A small bald man and a large flowery woman arrived and Roy and I were put on our best behaviour. At the end of the week they left and I cried because I thought we had let the side down. It turned out that they were not married and had only come for a dirty holiday anyway. My mother was quite glad to have her bed back.

In the following spring came the job at the munitions factory. She was only sweeping up the metal filings but the money was more than she had ever dreamed of earning. She worked seven days a week, finishing at four on Sundays, sometimes transferring to night shift. (We were lodged with a family down the road who had a monkey-puzzle tree in their front garden. They also had a pretty daughter of my own age and each night we used to go and get chips from Shepherd's shop. One evening, after we had finished eating them from the paper she kissed me with lips perfumed by vinegar.)

Perhaps needless to say, within a week of employment at the Ordnance Factory my mother was telling everybody how to run it. Half those shells, she averred, would never fit a gun, half those guns would never find a shell to fit them. She had her photograph taken with a jaunty crew of fellow munitions ladies and she brought home a handsome poker for our fire which had been made in somebody's spare time from appar-ently surplus war material. She wore blue dungarees and had a badge in her beret showing a cannon and cannon balls. She also fell in love.

Love, I suppose it was. Her last time.

It was a Sunday, her early day, in summer and I had gone to the bottom of the street in the afternoon to meet her from the bus. The bus arrived but she did not. Then a car pulled up and out she got. My mother riding in a
car
! I was thrilled and flabbergasted. I could not see who was driving but she told me it was a gentleman friend from the factory and I was not to mention a word about him because he was on secret war work.

This man, as later revealed, was about fifty, tall and powerful in a flabby sort of way and given to wearing hairy sports jackets with matching caps. His face was rubbery and he had blue eyes in a florid skin. His name was Jim and we did not like each other. I thought he had wicked eyes and he thought I was a nuisance.

He was, however, my mother's last chance and he
did
have a car. Where he obtained the petrol – then rationed – I could not imagine, unless it was on account of his secret work. We had never known anyone with a car before. Sometimes he could not avoid taking Roy and me along with them and once we maliciously persuaded him to drive us down the Lighthouse Road, a restricted military area during those days of threatened invasion. There were barbed wire and red warnings everywhere but we persuaded our mother, and him through her, that we knew lots of people who had gone down the road with impunity. He pressed on grumpily until we were caught in an area of tank traps and wire entanglements that barred further progress. Nor could he turn the car around. A threatening-looking soldier appeared and we were enthralled when he pushed a tommy gun through the window, right at Jim's throat. 'Where d'you think you're going?' enquired the soldier.

'The lighthouse,' muttered Jim while we squirmed with pleasure. Our mother told us to keep quiet and still.

'Didn't you see the notices?' demanded the sentry. 'They're plain-a-bloody-nough.'

'Yes,' mumbled Jim. 'But I . . . I . . . heard it would be all right.' He turned his frozen blue eyes on me.

'Another twenty yards and you would have been in a minefield,' said the soldier. 'You'd better back up, mister.' He looked at the car and us inside it. 'I'd like to know where you get the petrol anyway,' he said. 'There's supposed to be a war on, you know.'

Jim had gone even plummier than his normal shade. Fiercely he backed the car, sending it directly into a mesh of wire entanglements. With delight we heard the barbs scratching into the paintwork as he tried to get out. Then the wheels went into an anti-tank ditch and eventually a whole glut of cat-calling troops had to be mobilised to push us out. All the way to the bottom of our street Jim was grim and silent. For us it had been a really worthwhile outing.