In My Wildest Dreams (4 page)

Americans like to hear stories more than any other race apart from Arabs, and many years later I spoke about my Grandad during a New York television programme. I was wearing a watch chain across a grey waistcoat and the interviewer concluded, with no great prompting from me, that this was Grandad's. He plainly required me to elaborate, so, to my shame, I said: 'Yes, this was Papa's watch and chain.' I took the bright and bulbous thing from my pocket and dangled it. 'It arrived,' I related, 'in a package in the post with a note which said "I have always wanted you to have this. It was your grandfather's." There was no signature.' There was no truth either for I had made it up on the spur of the moment and, in fact, the watch was bought by my wife in an antique shop. But I was unable to resist telling them a yarn. They seemed very pleased and interested, too.

My Auntie Kate, who lived with my silver-haired Uncle Jack Roscoe in Barry (although they did not visit the beach – 'The Sands' – for twenty years or more) and with whom I spent holidays at the end of the war, cooked the Christmas pudding that was Papa's ultimate meal. He expired on the afternoon of Christmas Day, 1938, having retired to the red-velvet front room for a nap after lunch. He had been in the habit of going, rather daringly for him, to auctions held every Saturday night and once he came home with a nice wall clock. Auntie Kate alleged that, like the old song, the clock stopped at the very moment he died and never went again.

Auntie Kate was as thin as a vein, with red hair tight in a bun; her greatest achievement was catching flies in flight. She could catch them when she was staring absently out of the window, while she was gossiping, or while she was eating cake. It was remarkable. She had not missed a fly in forty years, or so she told me. She never did it, however, when people came to tea. That, she said, would be showing off. She had even caught flies when she was singing. For she was another Welsh singer. At her most exalted note she went into a locked gargle as if she were drowning. If she could not sleep she would get up and smash out midnight hymns on the piano, howling like a glutton. Neighbours feared these moments but lovely old Uncle Jack Roscoe would wake up and, lying back on the pillows, accompany her from bed. One night he heard a cat howling and after ascertaining that Auntie Kate was innocently snoring at his flank, he threw one of his working boots out of the window and never saw it again.

Of my father's relatives the only ones I knew during my early childhood before the war were this kindly pair. They looked after my grandmother until the old lady died still convinced that Grandad had been elected to Parliament, which was why he did not come home any more. They were simple and childless. 'Children makes you poor,' Kate used to recite a little regretfully. 'Don't go foreign,' was another of her proverbs, warning me against a life at sea. 'Go on the Company', the Company in question being the Great Western Railway. Sometimes she used to cry while laughing as she told me about my father's youth in Barry. How he had ridden the milkman's horse around a field one night so that it was too knackered to pull the milk cart the next morning; how he had once materialised at a roller-skating dance, scattering the participants by zig-zagging between them clad in a bonnet and shawl and with an appropriated perambulator containing a screeching baby. 'Oh, that Jim,' she used to say wistfully, wiping her eyes. 'That Jim Thomas.' And it was nearly half a century before.

These were the few things I gleaned about my father's boyhood because we were not what you would call a close family. I never met any of his other brothers or sisters apart from the youngest, Christopher, who appeared when I was in an orphanage and tried to get me out.

My mother had also fallen out with her family and never saw them although there was a shadowy episode once, just before the war, which was like a short story. She had taken my younger brother Roy and myself to Barry, but instead of going to the beach we went to some gardens overlooking the Bristol Channel. There sat an old man leaning on a stick, staring towards the ships on the flat sea. To our astonishment my mother crept up on this stranger from behind. We had the odd idea she might be going to rob him and we stood expectantly. Instead she curled her arms around his neck and kissed him thoroughly. 'It's me, Dad! Dolly!' she cried. 'Oh, it's you Dolly' he said calmly. 'Come back have you?' Roy and I were dispatched to the sands but she remained talking to the old man for a long time. When we finally walked away from the place she was quite wet-eyed. 'That,' she said having failed to introduce us, 'was
my
father.' She had not seen him for many years and, as far as I know, she never saw him again.

There were twelve offspring from her parents but, apart from her younger sister, Iris, whose husband was Bert, a soldier who eventually fell into the Newport dry dock, we knew none of them. Once, just after she had ambushed her father, she took us to a street in Barry where one of her sisters lived. She had not seen her since she was a girl. 'Hello, Doll,' said the sister flatly. 'What is it you want?' There was a short conversation, as unfathomable as it was uncomfortable, on the doorstep and we went away, again for ever.

If my mother's relatives remained anonymous then my father's brothers and sisters were familiar only from stories and photographs. There were pictures of Eisteddfod outings by the Barry Choir, each lady in black and wearing a flower, each gentleman throttled by a wide, white collar and topped by a proper hat. That was Auntie Her, that was Uncle Him; each one pointed out and possibly an anecdote related. There were also many pictures of dogs, including some taken over the years of Lady, my Uncle Jack's pet which was like a pig. Hugely obese and horribly pink, it was so engulfed in fat that when it descended to the floor from the sofa it rolled over like dough. Jack loved Lady – whom he inaccurately called his 'pup' – and on occasions took her down to the Institute where he played billiards. He never took Kate because he said that the only females allowed were bitches.

A family photograph that never failed to impress me was of my Uncle Leslie, after whom I was was named. He had been a sportsman, excelling in rugby and cricket (he married a Sussex cricketer's daughter but I don't remember her name and now there is no one to ask) and attained fame as a Welsh schoolboy international soccer goalkeeper. He had thought of turning professional with Cardiff City but instead joined the East African Police Force which my grandfather thought was safer. In the photograph he stands crossed-armed in goalkeeper's jersey at the apex of the Kenya International Team. Every other player is a black man. Leslie died in the late nineteen-thirties of peritonitis somewhere in the African bush. I once met a man on a ship who had known him out there but he could not remember much about him except that he had been good in goal.

There really
is
no one I know to ask, even if I wished to do so. These two large families totalling twenty-five children have vanished. No one ever told anyone anything. Nice old Uncle Jack, a silvery man and decent, spent his waning years working in the Cardiff office of his brother-in-law, Uncle Chris. We were not often in contact but one day I telephoned and during the general conversation asked how Jack was.

'Jack? . . . Oh, Jack, he's
gone.'
I was told.

'But it's only four o'clock,' I said. 'You let him go home early, I suppose.'

'No, not gone
home
. . .' A pause. 'Although I suppose you
could
put it like that.'

An unpleasant notion settled in me. 'Well, where
is
he gone?'

Just gone . . . you know, well actually he's dead.'

'Dead? Jesus Christ! When?'

'Oh, months ago now. Months . . . let me see, when did Jack die? We must have forgotten to tell you.'

This was not unique in our family. My elder brother Lindon died in hospital in Tokyo while I was staying in the hotel almost next door. I knew nothing about it until a year later when it was passingly mentioned in a rare family letter. My second brother's daughter was brutally murdered and I knew nothing of that either; not for years.

For a long time, I must confess, I have been party to this conspiracy of silent Thomases. I subscribe to it heartily and I truly hope the other unknown aunts, uncles, and what must be a multitude of children, and their children, continue to keep our family secret.

Only with my younger brother Roy have I retained any sort of relationship and contact. When he was nine and I was twelve our parents died within six months of each other and we were uprooted from our poor but secure home and put into the howling corridors of an orphanage. He unknowingly escaped by being lent to foster parents and I lost him for almost two years, having no idea where he had been sent. He had a habit of writing his initials. In the parish church at Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire you can still see the letters he carved in the woodwork while he was supposed to have been pumping the organ. Once, when we were in our early teens, living together again, and I felt responsible for him, I was standing on a railway station and saw his monogram outlined in the soot
underneath
the footbridge. When I upbraided him for this he protested: 'I had to hang by one hand to do that.'

He always wanted to be a sailor and he started by going up and down the Thames on an outings boat. He wrote and told me he was the mate, but it turned out there were only him and the captain aboard. Now he voyages on a different but equally concise course, an eternal circumference around Australia, where he has lived for more than twenty years. Last year I was in Sydney and we arranged to have a night out together. He telephoned my room from the hotel lobby and I told him to come to the fourth floor. The room was directly opposite the lift and seeking to amuse him, for I had not seen him for three years, I stood at the open door wearing a dressing gown and with a tin waste-paper basket over my head. I heard the lift door open and the exclamations of surprise as the passengers got out. My brother, who had paused to get some cigarettes, was not among them.

Quite recently the compiler of one of those odd but apparently fascinating books of lists included my name in a section uncompromisingly headed: 'Ten Famous British Bastards'. The selection was headed by William the Conqueror (who may have been a bastard but was scarcely British) and I was in excellent company throughout. The distinction was, however, undeserved (the researcher, I was told, had mixed up 'orphans' with 'bastards'!) for when I was born on March 22nd, 1931, my parents had been married almost twenty years and had two other sons, Lindon, who was eighteen, and Harold who was fifteen. My younger brother Roy was born two years and eleven months later and his bawling from the open front door of the little brick house in Milner Street provided me with my first graspable memory. I was trundling along the street on my coloured tricycle with a companion called Georgie who enquired about the screams. 'I've got a new baby brother,' I boasted.

'We're going to have a baby soon,' Georgie replied jealously. 'We might even have two.'

'You can't,' I asserted. 'The doctor hasn't got any left.' He looked discomfited and I sought to cheer him up with some sensational information. 'When I was in the doctor's house before I was born,' I confided. 'I looked out of the window and I saw the moon fall down.'

This early foray into fantasy was witnessed by Silvia, the daughter of our landlady, Mrs Jenkins. She returned from the past only a short while ago, a commodious Welsh lady who approached while I was engaged in the hazardous occupation of signing books in a Newport shop. Although I had not seen her since childhood I knew at once who she was. 'Oh Leslie,' she said, full of Welsh accusation and sentiment. 'Why didn't you come and see my mam before she died?'

Fumbling for an excuse, I was taken by surprise when she leaned across the table and embraced me powerfully. We lost our balance, clutched at each other as both we and the stacks of books began to topple. We ended amid the debris of everything I had ever written. We picked the books up together, kissed emotionally again, and I haven't seen her since.

Jinka, the name I gave to Mrs Jenkins, and her daughter, who I called Siv, had taken us in when we had nowhere else to go. Jinka was my godmother and it was in her house that I experienced my first whiff of eroticism when playing houses behind the sofa with a little plump girl who had come to look after me when my mother was out. We had a wonderfully emotive roll around in that warm tight space and I was only three.

In one corner of our room was a loudspeaker from Rediffusion, simply a square piece of plywood with a central panel, presumably an extension from the landlady's wireless set. It played a song called 'Looky, Looky, Looky, Here Comes Cooky', to which I could sing and dance. Sometimes I would stand and stare up at the piece of wood, daring it to play my song.

Jim and Dolly Thomas had gone to live in Newport in the years after the First World War. My father had served in the Royal Artillery and received several wounds, one of them when his own gun carriage ran over his foot. Nobody realised why he was making such a fuss, or perhaps there was a noisy barrage from the German lines, but it was some time before they realised what had happened and backed the horses up to release his toes. The battery was due to move its position in the line and my limping parent was left in charge of a horse which had a like impediment. Off went the other men, horses, and guns into the Flanders dust, leaving Gunner Thomas trudging a great way to the rear. He and the horse limped along together, a picture I can imagine fondly, until eventually they came upon a Frenchman leaning on a gate. My father paused to pass the time of day and the Frenchman admired the horse. He was of the opinion that it might yet recover sufficiently to be useful as transport. Otherwise it would be useful on a plate. A simple bargain was struck and my father continued limping on alone until, at evening, he reached the place where his battery was encamped. 'Where's that horse, Thomas?' demanded the sergeant.

'Gone, sarge, gone for ever,' answered Gunner Thomas. 'I thought you said he was lame?'