In My Wildest Dreams (5 page)

'That horse
was
lame.'

'Sarge, there was a German shell landed a hundred and fifty yards away,' related my father sorrowfully. 'And off that horse went. It would have won the Derby.'

'It was a mare,' said the sergeant, loaded with suspicion.

'All right, then,' said the Old Man. 'The Oaks.'

He fought throughout that awful war, then in the Spanish Civil War – on the opposite side to my elder brother – and finally died in the bowels of a torpedoed ship in 1943. When he was in France in 1917 he received the worrying news that his wife had fled Wales and was in Birmingham with a man who played the cello in a picture palace. Father returned home on leave and, with my shocked grandparents, journeyed to the English city where they sat in the cinema watching the man scrape at his cello.

As a serving soldier my father was incensed that, quite apart from anything else, this person was not opposing the Germans in the trenches. His anger was as much martial as marital.

He strode from his seat and put his twin points of view to the cellist. Something of a fracas ensued which I like to think may have been complementary to some silent slapstick fisticuffs on the screen. The reason that the cellist was not on active service became apparent at once because he raised an artificial leg, which he had unstrapped during his work, and struck my father a felling blow on the temple. Gunner Thomas had travelled from the hell of the battlefield to be sorely wounded in the orchestra pit of a Birmingham cinema.

In any event he won back his wife because my mother's recollections of the war were predictably melodramatic. 'When your brother Hally was a tiny, tiny baby,' she recalled by the fireside one night. 'He was screaming his head off in the early hours of the morning. There was I, all alone, your dad away at the fighting, and I couldn't stand it any longer. I threw that baby down the bottom of the bed. Then I saw a vision, yes a
vision,
of Jim Thomas standing straight in his uniform at the foot of the bed, holding up his hand and saying to me: "Steady, Dolly, steady. Don't throw the baby about like that! I'll be coming home soon."'

Generally, however, it was my father who had the visions. They usually occurred shortly after closing time.

I have often wondered what those two people, my mother and my father, were really like. Physically, he was thin and I believe quite tall (it is difficult to remember people's heights from your childhood), a spare and sinewy man hardened by a life of shovelling coal into the boilers of ships pitching on the world's oceans. He had low eyebrows, little other hair, and a bit of a hook at the end of his nose, so that I recall him as looking quite fierce. He had a habit of talking out of the corner of his mouth as if passing on confidential information. His hands were like nuts and bolts and he had tattoos hidden among the hair of his forearms. When ashore he wore a trilby hat and a white silk scarf with which my mother several times tried to throttle him.

'You old soak!' she used to shout. For some reason, in my childish manner, I imagined that the scarf was called a 'soak' and I thought so for many years.

Dolly was tiny, with a bird's bright eyes. I have two photographs of her, one taken as a young woman with an elegant profile and a mass of lovely hair done like a cottage loaf; the other is with Roy and me and must have been taken only months before her death. Perhaps she knew it would be the final picture for she had expended the money to go to a photographer's studio in Newport. We two little boys are in our best suits, our mother wearing a flowered blouse stands between us. Her eyes gleam fiercely.

Do I remember them only as caricatures now, plucking from the past only the things they did and said that were noteworthy enough to remain in my boy's memory? Perhaps it is true that you only really get to know your parents when you have grown up and by that time mine were dead. Over the years I have met a good many people who knew my father, mostly men who had sailed with him, and they invariably have some legend to relate. 'Nothing was too hot or too heavy for Jim Thomas to handle,' one old shipmate told me. And as the others always did he smiled at the memory. Apart from my mother I have never found anyone who would say a bad word about him.

She saw him in a lesser light. Sometimes when he rolled home awash with beer she would not let him into the house so he would break some windows and all the neighbours would peer into the street to see what was going on. It was always enjoyable to hear a fight happening somewhere else. During the war when the windows had once more been damaged by Dad, I told my Cub mistress that a small German bomb which had landed in the garden was to blame. Since the windows of the neighbours' houses had remained intact she must have wondered just how small the bomb was. She was a nice young woman. We had to call her Akala but her name was really Miss Rabbit.

Also, I think, my mother must have resented deeply the decline in our social standards from whatever they had been. Even when we moved from the two rented rooms in Milner Street to a council house with a view, boasting a pebbledash facade and a bathroom, she felt the relegation. And to think,' she sniffed, 'that we once-upon-a-time had a motorbike and sidecar.'

There were always, of course, the possibilities presented by my father's life insurance for the sea was ever a perilous business. There was one notable false alarm. During the Spanish Civil War he was a member of the crew of a ship which was bombed in Barcelona harbour and sent to the bottom with all hands. It was an unusual thrill to hear 'David James Thomas, Stoker' listed as dead on the wireless. As it turned out he was the only survivor. He had been, unofficially I imagine, ashore when the dive bomber dropped a single high explosive down the funnel of the vessel and blew it to bits. When he came home he told the emotive tale: 'All bits and pieces floating on the water,' he said. 'And there . . . bobbing about among it all was the cabin boy's hat . . . Ah, he was a good lad too . . .'

My brother Lindon, who was also gun-running to one combatant or the other in Spain, returned home trembling from the experience. He had seen his friend killed by soldiers guarding the ship when he and a fellow officer had gone on shore to give some food to famished children. When he and Dad eventually exchanged reminiscences at home it became apparent that something was amiss. What was my father doing in such and such a place in November? After all the other side was occupying it then. Carefully they examined their adventures and concluded they had been running guns and other supplies to opposite sides.

A family of sailors is rarely together. I never remember a time when we were all in one house, which was just as well because there would only have been further arguments. My second brother Harold, known as Hally, was also at sea as an apprentice and Lin was already a junior officer. The old man remained deep in the stokehold.

Our move to the council house had at least given us something at which to look. It was on the eastern side of Newport, on a long-backed hill, with the roofs of the other, lower, streets serrated beneath our very feet and behind us the first green fields of the countryside. There was a lady called Auntie Blodwyn, although she was not truly a relative, who lived at the foot of the hill, next to Newport County football ground. One day her chimney caught fire and brought a match to a standstill. Several of the spectators came and demonstrated outside her gate, but others were quick to offer congratulations and say that it was the best thing that had happened that afternoon. Newport were never very inspiring or even aspiring. Just after the war they lost 13–1 to Newcastle United. My sister-in-law, Mary, told me that she had private information that the goalkeeper was in no way to blame. I remember her saying it because it was the day I nearly killed myself when I demolished her old chimney. It was over a ruined outhouse in her back garden and, aged fourteen then, I stood on the wall and, with a sledge-hammer, knocked the bricks away from under my own feet. The heavy chimney, followed by the whole building, collapsed. Fortunately I fell on top.

Money in the nineteenth-thirties was so scarce as to be a novelty. On my sixth birthday I went to school and rashly boasted that I was having a party. Nobody in those days, in that area, had birthday parties. The eyes of my classmates glowed. The lie, once told, was difficult to retract and with abandon I compounded it by going around the infant class and choosing who was to come to the party and who was not; that fiendish sadism peculiar to small children: 'You can come, and you, but you can't, nor you . . .' The lucky party-goers were given instructions to appear at five o'clock at our front door in their best clothes, and bringing with them a plate, knife, fork, spoon and cup and saucer.

Now I was really in it. As the school clock hours went by I desperately tried to think up a plan. I dared not tell my mother about my birthday party because we hardly had enough to put on our own plates. When I got home I found I had a birthday present, a bar of chocolate. That was a start anyway. I hung about outside the house until my five or six favoured guests arrived and, somewhat to their surprise, I announced that since it was a nice day for March we were going to have the party out of doors. They sat down on the path and the front door step and I gave them each a square of chocolate and a cup of water. My powers of persuasion must have been immense because, not withstanding the paucity of the feast, I promised them organised games to follow and suggested that it was in order to sing 'Happy Birthday To You'.

They did, the tinny voices attracting my mother who came to the door as they got to 'Happy birthday, dear Leslie, Happy birthday to you!'

She sent them off home and then sat in the front room howling into her hands while I stood mystified. Only a few years ago, just before they demolished the houses, I climbed the hill to Maple Avenue again. On the step of Number 16 was a toddler, sitting, apparently stunned as toddlers often do, staring into space. He looked like somebody left over from that party so many years ago.

Not having very much is a great provoker of envy. The boy next door had found sixpence and the story spread with the speed of jealousy around the neighbourhood children. The green eye flickered within me when he showed the little silver coin and told me, and a number of others assembled, how he proposed to expend this wealth. When I next went shopping for my mother, across a muddy quarry to a low street where the crouching corner shop showed its lights, I fell to temptation and shame which I have never forgotten. The shop was kept by a kindly and confused man who would even give credit. My mother once sent me to him with a list of groceries and instructions that the fact that we had no money to pay should be concealed until the ultimate moment, when the purchases were already, so to speak, in the bag. I was very worried about this but I carried out the plan only to be confronted with his aghast face when the credit was suggested. 'I can't do that, sonny' he said. 'I'd have to ask the missus.' The missus it turned out was in another shop several miles away and I was dispatched there on foot, with a medallion of his as a token to show that I had already seen the husband. I cannot remember whether we got our groceries, to be paid for next week, but whether we did or not the man's kindliness was ill-repaid by the small boy who again approached his crowded counter having just seen that desirable sixpence lying in his neighbour's hand.

As I stood there waiting to be served, while the shopkeeper was getting confused by the demands of half a dozen people, I became aware that on the counter, its milled edge shining at the level of my eyes, was a half-a-crown. It was grand larceny. I had never seen so much stray money, so temptingly close. Before I realised what I was about my hand snaked up and into my pocket thudded the heavy coin. I left the shop, having calmly made my purchases and preserved a criminally straight face while the poor man searched pathetically for the lost money. Mean and triumphant I went home, pausing only to boast to the boy next door that I had found five times as much as his miserable sixpence. The loot sat on my hand, a silver miracle. Like a cat my mother pounced on it.

'Where did yon
find
this?' she asked, giving me the credit of having come by it honestly or needing, at least, to keep her own conscience clear.

'In the quarry,' I answered. 'It was just lying there.'

'Oh good,' she breathed. 'That's a prayer answered for a start.' To my chagrin she relieved me of the coin. 'If nobody comes for it,' she said fixing me in the eye, 'I'll give you a penny next week.'

This, it appears, could be labelled the early criminal part of my life, because before long I stole something else. This time it was a vegetable marrow.

On my way to school I had spied this large and lush green object, lurking below its leaves, at the foot of somebody's garden. I had no idea what it was but it looked good enough to eat. After a couple of days I took a kitchen knife to school and on my way home I cut it and staggered the rest of the way, running with it in my arms like a big green baby. My mother, however, was less than pleased. 'I can't cook that!' she protested. 'We don't like it. Where did you get it?'

This time the quarry was out. I confessed. She bore it back to the owner. After that I had to make a long detour to and from school to avoid the scene of the crime but, even so, I saw the woman waving her fist at me in the distance. I did not steal anything else after that. Nothing large anyway.

As it was, I thought the police had tracked me down. On top of the hill where we lived there was no road, only a footpath so if a policeman appeared then everyone knew that he was on his way to one of the neighbouring houses and observed him spitefully. Shortly after the larceny of the marrow I was digging in the patch of ground next to our front door when a constable appeared, black and lofty on the horizon, and strode purposefully towards our house. Some little girls, who had recently heard me use some bad language and threatened to report me, were playing by the path and the policeman paused and asked them something. Skinny arms went eagerly out and accusing fingers pointed towards me. No, I thought, no . . . surely not . . . not the
police
! All I had said was 'bugger'.