Once Read online

  What’s the time? Only two minutes older than when you wondered last. Oh the sickly sweet smell of a bedridden body in a white mop cap and a shawl. Oh the race down the road after, clearing your lungs of mothballs and disinfectant, and the smell of fish and chips from Oldham’s to greet you, and a waft of beer from the Ship nextdoor, the salt sea blowing beyond Min-y-Don, and the Emerald Isle Express snorting steam and soot, rattling along, laden with Irishmen, bound for Holyhead or Euston, the fireman in his shiny peaked cap, waving, as if it was all a novelty. For so life seemed.

  If not at the pictures, where else might I have heard the siren, whether the air-raid warning or all-clear, except, perhaps, on the radio? Maybe parents explained or older children told us what it was. But I suspect no one told anyone. It was on the air we breathed. Yet I know, to me, it was the all-clear, not the air-raid warning. As who would need warning of lunch, unless they took school dinners? To be clear to go was what I wanted, back into momentary freedom, however fleeting; and fleet-of-foot I’d run to make the most of it, home to ‘Thornfield’, our damp little, narrow little three-bedroom semi with its short backyard and long steep garden terraced high above it, from which you could see the tops of the trees in the Fairy Glen, across the Red Wood road below.

  But how keen I’d been to surrender my freedom to the prison-house of Pa-D’s Primary. I suppose I adored my sister, or else envied her, or was merely very foolish and didn’t know myself by heart. At any rate, when she went to school I missed her, and I thought I should go with her too. I began to clamour to go to school. As seems incredible now, to one for whom school days were ever and always the worst days of my life, early and late, kow-towing to petty authority, learning things I never needed to know and not learning things I did, the history of an education for most of the population. But I didn’t want to be left at home. I thought I was missing out. (There’s one born every minute.)

  So an arrangement was made and I was allowed to go. I started school in my fourth year, the due age being five. But it was a disaster, even in the shelter of the beginning infants. I could not bear it. It seemed I was a very nervous infant, not cut out for a career in the infantry. What’s more I was an embarrassment to my sister. She had to stand and hold my hand in the playground, waiting for the bell (ask not for whom it tolls: it tolled for me), where the infants ran on the girls’ side of the hall. For boys and girls were otherwise segregated at play. This was not a good start for a boy, a damaging legacy, a telling indicator?

  I’d got ‘run down’ as they used to say, in that now distant world of Cod Liver Oil, Radio Malt, Virol, Minidex, and other proprietary medications, intended to put iron in the soul, treatments so numerous that being ‘run down’ must have been a national pastime in those days. In my case it was to do with nerves, the nervous system. I was ‘highly strung’ as they still say of horses and used to say of children. I suppose this would be why Elliman’s Horse Rub or Universal Embrocation was also applied to me, from time to time, and other potions, on bits of greaseproof paper, on my chest, Wych-Hazel another I seem to remember, not to mention the consumption of Hot Toddy, my father’s dire all-purpose concoction that might have put me off whisky for life, had I been less the man I am. So much do I have to thank him for.

  In response to the stress of encountering school, I developed a large scab on my bottom, as the polite expression was, necessitating sun-lamp treatment, at Dr Miller’s in the Bay. I remember the pleasant trips there to the West End on the top of the bus with my mother, and lying on the bed, under the big round Sun Lamp, and hearing my mother in another room, talking with Dr Miller, the family doctor, a Scot who drove a red Aston-Martin and between surgeries spent most of his time playing golf. Apart from my condition they’d perhaps be discussing my father’s latest psychosomatic tummy and self-prescribed fish-diet regimen.

  I had to be withdrawn. School fell back below the horizon. But I knew it existed now, and what it was, in all its horror, even when I wasn’t looking at it. I was that much less innocent now. Time acquired new meaning, for it would run out. But however shadowed by experience, I had to return to the womb of home and discover myself again, in childhood’s dreamy world, digging for coal on the top terrace beyond the gooseberry patch, among the blackcurrants, driving dinky cars through the mud, flying little silver ‘Meteors’ and ‘Canberras’ at arm’s length across the sky, that manner of diversion, or sailing to and fro on the swing, all the world below me, dreaming along. I liked my own company but I had a convivial sense of fun too and knew a joke when I spotted one. (When I burped at table, ‘just testing my brakes’ I’d declare. Oh the age of the motor car....)

  Once, up there at the top of the garden, I heard my father in conversation with Stan Valentine over the hedge. Stan was the black-sheep brother of the great Welsh Nationalist Lewis Valentine. It was said that as an infant he was so wilful his mother threw him to the end of the bed. Whatever that meant. Welsh was his first language. He liked to say in exclamation, ‘Well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs!’ He was this day sprinkling thick black soot from the chimney round his gooseberry bushes, to deter slugs and snails. My father, playing gooseberry to his neighbour’s peace and quiet, was interested.

  ‘Let me have some,’ he said, ‘I’ll sprinkle a little on myself.’

  At which, as if hand over mouth not to laugh aloud, I tripped rapidly down the steep concrete steps (how many, 39? – dozens and dozens, anyway it always seemed) wellingtons flapping, to tell my mother, about my father, the thought of him sprinkling soot over himself too much to bear. Humorous in my way I was, but also it seems nervous and prone to stresses and anxieties.

  Not I think that I was especially sickly, not in any romantic way, you understand, as might have been interesting. But writing about this faltering exposure to schooling reminds me quite strongly of unlocated spells spent ‘ill’ at home at ‘Thornfield’, long afternoons, for some reason in my parents’ bed, presumably for the view that my little back room didn’t have, staring at the bare wintry tree-tops in the Glen, listening to the homely cackling of the jackdaws, on long interminable afternoons, pricking up my ears at hearing Mr James with his pony and trap come down the road at a trot, carrying milk churns to the dairy, from Pentr’uchaf.

  I’d shoot out of bed when I heard the hooves and watch him go. He was a man you’d know now as one straight out of R.S. Thomas’s early poems, a Lloyd George thatch of grey hair under his tilted cap, old trench-coat tied at the waist with regulatory binder twine. He was Iago Prytherch. I’d seen him up at the farm when I went to play with the Roberts brothers, red-haired Welsh boys in Red Wood country, and to lean over the sty to see and get a closer whiff of the mochyns.

  Or it would be Hughie Bach, the casual farmhand, with the emphasis on casual, staggering up from the Ship. Drunk as a lord he’d struggle along, heading for the hills, for whichever farm outbuilding he spent his nights in. You’d hear him singing, or calling out, and he was a sight to watch, trying to snatch his cap up from the reeling road, singing in Welsh, earth of the earth. He made you nervous if you met him on his way but he was harmless they said, with quick but gentle hazel eyes. It always intrigued me what kind of being he was, another one who wore a belt of binder twine. A character they said, a rogue, handing his way up the road by means of the Glen railings, rolling and pitching, slumping, as if still aboard the Ship and the Ship at sea in wild weather.

  During the war Hughie once tried to sell my parents a stolen goose from under his coat at the door. ‘Iss a fine goose,’ he said, flashing it out from the skirt of his coat. But they were having none of it. They knew whose goose it was. The story of his crime had run ahead of him and lay in wait to send him ‘down the line’ for a spell in Liverpool’s Walton Jail. Another time he took my father for a ride, up in the back lanes after nightfall, near Llanelian, selling him a sack of black-market mud and stones, with just a foot of so of potatoes on top for good luck. Sometimes on a wet day you’d see him in a hood improvised from a sack, one c
orner poked into the other, with the rest of the sack hanging behind, keeping his shoulders dry. He always made you think of the earth, smell the earth when you saw him.

  I was once brought to a sudden halt running in the Glen when round the corner I came face to face with Hughie Bach’s arse, as he bent double to relieve himself, barely screened by a laurel, trousers round his knees. I doubt you ever saw anyone turn whiter in the face, whiter than Hughie’s grey-pink arse, for sure, or beat a hastier retreat than I did that afternoon.

  Or else it was the clopping laundry van, from Laundry Hill. For there were people in our lower middle-class ranks who used the services of the laundry. A sometime Lord Mayor, Mr Dunwell, Royal Welch Fusilier veteran of the Great War, lived two doors down, a Yorkshireman by birth. And there was Captain Miller, risen from the ranks, still further down, with his very pretty wife ‘like an actress’, and the Isherwoods, the McCleans and Miss Burke. These were people of standing, you’d think, but no one thought so, unless themselves. Mr McClean was a retired solicitor. He knew eminent men in London, just a little perhaps. The Isherwoods went into formal mourning, and closed their curtains, when the King died (as the entire road did for any neighbour’s funeral). Yet young Miss Isherwood would collect bets from Walter Price, always at night, in a huddle at the front door, for a book someone kept, perhaps her mother or her dad? Or was she placing them?

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ What was it? ‘The King is dead!’ she whispered to my mother, in loud reverence, on the Abergele Road, and the man barely cold in his winding sheet.

  The horse age had now all but become the race-horse age. But my father knew working horses and had worked with them, had driven a pony and trap, as a matter of course. It was a horse, the red horse Fox, from Bill Davies’s stables in the uplands of the Bay, that nearly brought my story to an early close, at the tender age of nine. Fox bolted with me one Saturday morning, onto a metalled road and after about a quarter of a mile, off I came, knocking myself spark out against the bottom of a lamp post. The people who found me knew me and brought me home concussed and semi-conscious. I remember coming round and being sick into the sink all over the washing-up. Everyone on the Red Wood Road knew about it before I got home, from Dick and from my sister. Was I dead? Would I live?

  Perhaps it was the protracted convalescence from this concussive episode and the resulting great span of time off school that makes those afternoons in my parents’ bed seem both numerous and haunting, lying there listening out for the now nightmare tattoo of hoof-beats, gazing into the wintry sky, that was always so buoyant, because of the sea nearby. The sea ran not much more than half a mile away from our door, the white-horse sea. It would flood my mind forever, as a prospect of elsewhere, a restless realm of tides and skies and light, its light always there, in our daily lives, conditioning us, whoever we were, whatever our capacity for dreaming. Neptune tapped a rock and up sprang a horse. I saw the sea and my heart rode away. So it rides now at the drop of a hat, not for escape, but for respite.

  Mr Edwards the smith (whose wife once described my father as ‘very athletic’, mystifying us forever) was largely a wrought-iron and an agricultural repair man now. But he shod horses still, and he rounded wild ponies up and held them, at the back end of the year, corralled at the old mill, to what end, I don’t know. (The Belgian meat market they said at Price the Butcher.) One misty morning I remember coming up early from the shore by Pen-y-Bryn and seeing what seemed like hundreds of wild ponies off the moor herded together there. The uncommon mist that shrouded the village must have magnified my sense of their number. They stood shoulder to shoulder, packed, crowding the yard and up the length of the track from the mill to the road.

  I would have been twelve, going on thirteen at most the time I saw them. I’d been down fishing in the early morning, attending a nightline, digging bait, one or other, or all three. The ponies all rough and ragged seemed like an apparition, a ghostly vision, neither neighing nor whinnying, in the great, still silence of the mist. Some of them had hooves like hockey sticks, from being on the moor and mountainside, with no hard surface under them to keep their toes in shape. It’s a strange sight to see, a horse with all four hooves that way, like some mad attempt by Leonardo da Vinci to design a rocking horse or a mount for a horseback ball-game.

  It might have been the tail-end of the horse age, but still there were very few cars in our world at that time. Only Mr Pierce and Ernie Thomas owned a car on our road at the start, and Mr Meredith (of Meredith & Kirkham garage, so he hardly counted). If I remember right, even by 1956 and Suez there only one or two more; Suez an event I recall, not of course as ‘Suez’ but as something worrying, like Hungary and dark night images on the television news, chez Dick.

  I always associate Suez with a grave conversation that passed in the road between Mr Pierce and my father, about petrol rationing. Mr Pierce was peering under the bonnet of his black Ford Prefect, or was it a Poplar? – I don’t think a Pilot – a model on which the bonnet lifted and folded up from the side, as I recall, like a wing. How many horse power did it have? My father peered in with him as if to see. Then the two men stood up and talked, let’s suppose, as would be likely, something about Nasser, and Eden’s fallen world. What I do know is you’d have thought the end of the world was round the corner, running on empty, stuttering to a halt, the way Mr Pierce folded the bonnet down and closed the engine away, as if, it now seems to me, seeing him again in my mind’s eye, consigning the car to the scrapheap for eternity.

  My Scottish grandpa had a car, an old Austin with a crank handle, leather seats, and running boards. So far away was the world then he would sit me between his arms and let me ‘drive’ around the village sometimes, when he and granny came over on Sunday. Our own first car was called a brake, an Austin van with seats in the back and windows cut in the side, and minimal comfort. I think we must have had it in coronation year, or just before, from the proceeds of my father’s writing, I guess. Whenever it was it was by 1954, when my brother was born. I remember father lying on the sofa in the rarely used front room, holding his brow because he found the car hard to drive. It wasn’t that he’d never taken a test, which he hadn’t, but that the brake had a novel gear-shift, fixed to the steering-wheel column, and he couldn’t get the hang of it.

  Cars were rarely left on the road but parked or garaged elsewhere, most of the houses on our road having no such luxury as a garage. My father rented a garage from an old lady, beyond Fairmount. He lavished care on his vehicle there, sealing its underneath with some kind of bitumen and wrapping its suspension springs with coarse tape coated with a stiff gluey-green-grey paste. One of his many mad precautions in life, this one I suppose to guard against corrosive salt air from the sea. I remember standing around all morning while he struggled and swore under the car applying the sticky tape. A cold dull morning but never quite boring because my father’s antics always set such occasions on edge.

  Pa D the primary school headmaster had a car, and my father’s bosses too, at Ratcliffe’s Engineering Company, some four hundred yards back down the Red Wood road from ‘Thornfield’. They had very big and powerful cars and conceit to go with them. Thick-headed petty fat-cats they were, lunching at the Metropole, height of sophistication, in the Bay, on the spoils of war.

  The war, the war.... We lingered in its aftermath. It lingered in our young lives. Even more than forty years on there was the war still. As when my nephew, a small toddling boy, halted outside Hughie Jones’s house and called down the path to him a childish enquiry, ‘Where’s your gate?’ ‘They took it for the war,’ answered Hughie, so many years later. (Never brought it back.) There was National Service too. I suppose that was what took Ernie Davies’s son away. I remember him coming into our backyard in his uniform, boots and puttees, and giving me a Royal Welch Fusiliers cap badge. There was Korea, the Mau Mau, Suez and Hungary, Malaya, Ireland... so the never-ending war ran on, as perhaps Mr Farrell at the Laundry wanted to remind us: war as much a precondition o
f our existence as sex. Once in this time an IRA bomb went off at Kinmel Army Camp, not so far from us. I remember the shock of it – not of the bomb going off – but of the event as gossip.

  I missed National Service by a good margin. But soon time came round as time will and I must enlist in the infantry again and face the world, and quite soon experience it as represented by the fanatical Pa D.

  It must be said that such a world as Pa D made would be a national scandal, and illegal, today. For us it was a wild drama, violent, and comic too, in a grim way. But we weren’t censorious. We thought it was just life and nowhere worse or better. It was all we knew. Fortunately for the infants they did not share the daily ritual of morning assembly with the upper school. They were sheltered from it for a couple of years, the better to render them ripe for the shock of first encounter. Little by little they soaked up rumour and tasted anxiety. In the infants life was gentle enough, though they struggled with me, for a while, trying to make me use scissors in my right-hand, but I am left-handed, and a pencil. How Miss Lewis pounded me in the back when I broke the pencil.

  They picked me to play Joseph in the nativity. It doesn’t get more innocent than that, and a very unlikely choice, to pick a nervous boy. So nervous was I that I not only knew my own part by heart, I knew everyone else’s. When my mother rehearsed me, to try to build up my confidence, I would repeat my opening lines, and add: ‘Then Mary says.... Then the First Shepherd says…. Then I say…. Then the Second or the First or the Third Wise Man says...’ and so on and on until they’d all had their say and the Christ child came once again to Colwyn. The best Joseph they ever had, they said, as they always said. Be-robed in my sister’s dressing gown, it was my only thespian triumph ever and (barring one other much later, in Synge’s Riders to the Sea) the only time I trod the boards in my life.