Once Read online

  They were the boards in the big Assembly Hall, which doubled for school dinners as a canteen. They were the boards on which each morning mad Pa D stalked into the limelight of his megalomania, and, usually, if not quite every day, lost the plot, or found the plot, perhaps I should say, his crazy version of it anyway. He was a short man with a short fuse, and vigorous in manner, made somehow more menacing by heavy black-framed spectacles. His white hair combed back from his hairline was wavy and, though fine, could seem unruly, as became a maestro.

  Pa D generally wore a three-piece suit (in the summer a cream or sometimes a buff linen jacket). When he was really getting going he’d take off his jacket and conduct in his waistcoat. The sleeves of his shirt billowed, held fast above the elbow by little silver elasticated armbands. I can remember detachedly studying his dress, his manner, his frantic enthusiasm. It was as if I saw into his absurdity even then, his not being a man, but a schoolmaster, a particular kind of aberration, a king, a tyrant over children under eleven. My father detested schoolmasters and often voiced his scorn for the breed. Perhaps it was this encouraged me to observe Pa D critically.

  But parents respected Pa D, my own included. He was energetic and well-intentioned, and saw above the horizon and beyond it, they would later say. They liked him very much. As to that horizon, Pa D once took a party of us by train to Bristol, and a coach to Wells to see the Cathedral and to the Cheddar Gorge, an old steam-train marathon, 6am to late at night. It still hangs in my mind, staring in wonder at the unknown world from that train. Perhaps I registered then the first pull, the first urge to escape that would later get the better of me, never say worst.

  We sang hymns in the morning and some afternoons we’d be assembled again, for more of the same, and for musical, and once in a way, theatrical, education and diversion. A Shakespearean actor came one afternoon, all violet tinted make-up and period costume, discernibly a quare fella, even to my childish gaze, lisping speeches from Shakespeare, as if we understood a word, or knew what he was doing, or why. Yet I remember him so well I can see him now, delivering bits of Falstaff and Lear, as now I realise they must have been. We’d be played 78s of Kathleen Ferrier, the English contralto, while Pa D waxed lyrical and incomprehensible to us about the beauty of her voice.

  Nineteen-fifty-three was quite a year, Coronation year, when we lined up along the Abergele Road clutching our coronation mugs, waiting on her majesty’s majestic progress to wave our flags and cheer. There was bunting hung along a stretch of the road in the village, along the viaduct. I do remember catching sight of the queen and the duke beside her, on that bleak day, a very dull and chilly day. I was stood just below Rose Walk, opposite W.H. Smith’s. I don’t know what I’d expected but they struck me as too ordinary. They might have been anyone. I can still see them, and the open-backed limousine disappearing. My mother was up at Hebron on the hill, where there was no crowd, but just a few folk gathered. They stepped out into the road as the cortege approached and cheered, involuntarily, having vowed they’d do no such thing. She says the Queen wore pink, a pink hat, and they ‘both looked beautiful’. Somehow I remain certain I glimpsed the queen in yellow, but from my height, peeping from the crowd perhaps I saw nothing at all, but the hood, like a pram-hood lowered at the back of the limousine, and the back of the Duke’s little head.

  In a world where news was so thinly broadcast, compared with the 24/7 wall-to-wall of today, we had no other view of it than what we saw with our own eyes and what we were told at home and school, about the Queen. In my case, if I heard it from my father, it would not have been enthusiastic. He disliked the idea of monarchy.

  It was also the year Dylan Thomas died, far from his native country, an occasion of great sadness my parents felt. My father loved his stories. It was Dylan Thomas described the way we lived on the Red Wood road and invented it too. But more important for Pa D, 1953 was the year Kathleen Ferrier died. She died of cancer. No doubt he told us that too. It was my first year under his regime. What we were supposed to make of it I don’t know, but some time later we were assembled one afternoon for a kind of memorial service to the great singer, in which recordings were played on a gramophone. These cultural afternoons were never, as I remember, quite as fraught as, most days, the morning assembly proved to be, but they too could be the scene of sudden public canings.

  We sang in English and we sang in Welsh, and also, sometimes ‘Non nobis domine...’ etc, in Latin, and not always hymns. Pa D loved music, with a vengeance, the vengeance being visited on us. He did the thing properly, conducting us with a real ‘ivory’ baton. If we started at 9am, it was not unheard of for us to be still at it at 11.30am, and not to be dislodged but by protesting dinner ladies anticipating the siren. ‘Who is Sylvia, what is she?...’ we’d warble, curious indeed as to who she might be. Sorry to know it wasn’t Sylvia Hughes. Our ranks might be thinned, as one or other Sylvia fainted, thudding down onto the rough wood floor, and our singing suspended while her body was removed. Or, after a boy was sick there was a hurried halt and fluster as one of the staff put sawdust down, tipping it from a galvanised bucket, to absorb the vomit. Those nearby stood clear, now feeling sick themselves, from the sweet scent of sick and resin.

  So our ranks were thinned and not perfectly serried by the end of a session. Then, for catching Pa D’s eye at the wrong moment, probably during the hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, a boy would be ushered off and pushed behind the dinner service cupboard, with a gratuitous clip round the head from one of the masters to see him on his way, while the other teachers stood by the radiators to keep warm or leant back on the wall, inscrutable but righteous-seeming, their arms folded in front of them. We would sing, our voices somehow tensed and yet relieved, knowing there was a victim installed, behind the cupboard, either side of which hung down old blackout drapes, there in the dim light to await his master’s pleasure.

  This boy was almost always the one called Sellars, a swarthy boy, with next to no forehead. Sellars came from beyond our catchment and seemed older than the other older boys. You never felt sure about him. He did daring things in the playground, to show off, like climbing drain pipes. He knew a place out of reach to the rest of us where, if you put your hand in, you received an electric shock. We regarded him with awe and honest incredulity when he showed us what it was like to reach up along a piece of gutter to where the shock was to be had.

  When it came time for Sellars to leave the school, to move on to the Secondary Modern, his place as scapegoat was at once filled by a boy called Clarke. It was if they belonged to some special tribe of victims, Sellars and Clarke. I can hardly remember any other boy being sent behind the cupboard, to await the cane, the grand finale to the morning, and sometimes a vigorous ear-boxing and thumping about the stage, as a warm-up. Pa D loved a quick flurry. There was something in Sellars’s look was like a red-rag to him. Oafishness I suppose, and being ‘twp’, that is, thick or stupid, in Welsh.

  At first it was reassuring to know Sellars had come to school, or which of us might not escape a beating? But in time you learnt not to worry. You knew that it would never be you, but always Sellars or Clarke. Just now and then I dimly recall someone else would be given a trial, as if he was a promising footballer who might take Clarke’s place in the team, once he transferred up the league, to the dignity of private canings at the secondary school. The spectacle and general atmosphere would sometimes provoke tears of fear in Dick. I’d be aware of them trickling down his fat red cheeks as he stood next to me anxiously wringing a sodden handkerchief in his hands, until at one year’s start his parents transferred him to the school at Llysfaen, in the next parish.

  By today’s standards, it was a scandal that Pa D should ever have had tender minds and hearts in his charge, a mismatch from another era. But at least it exposed us to life with a kind of dramatic intensity that made it real, distinct and unforgettable as lessons largely were not, except insofar as we learnt by rote, ‘times tables’ especially. Compared with br
utalities my father had grown up with, it was a Sunday school outing. Though I know nothing first hand about those. The nearest thing I ever came to Sunday school was a funeral when a governor of the school died. I was ten years old and select band of us were marched through the village to the funeral service up the hill at Hebron. There we sang the Welsh hymns for which we’d been at short notice furiously rehearsed.

  It was my first experience of a funeral and just about any kind of religious service, for we were, or I was, ungodly, having not even been christened. My father was dead set against institutionalised religion. He’d had an excess of it beaten into his Scottish childhood. (My sister was christened, though, attended Sunday School and for a time joined the Band of Hope, a teetotal sect, purely for the social life....)

  Here in the alien pale duck-egg-blue plastered and varnished Calvinistic-Methodist world of Hebron Chapel, I saw solemn blue-jowelled hatless men, and their wives, sisters, cousins – behatted bereaved women I didn’t know from Eve, sobbing their hearts out, faces puddled with grief, as the interminable service progressed, and the fearful organ marched its funeral march, or soared to the heights with ‘Bread of Heaven’ in Welsh, and the Minister delivered his sermon-without-end, world without end, in rousing Welsh. And though I didn’t know anything of the sort here I witnessed Wales at full-strength, no matter it was all but on its last legs, swaying to sing its praises to heaven.

  Next door but one to ‘Thornfield’ on the way up was the Baptist minister’s tied house. His world was even more dour than that at Hebron, and he was paid a dismal pittance. We knew well two tenants of that house, both lovable men. One of them, a young man called Maxwell spent a good deal of time talking with my father. In the end so persuasive did the conversation prove that Maxwell gave up his calling to become a schoolmaster. Schoolmaster prejudices notwithstanding, this move was regarded at ‘Thornfield’ as a great triumph over the forces of darkness, as personified by the chapel deacons who held their man to account as if they worked for the Kremlin, so deadly were their attentions, so vicious their powers to bring to book.

  No translations were ever offered. I didn’t understand them. But I loved the Welsh hymns best of all. It shows I didn’t lack discernment, for nothing’s more rousing than a Welsh hymn. But the test piece of test pieces for us at Pa D’s was an English hymn, ‘There is a green hill far away’. Sometimes we would spend an hour on it, while Pa D got more and more exercised about the fact that when we sang ‘without a city wall’, the emphasis was all wrong, reflecting of course our incomprehension: why mention the city wall if there wasn’t one? Sellars was one thing, but that line could work like a madman’s flash, a glint of lunacy, across Pa D’s brain.

  Up would come the vomit. Down the troops would go. Bash would go the baton on the lectern. And bash, until, one memorable morning, it broke, and for the following week a much cruder one was used, one you could hardly take seriously, a clumsy thing, not at all the fine white implement, with its pointed tip and little cork end for the maestro to grip, with which we were accustomed to be kept in time. (For some reason I can still see it very vividly even now. It’s ‘handle’ was whipped with string, a couple of inches and varnished over.) Even if we managed to get the pitch of ‘with-out’ right, we had ‘O, dearly, dearly has He loved’ to come, and the intensity with which we were supposed to sing ‘dearly’ always cost us dear. We were irredeemable and literally so, for we could never quite sustain the right number of ‘e’-s in the line that bade us love Him too and trust ‘in his redeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeming blood’. Even if we did come at all close to it, nothing – not the wildest tantrum – could stop us next propelling ourselves at a gallop into the short last line ‘And try His work to do’, and so spoil everything.

  In spite of it all, as I say, I liked – and I still like – hymn singing, the old hymns that is (however banal their words), and I loved Welsh hymns best of all. We weren’t a Welsh family. With a name like ours, how could we be? But my sister and I were Welsh by birth, natives of the place, and my brother too when he joined us. While that counted for nothing among the locals, it would matter to the world beyond, the unknown world, in time, and mattered much to me.

  Meanwhile the issue for us was that we weren’t English. For my part what mattered was that I was Scottish. Though this wasn’t simply true. My father was Scottish, my mother unmentionably English. I was a native of Wales. But under Scots law my father assured me I was Scottish. I knew I was Scottish when my grandpa and granny came, that was for sure. They spoke bagpipe music. My granny was a McDougall and a Munro, of Highland stock, and a Bruce (a very un-McDougall thing to be) if you went far enough down one line, and a Sinclair from Caithness. My grandpa was from Galloway and would have killed you if you called him Irish. But his mother was a McGarva and they came from Ireland. The McNeillies too were Irish in the long ago when Galloway was part of the gaelic speaking world, as was nowhere else in lowland Scotland. They came from Co. Antrim. Their name is anglicised it’s said from Mac an Filidh, son of the poet or poets.

  Having a Scottish (though by derivation an Irish) name was no disadvantage in Wales. But if you didn’t speak Welsh they tended to call you English, a thing deeply offensive to me. Even as a boy of eight, or particularly as a boy of eight, I remember hating that, and hated not having been born in Scotland. Most people who knew anything, knew my father was a Scottish writer. I was not English. Pain of death to call me so.... Though the truth is I’ve always belonged nowhere, not even at home. I was and am merely a witness to what has passed for life about me.

  I can be so precise about my age in this matter as in others because I was eight in August the year my brother was born in November. I remember sharply many things and matters from that time. It was a time when I stepped deeper into solitude. It was a time not too much later – the ten months from November 1954 to August 1955 – when my father, during a family holiday at Traeth Coch on Anglesey, saw into this isolation and sought to compensate by spending time with me. This included renting a clinker-built row boat with a Seagull outboard and taking me fishing off Traeth Coch – Red Shore or Beach – known also as ‘Red Wharf Bay’.

  At one wild moment he set me off alone at the helm, to circle the inlet on a quite choppy grey morning, and at frantic speed. The engine roared and I raced off, speeding between moored boats, the outboard blaring, and by sheer luck and hair’s-breadth getting by, unable to slow down because I’d not been told how the Seagull worked. Round I came huddled in the stern, eight going on nine-years-old, or just nine going on ten, head-on for the shingle slope, and came to a crunching halt, safe and sound, and excited, the engine roaring away and churning the water so loud I could hardly make out my father’s directions as to how to wring the Seagull’s neck.

  It was in that time he talked to me, as we rode up and down on the choppy sea failing to catch fish, how it was that I was Scottish, and had no need to worry as to that. But it did worry me. Whatever it was worried John Hughes in Pa D’s primary that he had to lie to me and say he was born in Philadelphia, I don’t know. But I lied to him back, in no uncertain terms.

  As to the Welsh language, the disadvantage was that no one in the family knew any Welsh. Welsh lessons were always a great mystery and there was no one to turn to, and no one to mind what result you got. So scandalously low stood Welsh then, almost done for, as R.S. Thomas and others, like Lewis Valentine and Saunders Lewis knew. It was a national disgrace and those who were angry about it were right to be angry. They might have been a lot angrier and taken up arms like the Irish. But they worked largely by stealth in the end and by tongue and pen and modest protest won what is now beyond doubt one of the great cultural victories of our post-colonial times and no recent tally of dead to keep.

  But I jump ahead; forget the Welsh language. Indeed most lessons were a great mystery to me, for quite a long time – for far longer than might be considered ‘normal’ or average. I had miserable difficulties learning. Perhaps I had what are now classed as ‘lear
ning difficulties’. At any rate, by any standard, I took a painful age to learn to read. I found it a mystery and I’m not sure why. I found it hard to connect words with their sounds. I looked at them and they seemed like objects to me, opaque combinations from the alphabet, attractive but meaningless, except I knew that they generally meant what you saw in the picture above them. As long as there weren’t too many things to choose from, that was fine. Otherwise they swam before my gaze like fish in a tank. My progress was so slow that my father, an impatient, hot-tempered man, took an interest in it. He was like Pa D on the home front, without the cane, but with far greater intensity of rage and I suppose far more pervasive and intimate and so crueller authority.

  What did I have in my head, sawdust? – he’d rant furiously. I am sure this helped a great deal. But help or no, my progress through the Beacon Reader series was painful. Book One about the wretched farmer ‘Old Lob’ had me dug in for the long haul and not just down to Christmas. I was like those soldiers in their trenches in the Great War. The longer it went on, the worse it got. The worse it got, the longer it went on. In the process I suffered a kind of educational shell-shock. As for arithmetic, I couldn’t even begin to spell it. Nothing seemed to add up, except blushing and burning unhappiness, and fear.

  Words swam before my gaze. They were like the perch my father kept in a fish tank in the backyard. Their world was a silent mouthing world. They couldn’t say their letters either, but at least they were full of life and a different, an absorbing, mystery. I could stand and stare at them for half a morning at a time, feeding them earthworms and slaters and other grubs I found under stones, watching them dart and turn and vie with each other, bold, bright, green, dark barred, ruddy-finned, spiky hump-backs, darting over the gravel bed of the tank. The word for them: ‘perch’ – so odd after all, paradoxically sedentary, or more than five yards longer than any perch you saw. What sense is one to make of words? What not? The word is your oyster.