Once (2 page)

What else could we be? ‘Give us a
sws
,' said Gwyneth to me, and I knew why I loved her chestnut hair, her cool white cheek, and something in me stirring, to record that moment in my head for ever. Give her a kiss? We were with our mothers. I didn't want to, and I did.

We had no television in our house while we lived in the village, all the first thirteen years of my life that is, and we went to the pictures rarely, perhaps once every school holiday, or twice in summer. This made the local picture-houses – The Odeon, The Cosy, The Supreme – all the more places of romance and allure. (Not to forget the pastoral Arcadia where, one season, the new-sprung Teddy Boys ripped up seats and scandalised the citizenry, in a wild Presley frenzy, about ‘Jailhouse Rock', was it? I think so.) Not having television at home turned watching ‘The Cisco Kid' and ‘The Lone Ranger' at my best friend Dick's house into stolen delight cut short, to be home in time for tea, six doors down the road.

What other trespasses and scrapes too there were to be had with Dick, whose family owned a butcher's shop: Dick and his mongrel cur Rinty, the most marvellous of mates, nervous as a bird, brave as a lion, and fit as a butcher's dog. Together we did things ‘Thornfield' wouldn't have conscienced for a minute, building and maintaining an underground trench at the top end of their terrace, with a fire, and no smoke without one, and Woodbines to cough over and Player's Weights, cooking twists of flour and water.

Fearless, we'd drag sheets of corrugated iron, old carpets and linoleum scrounged from the tip at Fairmount, down the Muddy Path (past Captain Miller's allotment), and on up the Red Wood road, beyond ‘Thornfield', to Dick's nameless house, to make our subterranean hide-away. There his mother turned a blind eye. She even dished up custom-made chipolatas to sustain us, out of a black and spitting frying pan, dark and rich sausages, full of meat, of a kind you could never buy over the counter, homemade for the family. Unless we drove her into a fury, as we did when we stole a bag of cement from the coal hole, with a view to making our trench a more robust and permanent fixture. The bag tore before we could lug it a couple of steps up out of the yard and cement powder went everywhere to betray us, blowing onto the washing, cementing our fate.

As to sausages, you never even dreamt of their like, with Daddy's or HP sauce. And no baked beans, as Dick, being too polite to say he didn't like them, once secreted into his trouser pocket, during tea at ‘Thornfield'. He did so by a sleight of hand so deft as to remain to this day a marvel of the known world. Yet he never received the credit he was due. Unlike his sister who could eat a cream cracker without making a crumb. As their mother liked to say, by way of reproaching her son. How do you get baked beans-on-toast into your trouser pocket – short trousers, plump legs, tight pockets – while sitting at the table in full sight of everyone, without leaving a trace of sauce anywhere? By dint of genius.

And there'd be jelly-sponge for tea of inimitable flavour, and sloppy blancmange by the bucket. Dick's mother insisted on bringing blancmange down the road to ‘Thornfield', in a big bowl covered with a dish-cloth, to shovel into Dick when he came to tea. She brought a tablespoon with her for the job. There Dick would sit being crammed with pink blancmange like a
paté de foie-gras
goose fattening for the slaughter.

You might one day expect to see him displayed in the window at the shop, all gooseflesh. ‘Ripe young boy – home-killed. 1s 6d a pound.' ‘
Paté de blancmange
. 2s a pot.' Undaunted by our mother, his mother stood over him, in her wrap-around floral apron (in summer), or her broad-belted brown gaberdine (in winter wind and rain), to the last mouthful. Just so one day she brought an ugly old hedgehog on a shovel to show my mother the new family pet. It was a world, full of eccentricity, of ordinary folk and simpletons and oddities, and community.

There was, for a sublime example, the lady who whistled through her teeth. Every time she spoke, she whistled, like a twittering canary. We were once in the queue behind her at Trelevan Jones the baker. She had a cardboard box on the counter containing a large order of loaves. ‘What's in the box? What's in the box?' I demanded loudly of my mother every time the lady whistled. Each time I asked Mrs Whitworth serving the canary-woman died of trying not to laugh. ‘What's in the box?' I was convinced it was a canary. My grandad had a canary called Hamish. I knew what canaries sounded like. ‘Shush! Shush!' said my mother, bending confidentially, and ‘SHUSH!' for all to hear.

There was Alan in the terrace just below Ratcliffe's. He stood in the window all day knitting a scarf from a ball of wool that tumbled slowly as it unwound in a tall glass vase. How long
was
that scarf, where did it wind to in Alan's head? Up into the attic or the boxroom, like an anaconda, taking over the house. He seemed to have no other sense of time passing than the slow unwinding of a ball of wool.

While Sam Cook has it on his hands, and all the dirt of ages. Sam is Dick's nextdoor neighbour, and Alan-the-knitting's chaperone. He gives Alan his daily constitutional, an act of simple kindness. Sam owns houses on Beach Road. Rentier, rent-collector, and great unwashed, he's a short round man in a peaked cap and national health specs, with a moustache like a tired yard-brush and finger-nails like a badger's.

Don't let him give you a sugared almond out of his coat pocket. It's been there since before the war. Or that apple. Watch your mother snatch it away, with a set smile, before it gets to your lips. But if you are dutiful in pursuit of sixpence, go and sit an hour with Miss Cook, Sam's bedridden sister, and suffer her to teach you how to knit ‘pan-scrubs' (pronounced with a strong Northern English accent), out of a wool wound with a fine wire.

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 corner 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.