Senor Nice (2 page)

But tonight would be the real test. I had to perform in front of a home crowd at the Royal Pavilion, Porthcawl, four miles from Kenfig Hill, where I was born. I was last there thirty-five years ago as one of a number of drunken yobs participating in
an Elvis impersonators’ contest. I came close to last. Would they remember? I was now playing the part of a prison-hardened gangster in front of people who terrified me as a schoolboy. How could they possibly take me seriously? Worse still, the whole performance was going to be filmed for a
Mr Nice
DVD.

Gruff stepped down from the train at Cardiff, lighting a cigarette as soon as his foot touched the platform. Twenty minutes later, I did the same at Bridgend and took a taxi to Kenfig Hill. The semi-detached house in Waunbant Road had been empty for just a few months, but already the home-made weathercock was dangling from the rotten chimney, and the front gate had almost come off its hinges. A carpet of decaying litter covered what used to be the front lawn. I knew there was a garage behind the brambles and ivy; I just couldn’t see it. My key still turned the lock, but the damp door didn’t want to open. I forced it and stumbled through a pile of mail to switch on the light then walked up the stairs and into the infinite familiarity of my parents’ bedroom, where fifty-five years previously I had first breathed in harmony with the universe. Now both my parents had gone. Just the house lived on. It couldn’t stay empty forever; it would have to be sold or rented. No rush. First, it would need to be emptied of boxes and several generations of memorabilia – but some other time. It was mid-afternoon, and cameraman Martin Baker, son of Welsh actor and director Stanley Baker of
Zulu
fame, was due any moment.

The doorbell rang.

‘Who is it?’

‘Martin.’

It wasn’t Martin Baker but my oldest friend and first dope-smuggling employee, Marty Langford. I had been home for twenty minutes. Word gets around.

‘Julie from the shop just told me you were home. Why didn’t
you call me? All this author and performer stuff has gone to your head, hasn’t it? Put the kettle on, then. I’m dying for a brew and a blast. Got anything decent?’

‘I’ve got some excellent hash for a smoke, Marty, but there’s no milk in the house for tea.’

‘I knew I should have bought some milk at Julie’s. And hash is no good for me, Howard. I don’t smoke tobacco, and I can’t be messing with pipes and buckets and things at my age. Haven’t you got any skunk?’

‘A bit, just a third of a spliff, actually. We could smoke it and go down the pub.’

‘What! For a cup of tea?’

‘I thought they sold everything in pubs now from Thai food to cappuccino.’

‘Not round here, Howard; it’s still just beer and crisps. But we might as well go down. I fancy a walk. Haven’t been for months and months. I usually stay in these days – on the computer.’

The pub was a good twenty-minute walk. On our left we passed the furniture shop, once Kenfig Hill’s only cinema, and then the Institute, where we had been taught snooker by miners working nights and where I had first dared imitate Elvis in public. The skunk hit hard. Marty and I looked at each other and started giggling like the children we still were. On our right we could see the Prince of Wales and the old Victoria Inn, both smothered in scaffolding on account of their being converted into flats.

When I was in my mid-teens Kenfig Hill had a population of just over 5,000, one church of Wales, one Roman Catholic church, four Welsh Nonconformist chapels – Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist and Welsh Congregationalist – and nine pubs. Since then, housing estates and new streets have sprung up but the population is approximately the same; the accommodation is just less crowded. Television keeps the elderly at home while cars and motorbikes have enabled the
young to get away from the prying eyes of family and neighbours. Accordingly, there are now two fewer pubs and one less place of worship. The chapel that bit the dust was the Welsh Congregationalist one, named Elim, the first chapel in Kenfig Hill. Members of my family attended Elim for several generations, preaching, deaconing, singing hymns and playing in the tiny orchestra, but lack of interest closed its doors a few years ago. At the tender age of ten, I was taken to Elim and introduced to the serious side of God. Until then he had been little more than a powerful Father Christmas figure from whom one occasionally asked for serendipitous gifts and various forms of assistance. Learning that God is everywhere at once and saw everything had conjured up the idea of a wonderfully active and clear-sighted person.

Unlike my father, my mother was deeply religious, and she insisted I went to Sunday school in the afternoon and to either the morning or evening service. My mother also insisted my father went with her to the evening service. I hated both Sunday school and services. I opted to attend in the morning alone rather than go in the evening under the watchful eyes of my parents, partly to get the chore behind me, but mainly because I could get away with not going at all. I would leave the house at 10 a.m. and go to Marty’s place for an hour to chain-smoke cigarettes and listen to 78s on his impressive radiogram. Eventually I was grassed up by one of Marty’s neighbours and forced to attend the evening service.

Thousands of unhappy Sunday walks flooded through my memory as Marty and I turned the corner at the Victoria Inn. This used to afford the first sight of Elim, a dull grey roof pointing hopelessly at heaven.

‘See what’s happened to Elim, Howard?’

‘Jesus!’

Elim Welsh Congregationalist Chapel had been replaced by red-brick houses surrounded by manicured gardens and little fences.

‘That must mess with your memory circuits, Howard.’

‘I used to hate the place. I feel worse about the Vic being turned into a house.’

‘C’mon, there must be some good memories. That’s where you first got married, right, in 1967? On a Thursday, wasn’t it?’

That was, indeed, a good memory. Loads of people turned up to witness my marriage to Latvian beauty Ilze Kadegis. It was followed by a hard-core drinking competition in Kenfig Hill’s pubs between the Welsh and visiting Latvians. Both sides definitely lost.

Not only was Elim Chapel where I had lost my bachelorhood, it was also where I had lost my virginity some years earlier. This had happened on a Saturday.

On Friday evenings during the early 1960, the vestry of Elim Welsh Congregationalist Chapel served as the only youth club in the community. This weekly transformation was achieved by pushing the pews and chairs to the side, placing a Dansette record player on a bench, and setting it to continuous full volume. I and other village teenagers brought our 78s, and taught each other to jive before snogging and smoking in the dark rooms and cellars adjoining the vestry. As I was one of the very few kids who was both a member of the youth club and the chapel, I was entrusted with the keys, and it was my duty to go there every Saturday morning to tidy up.

On one particular Friday, a new girl, Susan Malone, whom I had asked for a date a few days before, came to the club. I went up to her and asked her to dance just as the Shirelles were singing those very same words. We jived furiously to Danny and the Juniors’ ‘At the Hop’, then moved into one of the unlit rooms for a frantic snogging session that left us breathless but wanting more, lots more. I asked if I could walk her home, and she agreed with far more enthusiasm than I had expected. Susan lived in a caravan and was the daughter of an Irish construction engineer who had just started a three-month
contract at Port Talbot. I secured another date for the next afternoon, but I had no idea where to take her. It was bound to be raining, and we were too young for the pubs. Overnight I had a brainwave. I would leave the club-tidying chore until the afternoon and take Susan with me.

We sneaked into the damp vestry. Cigarette butts and sweet wrappings littered the wet floor, but the chapel was much warmer, ready for Sunday’s services. I switched on the organ and, out of respect, played some classical chords. Then I played ‘The Twist’. We lay down on the front pew. And then I shagged her. We had a few more dates over the next month, after which she left the locality as suddenly as she had arrived.

‘Shall we go to the Oak, Howard? The Masons has just been pulled down.’

Marty and I walked into the public bar of the Royal Oak. We were completely ignored; everyone was transfixed by the rugby match on television. Wales lost; nevertheless, the pub would still stay open continuously for two days and play host to hundreds of tales of successful and heroic Welshmen, past and present. As the drink flowed, the tales got taller.

‘Well, now they finally have the proof,’ said Eddie Evans, the village sage. ‘Elvis was Welsh.’

‘You mean Tom Jones, don’t you, Eddie,’ said Ivor Prior, who loved to catch Eddie out. ‘And you are right, Eddie. Tom was born in Treforest. His real name is Tommy Woodward.’

‘I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about the real original Elvis, Elvis Presley.’

‘How do you mean, Eddie?’ I asked.

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? His mother’s name was Gladys, and they’ve now found out that his surname a few generations back was Preseli, same as the mountains in Pembroke where the stones in Stonehenge come from.’

‘But Elvis is hardly a Welsh name, Eddie,’ I protested, a
little discomfited to hear that my god’s grandfather might have been a neighbour of my grandfather.

‘Of course it is, Howard. I thought you would have known that, having been to Oxford. Elvis was the name of the bishop who baptised our patron saint, St David. The parish of Elvis still exists. It’s very small, but it’s definitely there. No doubt at all. It’s not far from St David’s itself, which, as you should know, is the smallest city in the world.’

‘How did they move those bloody huge stones from Pembroke to Salisbury then, Eddie? There’s a question for you,’ said Ivor Prior.

‘There’s two theories. One is they were taken by boat; the other is that the great wizard Merlin moved them. Take your choice, Ivor.’

‘How the hell can a boat get to Salisbury? It’s not even on the coast.’

‘Ever heard of rivers, Ivor?’

‘There’s no river from Pembroke to Salisbury, Eddie,’ said Ivor a little uncertainly.

‘Obviously not, but there is a river from Pembroke to the bloody sea, and there is another river from the bloody sea to Salisbury.’

The pub liked this explanation.

‘Merlin was Welsh,’ added Eddie.

‘Doesn’t sound like much of a Welsh name,’ teased Ivor. ‘You’re not getting mixed up with Mervyn, are you?

‘Merlin is what the bloody French call him,’ explained Eddie. ‘His real name was Myrddin, and he was born in Carmarthen, which is shortened from Caer Myrddin. He died near there as well, after ruling the roost for a bit at Stonehenge. Awful boy he was too.’

‘In what way, Eddie?’ I asked.

‘Well, just think a bit about it. Merlin’s father was the Devil. His mother was a virgin. And he ends up telling Arthur, the ruler of the first Christian kingdom, how to run the country.
Don’t forget Camelot was very close to here – in Caerleon, just by Newport, in fact.’

‘That’s really interesting, Eddie. I wish I could stay and listen to more, but I’d better go now. I’m doing a show tonight at Porthcawl.’

‘As if we didn’t bloody know that already,’ said Eddie. ‘The whole village has been talking about bugger-all else. Why anyone should pay good money to listen to you chopsing on a stage about smoking weeds is beyond me. What a waste of an Oxford science education. What a bloody waste!’

‘Would you prefer I was a nuclear physicist, Eddie?’ I said walking to the door.

‘You’ve got a point. No, I’m only joking. Good luck tonight, boy
bach
. Break a leg, as your understudy might say. That’s where the saying came from you know: a Welsh actor was once performing …’

Marty and I left. Eddie’s voice receded as my mobile picked up several voice messages: Martin Baker was waiting in his car in Waunbant Road; Christine from Lloyds asked if she could have twelve tickets to give the bank staff; Polly, the area’s best skunk grower for the last ten years, wondered if she should bring some buds along tonight; Leroy, my Jamaican friend from Terre Haute prison and current security man, had called from Birmingham to say he had got lost driving from London but knew the way now; and Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics asked if I could ring him back.

‘Hi, Kelly. Howard here.’

‘All right, butt? Tell you why I called: I heard you were doing a show tonight.’

‘That’s right. You want to come along?’

‘Aye, but any chance of another ticket as well, like? I can have a lift down then.’

Kelly is one of the country’s highest-paid rock stars and could probably have a fleet of limousines on twenty-four-hour call without noticing the cost, but you can’t take the valleys out
of that boy. It was hard enough getting him out of the valleys.

‘No worries, Kelly. You can have more if you want.’

‘No, two is fine, butt. Thanks, How. Good luck for the show.’

‘Hello, Polly. Just got your message. Everything all right?’

‘Oh hello, Howard. Yes, everything is fine, thanks. Do you want me to bring something along tonight?’

‘Of course.’

‘Right, I will. You’ll never ever guess what it is: it’s my first crop of your Mr Nice Seedbank’s Super Silver Haze. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it looks as if it’s going to be the best I’ve ever grown or known.’

Back outside the house, I introduced Marty to Martin.

‘Hello, Marty. I’ve heard a lot about you. Any chance of filming an interview with you later?’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ answered Marty. ‘Last time I answered any questions about his nibs here, I was put in jail for a few years. Sorry. No offence, but I’d better say no right away and be on the safe side. Well, I’ll be off now to pick up my mother from bingo. See you later, How. Best of luck and all that.’

I led Martin Baker into the house.

‘I find that a lot of people I was hoping to interview take the same attitude, Howard. I hope Leroy won’t be the same. Do you think he’ll agree to be interviewed?’