In My Wildest Dreams Page 3

  There is, of course, the occasional comeuppance. I was giving lectures on the liner Oriana and was sitting in the library having just come across my entry in the Larousse Dictionary of Writers. I was wallowing in the phrase: 'His writing is unaffected, truthful, funny, often poignant' when I heard two ladies conversing on the other side of a huge bowl of flowers. 'This Leslie Thomas,' one said. 'They say he can write and that he's funny and charming. I can't see it myself.' Her friend replied: 'Nor can I.'

  But it has been a highly satisfying life. This semi-educated scribe has become a Doctor of Letters and a Master of Arts (both honorary, of course), I've done hundreds of broadcasts and signed thousands of books and shown off on television, without ever becoming a star. People know me, though, and they know my work. I have been happy in my homes (all twenty-six of them!) and, apart from the odd falling-out, with my immediate family.

  That is why this book is called In My Wildest, Dreams because that is where I have ended up. Not beyond them.

  PART ONE

  HOME

  I

  Stories run in our family. My father, a wandering Welsh sailor, would come in with the tide, overflowing with yarns of ships and places, although as far as the places were concerned he often wrongly pronounced them and his knowledge of where they were located was not considerable. 'Well,' he answered when once someone remarked on this. 'It's being a stoker, see. I'm hardly on the deck from the time we sail to the time we tie up. How do I know where the ports are? All I know is I've been there.'

  Similarly my mother responded to drama. Romance, tragedy, weepy songs, stirring hymns, disasters of the larger variety, weddings and especially funerals ('Oh well, it was a nice day out wasn't it?') were the enjoyments of her life, to be retold often and with increasing exaggeration. Even my birth was a tall story. According to her it took place in the pricey privacy of a nursing home on Stow Hill, the highest point of Newport, Monmouthshire. This was an elevation in more ways than one because thereafter there were times when we could scarcely manage the cost of a bed, let alone a nursing home. 'There was a terrible thunder storm,' my mother would relate, eyes beginning to glow, hands beginning to move. She had a throaty Barry Island voice. 'Terrible. Bangs and electric shocks all round the bed.' Another, possibly pregnant, wait. 'And there was me, sitting up, see . . . singing!' I could believe that. She had a faltering Welsh wail. She claimed she had sung 'Rock of Ages' between thunder claps.

  Not long ago I went up Stow Hill, a place of elderly large houses crowned by St Woolos Church, now a cathedral, and looked out over the dented roofs of Newport, my homeplace, a frontier town between England and Wales. There is a pub across the road from the churchyard and I wondered, as I sat in the bar, whether my father had drunk there. He probably had. There were few places he had missed.

  My parents agreed on little but they would gladly call an armistice to verify each other's tall stories. Like the one about the dog we had who one night came home, pleased enough, with a whole quiver of bones from the St Woolos burial ground. The road was being widened and he had taken advantage of the excavations to do some digging on his own account. In this story they actually lived ('in residence' according to my mother) on Stow Hill, possibly to be near the nursing home, but the first domicile of my memory was two rooms in Milner Street down by the murky and mucky River Usk, not far from the Transporter Bridge.

  Now there was a wonder, the Transporter Bridge. We were told at school that it was one of only two in the country and a Frenchman was brought over specially to build it. I do not doubt that. It must have been the most uneconomic way of ever taking goods, people and vehicles from one side of a river to the other. In recent years the town discovered that it would cost more to demolish it than to keep it; so they kept it. It has two massive steel structures, one on each bank, like the towers you see above Texas oil wells but taller. Between the towers is a Meccano-set bridge and slung below this on cables, a platform pulled by hawsers from one side of the river to the other. For a boy it used to cost a penny to go across.

  It was a child's delight to make that journey from bank to muddy bank of the Usk. I used to pretend I was going to another country. It was like travelling in the gondola of an airship, whirring slowly through space, the broad, black-tongued river curling below, little ships lying like dogs against its bank. On one side you could see the other more conventional town bridge and its traffic, the green cupola of the Technical College, with the wharves and warehouses and the stump of the ancient castle. Electric trams travelled in the distance, making sparks on dark days. On the other side of the Transporter, beyond the puffing steel works, the river yawned to the Bristol Channel. Misty miles away it seemed, the gateway, as my father pointed out to me in a scene reminiscent of the Boyhood of Raleigh, to the wide and amazing world. To look directly down below from the moving platform was to experience a delicious terror; snakes of thick water wriggled between slime coated by coal dust drifting from the Welsh valleys. It was legend that people had fallen or jumped and been sucked up by the hungry mud. I used to imagine them lying down deep, engulfed by the stuff . . . preserved. When the tide was up the river flowed strongly, but still foul and thick as if its bed were on top. One day, however, we saw a blithe sailing boat with scarlet sails on the moribund water and my mother burst into a loud and embarrassing chorus of a song called 'Red Sails In The Sunset'. I had to ask her to stop and I could have only been four years old.

  On another day she made a gallop for the travelling platform moments before its gate slammed, almost dragging me off the ground in her hurry. An avid funeral-spotter she had seen that the bridge's cargo was nothing less than a cortège, the hearse and the two mourners' cars standing dreadly beside a horse and cart and various pedestrians looking decently the other way. No such embarrassment discouraged my mam. We stood holding hands, neither of us being able to take our eyes from the glistening wood and shining handles of the coffin as the platform began its crossing. Unable to restrain herself any longer Mam approached the first mourning car and tapped politely but firmly on the closed window. A distraught and astonished face was framed when the glass had been lowered. 'Who is it?' she enquired in a huge whisper jerking her head towards the hearse. The wind was blowing down the Usk and the platform was swaying.

  Hardly able to credit the enquiry the mourner, a man in a black bowler hat, haltingly told her the identity of the deceased. My mam thanked him and whispered: 'There's a pity,' before the window was hurriedly rolled up again. Only a toddler, I witnessed this brazenness with amazement and admiration. She returned to me and once more took hold of my hand. 'Nobody we know,' she confided.

  The Transporter Bridge straddling the river can now be seen afar from the railway or the motorway like a giant standing over Newport. The borough used to have a nice little Victorian town hall with a big white clock in the main street too, but they knocked that down and built a flat-roofed store instead. You could see the hands of the clock from Stow Hill and, it was rumoured, even further. I remember that town hall well because on the night that Japan surrendered and the war was finally over I went down there dressed as a girl. It was only in fun (the nuances would have been lost on me then) and the boy next door encouraged me. The clothes were his sister's. During the general dancing and celebrations a soldier grabbed me and shouted 'We've won! We've won!' and he kissed me on the lips.

  Along the river bank from the Transporter Bridge was a wharf beside the steelworks. One morning in the unemployed nineteen-thirties, my father took me there to act as bait in getting a job aboard a little coaster. 'Suck your cheeks in. Try to look half-starved,' he suggested as we went aboard. It was not difficult. I had seen my mother burst into tears when, having seen the plates put out for tea, I enquired: 'Well, there's the plates – all we want now is something to put on them.'

  The skipper of the coaster was presumably impressed by the waif because he not only gave my father the job as a stoker on his weekly boat (so named because it went to Ireland and back in a week)
but took us to his cabin where he spread out a hundred or more coins on his polished table. It was like a treasure and my eyes shone. 'Let's see what we can give the boy' ruminated the captain. He shuffled the wealth about while I trembled with anticipation but eventually decided that every coin was foreign except one, a halfpenny, which he pressed with ceremony into my hand.

  During his workless times, and they lasted weeks and months, my father used to look disconsolately for odd jobs ashore, sit at home eating bread and cheese (all he ever ate) or go to the public library to stare at the papers. When he got his dole money my mother would escort him to make sure he did not head for the nearest public bar. Once, the money in his pocket, he abruptly announced that he had been informed in a vision that our house was on fire. Before she could stop him (I was with them and she was holding my hand and that of my young brother) he had loped off into the dusk. He came home at midnight, plastered and penniless, and she threw the chamber pot over his head. Hurt and in a huff he went away and we did not see him again for nearly two years. Then he turned up in the middle of the night. He had been on a ship to Argentina and was dressed in a goucho's outfit and plucking a guitar. He said he thought it would make her laugh.

  There was an announcement one day that a free concert was to be given for the children of the unemployed. It was held at an extraordinary Grecian building with white portico and marble columns, which sat incongruously amid the straight streets and was the steel works social institute. My father took me and I sat enthralled by the various acts that attempted to temporarily alleviate the misery of the workless. We sang with feeling a song called 'I Do Like Potatoes And Gravy', a social commentary if ever there was one. One performance thrilled me more than any, a whistler who whistled through his fingers while adopting various poses, on a bicycle, on a chair, and standing on his head. It seemed to me that he whistled better when he was upside down than he did when the right way up. When he had finished the applause shook the Grecian columns. 'Oh, Dad,' I enthused. 'He was good, wasn't he!'

  His reply was heartfelt: 'There's too many of them,' he said. Both my parents were born in Barry, Glamorgan, twenty-five miles or so inside Wales, west of Cardiff, a town which managed to combine the difficult functions of being both a seaside resort and a coaling port. More than one hundred years ago, the importance of coal transformed it from a village of fewer than one hundred inhabitants into a major town. 1 have heard it described as Sin City and the Candyfloss Capital of the Western World.

  There was an excellent deep water harbour where the ships would load Welsh steam coal brought down from the valleys, colliers waiting with grey patience out in the Bristol Channel, in Barry Roads, for their turn to berth. This gritty occupation was successfully kept separate from the seaside resort on Barry Island and it was only with a contrary wind that coal dust speckled the ice creams on the beach. Some people thought it was decoration. On the other hand the prevailing breeze often enlivened the dusty environs of the port with the fragrance of ozone and fish and chips.

  Barry Island, which boasted (and may still do so for all I know) of being the nearest seaside resort to Birmingham, is not an island at all. A railway embankment and a road stretch out of the resort with its twin beaches, one of sand and one of globular white pebbles, divided by a headland called Cold Knapp. Between the two are the municipal open-air swimming baths where, in the summer the war ended, I entered for the town aquatic gala. I was three months over fourteen and my sole opponent in the 'Over-14s, Under-18s One-hundred-yards Freestyle Race' was a day under eighteen, a fierce Tarzan-like youth whose leopard-skin swimming trunks, tight around his thighs, contrasted vividly with the two pairs I was wearing of plum-coloured, sagging wool; worn in tandem because the holes in one covered the holes in the other.

  The event had encouraged a large and festive crowd to the pool. They had a bonus as this white ribbed competitor struck the water a measurable time and distance behind his athletic opponent and as he did so both pairs of trunks fell down. As I gamely struck out in the wake of Tarzan they dangled around my knees, leaving me both handicapped and humiliated. Hoots and exclamations were provoked by my bare bum surfacing. 'That boy's lost his knicks!' I heard someone shout coarsely. Somehow I managed to pull them up around my waist again. Tarzan was now just a splash on the horizon and, in truth, by the time I had completed the course the competitors were already lining up for the next race. Nevertheless, there being only two competitors in mine, I was awarded second prize, a pig-skin hairbrush (the first prize had merely the addition of a comb). Much more important, the results were printed in the local newspaper and my aunt and uncle, with whom I was staying, put it around the town that I was a potential Olympic champion. It was also the first time I had ever seen my name in print.

  All that occurred half a century after my grandfather had retired from the adventurous business of rounding Cape Horn on the shrieking deck of a sailing ship. He left the sea, so he said, because he abhorred bad language and one imagines there was a certain degree of that among the calloused crews of those wild waters. It must have been difficult to make a decent comment when you'd just lost a finger. He refused to go to the annual dinners of the Cape Horners for the same reason. 'There is never any excuse for blasphemy,' he used to say to his children.

  Back beyond my grandfather was a long tradition of sailors and sea. There were two great-aunts who had voyaged on sailing ships and who, in their eighties, ascended ladders to clean the upper windows of their house in Cardiff and apparently climbed on to the roof itself to get a better view of the Jubilee procession in 1935.

  We called the old grandfather Papa, a genteel appellation and apparently we were a family of some substance in Barry in those days. He started a business repairing ships in Barry Dock, later to extend to Cardiff, Newport and ports all around the Bristol Channel. He had the good idea that if he had workmen in all these ports then the vessels would not have to interrupt their coastal voyages while repairs were carried out. He was derisive of steamships, often quoting the sailing man's jibe: 'Wooden ships, men of iron – iron ships, men of wood.' Nevertheless the boilers of the steamships required scaling and it provided additional prosperity. In the eighteen-nineties he was also alleged to have been Harbourmaster of Barry Dock, a boast I have heard many times. His family – there were twelve or thirteen children – lived in a substantial manner. My grandfather was a Liberal candidate in an election in the early years of this century and his election address photograph shows him with a dipping moustache and matching watch chain. Lloyd George knew my grandfather and my grandfather knew Lloyd George and made some attempt to look like him.

  Americans like to hear stories more than any other race apart from Arabs, and many years later I spoke about my Grandad during a New York television programme. I was wearing a watch chain across a grey waistcoat and the interviewer concluded, with no great prompting from me, that this was Grandad's. He plainly required me to elaborate, so, to my shame, I said: 'Yes, this was Papa's watch and chain.' I took the bright and bulbous thing from my pocket and dangled it. 'It arrived,' I related, 'in a package in the post with a note which said "I have always wanted you to have this. It was your grandfather's." There was no signature.' There was no truth either for I had made it up on the spur of the moment and, in fact, the watch was bought by my wife in an antique shop. But I was unable to resist telling them a yarn. They seemed very pleased and interested, too.

  My Auntie Kate, who lived with my silver-haired Uncle Jack Roscoe in Barry (although they did not visit the beach – 'The Sands' – for twenty years or more) and with whom I spent holidays at the end of the war, cooked the Christmas pudding that was Papa's ultimate meal. He expired on the afternoon of Christmas Day, 1938, having retired to the red-velvet front room for a nap after lunch. He had been in the habit of going, rather daringly for him, to auctions held every Saturday night and once he came home with a nice wall clock. Auntie Kate alleged that, like the old song, the clock stopped at the very moment he died and never went
again.

  Auntie Kate was as thin as a vein, with red hair tight in a bun; her greatest achievement was catching flies in flight. She could catch them when she was staring absently out of the window, while she was gossiping, or while she was eating cake. It was remarkable. She had not missed a fly in forty years, or so she told me. She never did it, however, when people came to tea. That, she said, would be showing off. She had even caught flies when she was singing. For she was another Welsh singer. At her most exalted note she went into a locked gargle as if she were drowning. If she could not sleep she would get up and smash out midnight hymns on the piano, howling like a glutton. Neighbours feared these moments but lovely old Uncle Jack Roscoe would wake up and, lying back on the pillows, accompany her from bed. One night he heard a cat howling and after ascertaining that Auntie Kate was innocently snoring at his flank, he threw one of his working boots out of the window and never saw it again.

  Of my father's relatives the only ones I knew during my early childhood before the war were this kindly pair. They looked after my grandmother until the old lady died still convinced that Grandad had been elected to Parliament, which was why he did not come home any more. They were simple and childless. 'Children makes you poor,' Kate used to recite a little regretfully. 'Don't go foreign,' was another of her proverbs, warning me against a life at sea. 'Go on the Company', the Company in question being the Great Western Railway. Sometimes she used to cry while laughing as she told me about my father's youth in Barry. How he had ridden the milkman's horse around a field one night so that it was too knackered to pull the milk cart the next morning; how he had once materialised at a roller-skating dance, scattering the participants by zig-zagging between them clad in a bonnet and shawl and with an appropriated perambulator containing a screeching baby. 'Oh, that Jim,' she used to say wistfully, wiping her eyes. 'That Jim Thomas.' And it was nearly half a century before.