by Dai Smith
They lived where they did and they did what they did because both had married women from the Valley, and were so drawn by marriage into lives which neither might have quite envisaged or wanted, for sure. They were drawn back or into our orbit. It was our orbit without any qualification because we who were born there had no other in our early life, nor wanted any other in those cosseted post-war days. Not that this was ever entirely true of Theresa.
Our fathers had travelled together to the Valley by train from Portsmouth after shipping back from the continent they had, as those jovial newsreels put it, helped liberate. Whatever was familiar and welcoming after so long a time away, even the frequency with which pubs punctuated the main road up the Valley, would not have delayed or hindered them as they marched in step and in uniform to the hospital set in isolation, above the river and the houses and the collieries, in a wooded grove on an otherwise denuded hill. Theresa and I were to be the first home-grown fruit of their personal liberation. I was my father’s first child and would be named Gareth after him, and Idwal after his father, a North Walian. I would only know my Grancha from a solitary beside-the-seaside snap of him and Jane, his equally long-dead wife. My father had met Doreen, my mother, when he’d found work in the thirties as a baker’s roundsman in Wembley, and she was “in service” in West London. The war had sent them home, though my father had vowed never to work in the pits again, as he had once done in his youth. He kept his word on that, but only after the war. She waited for him through the war in the house where she’d been born, the only thing of any worth which her parents could leave to her, as they duly did.
Theresa was named after a saint, and was the third child and first daughter of Buddug Riley née Bowen. She had met Brian Riley, her Irish husband, when he turned up in the wintertime of 1935 with the travelling fair of whirling rides and hoopla stalls which pitched up in the Valleys’ townships over Christmas and the New Year. Brian Riley fixed things. He painted things. He dismantled things. He moved things. He erected things and, at night, slightly built but sinewy strong he pushed and pulled the dodgem cars, everyone’s favourite and squeal-guaranteed ride, in and out of line. It was the nearest we came to glamour amongst the eye-watering smart and chest-catching stench of cheap petrol fumes and the crack of air rifles or the thud of feathered darts as collier boys sought to win prizes of pink or blue chalk figurines of stalking polar bears for their cwtched-in girlfriends. One such was the nineteen-year-old Buddug Bowen, who caught the eye of dark-haired Brian Riley, and moved away from the familiar. She mistook his self-containment for some other depth, perhaps, and the wandering twenty-five-year-old fairground roustabout maybe saw a fleeting innocence of form in the girl who liked to flirt. All I can say for brute certainty is that when eighteen years later I first knew her to look at her, what had won Brian Riley over to stay was not readily apparent in the dumpy shape of the woman perpetually in the pinafore smock worn over her dress, or in the pudginess of a face permanently dented by the smouldering tube of a half-smoked cigarette from which she would light its immediate successor from her apron pocket. And yet, when she danced, and she did that in the street, alone or in the arms of one of her sons, and when she drank, as she did from flagons of beer or cider just tipped back, laughing as she sat on her front garden wall, then she was, in her motion and in her eyes, to all of us who watched, and even for those who disapproved, as undeniably vital as she was eerily enchanting. And if you looked long and hard you might have found her to be, as we secretly did, disturbing.
Disturbing, that is, even by the standards of the raucous street lives we then led. For, at that time, any excuse was made and taken for living-it-up out of the doors we never locked. Perhaps it was the sense of collective release, or a surge of individual spirits after the war, which came with the men’s return to households of supportive grandmothers, aunties, sisters, mothers and children. Perhaps it was just the way we all lived then, together whether we chose to be or not, because there was no real choice. I suppose half a century on, looking back, we would appear rough even to ourselves. Our reputation at the time was not in doubt.
Fighting in the street was as much part of the street furniture as card schools and the Salvation Army band. And not just after the pubs closed. And not just between men. Cross words and imagined slights might drive women to wallop each other with the heavy squares of coconut-matting they’d been shaking, a moment before, on their doorsteps. Boys were encouraged, with the gift of birthday or Christmas boxing gloves, to match up for an impromptu scrap. Ball games, cricket wickets and goalposts chalked onto the concrete of a pine-end wall, could be played, in and out of season, by day and in the dusk, until the thud and thump brought the inhabitants out to scatter the players until the next time. Footraces, hide-and-seek in and out of people’s gardens, and that Kiss-Kick-or-Torture in the bushes which grew more bizarre in its various outcomes as we grew older. Trestle tables could suddenly appear, lugged out from church halls, chapels and workingmen’s clubs, to signal a street party. Special ones, for royal birthdays or the Coronation, when all political twitches were stilled by a sugary binge of jelly and trifle and iced dainties, were made grandiose amongst our drab streets by flags and bunting and balloons. After the children were fed at these parties the booze came out and with the booze came the dancers, and that would be when I first noticed Mrs. Riley jitterbugging to a gramophone record wound up to play, over and over, “American Patrol”.
That particular party was for a homecoming. We’d had a few already for boys coming back from the Korean War or just their National Service. All done, and celebrated, in the lee of the bigger War which hung over us, its end a relief, its shadow cast over our assigned futures. Only, this homecoming was neither for soldiers nor innocents. It was for James and Llewellyn Riley, Buddug’s two sons by her Irish husband, Brian, now installed as a hands-on foreman in the painting and decorating firm of W.P.T. Davies, J.P. For her boys, Buddug Riley had Brian fetch his ladders and string across the narrow roadway of our street – a cul-de-sac that buckled downwards in the middle and rose at thirty-degree angles at either end – a home-made banner torn from bed-sheets, and daubed in the best red paint her husband could find. Its emblazoned capital letters said:
“WELCUM HOME JIMMIE AND LEWIE”.
They were a handsome but contrasting pair. Jimmy was slender and fair with deep-set hazel-tinted eyes, whilst his younger brother, Llew, was thick-set with Brian Riley’s blue-black thickly plastered hair and his pale blue far-away eyes. The boys were eighteen and sixteen years old. They’d been away a while: James Riley in Wormwood Scrubs and Llewellyn Riley in a borstal for more juvenile offenders. The offence, which they held in common, was for theft with aggravated assault. They’d broken into the vicarage, stolen petty cash and pewter plates and candlesticks, and thrown a heavy white clay pot of Keiller’s marmalade at the vicar’s wife when she walked through the front door as they left by the back. They missed. Or, it was assumed, at least, by the magistrate, W.P.T. Davies, instructed by his employee, Brian Riley, that the elder thief had missed. The likeable and mischievous younger sibling would have been our best guess. Either way, not everyone approved of their joint homecoming as an excuse for a party, but as I’ve said, a party in the street was universally irresistible whatever its ostensible reason and, as usual, the withdrawn Brian Riley was there looking on, with Theresa in the crook of his arm, as his carefree wife jigged on and on.
Brian was liked for his good manners and admired for his fortitude. He was equally pitied for his troubles and scorned for his complaisance. That last was not a word we would have commonly used at the time but we would know what it meant. You only had to look at him, and then Theresa, to know that. When Brian Riley was at home she scarcely left his side. She was a quiet, almost grave, child, who returned look for look. We stared at the difference between us as she grew more and more distinctive. Theresa stood out and soon stood apart. My father’s own story, quietly told, of what Brian Riley had said to him when he first
saw his acknowledged and accepted daughter had become everyone’s story of that life of a Riley.
In the spring of 1945 the two soldiers had quick stepped into the maternity ward and spotted their respective wives in opposite corners of the bare and airy room. One of the nurses on duty half-clapped, half-cheered, and then stifled her welcome for the soldiers as she saw their destination. At the side of the iron-framed beds, with their council-stamped and starched linen creased into shape, were the unvarnished wooden side bars of tiny cots. Beneath heavy grey and blue woollen blankets were tiny pink heads with strands of hair and snubby pink noses and translucent pink lips. My father kissed my mother and, he said, gurgled a bit over me in all my fresh pinkness. Brian Riley had kissed his wife, who shrank back into her pillow as her soldier-husband leaned over the tiny cot, and stared at the baby girl in it. He looked back up at his wife and then over to my father who was listening close to the whispers of my mother. And then, saying nothing to anyone, Brian Riley ran from the Ward. His army boots had clattered down the disinfected corridors and out again like a manic drum roll.
My father found him in the White Hart, one pint and a large whiskey chaser already drained and another pair set up. Brian Riley, who had fought blind with him, with sand in their nostrils and fear in their mouths across the deserts of North Africa, and killed murderously with him amongst the hedgerow tangle of the bocage of Normandy, only glanced at my father, and said:
“Gareth, your woman’s a Darkie.
She’s black. The babby is black.
Black as the hobs of hell, she is.”
My father told me that after that they both got drunk, stupefied drunk, crawling home by leaning against each other on the pavement and in the gutter. My mother filled in the back story after they’d all been long gone. Buddug Bowen, she said, had always been one to go off the rails. She might, my mother had sniffed, even already been pregnant with her first son when she snaffled up the travelling Irishman, and rooted him in our spot. Llew, though, was certainly his, and the family had seemed as settled together as any other in those hard times. And then, when the war came, Brian, though a citizen of the Irish Free State as it then was, volunteered for the British Army in some species of brotherhood with those all around him, receiving call-up papers as 1939 bled into 1940. Five years away and things seen and done but not to write about, or later recount, in infrequent letters and postcards. A generation passed through a black hole of absence as empty as the gravitational pull of death itself, and came out the other side of existence. Our fathers.
Brian Riley’s wife, in her mid-twenties, had brought her widowed mother into the house to look after her boys whilst she travelled by bus out of the Valley to work in the munitions factory, assembling bombs, detonators, explosives, on the coastal plain to the south. Her fingers turned yellow and her cigarette-cough worsened but she could afford endless packets of fags now, and garish make-up and cheap, bright clothes. It was, amongst all the parakeet chatter of women finding work together for the first time in their lives, not enough. My mother sat with her on the bus that chugged back each day, full of bone-tired women, to the Valley. Buddug said that the money was great, but it was company she wanted. Once she asked my mother if she had the same yearnings as she had eating away at her. Needs, she’d said, and when my mother took Buddug’s meaning she decided not to give her the benefit of any discussion on the subject. Some things, my mother implied, were best left alone, unsaid. What you felt was what you felt. And nothing to be done about it. And then, suddenly, in the months of 1944 before that summer of change, there was something to do about it.
The first American troops, readying for the invasion, arrived in the Valley by train to be taken by truck to their tented camps. Officers were billeted amongst the few so-called professional families we had – teachers, doctors, solicitors, clergy, shopkeepers. The G.I. Joes were under canvas on municipal playing fields and the lower mountain slopes that had a semblance of flatness. They came to us from a world we had already lived as a fantasy. Their actual physical presence was tricked out with a gift-wrapped offering of clothes, food, goodies and health. They marched, in loose and insolent formation, to the soaring enticement of brass, and they danced, louche and daring, to the swoop of swing bands assembled for the social evenings to welcome them, and all too often embrace them. My mother said that a lot of the local women, married as well as single, would take to hanging about the camp perimeters, just for a look, a smile, a contact. She said that they were like crows shuffling up together on a telephone wire, and then, one by one, flying down.
In all the camps there were, as we and they would all say then, Negro cooks and orderlies to wait and serve. But one camp, made up entirely of combat infantry, was solely for black Americans. These black GIs were never seen in the company of their white equivalents in the streets of the Valley or in its shops and when they collided in the Valley’s pubs there were stand-offs, squabbles, and knives could match fists. The segregation, of course, was extended to the dances. But it could only be officially enforced for the troops. The white American G.I. was not the only overseas source of glamour for women who chose not to shun the black Yanks who had also come. When all the troops departed from the Valley there were, again, no more non-white faces to be seen, and, except for the occasional Chinese laundry worker, there would not be again for decades to come. Through the 1940s and 1950s we saw no black faces except for those glimpsed in bit parts on the screen. None at all. Except, of course, for that of Theresa Riley.
What Brian Riley learned from his wife of her wartime liaison was never revealed. He retreated into incessant work and a blow-out drinking session every Saturday night. He did not neglect Buddug materially but, it seemed, in every other way he shunned her and did nothing to halt her self-neglect. She became slovenly in bearing and her looks, though they could flash back through a memory imprinted somewhere inside her, drained from her grasp. The house, at times loud with drink and quarrel, conspired to empty itself of comfort, as if to match her. Slattern was the word that was used. Brian Riley shared neither anger nor despair nor forgiveness. He was, in all this, set apart and we, in our pitiful ignorance, allowed it to be so because we probably thought that it was the only life this Riley could now have.
The two sons had, at Brian Riley’s languid insistence, attended the local Roman Catholic school and, no doubt, Theresa would have followed them when the time came if it was not for the priest who had come to the house one day to tell him, amongst other priestly things, as Brian had later told my father, that a sin should be forgiven even if the sin was there in front of him day by inescapable day. The priest had been shown the door for his lack of understanding, and Theresa went instead to the Council School, aptly named Mixed Infants. Brian Riley took her there himself and saw to it that he was free to bring her home every afternoon until she was old enough to go and return, like the rest of us, by herself. Maybe that is where the bond between them was made, and grew strong.
As for us, the silent witnesses to all this, Theresa played with and amongst us, her reserve a barrier but her presence, as one of us, not questioned, except for once when a boy told her that her skin looked dirty because she didn’t wash it and was answered by a smack to his face. That brought an angry mother to the door, but a father sent her away, his own unfathomable anger fiercer than the woman’s indignation. Brian and Theresa. That is what they had, separately, become. The Rileys. Father and Daughter. Outsiders, both. Insiders, too. How he treated her, and how she grew up, was to be all.
We were not, ourselves, without our common share of prejudice, and I do not excuse the unthinking depth of what we had, and the names we used to label it, if I also say that it ran mostly against the things we thought we knew as in opposition to ourselves. The familiarity of a threat, not the general absence of otherness. In that sense, Brian Riley’s wayward decision to send his daughter, Theresa, to our school would have met with approval. There we had no religious observation other than a morning hymn sung raggedly
to the thumped-out piano accompaniment of moustachioed Miss Bentley. Our worst prejudice was stored up for Catholics, and whether this had its origins in the tensions aroused by imported strike breakers a century before and the anti-Irish riots that had caused, or in the native distrust of the influence of priests, the chicanery of ceremonial worship and the foreignness of Romanism, there was no argument but that Catholics were, for us, a recognisable threat.
This was given a bricks-and-mortar symbolism in the squat presence, a few terraced streets below our schoolyard, of the Roman Catholic school. Once a year, without set cause or reason, the two schools emptied from their asphalt yards in maddened swarms that rushed to meet in confrontation. Teachers were alerted too late, helpless to act as guards, swept over and around by whatever induced instinct or impulse had possessed us. And so it would happen no matter what, and we stooped to the road to gather handfuls of loose stones to shove into the bulging pockets of our short trousers. At the back of our insane child-army, the girls yelled us on and we hurled the stones, flat and pointed and egg-sized, into the air to criss-cross the rain of stones with which we were being showered. When they fell to the ground on either side they were picked up again, and the primitive battery started over. In the third year in a row when this had happened, and all before I was nine years old, a boy on their side lost an eye when a sharp-edged flint splintered into the eye socket it had cracked. We didn’t know him, only his name in the paper to be read out. And, of its own accord, somehow it stopped.