Dream On

by Dai Smith

  Beyond these flares of anarchy in which we had revelled, back in our high-windowed Victorian classrooms, sat two by two on bench seats at our double desks, we were winnowed out as chaff and wheat, conducted towards our destined futures. The more likely candidates for success in the scholarship exam that awaited and which would ordain who was to be a clerk, of whatever kind, and who not, were sat at the back of the five rows of desks which stretched from the coal fire and teacher’s table at the front of the classroom. They were in positions of attentive trust already. The least talented or wilfully unattentive were sat in the front rows of those iron-framed, sloping desks with their white china inkwells centred in the dark and pitted wood. That is where Theresa Riley, front and centre, was placed by Mr Rosser, and tormented.

  Mr Rosser, balding, stocky, ancient beyond the ages to us although he can have been no more than in his mid-forties, taught through terror. He had been a prisoner of the Japanese and was spoken of by our parents in hushed tones of sympathy and respect. To us, as no doubt elsewhere to them, he told his tales of degradation and misery at the hands of that infamously evil, and “yellow”, people. He had, it was understood, suffered for us, and so he made us suffer. His hands were hard. His testing of us ceaseless. He dessicated our minds with the rote learning of times tables, of numbers, the chanting of spelling words, with penmanship and shading, which is what, with chalk on a blackboard, he taught as the principles of all drawing. Reading was to be done silently: knuckles were rapped with a ruler if lips moved. The bane of his life was the essay, a task we would all have to undertake if the scholarship exam was to save some of us from the secondary modern school, a fate he could make sound like the near-death experience of a Japanese POW camp.

  Mr Rosser set the range of topics to be encountered, and week-by-week he would pick one from animals to adventures to hobbies and holidays or gardens and pets. The set essay he chose for us at the end of a summer term in 1953 was: My Favourite Day Out. He gave out sheets of lined foolscap, made sure our nibs were clean and our wooden shafted pens ready to dip into the black ink-filled wells. Then he walked between the rows of desks, nodding and smiling as if we had been blessed to be with him on this afternoon. He muttered as he went: “A gift, boys and girls. A gift. A gift.” He rubbed his chalk-smeared hands together: “Now. Just think. Think before you ink! A day out. Not going to be from school to home, is it? So where, eh? Where? Porthcawl and the fireworks at Coney Beach? The scenic railway and Barry Island? Cardiff Castle? Or, maybe, for you lucky ones who’ve been, Blackpool and the world-famous illuminations?”

  We scribbled, I think, rather than thought. Mine was a bus trip over the mountain to Aberdare to visit relatives and see their magnificent, we thought, park. I used words like “odour” for flowerbeds and “splendid” for the bandstand. I wrote of “Happy Families feeding the Ducks” with leftover fish paste sandwiches. I was a tourist brochure copywriter in the making. We had twenty minutes to exhaust our imaginations before Mr Rosser would bark out, “Pens down”, and the monitors would collect the wet sheets of paper. Judgement would come later. We knew it would not be benign.

  Mr Rosser had long made us aware of our frailties as potential scholars. We were more froth than cream. He told us, “Gratitude is owed to the council and to the inspired generations who have secured the chance of education for boys and girls like you”. We were all included by his panoramic glare around our ranks with that “You”. We had to understand we were made of common clay, the muck of our ancestry, from which we had been mis-shapenly moulded. But now, for us, there were “Chances. Opportunities Your Parents Never Had.” And to prove to us who these benighted and bereft people, our parents, really, in all their hopelessness, were, he would periodically humiliate us as we jumped up and down to his prompts:

  “Stand on the seat anyone whose father works in the pit.”

  That meant three quarters of the class.

  “Stand on the seat anyone whose father works with his hands.”

  That meant everyone else.

  “Stand on the seat everyone whose father smokes.”

  That meant all of the class except for the three whose fathers had been killed in a pit explosion, though they’d stood for the work question anyway.

  “Stand on the seat any boy or girl whose father drinks beer.”

  That still meant a majority.

  “Stand on the seat anyone whose father bets on the horses.”

  For some reason this was felt as a deeply unwanted slur and even some whose fathers did indeed study form on the back pages, did not rise.

  And after this, though there would be variations to his peremptory tune, would come his clanging note of doom.

  “Stand on the seat any boy or girl whose mother smokes and drinks.”

  At which point, with relief, there would be a mass sit-down. Except for innocent and truthful Theresa Riley, who had stood after the first question and did so yet, alone and unwavering, until Mr Rosser dismissively waved her down.

  Theresa had become taller than the rest of the girls, and was as tall as most of the boys. When she stood on the bench, alone at the end of the ordeal, she seemed at a higher level altogether. She stood two feet at least above Mr Rosser himself. She kept a fixed stare over his shiny head to a distant point of a far wall. So hard and long did she stare that she might have been looking through and beyond the wall itself. She stood perfectly still. Her legs were bare above her white ankle socks, her feet in the black rubber daps with which she seemed to glide over the playground and run in scores at rounders after she slammed the ball out of sight. She was ramrod straight in a red-and-white spotted cotton dress with a lace collar and three dark red buttons on its bodice. Her hair was a tangle of curls. Her skin shimmered like the translucence of a peat stream. Outside the class, when our fathers met to talk and took us along with them on mountain walks, I hoped she was becoming my friend. I wanted her to be that.

  Behind the houses of our upper terraced street was an unmade back lane. It ran parallel with the street. Beyond that was a vertically running path, bounded by bushes of mayflower in season, that led to the farm which had been there before all of us. And then there was the open mountainside rolling upwards, riven by stone-bedded streams, to its plateaux of whinberry-covered uplands. But before you reached the sky, it was something quite other. The colliery, just half a mile onto the mountain and below the ascent to its tabletop, had been closed in the wake of the 1926 strike and lock-out, never to re-open. In the war it had been torn down and mangled for whatever purposes its paraphernalia of iron, steel and brick might serve, but it had not been removed. Its buildings were ruins whose rubble we inhabited throughout the summer. The pit-head wheels had been dismantled but the engine house, its long thin broken-paned windows marking out its high Victorian walls, was a recognisable space, a hall whose bolted-down turbines and boilers beckoned us to play beneath its roofless shelter. Across the blue-cobbled yards of the pit were the weigh stations, the clerks’ offices, the pay office, sheer walls one brick wide across whose parapet-to-death we tightroped to safety, and outbuildings flooded with rust-brown watery pools over whose fathomless depths we swung on frayed steel hawsers that whipped back to the next waiting boy as we let go to land on the mounds of loose bricks on the other side. To the south of this wasteland left us by our forefathers was a honeycombed tumble of hillocks and hollows piled together from the rubbish spewed up by the workings. It was a landscape of ashen white and dull red shale, and it was still in places warm underfoot, smouldering and sulphurous. We knew it as the Burning Tip, and even we moved cautiously amongst its falling overhangs and crumbling bluffs. No girls ever joined us on these adult-free expeditions, and Theresa especially was guarded by her father’s close instructions.

  Sometimes, on Sunday mornings usually, Brian Riley would knock on our door and, pre-arranged I suppose from the previous night’s drinking, my father and I would join him and Theresa to walk on the mountain before the custom-and-practice of a Sunday afte
rnoon’s sleep, when I would be kicked out to Sunday School and Theresa to their patch of garden. One time, not too many years after the war and when we were still children enough to hold hands, we trailed behind our fathers beyond the Burning Tip and the colliery ruins and its bile-green feeder dam where dogs were drowned and teenagers swam, until we reached a mountain stream that rushed a little more slowly before its helter-skelter descent from the plateau above into the dam below. Here, Theresa and I gathered smaller, flatter stones and brush as our fathers, laughing like boys, waving their cigarettes at each other, rolled up their trouser legs and, shoeless and sockless, waded up to their knees in the swirl of water. They threw their lit cigarettes into the stream from whose bottom of gravel and pebbles they heaved to the surface the largest boulders they could find, and hugged their wet mossy stones to their chests. Then, boulder by boulder, as we sat on an island of turf past which the stream flowed, they built a wall until the waters of the stream grew stiller and glassier behind its dam. It was then that Theresa and I could paddle, too, and our fathers lay on the banks of the turf island and smoked their glowing cigarettes, one after the other, until it was time to go down.

  At the edge of the colliery’s feeder dam, a pond about twenty yards across and another twenty to its retaining wall of quarried mountain stone, we paused. Out of his inside coat pocket my father took a tin toy boat he had bought for me in the market. It was a tug boat, black and brown and white, with a high bow and a low, broad stern on whose right hand side was a large square silver key to wind it up. For that was the joy of it. It moved, propelled mechanically and guided by a rudder that was there, in place, to make it turn, and return. We had tried it in the oval tin bath which was put before the coal fire every Sunday night for my weekly bath. But the tug boat frustrated us because the bath was too small, and so it went round the sides of the bath once we had set its clockwork in motion to cross the bathwater, and simply bumped along the sides. Now my father would show us what it could do. He smiled at me as he took out the concealed boat. He wound it up as far as its spring would go. He held the key tightly between finger and thumb. He bent down and put the boat, with its profile-painted figure of a tugboat captain in the wheelhouse, carefully into the lapping water. He looked at Theresa and me, and grinned at his friend, Brian Riley. Then, with extreme care, he let the key go and the tin tugboat bravely chugged out onto the colliery feeder dam and kept a straight line towards the wall of the dam. “Now, wait,” my father said, still hunkered down at the dam’s edge. “Wait. Watch. It’ll turn in a minute and come back.” And as we watched it did begin to turn, its high bow rippling the water and its stern skewing to the right, until, right in the middle, the clockwork stopped dead and the tugboat began to sway gently on the water as the wind sighed down from the mountain top. It was too far out to rescue. My father, I think, hesitated. It had cost 10/6d in its cardboard box, and I loved it most of all. There was a slight wash of water over its back. It swayed, and began silently to sink into the depths of the dam. “Oh, fuck,” said my father, not turning to look at me. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” said Brian Riley as he flipped his cigarette into the dam. And then Theresa took my hand in hers, and said nothing, and did not look at me, and squeezed my hand in her hand.

  On the day of the essay test she had been as distantly self-absorbed as ever. She had sat alone, cross-legged, in the schoolyard bouncing a small rubber ball to and fro off a wall, catching it one-handed and then starting up again. She trooped in when the school bell rang, ready to endure another afternoon. Her school marks were never better than adequate. She gave out the sense of someone waiting rather than expecting. That afternoon when the essays telling of our fantastic days out had been placed, unread as yet, on his desk, Mr Rosser finished the day by quizzing us on the destination our essays had described. And one by one we told him of charabancs and seasides and chapel outings and steam trains and all of the setting out early and arriving back late which our valley location ensured, until we were back safe, tucked up, tired and, oh so grateful and childhood happy, we said. In the middle of all this came Theresa’s turn to answer.

  “Where did you go, girl?” Mr Rosser asked.

  “Africa,” she said.

  “Africa? Africa? What on God’s Earth do you mean, Africa?”

  “I went to Africa.”

  “How for God’s sake? How?”

  “In an aeroplane.”

  “In a plane?”

  “Yes. In a plane. Just for the afternoon.”

  “The afternoon. You stupid girl, you can’t go to Africa for the afternoon, can you?”

  “I did.”

  “No you didn’t. You said you did, it seems, but you didn’t because you can’t, can you?”

  “I did, though.”

  “Look Theresa Riley, an examiner would not be impressed, and I am not impressed, not after all I’ve taught you. See? You couldn’t because no one can. See?”

  “But I did.”

  Then Mr Rosser grabbed her by her hair and yanked her to her feet. His face was mottled, red and yellowed with righteous anger. “Get on the seat, girl,” he shouted into her startled face. “Get on the seat.”

  “Now, for the last time, because I will not have cheek. Will not have insolence. Will not have fools and liars in this class. No matter what you wrote, you will say now, in front of everyone, that you cannot go to Africa for the afternoon, and come back. You cannot. Learn that, girl. It’s called a fact, see.”

  Theresa looked down at him. She did not cry. She did not smile. She said, in her quiet Welsh voice:

  “I did, though. I wrote it, and so I did it. I went to Africa for the afternoon.”

  Mr Rosser leaned towards her face from the waist. His hand appeared from behind his back like a flat pink paddle, and he slapped her as hard as he could across the back of her legs, so hard and so often on both of her legs that she did cry out, and we could almost feel the sting and smart of her flesh, and we could see the livid, puckering weals that rose to the surface of her skin and quivered there like blistered creatures. Mr Rosser began to shake. Theresa stood, also trembling but without a sound now, until her teacher pushed her down hard onto the bench.

  I do not think Theresa told anyone at home, though I suppose the marks on her bare legs might have alerted her mother, if she had been aware of her child. But it was my mother who waited until she saw Brian Riley coming up the street after work and intercepted him to tell him what I had told her. He thanked her, and nodded. Nothing more than that, she said. But that is why he walked to the school with his daughter the next day and did not leave her at the gate to the schoolyard but marched with her into the classroom where Mr Rosser sat at his desk until Brian Riley hauled him to his feet by his tie and shirt-front, and hit him with a clenched fist, full in the face and not once but twice until the teacher fell to the floor, sprawled against his table. Father and daughter then left together, Theresa holding his hand tight.

  Jimmy and Llew Riley were no longer living at home, the one in jail again, the other in the Army. Brian Riley gave the house and what was in it to his wife, along with what money he had in his bank book. He packed a case for himself and his daughter and, with only a handshake for my father, he took Theresa’s hand in his and went away with her. It was my mother who later found in the back lane behind our house Brian Riley’s discarded army blouse. The single chevron of a bombardier in the Royal Artillery had been torn off at the sleeve.

  Sweets and Treats

  He always wore black. A three piece black woollen suit, its waistcoat with four neat black buttons, a black knitted tie over a crisp white cambric cotton shirt with a stiff collar, black Oxford brogues and plain black lisle socks on his feet, and black leather gloves on his cuffed hands. People who didn’t know him took him for an undertaker. And since he drove a new model black car, that was understandable. But he wasn’t any kind of undertaker, and even a minute in his company would have convinced you otherwise. He was one of the few men you might ever meet who had two
smiles, both permanently at the ready. There was the closed-lip genial smile that went with the conker-brown eyes whose depth welcomed you in, and the open-mouth-you-make-me-laugh one, accompanied by a crinkly-eyed look which radiated pinpricks of happiness to make you feel good about yourself, and of course him. He was, everybody agreed, “nice looking”. By which I think they meant he was neat and tidy, aspects we admired then, and nondescript or average in general appearance, which was another virtue in a society that had banished the flamboyant to its outer edges as an undesirable and untrustworthy twitch if you just wanted to survive the troubles of the world. So he managed – neither too short nor too tall, neither too flash nor too drab, neither too gross nor too modest – to seem agreeable to whoever was looking into his mirror of reflection. What you got was what you wanted to see. And around him was no disturbing aura, merely a pleasant aroma. Not of carbolic soap and shag tobacco or stale beer and the lingering whiff of urine on wool, which was the symphonic nosegay with which most men in the Valley announced themselves in those post-war years, but the scent of lavender and lemon from the hair lotion which slicked down his black patent-leather shiny and sharply parted hair, with a hint of roses on his cheeks and mint on his breath whenever he bent down to kiss me.

  He had taken to doing that whenever he slipped me from my mother’s loose and soft handclasp to throw me, with a short and pretend drop, up into the air above his shoulders before catching me safely, and then planting that unwanted kiss on my parted lips. “He’s getting a bit big for that”, my mother would say nervously. He’d laugh, and say “Bit of fun, eh, Gareth? Bit of fun, that’s all.” And then into his right hand trouser pocket would go a leather-gloved hand, and out would come the sweets of that week. Chocolate Rolos, warmed and gooey in the gold foil tube of their wrapper. Squared fruity Spangles. Hard tangy Midget Gums in paper screws. Home-made, hard-boiled Losin Dant, a taste of mints and sugar like no other, in white open paper cones, bought from the front room which Ma Stephens had used as a shop since before the war. From her, too, laid out in their shiny brown paper coffins were the friable chocolate flakes, dear at twopence each for their brief crumbly moment, but which my mother had recalled as special pre-war treats, which now came again for us, courtesy of him.