by Dai Smith
We left before nine in the morning. Rain threatened but held off. We rollicked, for there is no other word for the swaying and bumping and singing and shouting we did, on the upstairs deck of the buses where we children had been put to sit by ourselves. We ate our Shippam’s fish paste sandwiches on the pale sands and washed the grit down with orangeade whilst the men filed in military formation to the pubs in the town. When they were gone the rain came, blowing in over the Channel in gusts that turned to a continuous downpour, until we huddled with others of our kind, wet and wild, under the concrete roofs of concrete shelters, our fairground pennies all spent. Fathers drifted back to sodden wives who demanded bus drivers be rooted out of cafés to take us home early. Out of the light dropping on the sea and back into the Valley, the buses juddered, and we no longer rollicked.
In familiar streets families said their goodbyes and scattered. It was not quite dark. Street gas lamps would not be lit for an hour yet and no house windows flared yellow in the half-light. I walked alone up the hill across which parallel lines of streets cut to left and right until I reached the topmost terrace which was our street below the mountain. The front door was set a few steps up from our railed and miniscule front patch of garden. I looked to the right at the curtained bay window from which piano music, slow and anticipatorily insistent, came. This room was lit. I could see a curve of light oscillating between the folds of the centre curtains. I felt inside the rectangular brass-plated letterbox for the string to which we tied an old-style black saw-toothed key. I pulled it out. It had no key attached. We had no doorbell to push so I tapped the knocker against its metal mount, and waited. The music, faster and louder, had continued. No one came to the door. I stepped down into the front garden and on tiptoe looked through the slightly parted curtain into the room before I went to tap on the windowpane.
At the piano with her back almost directly to me was the pianist, a curly-headed blonde in a loose-fitting red and yellow floral patterned dress with wide puffy sleeves that billowed down to the wrist. The pianist’s hands were moving tightly, unseen to me, to the front. A glass of gin and tonic whose adult, sweet sourness I could almost inhale through the window sat on top of the piano, next to an ashtray my father had won at the fair. In the ashtray a cigarette burned unheeded, grey ash flaking off after its fire of paper and leaf. The piano stopped dead, before caterwauling off at a new pace as its player suddenly inclined to the right, to that corner of the lamplit room where the door was slightly ajar. I heard through the glass a giggle, stronger laughter, and saw the door slowly push open.
Two men came into the room. Both wore flat, black and grey checkered dai caps. On their feet were colliers’ hob-nailed boots. They wore black alpaca jackets and waistcoats and dark grey moleskin trousers tied at the knees with yorks. Their collarless, striped Welsh flannel shirts were buttoned to the neck. One of them, the shorter one with the black cork smudge of a moustache sitting above a clay pipe, was my mother. The other man had a brightly lipsticked mouth and hands that came up from behind to flutter onto my mother’s breasts. I fell smack against the windowpane and my head stayed there as if stuck.
Gillian said, flat and with force, “Jesus Christ! Oh my God!” The piano stopped. My mother sank to her knees as if all the breath had been punched out of her. It was only then that the pianist turned to the window and raised a black-gloved hand from its keys. “Uncle” Jack swivelled fully around to see the face in the window. He picked up his cigarette and acknowledged me with it before moving it up to lips which opened imperceptibly in a face framed by the curls of a yellow wig.
I turned and ran. In a den we’d made from railway sleepers and corrugated metal on the mountain, I kept hidden beneath a stone a sheath knife, wooden handled in its leather cover, and I uncovered it to remember how my father had given it to me. He bought it for me after I had found by the side of a mountain bog a springy double-edged blade, its handle a rectangular dimpled black rubber grip. I had shown it to him only, despite my tears, to have it taken from me. It was, my father told me, a Stiletto blade. A killer’s weapon. Army issue. The sheath knife replaced it for my birthday. Now I took it and ran with it to a bend in a mountain stream where the turf was deeply green and giving, and into it, crying and sobbing, I plunged the knife, into the green breast of the river turf over and over until I stopped and threw the knife away, into the stream.
That night was the last time I ever saw “Uncle” Jack in any guise, though I turned away a few times when I saw one or other of his black cars on the streets of the Valley. Quite soon there would be too many other, smaller and brighter cars to pay any such cars as his any attention anymore. Sweets came off ration. My mother married again, and with her new husband she took me away from the Valley.
Show Time
In the subdued light of the cinema foyer the woman who sat behind the glass window of the ticket booth glowed. She was herself an enticement but she was also glamorously framed by the allure of movie posters in blocky comic book colours and 3D printing, and by the faces of the stars set on the stucco-plastered walls around the booth. Amongst them, backed by the baby-pink and tawny-gold of the Greek-and-Roman pillars which profiled the walls, she still shone out. You walked towards her on the worn pile, once plush, of a blood red carpet and watched as others took their tickets and went before you past the walnut-inlay double doors with their heavy brass handles. The doors swung silently open and shut releasing and stifling as they did so, the murmur of American voices.
The woman’s hair was backlit by the soft halo of a semi-circle of small electric bulbs on the board behind her. It was a Gloriana auburn colour cut in the style of a Veronica Lake peek-a-boo so that it fell in one straight drop down the left side of her face. Her right eye, an oceanic blue in its depth, glistened on its surface with splinters of artificial light. It sat on her face above a cheekbone convexed with Hollywood in mind. She was, as we would say, a real beauty, and it was only when, at the top of the queue, that you came close that you first noticed the fixed sideways and downwards twist of her mouth on the left side where her lips seemed forced into an immovable snarl. And so, if you went to the pictures often enough, you learned not to flinch, or stare too intently, when, as she issued the perforated tickets stubs from the flat grey steel dispenser in front of her, that shimmering curtain of hair moved with her movement, and you glimpsed through its cover the perpetually-held grimace of a mask. It was a mask of horror in which an eye had been dragged hideously down onto her cheek, and everything else that was beautiful about the woman was cancelled out by its presence.
Her name was Maisie. The grotesque configuration of that one plane of her face was a distortion to which she reluctantly gave voice in a slurred, grating speech, speaking only when she had to. She made herself front up to the public gaze for two double bills twice a week in the town’s one remaining independent picture house, the bijou 1920s Royal Cinema. Before the war the family had run two billiard saloons, a tea room and two cinemas elsewhere, further up the Valley, but by the time I first recoiled when confronted by Maisie Robinson in the late 1950s there was only the Royal left. Her brother, Freddie, managed it and acted as projectionist. Maisie doubled up at the box office and in the dark of the auditorium where she directed her cone of light down the aisle as an usherette. Neither Freddie nor Maisie had married, but Maisie had a son, Marcus.
My mother, who had known her as a young woman, told me that Maisie had had an “unfortunate accident”, and that I was not to stare. I was twelve. I peeped. It seemed more fascinating and terrible than unfortunate. The Robinsons – brother, sister and elderly parents – lived in a red-brick and bathstone Victorian villa set on one of the town’s few crescent streets. It faced south, its frontage ignoring the dark cleft of the Valley to the north, and half-way up one of the clump of hills which enfolded the town. We had ourselves moved to this mouth-of-the-valley township when my mother re-married. My stepfather was a carpenter, a chippie in one of the town’s large building yards and kindly e
nough, more enamoured of my mother than interested in me. Babies would soon follow and I drifted into teenage years and into a relative distance from family ties, all of which suited me fine. There were new friends and new perspectives to discover.
Not least the Robinsons. Not at first though, because our own Bevan-built council house – a garden, three bedrooms and inside plumbing – was on the Wheatley Estate two miles to the south of the old town’s centre which the Robinsons’ villa overlooked directly. I did not, as a result, meet Marcus until the second year of grammar school when the forms were more tightly streamed into “Scholars” and “Others”. We were both put in the more academic class though it was quickly clear that Marcus was not exactly “Scholar” nor quite “Other”, but somehow both, intriguingly and unfathomably, combined. Neither of us, in any event, was particularly sporting and in those more enlightened days if you chose not to bash others and muddy yourself, you could sit by a coal fire in a room which doubled up as a school library, and read. What you read was up to you, and not policed. Out of my satchel came Agatha Christies from the public library and the occasional Sherlock Holmes. Marcus sniffed at these, though he seemed to have consumed them at some time. Actually, everything he touched, books, food, ideas, he consumed. There was no other word for his wolfish appetite. I was to be, in my turn, consumed, too, one way or the other. From the start, I think looking back on it, he decided he could envelop me with his own tastes. From a deep canvas kitbag, more cavernous than my second-hand three-pocket satchel, came the works of authors and books whose names and titles I had never seen or heard. There were red Everyman editions of Ruskin and Morris and Butler. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and strange things by H.P. Lovecraft, both in hardback American published volumes in blue cloth binding. Where did they come from, I’d ask? Marcus would shrug. Then the next week he might show me Edwardian editions of Arthur Machen and purple-bordered Pelican paperbacks of Tacitus’s History and Caesar’s Gallic Wars. He let me touch them, hold them and skim, but rarely did I ask to read or borrow anything. It was all too peculiar. It would be many years before I finally read Norman Douglas’s South Wind or A.J.A. Symons’ Quest for Corvo or Fr. Rolfe’s Hadrian or Rose Macaulay’s Towers of Trebizond, but I first saw and heard of these exotic outriders of the mainstream when Marcus delved into his army kitbag and pulled out the treasures he had already devoured.
I think he frightened some by the crazy dimensions of what he knew. If he had not been so physically large he would have been bullied more than he was. His size protected him from other than verbal jibes about his “posh” accent, his “weirdo” diction, and his deep disinterest in anything adolescent or indeed for what passed for being adult. Schoolmasters were treated by him with polite disdain. Schoolmates were, with a rare exception such as me, simply ignored. And in the years I knew him best, up to eighteen when university took me away from him, his massive boulder of a head with its shaggy, leonine hair seemed to grow more and more sphinx-like as our several lives flitted past him.
He was never just fat for, at six foot plus at the age of fifteen, his frame held his growing expansiveness in check. But his weightiness of body and mind, hinted at an immobility of being and a settlement of purpose which the rest of us were not properly able, or perhaps privileged, to understand.
The only time, in those days, when he seemed willing to leave his home, other than for the enforced attendance at school where he studied nothing and knew enough about everything to be left alone, was to go twice a week to the Royal to see the films. He took to inviting me to go with him and lured me on by the promise, always kept, of complimentary tickets at the box office. I had, of course, seen Maisie at her workplace. Now I would call for him at the house and see her at home as well. As with her face, the first visit was scarcely a preparation for what you saw when the etched Victorian glass inner door was opened onto the entrance hall of Bryn Villa.
The hallway was still lit by gas. There was a barely audible hiss from two wall brackets and an ochre gleam was cast onto the brown varnished wood and the dun-coloured lincrusta walls. A hallstand with a plain mirror above it, and space for shoes below, was draped with overcoats and hats. And on adjacent pegs were hung four wartime gas masks. Next to the hallstand, pinned to the wall, was a fading poster, measuring about two foot by eighteen inches. Its bold black capitals stood out against the fading yellow white paper. It was an Air Raid Precaution Warning, a series of commands and instructions, a list of Dos and Don’ts, a sort of proxy transfer of powers over people to wardens from government. It was dated “23rd October, 1940”. Next to the poster, on another wooden peg, was an ARP stamped helmet and a dungaree-blue cotton jacket with white insignia that looked like a handstitched and home-made badge. On a rickety bamboo table was an actual aspidistra. Something, time or desire, had stopped here.
There were two doors to rooms off the hallway on the left which at that time I never saw opened, and then carpeted stairs to the bedrooms. All life in Bryn Villa, however, happened beyond that entrance. It began where the hallway became a red-and-black lozenge-tiled passageway, with one step down to the kitchen and back scullery. There was on the facing wall of the kitchen a cream, enamelled range of ovens and hobs with a banked-up permanent coal fire in the middle grate. To the right of that was a deal table which was alternately laid with a tasselled purple cloth of a plush velvet nap or with a meal-time, white linen one. There were straight-backed wooden chairs and a dresser full of white china cups and saucers, and blue willow pattern plates. To the left as you walked through a cranberry glass door was a deep armchair with long wooden armrests and well-stuffed feather cushions. A window gave onto a back yard and in front of the window was a low divan about six feet long. It was Empire style, in a moss-green velvet. On a low wooden table in front of the divan were strewn newspapers, books and plates, some empty, some full, and invariably a bottle of lemon and barley water with a water jug and a glass. And on the divan itself, half-sitting, half-lying, like some potentate in his palace, would be Marcus.
Things, mostly food and drink, seemed to gravitate towards him, sucked into the energy force he radiated. If his mother, Maisie, was petite, his grandmother, Thelma, was tiny. Her grey, wiry hair was, in daylight hours, scrunched up into a bun as she flitted, aproned and slippered, from scullery to kitchen with endless delicacies to keep Marcus going between set mealtimes. Eggs, boiled and still in their shell but purpled with a cochineal dye, would come, three at a time, in small bowls; plates with cold cuts of home-cooked meat, beef or ham or slices of tongue, would be flanked by jars of home-made pickled onions and saucers of horseradish and mustard; on the paper doilies put on larger serving plates were iced buns, Welsh cakes and thinly sliced home-baked bread and salted butter; fruit seemed confined to black pippy grapes. There was a hanging odour of fried offal, kidneys and liver, or the sweet cloy of stuffed hearts coming from the oven, or steam ascending slowly from saucepans of neck-end of lamb and root vegetables which simmered on the hob. Marcus would receive the offerings with a flutteringly gracious wave of the free hand that was not holding a book, and then use the other hand to pop morsels and titbits into his mouth. The mouth itself, though cavernous enough for all this feeding, was framed by the softest and pinkest of lips which, when not open for feeding, seemed permanently purse-shut.
I had never seen the adoration of one human being for another before this time. Love, yes, but not worship. Marcus was unfazed, even by the occasional resentful gleam in the eye of his grandfather, William, who was usually semi-comatose in the armchair. Freddie and Maisie were more often out at the Royal than in, but when they were present they, too, soporific and beaming, hovered with Thelma over Marcus’s recumbent form like the attendants-in-waiting they were. When he decided to move they edged back, smiling, as if any gesture was an act for which to be grateful. He rarely failed to reward any onlooker of this, for his bulk, heavier as the years advanced and the feeding fortified him, uncoiled with a surprising grace of movement. Then he was up and
towering over them, beaming, and patting Thelma delicately on her head, acknowledging Freddie with a clap on his shoulder, kissing Maisie on both cheeks as if she was a little girl rather than his mother and, even in his imperious ignoring of grumpy William, somehow still possessing the space he was about to vacate. He addressed them all by their first names, as if they were, but not quite, his equals. He would grin conspiratorially at me and we would be off, to saunter, perhaps, to the town library for more esoteric books to borrow – he had begun his Ford Madox Ford phase and never forsook Arthur Machen – or else, in the early evening with Maisie and Freddie waiting for us at the entrance to their Dream Palace, we would go to the family’s very own Royal Cinema. I’m not sure who “booked” the films that were shown and which we saw, sitting mostly on our own, from the upstairs balcony seats. The Royal was on no major circuit and few of the money-spinners came its way. So there was a diet of films other cinemas chose to ignore – John Cassavetes’ Shadows, say, or Orson Welles’ A Touch of Evil or Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks – or a back catalogue that could stretch back to Bogart’s Casablanca or Cooper’s High Noon or Wayne’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or a clutch of incomparable Astaire, Kelly, Garland musicals, or Double Indemnity. Did Freddie choose these? Or had Maisie? Perhaps it was Marcus. They were, anyway, always American and in the Royal no fluting upper-class English accents or cod Welsh ones or rollicking Scots were ever heard on the screen. On the balcony was another matter altogether, for there Marcus’s very own voice could be heard in a distinct but sotto voce commentary, and the most peculiar thing was, especially on our industrial Welsh patch, how strained a sound it was. Nasal, yet falsetto. Rounded, yet truncated. A voice from a time and place before and distant from the films we were consuming at such a rate. When I thought of it later I thought of Ronald Colman or Leslie Howard, a clipped Thirties tone mingled with compassion and fatigue. My own adolescent thrill was for the husky breathiness of June Allyson in The Glen Miller Story, just the wrong side of being maternal, or the throaty rasp of Jane Russell, just the right side of not being a man in Paleface, or the bat squeak palpitation of Monroe in Bus Stop, where the voice didn’t matter anymore since it came from a celluloid image just the right side of everything for an exploding adolescent boy. I sat in the dark clutching at an importunate erection rearing beneath the buttoned-up fly of my scratchy grey flannel school trousers. To my side, in a voice of no great surprise and only of friendly admonition, Marcus would murmur: “Sluts, dear boy. Sluts. Tarts and trollops all of them. Be warned.”