by Sean Smith
3
A Teenager in Love
Being laid up in bed with tuberculosis isn’t an ideal situation for a lad struggling through adolescence. Tommy could only gaze out of his ‘prison’ window in frustration and watch the local schoolgirls laughing and gossiping in the street below. One in particular grabbed his attention – Melinda Trenchard was the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood.
Linda was the daughter of Bill and Vi Trenchard, who lived in Cliff Terrace, just a few hundred yards away from Laura Street across Wood Road. Her parents ran the County Cinema, near the railway station in Pontypridd, and were well known in the area. Vi was friendly with Tom’s mother, Freda, and, like her, was outgoing and popular.
As youngsters, Tom and Linda’s paths seldom crossed. Boys and girls played separately, unless they went to the same school. Linda, who is six months younger than Tom, went to a Catholic primary school, so he was only vaguely aware of who she was at that age. He noticed that she wore little crucifix earrings, like many of the local Catholic girls, but that was about all.
Tom first became aware of Linda properly, before he was struck down with TB, when she was playing marbles in the street with some friends. He recalled light-heartedly, ‘I must have been eleven. I walked down her street and she was bending down and playing marbles. I saw those great legs and all of a sudden I thought of her in a new light.’
He did pursue Linda, after a fashion, but it was more for a game of kiss chase than anything else. All the boys would chase the girls and if they were lucky enough to catch up with one, they had to give her a kiss. ‘My first proper kiss was with Linda and it was her first kiss too. Afterwards I had to run my wrists under cold water. I was an early starter.’ It was nothing more than a playground romance at this stage, although Tom has always been disarmingly frank and earthy about growing up: ‘I can remember the first time I got to know myself better – I thought I had broken it!’
When he was confined to his room, Linda was the girl he would watch out for most. He would quietly seethe when he saw her talking to the other boys, but he could do nothing about it. She never came to visit him, because, in those prim and proper days, girls who weren’t family didn’t visit boys in their homes. Linda, as Tom could see from his window, was maturing into a lovely teenager. Her old school friend Vimy Pitman observes, ‘She was very, very attractive. She was everybody’s cup of tea. She had a lovely figure and was the sweetest girl. She would never say anything nasty about anybody or get involved in arguments or anything. She really was a nice girl.’
When Tom emerged from Laura Street, he had changed. He was taller and broader and his hair had turned the colour of coal. Linda hadn’t seen him for two years. She recalled, ‘When we met up after he went back to school, I didn’t recognise him at first, but I was immediately attracted to him again.’
Tom was equally smitten. ‘I don’t know what the feeling was. All I knew was I had a feeling for this girl. She looked fantastic.’
It was a classic case of opposites attracting – good girl in the A stream meets a boy who couldn’t care less and was languishing in the Ds. Tom’s lack of interest in all things academic had become even more pronounced. He had fallen so far behind during his two years away from school that he saw little point in trying to catch up. Linda, on the other hand, was particularly accomplished at drawing and illustrating – an interest she might have had in common with Tom if he had stuck with it. Perhaps art was too closely associated with the boredom of TB, because music took over as soon as he was allowed to sing again.
The girls at school weren’t too bothered about Tom’s classroom credentials. Vimy acknowledges, ‘Lots of the girls, well, most of the girls, I suppose, found him very attractive. He seemed a bit rough to me, but he definitely had the charisma. He had a way with him – a swagger.’
Linda had no idea at first that he was a gifted singer. She hadn’t been present at any family sing-songs, nor had she heard him entertain classmates. Instead, she had to wait until his sister Sheila’s engagement party to hear him. She described it in a rare interview in the 1960s: ‘Tom’s mother and mine knew each other well, so it was quite natural that when his sister got engaged he should invite me to the party. It was there I first really heard him sing. He sang “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and accompanied himself by tapping his fingers on the table. I wish it had been recorded.’
The opportunities for teenage courtship in Treforest were few. Linda and Tom got together first of all at the local youth club. She recalled, ‘We were too young to say we were going together, but we always seemed to end up with each other.’ They would synchronise running errands for their mothers, just so they could walk to the local shops hand in hand.
Tom and Linda became an item almost without anybody noticing. It wasn’t a case of them going into class one day and announcing that they were going out. His cousin Margaret can’t remember a time when they weren’t together: ‘I used to think they were like Darby and Joan – like an old pair of slippers. They were always together, with their arms around each other. They were very loving.’
Many of her contemporaries have likened Linda to Doris Day, the epitome of movie-star niceness. Tom, on the other hand, had a touch of Marlon Brando about him, being more brooding than clean cut. But something clicked between them. Looking back on those days in 2006, Tom said, ‘Teenage love is great. It never really happens like that again. We were so wrapped up with one another then and we’ve never really lost that. We like one another’s company. We are friends, we laugh and we are natural with one another. That’s something you can’t learn. It’s either there or it’s not.’
Things soon became more serious. If it was dry, they would walk for hours in the hills above the village. If it was raining – and it rained a lot in the Valleys – they would shelter in the old red phone box at the end of Laura Street. Fortunately, it was a fine day when they decided to make love for the first time. Tom was fifteen and Linda was fourteen when they found a secluded spot in a field overlooking the village. Tom said simply, ‘It was very special.’
Tom’s devotion to his girlfriend was clear from his reluctance to brag about her to his mates. He didn’t provide them with a blow-by-blow account, and flatly denied they had done the deed. It was all right to indulge in some swaggering talk with the lads about sex, but he wouldn’t talk about his sweetheart. As Vimy Pitman perceptively observes, ‘Linda was sacred.’
Tom had only a year of school left after recovering from TB. As well as Linda and singing, his other interest when he resumed his education was smoking Woodbines. He would join the boys and pop into the shop opposite the school gates, where they would buy one fag for a penny. Brian Blackler recalls, ‘Then we would go up the White Tips and smoke it and die on the way home. You think you are big when you have a fag in your mouth when you are a young kid.’
Tom left school at fifteen, as did practically everyone in Treforest. You had to be at the grammar school in Pontypridd to stay on and take A levels. Tom had no qualifications, but one thing had already been established: he wouldn’t follow his father down the mines. Even before his brush with TB had ruled it out, his parents wanted a different life for their son. Margaret observed, ‘He was brought up that he wasn’t going down the mines. Uncle Tom would never have agreed to that.’
In any case, Tom belonged to the first generation of Welsh sons who weren’t expected to follow in their fathers’ dusty footsteps. Instead, he found his first job as an apprentice glove cutter at the Polyglove factory in the Broadway, the main road between Treforest and Pontypridd.
His friend Brian joined him there when he, too, left school. Brian recalled, ‘We just used to shift some gloves. That was about it and a machine would do the rest.’ It was hot, dull and repetitive, and all for thirty-eight shillings a week in old money. Tom admitted that he hated it – not least because the cutting room was men only. The female staff were in another part of the factory, dealing with sales, packaging and retail.
At le
ast he was earning just enough money to indulge his interest in records, clothes and beer. Far more important than work was the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, with the release of the film Blackboard Jungle and the impact of the theme tune ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets. The song, with its hugely catchy, danceable melody, played over both the opening and closing credits. The film transformed a minor hit into a sensation. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was everywhere.
The song was released at the start of 1955 and made some waves in the UK before the movie came out in March. It re-entered the charts in November 1955 and marched all the way up to number one. Bill Haley was no Elvis though. He was already thirty, on the chubby side and just as likely to be performing an old country and western song as anything cutting edge. His music was much more influential than the man himself.
Tom first heard the song blaring from the radio that was constantly playing at the factory to keep the workforce entertained as they faced the daily grind: ‘All of a sudden this “Rock Around the Clock” came on and I thought, “This is jumping out of the radio”.’ His workmates were less impressed and failed to understand what he found so exciting about it. An exasperated Tom told them to ‘just bloody listen to it’.
At least Tom’s enthusiasm for the new music gave him a head start when it came to the two Christmas parties he attended during his time at the factory. All the staff had the opportunity to mix together, but the men tended to stand around drinking, while the girls wanted to dance. Tom had a big advantage, ‘I was the only one who could jive. I was like a kid in a candy store.’
Tom’s ability on the dance floor had been finely tuned by Linda when they went out dancing on the weekend. She had left school a few months after her boyfriend, and she found a job in Pontypridd, working as an assistant in a draper’s shop, where one of her tasks was looking after the window display.
By this time, Tom had embraced the new Teddy boy culture that was sweeping the country and Linda was happy to wear the uniform of the girlfriend. Becoming a Teddy boy was part of growing up for many young men who left school at fifteen and wanted to announce to the world that they had arrived. This was nothing like the gang culture of today, although it helped if you could handle yourself in a fight.
Teddy boys weren’t a natural product of rock ’n’ roll. The famous attire had been around for several years, ever since fashion leaders in Savile Row, London, had tried to reintroduce the Edwardian style to affluent upper- and middle-class young men after the end of the Second World War.
Gradually the uniform filtered down to working-class youths. They were known as working-class Edwardians until the Daily Express printed a story in September 1953 with a headline shortening Edwardian to Teddy and the term ‘Teddy boy’ passed into mainstream usage. The fashion lost its appeal to the middle classes when that happened, so the famous suits could be picked up for bargain prices on second-hand market stalls.
Tom was a Treforest Ted. He wore all the gear: gaudy waistcoats, cowboy hats, bootlace ties, black suede crepe-soled shoes, known as brothel creepers, and, his pride and joy, a sky-blue suit, consisting of a long jacket with a velvet collar and narrow trousers. Local journalist Colin Macfarlane memorably described Tom in the 1950s: ‘He could be seen walking along the streets with his Teddy boy coat and trousers that were reckoned to be as narrow as the thinnest drainpipe in the village.’
Tom always fancied himself in his Teddy boy finery. The proprietor of Linda’s drapery shop wasn’t so impressed when this dandified vision came to call during working hours. Tom may have thought he was the height of fashion but, to others, Teddy boy was synonymous with young hooligan. Linda had to make sure he stayed out of sight at the back of the shop during working hours.
Linda, who was always smartly turned out, had a figure that looked good in anything, especially the pencil skirts that were fashionable in the mid-fifties. She also had a DA haircut, which was a polite shortening of the coarser ‘Duck’s Arse’, so called because it resembled the rear end of a duck. In the US, where it originated, the style was known as a ‘Duck’s Tail’ or a ‘Tony Curtis’, after the heart-throb actor who popularised it. The cut was short at the back and long and curled over in a quiff at the front. The general idea was to pile as much of your hair onto the top of your head as you could, using slabs of hair gel to hold it in place. Tom had one as well, lovingly teased and shaped by Linda.
The young women were more impressed with his efforts than the men. One of the lads recalls Tom’s image: ‘He looked like a dipstick. Always did when he was younger – a greasy-haired gypsy.’
Brian Blackler, whose Teddy-boy suit was silver, remembers: ‘We would go down to Cardiff and see the boys down there with their hair like Tony Curtis and we would come home and copy them. We all looked the same then.’
After the working week was over, Saturday was dance night. The Teds would meet up in a pub for a few bevvies to start off the evening. Tom and Dai, who was a year younger but didn’t look it because of his size, would generally be served, because they seemed older than they were. The girls, meanwhile, would usually congregate at someone’s house before making their way to that night’s chosen venue. ‘We girls never touched alcohol,’ confirms Vimy. They would make do with crisps and lemonade and wait for the boys to arrive. The Ranch in Pontypridd, St Luke’s Church in Porth and the Catholic hall on the Broadway were popular for a night of jiving – at least until 10.30, when they had to play the national anthem and finish for the night.
Boys and girls would put on their best clothes on a Sunday afternoon and meet up in the centre of Ponty for what was known locally as the Monkey Parade – a weekly ritual in which the young men were like peacocks trying to attract the best-looking female. They would pair off for an innocent stroll through town. If Tom were delayed for any reason on the Saturday or Sunday, none of the local lads would chat up Linda, because she was strictly off-limits. She was Tommy’s girl.
4
The Making of a Man
Another rainy day in the autumn of 1956 changed Tom’s life for ever. As usual, he and Linda were sheltering in the phone box at the end of Laura Street, when she plucked up the courage to give him some news. Tearfully, she told him they were expecting a baby in the spring. Tom was now sixteen and she was fifteen.
They hadn’t bothered with contraception. There was no family-planning clinic in Treforest in those days. Tom admitted that he didn’t care about precautions, because he knew ‘I loved this girl’. He hadn’t given it a second thought until it was too late. He described his shock, ‘I thought, “Oh my God, what is my mother going to say. Or my father, what is he going to say!” The initial thing was “I am in hot water.”’
Despite his youthful swagger, Tom was still living at home and young enough for his mum to give him a clip round the ear and tell him to get his hair cut, which she frequently did when she noticed it was longer than Linda’s. He had huge respect for his parents and didn’t want to disappoint them.
Tom was right to be nervous. He later confided in bass guitarist Vernon Hopkins that his father was very angry at the news that he was going to be a grandfather. He thrust a wad of notes into his son’s hand and told him to head off to Cardiff and join ‘the bloody merchant navy’. When everyone had calmed down, Freda and Tom senior called a family conference to decide what should be done.
The meeting to decide the teenagers’ future was held in the best room at Laura Street, which was usually reserved for special occasions. While, strictly speaking, this was a very special occasion, it wasn’t a celebration. Linda walked round with her parents, Bill and Vi, then settled in a corner of the room with Tom, as the two families tried to agree a plan of action.
One option was ruled out right away. The Trenchards were a good Catholic family, so there was no question of an abortion, which, in any case, was still illegal in 1956. One solution, followed by many families, was for Linda to go away and ‘visit relatives’ for the later stages of her confinement, give birt
h and have the baby adopted. She could then return to Treforest refreshed and rested after a lovely ‘holiday’ and none of the neighbourhood gossips would be any the wiser.
A third possibility was that Linda could leave Treforest for a while, give birth and then hand the baby over to her aunt, who had no children, which would at least have kept the child within the family. None of these possibilities seemed ideal and the adults continued to try to reach an agreement. The whole time, Linda and Tom sat together, holding hands and whispering affectionately to one another.
Eventually, Freda noticed them. Tom recalled the moment, ‘My mother, God bless her, said, “Look at them. We’re trying to decide what’s going to happen and they’re oblivious to what’s going on. How can we get in the way of that?”’
Thomas senior asked his son what he wanted to do. Tom replied without hesitation: ‘I said, “I want to get married to Linda and she wants to get married to me.” My father just looked at me, it all went dead quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Go ahead.” I always loved him for it.’
It wasn’t quite as simple as that, though. Linda was not yet sixteen and was therefore too young to be married legally. They would have to wait until after her next birthday, on 14 January, and by that time there would be no hiding her condition. There was the wider family to convince that this was the right course of action as well. At least Tom’s mother and father weren’t hypocrites about their son’s situation: they, too, had married after Freda became pregnant – and that was in the 1930s. Tom’s cousin Margaret remembers her Auntie Freda telling her that Tom wanted to get married: ‘He wasn’t forced at all. Some parents might have done that, but he wanted to.’
Linda’s friends weren’t judgemental. While there was some inevitable gossip behind closed doors, Vimy Pitman recalls, ‘Everybody felt immensely sorry for her, because she was such a nice person. Nobody put her down. I didn’t know of any other pregnancy when we were that young. It was all so shocking. She was far too nice to say anything nasty about. You wouldn’t say, “Oh look, what has she been up to, then?”’