In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  Things come back over the years, like strange birds flying home; there are threads and coincidences, and my life has been woven with them. One summer's afternoon many years later I was playing in a cricket match just outside London. I was fielding and during one of those intervals which cricket affords, I fell to conversing with the umpire. He had a rich Welsh accent and 1 discovered that he came from the same valley village as my mother's gentleman Jim of long before. I had remembered the man's surname (I still do) and I asked the umpire if he knew the family. He knew them well, especially Jim, who was late and un-lamented. 'A real old bastard,' was the umpire's verdict. 'Absolute swine with the women, too.'

  In the spring of 1943 my father returned from sea for the last time. In his hideously optimistic way he attempted to gain entry into the barred family home by playing on my mother's sympathies. He brought a homeless cabin boy with him by night and calling up operatically pleaded that neither of them had anywhere to go. 'Go and find somewhere then!' shouted my mother before slamming her window.

  They trooped away. He found lodgings by the docks and returned most days during this leave with tales of chickens running loose in the house, an outbreak of Oriental plague and finally the harrowing death of the cabin boy, none of which my mother believed for a moment.

  Now I find it very difficult to understand how she could be so hard to him. True, he had been no great husband, but few men are. He had drunk and gone to whist drives (once hunting for our non-existent money boxes to do so) and he was a gifted liar. But he was the same age as I am now, as I write this in my house; he had no home to which he could go. At sea he faced the most awful of dangers. German submarines were sinking flocks of helpless merchant ships, not to mention the normal hardships of the life, and when he came back he had nowhere. I find this very difficult to understand, although now it does not matter.

  On this final leave there was some sort of half-reconciliation and she promised that after the next voyage she would think seriously about having him back. I remember even now the clumsy wetness of his last kiss, so beery that it made us turn our faces away, before he went out, his kitbag over his shoulder.

  He sent a letter from Freetown, Sierra Leone, and a week later – the worst week of the war for merchant shipping losses – his vessel, the Empire Whale, was torpedoed in the Atlantic and he was drowned. On the Merchant Navy Memorial at Tower Hill in London, among the many thousands of others, his name is on the list of fifty men, from master to apprentice, who went down on that vessel. I have taken each of my children to see it for that is all there is left.

  I first suspected his death when the local soothsayer (the lady who had warned about the 'grave' in the front garden) came to the house and had whispers with my mother. 'Illness or Hitler?' she enquired dramatically.

  That evening when Roy and I were in bed my mother came into the room and said curiously: 'I've got some bad news for you, Les. Your father has been lost at sea. The ship was sunk.' My first reaction was annoyance that she should have thought that only I would be sorry. What about my brother? We had both been brought up to regard our father as a devil who turned up between voyages. When I was not much younger I had recited an evening prayer: 'God bless Mam, God bless Roy, God bless me, God bless the cat, and everybody else – and make Dad's ship sink.'

  It horrifies me now but it was my prayer and on that day in March 1943 it was answered in full. The following morning the insurance man was around early and counting out bank notes across the Egyptian table cloth. There was over a hundred pounds. I sat on the table with my brother and touched the notes. We had never seen so much money in our lives. My mother seemed to think it was a fair exchange for a husband.

  To me, at twelve, my life appeared both secure and happy. Number 39 Maesglas Avenue was a small council-built fortress keeping at bay the perils and ills of the world. A little more money was available now, my father having proved a better source of income dead than alive. There was a war widow's pension, my mother was working and the marvellous insurance money was banked against a rainy day. We bought a two-bar electric fire and a whistling kettle. The fire was placed on the table, with the wire running down from the central and only light, and we would sit on the Egyptian cloth and warm ourselves by it. We also cooked toast on its red bars. To my mother's immense satisfaction the kettle whistled so loudly that all the immediate neighbours could hear it.

  Roy had begun his war work. At the bottom of the street, lined along the shops on the Cardiff road, appeared a convoy of ugly vehicles, each with a great oily boiler and chimney on its back. Their function was to provide a smokescreen for the engine sheds at the back of our houses and each evening at dusk they spewed out wide spasms of oily smoke. They were operated by permanently black-faced soldiers and my brother's war work was to run and get relays of fish and chips for these men. He used to come home worn out, with his face like a minstrel, eyes bright in the black and with a pocket full of pennies.

  Apart from games with Chubber, riding our imaginary horses around the Woods (whose pond had been fortuitously enlarged by the addition of a crater from a German landmine), I spent much time at home. I read books and newspapers and listened avidly to the radio. 'Monday night and eight o'clock, oh can't you hear the chimes?' went the chorus. I can hear them, now. 'Settle by the fireside, look at your Radio Times. For Monday Night at Eight is on the air.' Would I be able to spot the week's deliberate mistake? Another favourite was introduced by the sound of rushing vehicles, the calling of a news vendor . . . 'In Town Tonight . . . In Town Tonight.' The important voice of the announcer would say: 'Once more we stop the mighty roar of London's traffic to bring you some of the interesting people who are – In Town Tonight!' And on would come a fisherman or a clockmaker or a man who had once been to Tibet, or perhaps someone who could play the spoons. Simple magic, but magic just the same. I imagined that they actually stopped the traffic for each programme.

  Every variety act I knew because Music Hall was broadcast on Saturdays. There was Afrique who did impersonations, many of which, of course, you could not fully appreciate because you couldn't see him. There was Suzzette Tarri, a gentle and gossipy comedienne, and Jeanne de Casalis, Mrs Feather as she was called, who was posher. Two Ton Tessie O'Shea was another, and Ethel Revnell and Gracie West. Whatever happened to funny ladies?

  The funniest lady to me was a man, Arthur Lucan, the knobby, bulbous-nosed Old Mother Riley, whose daughter Kitty was his real-life wife. 'Oh Mrs Stonochy!' Mother Riley used to howl, rolling up her sleeves preparing for an Irish fight. When they came to the Empire in Newport the street and those around were besieged with people trying to get into the theatre.

  My mother, who sat the other side of the fireplace on those nights of radio entertainment (we shared the cat, passing it to each other at intervals), preferred the singers, Ann Ziegler, Webster Booth ('When I'm calling you . . . ooo . . . ooo'), Richard Tauber and a roving tenor called the Vagabond Lover who not only sang but managed to give the impression of travelling throughout some rural and peaceful country. He sang: 'I'm only a roving vagabond, so goodnight pretty maiden goodnight . . .' We once had an argument across the fireplace as to why he was called 'glover' a mishearing on our part. My mother said it was his name, like V Glover, and I said it was a man who travelled about making gloves. We had a sudden and squally row about it. She said that I thought I knew everything, just because I always had my head in a book. She was so angry that she got up from the chair and threw the cat at me.

  It was astonishing that this set life, so ordinary and so seemingly secure, should have ended so abruptly. But it did. In the space of twenty-four hours all was changed. My mother had been ill for over a year, not desperately, but with spasms of pain, days in bed and two operations. After the second surgery I lied about my age and managed to get into the hospital to see her. She was lying, like a corpse already, but she whispered proudly to me that they had put five hundred pounds worth of radium into her. She was ever impressed by money.

&nbs
p; After three years in the Wolf Cubs (rising to senior sixer, the highest rank I have ever achieved in anything) I transferred to the Boy Scouts. My departure from the cubs was marred by an occurrence at the home of the Cub mistress. Her name was Miss Rabbit and she had a parrot (although it may have been Miss Parrot and she had a rabbit), and she also had a monkey. One day she took the Cub pack to her house to visit the monkey and it bit me. In my anguish I gave it a kick up the arse and all bedlam broke loose. I was stripped of my stripes and went into the Scouts with no great regrets.

  At my first Scout meeting, I stood at the back behind the veterans, as we lustily sang: 'We're the Seventh Newport Scouting Boys, From the town of Newport Mon!'

  It was a stirring boast to the tune of the US Marines song 'To the Shores of Tripoli'. Joy flowed through me when a weekend camp was announced. A camp! I had never camped in anything but our air raid shelter. I rushed home, clutching a list of required equipment including an axe and my personal food rations. My mother was lying on our sofa. If I had not been so excited, or perhaps if I had been a little older, I might have seen that she was wasting away. She scarcely had the strength to prop herself up on her elbows. She looked at the list of rations – a square of butter, a piece of cheese, a few ounces of sugar – and she sent me with my ration book to the shops to get these.

  I took one of my father's old chipping hammers instead of an axe. These hammers had two edges to the head, each shaped like the bow of a ship. Their function was to chip away deposits from the inside of marine boilers. He would never need to use one again. I took also some ship's biscuits which he had brought me home; square and solid as rock, they were intended as provisions for lifeboats. Even with strong teeth it would take up to one hour to eat one biscuit. Sometimes we used to smash them up with the chipping hammer.

  On the Saturday morning I set out with the rest of the Scouts for the camping ground. It could not have been too distant because we walked, pulling a trek cart loaded with tents and other equipment, singing our brave Marine song as we marched. There seemed to be lots of hills and the cart was heavy to heave. Then it came on to rain. Apart from me everyone had some protection. With clever thinking, the Scoutmaster halted the march and instructed me to sit under the trek cart, where I remained until the shower finished. Unfortunately I had sat on a patch of wet tar and as I rose it tore the seat out of my flimsy trousers. They managed to unstick this from the road and the resourceful Scoutmaster sewed the piece on again, at least after a fashion, before we proceeded.

  The camp was memorable because during the night there was an air raid on Newport (by this time, 1943, a fairly rare occurrence) and we stood by our tents on the hilly field and watched the fireworks over the distant town, the searchlights, the exploding guns and the fire glowing over the roofs. I began to wonder if my mother was all right.

  She was not, although it had nothing to do with the air raid. When I returned on the Sunday evening, a strange man was sitting by the couch talking earnestly to her. My first reaction was that the CID had caught up with my brother on account of an incident in which he and a friend had removed a baby from a pram, removed the pram from its wheels, and used the wheels as a plaything. This was not, however, the case. When the man had gone my mother explained carefully that she would have to go back into hospital for a while and that this man had come to tell her about a wonderful school in the country – in distant and romantic-sounding Devon – where we could go until she was better. We would all be together again by Christmas.

  She must have been purposely vague about it because at first I imagined that this adventure was to be some obscure time in the future. It sounded exciting, a holiday to some place of which I had only read. 'The masters play soldiers with the boys in the woods,' she told us. She said it again and again, reassuring us, and herself.

  We went to bed, Roy and I, discussing this unusual prospect. The following morning I woke and heard her crying in the next room. We both went into her and weeping she clasped us to her. 'You might be going today,' she sobbed. Today! We were dumbstruck. Now, right away, instantly. She told us to go and put on our best blue suits and then the same man who had been sitting on the couch turned up and took us down to Dr Galloway Smith's for a medical examination. On the way we met Gwyneth, a girl with whom I had been in love for some time, and I smirked and was glad I was wearing my blue suit. 'We're off to Devon,' I boasted.

  Everything happened so quickly then. All this, our street, our friends, our very life – was changed in less than a day. We went home from the surgery and once more went up to our mother's room. She tidied our hair from her bed, hardly strong enough to lift the brush. 'Be good boys,' she said. 'See you at Christmas.' We believed her; we could not imagine that it might be for ever. She could not help crying again and I remember going outside the room and having a howl against the passage wall, marking the green distemper with my tears.

  Then the man came back and told us it was time to go. We went in and embraced her once more. She was wearing one of her posh silk nighties but her bones showed through. We all had another cry and promised we would be back for Christmas and we went out of the room and house. I'm not sure how old our mother was; about forty-eight, I think. We never saw her again.

  PART TWO

  THE HOMES

  V

  Even now, after all the years, I remember one chilling instant of that day; the man rolling off his overcoat in the train that was carrying us away and revealing on his lapel a round blue badge bearing the words: 'Dr Barnardo's Homes'. We were going to an orphanage! It was like a blow in the face. I attempted to manoeuvre my head in a circular fashion, like a parrot does, to make sure I had not misread the letters around the edge of the disc. There was no mistake. The man sat down and looked stolidly out of the train window. Choked, I whispered to my brother: 'We're being sent to Dr Barnardo's.' He did not understand and said: 'We already been once to the doctor's today'

  A sense of outrage, even betrayal, came over me. Our mother sending us to an orphanage when we were not even orphans! Then I realised that the train was passing the bottom of our street. I did not know then that it was called irony. There were the engine sheds, there was the working men's institute, there were the rows of houses with smoke coming from the chimneys. I could just pick out ours. Our mam was down there and she had sent us off to an orphanage! It was almost as if we had been sold. Then I realised what had realty happened. She had been tricked as well. That man sitting so concerned on the couch had told her all the tales about the school in Devon where the masters played soldiers in the woods with the boys, just to get us away from her. Dr Barnardo's probably collected children from all over the place with this disgraceful ruse. The train whistled along the banks of the River Ebbw and I saw some boys I knew playing on the coal dust. 'Look,' I said to my brother. 'There's ole Fatty Turner and Ben.' We waved but the boys did not look up from what they were doing. In a moment some trees blocked the view, they were gone, and we were gone too.

  Almost immediately, although I find it difficult to credit now, I began to get interested in the scenery. The sense of adventure caught me. The bright marshy fields ran away down to the Bristol Channel. We were going for one night, the man told us, to Cardiff, only twelve miles away but somewhere I had never visited, except when the annual summer charabanc threaded through it on its journey to Barry Island. It was my first taste of that anticipation which comes even now, a great many cities later, on journeying to a strange place. On the following day, the man told us, we would have to go back the way we had come, through Newport, and then change trains at Bristol and Exeter and Newton Abbot on our way to south Devon. Bristol! Exeter! Newton Abbott. Suddenly the world was opening up. And south Devon. That had a touch of the exotic about it. I could picture it lounging and lush in warm climes. And it was only going to be until Christmas. That had been her promise.

  We reached Cardiff Central, a cavern of steam, and then out into the strange city, onto a foreign-looking brown and cream bus, through
streets of unfamiliar shops and faces. We arrived outside a large house with a notice on its gate: 'Dr Barnardo's Homes. Cardiff Home.' The gate opened onto a new life.

  That night they put my brother to bed early and I went down to the front gate and watched the traffic running by on the main road, the route to Newport. It occurred to me that Roy and I might make a dash for it, board one of the lorries and easily return to Maesglas. We could get off at the bottom of our street. What that sick, solitary woman would have done had we abruptly reappeared I cannot think. I dismissed the idea and it was just as well.

  On the following morning with a woman bundled up in an overcoat as an escort, Roy and I embarked on the longest journey of our lives, a journey that, in time, was to prove very long indeed. The train retraced our route of the previous day and once more we stared from the window at the river, the engine sheds and the houses. There was no smoke coming from our chimney. Then, as if to compound the irony, we passed, on the other extreme of the town, the hilly street where we had previously lived, with the houses perched against the September sky, the cut of the quarry and the familiar grey pond. But it all quickly vanished as we travelled east, below the mysterious blackness of the Severn Tunnel and into England.

  At Bristol, our first pause, we waited on the platform. What strange voices the people had, with red faces and rolling walks. One station porter shouted to another that the war would soon be over now. It was September 9th, 1943, and the newspaper placards announced in big letters that Italy had surrendered.

  All the way down to Exeter I was pressed to the window, watching the fields of Somerset and Devon. Pleasant hills began and the earth became a red-brown. My brother read comics, a parting gift from a boy in Maesglas, but when we got beyond Exeter he joined me at the window and examined the foreign landscape. 'It's a long way, ain't it,' he said. 'It'll be a long way to get back.'