by Rob Brydon
A little put out by the arrival of my brother Pete.
Plotting his demise …
I think back on the eight years before Pete was born as years in which I was an only child, but this is not the case. In April of 1971 Mum gave birth to my brother Jeremy. I was about to turn six in May. I’m afraid I have no memories at all of Jeremy, the only image I can conjure up when I think of him is of my mother sitting on the settee at Woodside, crying. Jeremy died, without warning or explanation, in August of that year, a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. I can’t imagine how this affected my parents; it is unbearable to try.
As a young child I can remember a comforting glow of certainty in my surroundings; while Dad was often away at work, Mum was always with me, ferrying me around here, there and everywhere, to Swansea, Neath, Briton Ferry … you name it, we went there. In my hazy childhood memory we’re in a Vauxhall Viva, the one with the rectangular speedometer. We’re waiting, Nan and I, in the car outside C&A while Mum pops in for something. It’s raining hard and the wipers are flapping across the windscreen.
I have a very strong memory of being snug between Mum and Dad in bed and feeling that all was well with the world. ‘Snug as a bug in a rug,’ as Dad would say. Dad was always as much a friend as a father. He was also quite flashy; he had a way with words that betrayed his profession, that of a salesman. He sold cars. When I was little, he sold them from a large showroom in Margam that is now buried deep under the M4 motorway as it prepares for its flight of avoidance over Port Talbot; after Margam Abbey Motors he struck out on his own and set up a second-hand car dealership. I would join him on trips to the car auctions at Southampton. It was always raining and the trips always smelled of cigarettes – this, for me, was the smell of the seventies. Mum and Dad both smoked; they were quite keen, and it is them I have to thank for my never having been tempted. Without knowing it they carried out an early form of aversion therapy and I grew up with an almost pathological dislike for cigarettes, matches, ashtrays. In fact, any of the paraphernalia connected with smoking. I even disliked holding an unopened packet.
When I would hear The Beatles singing ‘She’s Leaving Home’, I’d always love the line about the man who worked in the motor trade. That was my dad, he was a man from the motor trade. As part of his devotion to this trade he had a Jet garage for a while. I remember the orange glow of the lights as they indicated a pump being used, and the Man from U.N.C.L.E. exoticism of the little safe that was built into the floor under the cashier’s chair. I would gaze down at it from the swivel chair and imagine a masked criminal forcing me to unlock it and empty the contents into a bag.
In Spain with Dad and Pete. Mum is on the other side of the camera.
At home I would hear Dad talk on the telephone to clients and he would be full of energy and charm, his voice shifting from its natural soft Port Talbot lilt and edging towards a mild mid-Atlantic twang. It was the seventies, so the phone in question was a Trimphone or Slimphone; I forget the name now. It was one of those narrow phones and it was probably a shade of green. Whatever the colour, it was undoubtedly the phone of the day, the very latest in telecommunications style.
We were in many ways early adopters in the area of consumer durable technology. A Sony cassette deck was purchased one Saturday afternoon on a trip to Swansea, soon to be augmented by tapes of Barry White, the Carpenters, the Doctor Zhivago soundtrack and Herb Alpert. I imagine it was quite swish in its day, with its FM tuner, slider volume controls and dark-wood casing and speakers. I used to play a double cassette on it that I’d received for Christmas, a compilation of hits of the day that included ‘Sad Sweet Dreamer’ by Sweet Sensation and ‘Devil Gate Drive’ by Suzi Quatro. I also enjoyed sliding the volume controls and making the transporter-room noise from Star Trek, pretending that I was beaming down to another planet. The room also had a rug with two circles on it, which to me represented the platforms in the transporter room from which Captain Kirk would teleport. Although state of the art, it wasn’t long before the Sony cassette deck became faulty and started chewing up the tapes, which would then have to be painstakingly removed before a pencil was inserted into the spool and careful rewinding began. On future plays, whenever the mangled bit of tape was reached the sound would acquire an odd ‘underwater’ quality that would last for as long as the damage stretched, before the music would come into the clear again, as though waking from a fitful sweaty sleep or emerging unscathed from a dense forest of thorns.
My pretend beaming would take place in the lounge, the ‘best’ room. It wasn’t a ‘best’ room in the traditional Welsh sense – that is to say, we did use it all year round – but it was also the room that grandparents would sit in on a Sunday. I can see my father’s mother with a cup of tea; Nanny Margam, she was known as (given that she was my nan and she came from Margam). She still lived, as a widow now, in the house that my dad had grown up in, number 51 Wern Road, just up the street from Anthony Hopkins and his parents. Hopkins’s father was a baker, and it was from his bakery that Dad and my Aunty Margaret and uncles Colin and Leighton bought their bread. My only memory of my grandfather Emlyn is of standing at the foot of his bed while paying a visit to the house; he died when I was very young.
Nanny Margam would come to our house on Sundays, always bearing a freshly made egg custard tart (still the best I have tasted), and we would discuss that week’s show by our shared favourite, Benny Hill. I would recount one of his sketches and she would tut under her breath, ‘Well well, there’s comical …’ before we’d listen together to ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’.
My fourth birthday and Nanny Margam is disappointed by the quality of the catering.
For the rest of the week this best room was somewhat underused, and I remember it now for just two reasons. It had a glass fireplace, which I once put my head through after twirling round and round in an effort to make myself dizzy. When I think of the room, I always remember that incident. The other memory was of Saturday mornings spent sitting on the floor cross-legged with a bowl of Sugar Puffs and copies of Roy of the Rovers and Tiger laid out on the carpet in front of me. They would be delivered on a Saturday morning and I would rush downstairs full of excitement, while Mum and Dad slept on above me.
I’ve always felt that, as a child, I had an above-average interest in several things; comedy was one of them, but magazines were also high up on the list. I had an ability then – and still do, to a lesser extent – to fixate on something and to elevate it to a loftier position than it deserves. Every week along with Roy of the Rovers and Tiger, I would also get Look-in. This was a TV-oriented magazine with features on shows such as Supersonic, The Six Million Dollar Man and other hits of the day. One week it was giving away a dragon pendant, cashing in on the success of the Kung Fu TV series. When my copy arrived the pendant had already gone and there ensued a quest, which lasted for some weeks, as I tried to track down another. I can’t remember whether or not I turned up anything, but the smell of magazines will take me right back to opening the comic and the horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach as I realized that the prized free gift was missing.
I must have spent a lot of time in newsagents as a child; the smell of newsprint, especially on a cold frosty morning, is one of the most evocative for me as an adult, right up there with the leather of my satchel at St John’s. Mulling it over, perhaps the comics weren’t delivered; perhaps I went down to Flares, the newsagent just down the hill on the corner, and bought my comics myself, hurriedly bringing them back in time for Swap Shop – a fine BBC programme, and one to which I was devoted.
It’s fair to say that I was a BBC child, faithful to Blue Peter and Swap Shop, with only occasional forays into the racier fields of Magpie and Tiswas, which seemed, as Alan Bennett’s mother would say, ‘common’. This is not to say that we never dipped our toes in the murky waters of ITV – far from it. We loved Rising Damp, Only When I Laugh and The Kenny Everett Video Show but were really more naturally at home with the BBC
where, like millions of others, we were regular viewers of The Two Ronnies, Top of the Pops, Mike Yarwood and The Generation Game.
A lot of my childhood seems to have been spent in front of the television, and yet I was just as content outdoors, roaming around Baglan with my friend Robert George. Robert was known as Georgie and loved the outdoors even more than I did. Together we climbed trees looking for birds’ eggs, a pursuit rightly frowned upon now but at the time it was all the rage and not seen as being at all cruel. We would cross over the main road and on to the marshy fields with their tiny waterways, where we built makeshift rafts with bits of wood and discarded plastic barrels. Once constructed, these fine vessels would carry us off to uncharted territories. While on the marshy ground we would collect frogspawn and bring it home in buckets, to be transferred into a water-filled bin just outside the back door, where it would sit until the frogs arrived. We were forever building dens, and this meant that I was always gathering sticks, boughs and branches, dragging them back to the house and trying to make some kind of shelter or hideaway with them.
From 1971 we lived on what might be called the nursery slope of a larger hill in Baglan and had a steep narrow lawn at the front of the house, perfect for sending Action Man hurtling down on a suicide mission in his jeep. I was very fond of Action Man and loved nothing more than suspending him on a length of string and dangling him from the top of the stairs, out through the banisters and down the wall at the side. I’d do this for hours, perfectly happy to watch him swing back and forth like a pendulum. In my mind he was scaling a cliff face or the walls of the castle to reach the lair of an evil mastermind. He would often have been stripped of his uniform long ago and, in a form of exhibitionism frowned on by the military, be attempting his mission naked. This was quite common in Action Men. I had several of them, almost a platoon, and within minutes of emerging from their boxes they’d be naked, huddled together in a heap like a drunken support group. With their toned muscular bodies, crew cuts and gripping hands, one wonders with hindsight exactly what sort of action these men were looking for.
Mine would soon be out of their uniforms and in their bespoke outfits that I’d made from old socks. A hole would be cut at the toe for their head to pop through, followed by two smaller holes at the side for the arms, with an elastic band serving as a belt. It was a sort of Roman slave tunic inspired, I suspect, by Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, the first film I ever cried at, sitting on the sofa between Mum and Dad, watery eyes glued to the telly. I made quite a few little outfits for my Action Men; this, combined with a love of not only Donny Osmond but also the Bay City Rollers, might prompt the reader to a few conclusions with regards to my young self and matters of orientation. Rest assured that I always knew where to draw the line when it came to my slightly fey leanings.
I offer as proof the time that my grandmother bought me a purple T-shirt on which was printed the face of Donny Osmond. Much as I loved what he and his crazy brothers were doing in challenging the perceived norms of contemporary music, I knew deep inside that it would simply be wrong for a young boy of my age to wear such a T-shirt. And so I broke Nan’s heart with my refusal, ‘Good God, woman, no! What the hell were you thinking?!’ That’s what a more forceful, not to say rude, child might have said. I politely declined, offering up all manner of excuses.
Despite waving the flag for sensitive, artistic children everywhere I was also involved in more boyish pursuits, and my love of trees and dens continued to grow unabated. One particularly ambitious Sunday morning I decided to build an extensive new lair in the garden, and soon realized that I needed far more in the way of raw materials if I was to do justice to my architectural vision. So I set off just down the hill from our house to a point where a few trees stood on a grass verge at the side of the road. I climbed up, knife in hand, for twelve feet or so to where the tree divided off into a network of branches and then, sitting on one, began to saw at a limb. I tugged away at the branch with one hand while hacking at it with the other, all the while blind to the laws of physics, which confidently predicted my imminent downfall. Not unlike the splendid Wyle E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons – when he speeds off a clifftop and only falls when he looks down and realizes what he’s done – at the point that the branch parted company with the tree I suddenly recognized the folly of my ways and plummeted downwards, landing in a dead weight on the grass and knocking myself out cold in the process. Luckily for me a local man, George Williams, happened to be passing, walking his dog, and he witnessed my fall. Were it not for him, I might still be there now.
He hurried over to find my lifeless body lying limp and abandoned amongst the long grass and, no doubt aware of the weight of responsibility dictating that he should do the right thing, immediately flagged down the next person he saw. As luck would have it, that next person was my father, returning from the pub, where he’d been enjoying his traditional pre-Sunday-lunch drink.
‘Come and look, Howard! Whose boy is this?’
Dad wandered over to help, full of public-spiritedness, only to receive the awful shock of seeing his own son lying in the long grass. Rather like George Cole’s Arthur Daley in Minder, when realizing that one of his plans had gone asunder Dad uttered a quick, ‘Oh my good God!’ and then concentrated on not passing out himself. I was ushered into the car and taken, still unconscious, to the nearby Neath hospital and wheeled along a corridor to be examined by a doctor; all the while Dad was leaning over me in a concerned manner. Bear in mind that he’d come upon me directly from the pub and so each time he gazed down at my pale unflinching face he breathed out a constant stream of, frankly, alcoholic fumes. (Probably worth pointing out here that it was the fumes that were alcoholic, not Dad.) On examining me, the doctor couldn’t help but notice the sweet stench of beer and enquired, not unreasonably, ‘Has your son been drinking?’
Mum would not have been pleased at such a suggestion; I would only have been seven or eight years old, and I’ve no doubt she would have put the doctor straight in a direct and unambiguous manner. Anyway, I came around eventually and all was well, although I must have liked the hospital as I was to return a few weeks later, this time conscious but in some pain, after attempting to build a slide in the back garden. (Mum says I was accident-prone as a child, and these stories do tend to back up her argument.) I thought it would be a good idea, again on a Sunday morning – a particularly dangerous time for me, it would appear – to build a slide in the garden, a rollercoaster almost. To do this I took a ladder and placed one end up on the top of a low wall. This positioned the ladder at roughly forty-five degrees. Perfect. I then placed a plastic sledge, specifically a sand sledge – we used to go regularly to the sand dunes at Merthyr Mawr near Bridgend (as seen in Lawrence of Arabia – no, really …) and career around on these little sledges – at the top of the dunes. My plan was to slide down the ladder, and I was curious as to how far I would continue to travel once I hit the ground.
Holding the sledge in place with one hand, at the summit of my slide, I carefully climbed on to my chariot and surveyed the scene. Everything looked good. The sky was clear, there was little wind and, in my opinion, forty-five degrees was steep enough to get a bit of speed up but not so steep that I might come to any harm. I launched myself off and hurtled down, reaching the ground with a bump and stopping just inches from the foot of the ladder. The only thing out of the ordinary to have happened on my fantastic journey was the unmistakable ripping sound I heard as I reached the bottom, a kind of tearing noise. Strange. I stood up and noticed that a length of fabric from the left leg of my trousers, Sunday best trousers at that, was hanging down at my side, torn. That would explain the noise, then. I glanced at the sledge and saw that it too had suffered some damage, a huge tear down the left side, a gaping hole in the hull of the vessel.
This was when I realized that I’d made the mistake of placing the top of the ladder at the bottom of my slide. The top of the ladder was where the metal hooks, the sharp metal hooks through which you could
slide another ladder, were located. I felt a curious sensation in my leg and looked down. There, in full view thanks to the torn trouser, was my thigh, hanging open and exhibiting what, even to my untrained eye were evidently several layers of me. Lovely. That was when it began to hurt, only once I’d seen it. Very strange. I went in the house to find Mum and first apologized for ripping my best trousers before showing her the collateral damage. Off we went to the hospital again, not returning until my poor little thigh had been stitched up. The scar is still there, just below my bum.
If you’re ever in the area, do have a look.
4
Through my early childhood we had often hooked a caravan up to the car and headed off to a couple of spots around Wales – Brecon, and New Hedges near Tenby – and across the Severn Bridge into Dorset. Then, in the spring of 1977, Mum and Dad bought a large static caravan on a site in Lawrenny, West Wales, in those days a few hours’ drive from Baglan through lovely countryside, though now a considerably shorter journey thanks to the expanding motorway. Well done, the M4. A few friends already had places there, and the idea was that we would spend weekends and school holidays at the caravan with Mum, being joined by Dad when he could get away from work. Lawrenny is a tiny village, not a million miles away from Tenby, and the small caravan site was adjacent to Lawrenny Yacht Club where many of the caravan dwellers had boats in which they would sail, motor or paddle on the Cleddau Estuary. The estuary goes out past Pembroke Dock and Milford Haven to the Irish Sea and inland as far as Haverfordwest. We bought a little red speedboat, a Picton Speedmaster, and would take it out on the water most weekends.