‘Going somewhere nice, love?’
She’d tried not to boast, but it had been difficult. ‘America.’
‘Ooh, get you. Well there’s enough room in that bag for me. When do you want to pack me in it?’
She set the boxes aside, picked up the bag and shook the dust from it. It was heavy. She switched off the light, closed the door and carried it down the stairs to her bedroom. She set the bag on the cream crewel work rug beside her bed, instantly regretting it when she saw the dust smudges it made. The zip was stiff, rusted with age, the vinyl cracked. She persevered and broke two fingernails before she finally managed to open it.
On top was a photograph album. The plastic cover she remembered as white had yellowed. She opened it and was faced with a photograph of herself and Richard ‘Rich’ Evans taken on their first day at Swansea Training College. Underneath, she’d written Two head teachers in the making. She’d meant it ironically. Neither of them had the slightest intention – then – of pursuing a career in teaching.
Rich was going to be an actor. The only question was whether his career would progress along the Royal Shakespeare Company, classic theatrical route, or the film star path that led to Hollywood. She was going to be a groundbreaking artist who would create ‘true art’ – or what she at eighteen believed ‘true art’ to be.
Both Rich’s parents and her own had insisted they have ‘qualifications to fall back on’ because their chosen professions were notoriously precarious. They’d picked Swansea because it had been one of the first colleges to offer a Bachelor of Education degree. It was also the only college to offer them both a place. And, as they, but not their parents, considered themselves engaged to be married, they’d refused to be separated. Rich had opted to study English; she, art.
Penny turned the page. Her with Kate Burgess, her best friend since their first day in Pontypridd Girls’ Grammar School in 1959, and her travelling companion on that fateful 1968 trip to the States.
She leant back against the bed, thought of the letter she’d received, pictured the disfigured recluse who’d written it, closed her eyes – and the years tumbled away.
Swansea, January 1968
If she hadn’t cut her moral philosophy class to play chess with Rich in the common room, she might never have gone to America. Within an hour of the announcement being posted on the noticeboard, all the flight tickets had been reserved and deposits paid. A fist fight broke out in the union offices over the last two. But thanks to Kate, she’d booked hers before the trip had been advertised.
She and Rich had tucked themselves into a corner and were in the closing stages of a game. The room was unpleasantly warm. The college could never get it right. In winter, the students either froze or baked. The atmosphere was dense, blue with cigarette smoke, and heavy with the mixed odours of coffee, sweat, cheap aftershave and scent. She was about to checkmate Rich in six or ten moves, depending on whether or not he’d seen through her strategy, when Kate burst in.
Everyone turned when Kate slammed the door back on its hinges. She looked as though she’d been under a shower. Her nylon mac dripped puddles on the vinyl tiled floor; her white tights were grey with mud splashes, her short blonde hair was plastered to her head but her cheeks glowed with excitement.
Kate shouted but she couldn’t hear her above the political arguments raging against a background of Jimmy Ruffin’s ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted’ being belted out on the record player. She shook her head and pointed to her ears.
Kate charged across the room. Oblivious to their game her overflowing bag hit their chessboard. A yoghurt and monster bar of chocolate spilt out knocking over half a dozen pieces.
‘Pen, you’ll never guess—’
‘Thanks for killing our game and so much for your diet, Kate,’ Rich griped. He and Kate had hated one another for years. Neither of them bothered to disguise their mutual loathing. She’d told both of them it wasn’t easy having the love of her life and best friend at constant loggerheads but her protests hadn’t had the slightest effect.
‘I’m talking to Pen, not you,’ Kate snapped.
‘That’s my rook you sent flying across the room. And I was winning,’ Rich carped, when Kate swept the board again with the edge of her mac.
‘No you weren’t. Pen had a cunning plan to checkmate you in three moves. She always does.’ Kate picked up the rook and turned her back on Rich. ‘The union’s chartered a plane. It’s leaving for New York the first week of June and returning mid September. Forty-eight pounds return and they’ll help any student who wants to go to find a job.’
‘Forty-eight pounds! You sure?’ She abandoned the game.
‘Where are you two going to find forty-eight pounds?’ Rich scoffed. ‘It’s two weeks into term but everyone I know has an overdraft.’
‘Not me. After watching my mother struggle with the tallyman for years I know how to hold on to my money.’ Kate had been brought up by a widowed mother on a council estate. The poorest and roughest in Pontypridd.
‘Do you have forty-eight pounds?’ she asked Kate.
‘I handed in my cheque ten minutes ago.’
‘Rob a bank or gone on the game, Kate?’ Rich goaded.
Kate ignored him. ‘I met Joe Hunt in town. He was on his way back from a meeting at the university union. The notice won’t be on the board until tomorrow morning. There’s bound to be a rush for seats because the offer’s open to all Swansea students in the Uni, Tech and Art colleges.’ Kate gave Rich a mocking smile. ‘As for the forty-eight pounds, the Dragon Hotel was advertising for a waitress. All day Saturday and Sunday and two week-night evenings. Five pounds a week plus tips and a free ride back here at the end of the shift.’
‘You’ve taken it?’
Penny didn’t know why Rich had asked. It was obvious from the triumphant look on Kate’s face she had.
‘It gives me four months to replace what I’ve taken from my grant cheque and save spending money.’ Kate wrinkled her nose. ‘Not that we’re going to be allowed to take more than fifty pounds out of the country. Stupid government and their stupid penny-pinching rules to stop the rich spending abroad; if we don’t find jobs within a day or two in the States, we’ll be sleeping in the street.’
‘Do the union want all the money upfront?’ Penny’d tried to calculate how much was left of her grant cheque in her bank account. She’d a massive overdraft before Christmas and spent more than she should have on presents for her family.
‘Do you think I would have handed my cheque into the union office if they didn’t? I’m still living off what I made working in the Post Office at Christmas. I haven’t touched my grant. I won’t need any extra cash for a few weeks and, when I do, I’ll have my Dragon wages to fall back on.’
‘You’re going to wear yourself out, waiting tables two days and four nights a week as well as studying. Most people who flunk out do so after the second-year finals.’ Rich couldn’t resist the opportunity to forecast doom for Kate.
‘You’re thinking of students of low intelligence and no stamina, like yourself,’ Kate bit back.
Rich ignored Kate and glared at Penny. ‘You can’t seriously be considering going, Pen?’
‘It’s America.’
‘It’s not like the TV shows.’ Rich was always teasing her and Kate about their addiction to American westerns, like Bonanza and the High Chaparral. ‘The cowboy films you watch are their idea of serious history. And Hollywood is a right dump. Worse than the council estates around Ponty.’
‘Been there, have you, Rich? The council estates as well as Hollywood?’ Kate sniped.
Rich remained unabashed. ‘Face it, Kate, you live on an estate. You know what I mean.’
‘No, I don’t. Would you care to explain?’ Kate demanded.
Penny’d stepped in. ‘Stop quarrelling.’
‘Kate started it.’
‘No she didn’t. You’re being childish. We’ve moved on since Victorian times. No one gives a damn where peop
le come from these days.’
Even then she’d occasionally wondered why she stayed with Rich. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t had offers from boys just as attractive. But whenever she came close to moving on, Rich would say or do something heart-meltingly sweet, like drive her down the Gower so she could photograph and sketch the landscape while he stood around freezing. Or produce tickets for a Royal Shakespeare production in the Aldwych they were both desperate to see. Or escort her to an art exhibition that bored him witless just so she wouldn’t have to go on her own.
‘Coming with us, Rich?’ Kate taunted, knowing Rich’s teacher father insisted both his sons work on their grandfather’s farm every holiday ‘to keep their feet on the ground’.
‘I suppose I could ask my old man if he’d let me off herding sheep, milking cows and mucking out horses this summer.’
‘Don’t bother. You’d cramp our style.’ Kate wasn’t joking and Rich knew it.
Tired of listening to Kate and Rich fence words, Penny’d left her chair. ‘You going to the hostel, Kate?’
Kate stuffed the yoghurt and chocolate back into her bag. ‘Yes, before I get any more gibes about my diet.’ She waved the bar of chocolate under Rich’s nose. ‘Alison asked me to get this when I said I was going into town.’ She bent close to Rich’s ear. ‘It’s for her little brother’s birthday,’ she shouted, making him jump.
‘What about our game, Pen?’ Rich questioned petulantly.
‘Kate’s right. You were losing.’
‘I wasn’t. And, you said you wanted to see The Magic Roundabout.’
The only time the common room was full was the ten minutes when the cartoon was shown on television before the evening news.
It was Rich’s remark that made her decide, no matter what, she was going to the States. If for no other reason than it would prove her independence.
She’d picked up her bag. ‘I need to phone home about America. If I plead poverty, my father may cough up the fare. He’s always telling us travel broadens the mind.’
‘Travel in Europe maybe,’ Rich declared. ‘But I fail to see how travel in America will do anything of the kind. There’s no culture …’
‘See you at supper.’ She’d pretended not to hear Rich when he called after her but she noticed Kate turning and poking her tongue out at him.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘America, darling, what a marvellous opportunity. For four months you said?’
‘June to September.’ Penny knew her mother would be pleased at the thought of her travelling with other students.
‘Is Rich going?’
‘He’s thinking about it.’ Her parents had made it clear they felt she and Rich had become too serious about one another too young. ‘Kate’s going.’
‘That’s wonderful, Penny, darling. I’ll get your father to transfer forty-eight pounds into your account tonight.’
‘It would be better if he sent me a cheque made out to the student’s union, Mam.’
‘You’re overdrawn again.’
‘Not by much,’ she lied.
‘How much is not much?’
‘I’m not sure.’ She reflected that that, at least, was the truth.
‘Sort it, darling, and tell me how much you need. And if Kate needs help …’
‘She wouldn’t take it, Mam. You know how independent she is.’ She glanced over her shoulder into the foyer where Kate was waiting for her.
‘You could try, but be tactful.’
‘I’ll ring you again when I know more. Love to you, Dad, and everyone.’
‘I’ll pass on the message. You’re eating properly and taking care of yourself?’
‘Of course, Mam.’
‘You’d better do some clothes shopping. Depending on where you go in America it could be hot. Shall I ask your father to put a hundred pounds into your account? Or won’t that be enough?’
‘I’ll make it enough.’ She wondered if the Dragon needed another waitress. ‘And, if he does stretch to a hundred pounds, tell him I won’t need another sub until the autumn and I won’t then, if I get a halfway decent job in America.’
‘Seeing is believing, darling.’
‘You’re not cross about the overdraft?’
‘Resigned. You’re no worse than Rachel, Ned and Evan.’
‘The advantage of being the youngest is your parents have seen it all before. That’s the pips, Mam. I haven’t any more money. Love you.’ She hoped her mother heard her last words before the line went dead.
‘Well?’ Kate asked.
‘My mother’s going to ask my father to send me the money.’
‘Lucky you.’ There wasn’t a trace of envy in Kate’s voice. She wasn’t sure there wouldn’t have been in hers, if their situations had been reversed.
‘We’d better talk to someone about work permits.’
‘And jobs,’ Kate echoed.
‘You’re really going?’
Rich’s question irritated her as much as his attitude towards Kate. ‘I dropped a post-dated cheque into the union office an hour ago.’
They were facing one another across the supper table. The dining room was almost empty. It was Wednesday, the one weekday evening when visits from the opposite sex were officially allowed in the hostels from seven until ten o’clock. Not that the privilege affected the boys’ hostel. Their wardens treated them as adults and allowed them to have visitors for as long as they wanted, at any hour of the day or night – and all night if the mood took them. Unlike the elderly female warden the girls had nicknamed ‘Fanny’, who supervised the girls’ hostel.
Fanny spent her evenings and nights creeping up and down the corridors in soft-soled bedroom slippers, listening at their doors for a masculine voice. If she heard one, the punishment was swift and severe. The visitor’s hostess was exiled to selected ‘digs’ where the landlady’s rules were even stricter than Fanny’s.
‘What about me?’ Rich asked.
‘What about you?’ She dipped a spoon into a bowl of apple pie and custard, decided she wasn’t hungry enough to eat it, and pushed it aside.
‘I can’t believe you’re going to leave me for four months.’
‘We’re not married.’
‘We agreed to marry after we qualified. I wanted to buy you an engagement ring for Christmas. You wouldn’t let me.’
‘I’m not in the mood to argue with you.’ She left the table.
‘Pen,’ he followed her into the car park. ‘I’m only upset at the thought of not seeing you for months on end. Come to my room and wait for me while I phone home,’ he begged.
‘You’re going to ask your father if he’ll let you off working on your grandfather’s farm this summer,’ she guessed.
‘After I’ve spoken to my brother.’
‘Clever move. Get Jack to argue your case for you.’
Rich’s elder brother was a postgraduate research student in London. Much to their geography teacher father’s disgust he’d chosen to study philosophy. Jack, too, helped out on their grandfather’s farm. When it came to family arguments, Jack always fought in their mother’s best interests as she was self-effacing and their father overbearing. Jack also did his best to protect his younger brother from their father’s volatile temper and arrogance, traits she was beginning to suspect Rich had inherited.
Rich held out his hand. ‘I’m sorry.’
She capitulated and took it.
‘Forgiven?’
‘I’ll think about it while I wait for you.’
They crossed the lawn. Rich went to the payphone in the foyer and she took the lift to his top-floor room. Even the corridors in the boys’ hostel smelt differently from the girls’. Mixed odours of male sweat, stale beer and burnt toast hung unpleasantly in the air, and Rich’s room had a distinct ‘dirty sports socks, gym changing room’ atmosphere. She opened the window. Shivering, she gazed out at the view of Swansea Bay.
The curve of the shore was highlighted by street lamps that burnt golden in the mis
ty twilight. Boats bobbed on their moorings at the Mumbles end of the bay but all she could think about was America.
She’d plenty of time to dream of New York and art galleries. As the minutes ticked past she stopped looking at her watch. She’d seen Joe Hunt when she’d dropped her cheque off at the union office. He’d given her a photocopied list of summer camps that employed students as counsellors but she’d set her sights elsewhere. She intended to find a job in the city. Waiting tables or working in a bar in Greenwich Village in the evenings so she could spend her days visiting the centres of culture she had read about. The Guggenheim, the Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art …
Penny heard the lift whirr upwards. The doors opened, footsteps echoed down the corridor and Rich strode in. She asked the question, although she already knew the answer from the expression on his face.
‘What did your brother and father say?’
‘Jack was great. He always is. He phoned my father for me but the brute wouldn’t even consider it. He said Granddad needs all the help he can get this summer. The old man says he wants to sell the farm in a year or two and needs to get it in good shape. That means repairing and repainting the farmhouse, all the outbuildings, and rebuilding the drystone walls. He can afford to get in professionals. But his grandsons are cheaper. Never mind that they have their own lives to live. And I don’t believe for one minute he’s serious about selling. They’ll carry him out of that farmhouse, feet first. I tried phoning my father after I talked to Jack but …’
‘But?’ she prompted when he hesitated.
‘I never want to see or speak to the bastard again.’ Rich threw himself on the bed and crossed his arms behind his head.
‘That’s your father you’re talking about.’
‘He’s an unreasonable sod. I wish I had yours.’
‘I’m lucky.’ She kept her relief in check. Ever since Kate had suggested that Rich would ‘cramp our style’ she’d been imagining the two of them wandering around America, sharing experiences, making new friends – and without Rich’s watchful and jealous eye – of both sexes. ‘I’m sorry.’
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