Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  It is a conference centre now, next to the Wonky Donkey gift shop, but still a noble seaside building. The manager showed us round. We went into the main ballroom. It had a wooden sprung parquet floor and a raised balcony running right around it. Here the tables used to be laid with superconductor silvery metal tea pots, too hot to be poured except with asbestos gloves, and ice cream scoops that you chased around those metal bowls on stalks.

  ‘The Beatles played here,’ the manager told us proudly, but I was equally affected by the poster outside which announced that Robert Pratt and Mark Howes, in association with Derek Franks, were about to present ‘the Troggs, P.J. Proby, Herman’s Hermits and the Ivy League’ on their fortieth-anniversary tour. God, I’d like to have been there for that.

  I ache for proper British seaside. I even associate it with proper British pop. After all, Herman’s Hermits, Dave Clark and the Beatles always ended up looning around at the seaside in their films didn’t they? When we were taken off on our middle-class holidays on our middle-class sailing boats, we kids had to solemnly negotiate with my father for R&R days in Walton-on-the-Naze. I loved the pier and the crowds. The Mighty Waltzer on Walton pier was a shocker. It still is and, as a fifty-year-old piece of machinery, is genuinely scary now At seven I became enormously excited by the posters advertising the arrival of the secret Daily Mirror man in a trilby ‘He will be in this town on Tuesday.’ This was real intrigue.

  Once we stumbled on the Radio One Roadshow on the beach and glimpsed Pete Murray on a big temporary stage. (I saw him stand in the wings and say in a different voice, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, give a big hand for Pete Murray,’ before walking straight on to a big round.) We were deprived children. I wanted to be inside the barbed wire surrounding the famous Butlins in Clacton, spending all day on free rides, instead of having to listen to my father making jokes about prisoner-of-war camps on the pebbles outside. You could get vouchers for Butlins worth three pounds in the Hotspur. Unlike where we lived, the seaside was cosmopolitan. I still visit resorts now, whenever I can, with an unhealthy addiction to their melancholy ‘Strangers on the Shore’, the Acker Bilk clarinet theme, starts playing in my head. It was one of our first forty-fives, with a holly-green label. The television show opened with that shot of a beach, and that mournful tootling. It was the theme.

  Weston was proving a marvellous dose of decrepitude for me, a proper husk. ‘My sister used to dance on this floor!’ I pointed at the parquet.

  ‘Mmm,’ said my wife. ‘Can we get lunch near here?’

  The manager pursed his lips. ‘What sort of lunch?’ He looked doubtful.

  ‘She would run down the stairs there. There would have been an orchestra. We must have danced here together, my sister and I, just to ingratiate ourselves with the old people. “Ah, there’s lovely!”‘

  Before we left the Winter Gardens I peered closely at some blown-up sepia photographs of Weston in its flouncy prime. Surely it was, historically, as important as nearby Tyntesfield House, which had been saved for the nation at the cost of a small fighter plane, except that, instead of being the private playground of some fertilizer manufacturer, Weston was the playground of huge numbers of factory workers from Birmingham and Cardiff, who effectively built the place out of their wages following the Bank Holiday Act of 1871.

  I pieced together the grains of the lumpy, blown-up gelatine and suddenly thought I identified some donkey carts, which had operated near the pier. A parking attendant confirmed my detective work. ‘That’s right, he said as I nodded proudly ‘They had a stagecoach and a train and a space rocket.’

  I was pleased with myself. This had made the whole trip worthwhile. I distinctly remembered the hard, red-painted seats and the complicated clip door on the space rocket, a Flash Gordon affair, pointing upwards at a forty-five-degree angle. And, yes, it was slightly incongruously drawn by a donkey. That didn’t matter to us. You had to jump in quickly before other kids took all the places. ‘And look!’ I had made another archaeological find in the sandy valley There was the oval pool for sailing boats, still there in the middle of the beach, still filled by every rising tide, where I launched one of those bright red miniature yachts with the woolly sails and the figure-of-eight cleats that, astonishingly, sailed very well, and which, even more astonishingly, you can still buy.

  But most of all I suddenly got flooded with a vision, of a sea swimming pool. It was somewhere along the front. I trotted off in search of a blinding snowy light, reflecting off the cream-painted walls of the lido, and the bright blue tiles of the pool itself. Was it still there?

  It was boarded up now, behind a green-painted hoarding. Inside, someone was pumping water through a pipe into the main sewer, but I couldn’t find a way in, so I went around the side, and found a set of steps down to the beach and a rusty side entrance.

  ‘Look at this,’ I grumbled to Jo, moving away some temporary barriers. ‘They’ve tried to stop us getting down there.’

  But in fact they’d just built new steps. I put my hand on the rail and covered it with an orange tar that took six days to get rid of.

  But I still lay on the sand and peered under the rusted gate. The great parabola of the diving boards, the nose of the place, had been surgically removed. Not a trace remained, but I could just see, over in the corner, beyond the sweep of the cracked plain of pavement, which I was now looking across from a child’s viewpoint, the wedding cake structure of the fountain. That fountain had been the essence of a trip to the pool. It was white on the outside and seaside blue inside, with a rough-finished non-slip circular lip. It had a scrapey surface, and my sister, who used to wear a ruched pale-blue swimming costume, would clamber through a sheet of falling water holding hands with me until we were inside, splashing in the shallow blue pool and looking out on the Technicolor world through a water lens.

  ‘There’s a plan to revive the place as a Caribbean Paradise Disco Resort,’ the car park attendant explained.

  And that was that: the fountain, the mini-stagecoach and the concrete pond in the sand. All brought back to the frontal lobes. Later, in the interests of further research, I directed my wife through the back streets to where the houses backed on to the railway, to Coleridge Road.

  ‘This seems to be some sort of sink estate,’ she said, but we came round the bend and there were some houses with peculiar second floors built into mansard roofs. ‘Stop. This could be it,’ I commanded.

  ‘I thought it was a bungalow’

  ‘Yes, but these places were once bungalows. I’m sure of it. Look, they must have built these silky roofs on later. That’s exactly the same crusty grey pebble-dash. Those are the concrete slabs of the path round the side. And look. I remember those prefab garages.

  I rang my mother. ‘I can’t remember the name of the street,’ she said. ‘My memory is going for all that sort of thing. Anyway,’ she went on, remembering after all, ‘I was never there for more than half an hour. We’d dump you lot and high-tail out of it.’

  ‘Where were you going?’ I sounded abandoned.

  ‘Oh, just off on holiday without you for a change.’

  ‘Oh. Well, this is where you dumped us.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’ She remembered more. ‘It was a cul-de-sac.’

  ‘They probably extended the road later.’ I took a last look at the horrid little house we used to hate.

  When we were back on the motorway my mother rang back. ‘It was Brewster something. I’ve just remembered. Brewster Road, or Close. You see, my memory isn’t so bad.’

  We’d been nowhere near.

  3. All About Me

  Between attempts to prostrate my poor mother by ‘disappearing’ in public places and ‘appearing’ in even more public places, I was gaining a reputation as a forward child: cheeky, of a ‘sunny disposition’ and a nuisance, sniffing out the advantages of my position. I was one year ahead of the vulnerable, girly baby, Helen, and three years behind the aged William. He had to take responsibility for all three children, t
he dignity of the entire family, and the duty of carrying dicta to elderly relatives, while, as ‘Griffith, Griffith Bach’, I was allowed to simper and wriggle.

  ‘Don’t shift the blame on to Griff, you’re the oldest.’

  ‘You can stay behind and help your father … because you’re the oldest.’

  He was also the biggest, so he could hurt me. His function, apart from absorbing parental flak, of course, was to act as a mobile punch bag.

  My own son had nobody but a little sister to fight with so I had to wrestle with him, but fathers say, ‘Not now,’ and laugh at key assaults, whereas brothers, given a hefty kick getting into the car, respond in kind and get themselves into trouble. You could karate-chop an older brother to see if it really hurt. He in his turn didn’t just ‘play’ at fighting. He liked to win. (‘No punching! No biting!’) If he shouted, ‘Submit,’ there was always the last resort of pushing him to the limit so that he actually hurt me. I could yowl seriously then, provoking Mother to leave Mrs Dale’s Diary and demand furiously why William, who was the oldest, didn’t know his own strength. And look, he had actually hurt his brother, and we had better stop fighting and go outside, otherwise our father would hear of it. Temporarily gathered up into a bosomy, powdery hug, I could be the brave one. Then I could follow him outside and whack him with a stick.

  I was put up for things: songs, recitations, kisses. My mother recalls a visit to an end-of-the-pier show in Bognor. The family sat up with glassy-eyed attention when, during a break in the musical light entertainment, the cast were joined by a four-year-old boy who came on and sang ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’. The grisly child was me.

  I knew how to suck up. Our earliest holidays were at a place called Gorran Haven in Cornwall. We stayed in a flat above a crab—fisherman’s locker and played on the beach, while my father paced about in a distracted fashion on a cliff until it was ice-cream time. Here, I recall, I made a paper knife out of a spider crab’s leg and a bit of charred driftwood. I solemnly presented it to my mother. It hung around the house smelling noxiously for most of my childhood.

  Occasionally we travelled to Cardiff, on a deathly visit to Nain, my father’s mother, the white-haired matriarch of the family. She was spoken of in awed if not quite respectful tones. From the perspective of the back of the car, as it rumbled through the four thousand traffic lights on the way from Sussex to Cardiff, she seemed to be a powerful brake on the independence of our rulers.

  We were ordered to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, to keep out of the way, to make no noise, not to fight or argue, and to make use of our two Welsh phrases, ‘Nos da’, good night, and ‘Boredar’, good morning. This wasn’t because she spoke Welsh herself (though all the ancient crones of Wales usually had it in them somewhere). Nain (North-Waleian-Welsh for ‘Granny’) had long been settled in English-speaking Cardiff. The Welsh was only designed to make us look cute.

  It would appear that we children were the principal reason for the excruciatingly long journey in the first place. And she, Nain, despite being sensitive to the slightest flaw in our upbringing, like some ant-eater able to sniff out wriggly behaviour, was also apparently frail, not used to young children and in need of long periods of complete inertia in her gloomy house in the suburban street in Pen y Lan, the quiet, posh bit of north Cardiff.

  Her husband, Taid (North-Waleian Welsh for grandfather), had originally come to Cardiff to supervise the Western Region for Jesse Boots, always a slightly mythological presence in my father’s side of the family (There were ‘shares’, spoken of in hushed tones.) William Rhys Jones the Elder was a chemist who had worked in London and Southampton, having originally come from Betws-y-coed. He was a Senior Deacon of the Calvinistic Methodist Chapel and preached himself. He always entertained the visiting ministers. Three times every Sunday my father was forced to walk the mile to the chapel, and they always discussed last night’s film on the way Whether the film did for coming back, too, my mother couldn’t tell me. Taid was a charismatic man who died at the age of sixty-five, when my father was still at university, but my father was the runt of the family, ten years younger than his older brother, Ieaun.

  Nan and Uncle Ieaun took over the running of the Rhys Joneses. This seemed to have included a fierce duty to prevent the two daughters marrying. Any man who came back to Elan Road was virtually run out of the house. My aunt Gwyneth had to pretend to take my father, the little one, for a walk to get down to the tennis club and eventually escaped to Gloucester with a minister (although I can’t think that he played tennis). But Megan had to stay I sat with her in the Park Hotel towards the end of her life, when I was touring to Cardiff and its impossible New Theatre stage, and she remembered the dances she had been to there with tears rolling down her face.

  As children, we always arrived in Cardiff after dark. Wales is forever associated with inedible salad. It was ‘impossible’ to have a ‘proper’ supper, because nobody could guess when we might arrive, so big, weeping chunks of boiled ham were laid out with hard—boiled eggs, bitter 1950s lettuce and blobs of salad cream: that vile yellow gloop that puckered the mouth and just about smothered the taste of the over-ripe tomatoes. My father loved it. To us it seemed a poor reward after sitting for six hours in the back of the Morris Traveller. And worse, after Megan had cleaned the plates away into some smelly back bit of the gloomy, under-lit house (though it was Nain who did all the cooking, my mother assured me) it would be announced that it was immediately time for bed, even for my brother, who, although he was the oldest, must be tired out after the long journey.

  So we were lined up to kiss the old woman with the long, bright-white witch’s hair, a passable imitation of my father in drag, and then, God help me, I remember hugging her and piping up, like Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie, ‘There’s a kiss from Mummy, there’s a kiss from Daddy, there’s a kiss from Helen and a kiss from William.’ And the old dear raised a withered hand to stroke my bulging baby cheeks and wipe a tear from her eye. ‘Ahh, Griffith Bach’ (meant this time — my father only used it as a prelude to some expression of severe disappointment). My brother looked on with undisguised disgust.

  It had not been puritanism that influenced my uncle’s protection of his women-folk, it was snobbery. My mother is convinced he believed that Elwyn had married beneath himself, and in turn she disapproved of Ieaun and his playboy ways. Her deepest distrust was reserved for Joan, his wife. ‘When we first went there with William and they came down to the car, Elwyn passed the baby to Joan, who said, “Don’t give it to me.”‘

  Joan was admittedly a pretty stupid woman, but the pair were dead sophisticated for Glamorgan. They had a Bentley and a sequence of houses decorated in excruciating South of France taste, with lurid patterned wallpapers and gold-encrusted bibelots.. They modelled themselves on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, even down to their smelly, noisy, asthmatic pug dogs: all pretty glamorous for a consultant anaesthetist from Cardiff. My uncle came across as a Welsh cross between Rex Harrison and Bertie Wooster. He was a squadron leader during the war, and was the only man I ever met who actually said ‘what?’ at the end of his sentences.

  There was a picture of him when he was in his twenties, stood on the top of a cliff, in a trench coat and plus fours, next to a low sports car, wearing an outrageous jumper. He was the polar opposite of my father. Naturally I found him rather interesting.

  My mother can still work herself up into a fit over the indignities of their visits to our humble dwellings. ‘I didn’t think you lived in anything like this,’ was Joan’s comment on first seeing their house in Epping. Ieaun was driving in the car, quite possibly his Bentley, and turned on us children. ‘We’ll have to stop this car unless you lot can be quiet.’

  ‘But you used to say that all the time,’ I countered.

  My mother snorted. ‘You were perfectly quiet at the time.’ She giggled. William had been turned out of his bed to accommodate the visiting potentate and stood in front of him and said, ‘When are you going
home? We’re fed up with having you here.’

  What my mother resented was their concentration on luxury when she and my father were struggling to bring up their children. All their lives Ieaun and Joan danced attendance on a rich old aunt called Dolly, at the races, at Claridges and in the South of France. Dolly had married a French banker. She had become estranged from her own daughter and gave Joan a dress allowance and paid for her to come up to London once a month to have her hair and nails done. My mother liked Dolly ‘Oh, she was a lot of fun.’ A measure of her wealth was that she always booked two seats in the theatre — one for her mink.

  Ieaun and Joan never got the money. The French inheritance laws intervened. I felt my mother was quietly satisfied. She had never forgiven Ieaun’s silly assumptions about the superiority of surgeons over physicians. It had led to a row the night before my father’s funeral. Ieaun, already getting woolly-minded with the onset of Alzheimer’s, had claimed that Elwyn probably did not understand, during his final illness, what was happening to him.

  It still caused my mother to flare up fourteen years after the event, with Ieaun long dead too. ‘What nonsense you speak,’ she had told him. ‘Of course he knew He was a Fellow.’ She resented the way that Aunty Megs had tried to shush her, as if she were some junior even then. But she could also pity Ieaun now For Mummy, her family was everything, and his lack of children left Ieaun to die lonely and forgotten, whereas she sees her children every week, would do every day if she could.

  My father obviously felt oppressed by his brother and would have nothing to do with his Glamorgan snootiness. He had plans, even before we left Sussex, to move me from my posh kindergarten and once took me for a frightening glimpse of the noisy local state primary school.