Once (3 page)

I was once brought to a sudden halt running in the Glen when round the corner I came face to face with Hughie Bach's arse, as he bent double to relieve himself, barely screened by a laurel, trousers round his knees. I doubt you ever saw anyone turn whiter in the face, whiter than Hughie's grey-pink arse, for sure, or beat a hastier retreat than I did that afternoon.

Or else it was the clopping laundry van, from Laundry Hill. For there were people in our lower middle-class ranks who used the services of the laundry. A sometime Lord Mayor, Mr Dunwell, Royal Welch Fusilier veteran of the Great War, lived two doors down, a Yorkshireman by birth. And there was Captain Miller, risen from the ranks, still further down, with his very pretty wife ‘like an actress', and the Isherwoods, the McCleans and Miss Burke. These were people of standing, you'd think, but no one thought so, unless themselves. Mr McClean was a retired solicitor. He knew eminent men in London, just a little perhaps. The Isherwoods went into formal mourning, and closed their curtains, when the King died (as the entire road did for any neighbour's funeral). Yet young Miss Isherwood would collect bets from Walter Price, always at night, in a huddle at the front door, for a book someone kept, perhaps her mother or her dad? Or was she placing them?

‘Have you heard the news?' What was it? ‘The King is dead!' she whispered to my mother, in loud reverence, on the Abergele Road, and the man barely cold in his winding sheet.

The horse age had now all but become the race-horse age. But my father knew working horses and had worked with them, had driven a pony and trap, as a matter of course. It was a horse, the red horse Fox, from Bill Davies's stables in the uplands of the Bay, that nearly brought my story to an early close, at the tender age of nine. Fox bolted with me one Saturday morning, onto a metalled road and after about a quarter of a mile, off I came, knocking myself spark out against the bottom of a lamp post. The people who found me knew me and brought me home concussed and semi-conscious. I remember coming round and being sick into the sink all over the washing-up. Everyone on the Red Wood Road knew about it before I got home, from Dick and from my sister. Was I dead? Would I live?

Perhaps it was the protracted convalescence from this concussive episode and the resulting great span of time off school that makes those afternoons in my parents' bed seem both numerous and haunting, lying there listening out for the now nightmare tattoo of hoof-beats, gazing into the wintry sky, that was always so buoyant, because of the sea nearby. The sea ran not much more than half a mile away from our door, the white-horse sea. It would flood my mind forever, as a prospect of elsewhere, a restless realm of tides and skies and light, its light always there, in our daily lives, conditioning us, whoever we were, whatever our capacity for dreaming. Neptune tapped a rock and up sprang a horse. I saw the sea and my heart rode away. So it rides now at the drop of a hat, not for escape, but for respite.

Mr Edwards the smith (whose wife once described my father as ‘very athletic', mystifying us forever) was largely a wrought-iron and an agricultural repair man now. But he shod horses still, and he rounded wild ponies up and held them, at the back end of the year, corralled at the old mill, to what end, I don't know. (The Belgian meat market they said at Price the Butcher.) One misty morning I remember coming up early from the shore by Pen-y-Bryn and seeing what seemed like hundreds of wild ponies off the moor herded together there. The uncommon mist that shrouded the village must have magnified my sense of their number. They stood shoulder to shoulder, packed, crowding the yard and up the length of the track from the mill to the road.

I would have been twelve, going on thirteen at most the time I saw them. I'd been down fishing in the early morning, attending a nightline, digging bait, one or other, or all three. The ponies all rough and ragged seemed like an apparition, a ghostly vision, neither neighing nor whinnying, in the great, still silence of the mist. Some of them had hooves like hockey sticks, from being on the moor and mountainside, with no hard surface under them to keep their toes in shape. It's a strange sight to see, a horse with all four hooves that way, like some mad attempt by Leonardo da Vinci to design a rocking horse or a mount for a horseback ball-game.

It might have been the tail-end of the horse age, but still there were very few cars in our world at that time. Only Mr Pierce and Ernie Thomas owned a car on our road at the start, and Mr Meredith (of Meredith & Kirkham garage, so he hardly counted). If I remember right, even by 1956 and Suez there only one or two more; Suez an event I recall, not of course as ‘Suez' but as something worrying, like Hungary and dark night images on the television news, chez Dick.

I always associate Suez with a grave conversation that passed in the road between Mr Pierce and my father, about petrol rationing. Mr Pierce was peering under the bonnet of his black Ford Prefect, or was it a Poplar? – I don't think a Pilot – a model on which the bonnet lifted and folded up from the side, as I recall, like a wing. How many horse power did it have? My father peered in with him as if to see. Then the two men stood up and talked, let's suppose, as would be likely, something about Nasser, and Eden's fallen world. What I do know is you'd have thought the end of the world was round the corner, running on empty, stuttering to a halt, the way Mr Pierce folded the bonnet down and closed the engine away, as if, it now seems to me, seeing him again in my mind's eye, consigning the car to the scrapheap for eternity.

My Scottish grandpa had a car, an old Austin with a crank handle, leather seats, and running boards. So far away was the world then he would sit me between his arms and let me ‘drive' around the village sometimes, when he and granny came over on Sunday. Our own first car was called a brake, an Austin van with seats in the back and windows cut in the side, and minimal comfort. I think we must have had it in coronation year, or just before, from the proceeds of my father's writing, I guess. Whenever it was it was by 1954, when my brother was born. I remember father lying on the sofa in the rarely used front room, holding his brow because he found the car hard to drive. It wasn't that he'd never taken a test, which he hadn't, but that the brake had a novel gear-shift, fixed to the steering-wheel column, and he couldn't get the hang of it.

Cars were rarely left on the road but parked or garaged elsewhere, most of the houses on our road having no such luxury as a garage. My father rented a garage from an old lady, beyond Fairmount. He lavished care on his vehicle there, sealing its underneath with some kind of bitumen and wrapping its suspension springs with coarse tape coated with a stiff gluey-green-grey paste. One of his many mad precautions in life, this one I suppose to guard against corrosive salt air from the sea. I remember standing around all morning while he struggled and swore under the car applying the sticky tape. A cold dull morning but never quite boring because my father's antics always set such occasions on edge.

Pa D the primary school headmaster had a car, and my father's bosses too, at Ratcliffe's Engineering Company, some four hundred yards back down the Red Wood road from ‘Thornfield'. They had very big and powerful cars and conceit to go with them. Thick-headed petty fat-cats they were, lunching at the Metropole, height of sophistication, in the Bay, on the spoils of war.

The war, the war.... We lingered in its aftermath. It lingered in our young lives. Even more than forty years on there was the war still. As when my nephew, a small toddling boy, halted outside Hughie Jones's house and called down the path to him a childish enquiry, ‘Where's your gate?' ‘They took it for the war,' answered Hughie, so many years later. (Never brought it back.) There was National Service too. I suppose that was what took Ernie Davies's son away. I remember him coming into our backyard in his uniform, boots and puttees, and giving me a Royal Welch Fusiliers cap badge. There was Korea, the Mau Mau, Suez and Hungary, Malaya, Ireland... so the never-ending war ran on, as perhaps Mr Farrell at the Laundry wanted to remind us: war as much a precondition of our existence as sex. Once in this time an IRA bomb went off at Kinmel Army Camp, not so far from us. I remember the shock of it – not of the bomb going off – but of the event as gossip.

I missed National Service by a good margin. But soon time came round as time will and I must enlist in the infantry again and face the world, and quite soon experience it as represented by the fanatical Pa D.

It must be said that such a world as Pa D made would be a national scandal, and illegal, today. For us it was a wild drama, violent, and comic too, in a grim way. But we weren't censorious. We thought it was just life and nowhere worse or better. It was all we knew. Fortunately for the infants they did not share the daily ritual of morning assembly with the upper school. They were sheltered from it for a couple of years, the better to render them ripe for the shock of first encounter. Little by little they soaked up rumour and tasted anxiety. In the infants life was gentle enough, though they struggled with me, for a while, trying to make me use scissors in my right-hand, but I am left-handed, and a pencil. How Miss Lewis pounded me in the back when I broke the pencil.

They picked me to play Joseph in the nativity. It doesn't get more innocent than that, and a very unlikely choice, to pick a nervous boy. So nervous was I that I not only knew my own part by heart, I knew everyone else's. When my mother rehearsed me, to try to build up my confidence, I would repeat my opening lines, and add: ‘Then Mary says.... Then the First Shepherd says…. Then I say…. Then the Second or the First or the Third Wise Man says...' and so on and on until they'd all had their say and the Christ child came once again to Colwyn. The best Joseph they ever had, they said, as they always said. Be-robed in my sister's dressing gown, it was my only thespian triumph ever and (barring one other much later, in Synge's
Riders to the Sea
) the only time I trod the boards in my life.

They were the boards in the big Assembly Hall, which doubled for school dinners as a canteen. They were the boards on which each morning mad Pa D stalked into the limelight of his megalomania, and, usually, if not quite every day, lost the plot, or found the plot, perhaps I should say, his crazy version of it anyway. He was a short man with a short fuse, and vigorous in manner, made somehow more menacing by heavy black-framed spectacles. His white hair combed back from his hairline was wavy and, though fine, could seem unruly, as became a maestro.

Pa D generally wore a three-piece suit (in the summer a cream or sometimes a buff linen jacket). When he was really getting going he'd take off his jacket and conduct in his waistcoat. The sleeves of his shirt billowed, held fast above the elbow by little silver elasticated armbands. I can remember detachedly studying his dress, his manner, his frantic enthusiasm. It was as if I saw into his absurdity even then, his not being a man, but a schoolmaster, a particular kind of aberration, a king, a tyrant over children under eleven. My father detested schoolmasters and often voiced his scorn for the breed. Perhaps it was this encouraged me to observe Pa D critically.

But parents respected Pa D, my own included. He was energetic and well-intentioned, and saw above the horizon and beyond it, they would later say. They liked him very much. As to that horizon, Pa D once took a party of us by train to Bristol, and a coach to Wells to see the Cathedral and to the Cheddar Gorge, an old steam-train marathon, 6am to late at night. It still hangs in my mind, staring in wonder at the unknown world from that train. Perhaps I registered then the first pull, the first urge to escape that would later get the better of me, never say worst.

We sang hymns in the morning and some afternoons we'd be assembled again, for more of the same, and for musical, and once in a way, theatrical, education and diversion. A Shakespearean actor came one afternoon, all violet tinted make-up and period costume, discernibly a quare fella, even to my childish gaze, lisping speeches from Shakespeare, as if we understood a word, or knew what he was doing, or why. Yet I remember him so well I can see him now, delivering bits of Falstaff and Lear, as now I realise they must have been. We'd be played 78s of Kathleen Ferrier, the English contralto, while Pa D waxed lyrical and incomprehensible to us about the beauty of her voice.

Nineteen-fifty-three was quite a year, Coronation year, when we lined up along the Abergele Road clutching our coronation mugs, waiting on her majesty's majestic progress to wave our flags and cheer. There was bunting hung along a stretch of the road in the village, along the viaduct. I do remember catching sight of the queen and the duke beside her, on that bleak day, a very dull and chilly day. I was stood just below Rose Walk, opposite W.H. Smith's. I don't know what I'd expected but they struck me as too ordinary. They might have been anyone. I can still see them, and the open-backed limousine disappearing. My mother was up at Hebron on the hill, where there was no crowd, but just a few folk gathered. They stepped out into the road as the cortege approached and cheered, involuntarily, having vowed they'd do no such thing. She says the Queen wore pink, a pink hat, and they ‘both looked beautiful'. Somehow I remain certain I glimpsed the queen in yellow, but from my height, peeping from the crowd perhaps I saw nothing at all, but the hood, like a pram-hood lowered at the back of the limousine, and the back of the Duke's little head.

In a world where news was so thinly broadcast, compared with the 24/7 wall-to-wall of today, we had no other view of it than what we saw with our own eyes and what we were told at home and school, about the Queen. In my case, if I heard it from my father, it would not have been enthusiastic. He disliked the idea of monarchy.