In My Wildest Dreams
Read In My Wildest Dreams Online
Authors: Leslie Thomas
IN MY WILDEST
DREAMS
Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1931, Leslie Thomas is the son of a sailor who was lost at sea in 1943. His boyhood in an orphanage is evoked in
This Time Last Week,
published in 1964. At sixteen, he became a reporter before going on to do his national service. He won worldwide acclaim with his bestselling novel
The Virgin Soldiers.
In 2005 he received the OBE for services to literature.
Also by Leslie Thomas
Fiction
The Virgin Soldiers
Orange Wednesday
The Love Beach
Come to the War
His Lordship
Onward Virgin Soldiers
Arthur McCann and All His Women
The Man with the Power
Tropic of Ruislip
Stand Up Virgin Soldiers
Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective
Bare Nell
Ormerod's Landing
That Old Gang of Mine
The Magic Army
The Dearest and the Best
The Adventures of Goodnight and Loving
Dangerous in Love
Orders for New York
The Loves and Journeys of Revolving Jones
Arrivals and Departures
Dangerous by Moonlight
Running Away
The Dearest and the Best
Kensington Heights
Chloe's Song
Dangerous Davies and the Lonely Heart
Other Times
Waiting for the Day
Dover Beach
Non Fiction
This Time Next Week
Some Lovely Islands
The Hidden Places of Britain
My World of Islands
DREAMS
Leslie Thomas
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ISBN 9781407097114
Version 1.0
Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2006
3 3 7 9 10 8 6 4
Copyright © Leslie Thomas, 1984
Introduction to the 2006 edition © Leslie Thomas, 2006
Leslie Thomas has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life experiences and
recollections of Leslie Thomas. In some limited cases names of people,
places, dates, sequences or the details of events have been changed to protect
the privacy of others. The author has warranted to the publishers that,
except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the
work, the contents of this book are true. Whilst the publishers have taken
care to explore and check where reasonably possible, they have not verified all
the information in this book and do not warrant its veracity in all respects.
This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in the United Kingdom in 1984 by Arlington Books
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is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781407097114
Version 1.0
It has been an odd, perhaps even eerie, experience reading this book again more than twenty years after writing it. Even though it concerns the events of my own life which, goodness knows, ought to be familiar, I discovered it to be both revealing and engrossing as if it were the story of someone I had known quite a long time ago. In fact, once I had started reading the book I could hardly put it down!
This time I felt more concern for the struggles and upheavals of my boy's life than I recall feeling when it was clattering around me. The poignancy of my sick mother having to send away her two sons, knowing that she would never again see them, disturbed me deeply and almost for the first time, as did the shock of two boys abruptly realising they were heading for an orphanage.
But these tragedies were balanced, if only in part, by reliving the optimism I felt when a few years later I found myself firmly on two feet and knowing that I was starting my life again, alone it is true, but confident, even cocky, in knowing that I had a choice of the way ahead. Where I went, what I did, who I
was
even, were up to me. One famously successful man said to me not long ago: 'You had the great advantage of not having parents.'
Not that I go along with this Larkinesque twist entirely but I knew what he meant. I
knew
I had parents until I was twelve and those early years
had happened.
I could rely on the memories, dimming though they are now. What used to be called Dr Barnardo's Homes have produced many successful people but others, in their minds anyway, have never quite left the orphanage. They were always wondering about their roots. I had mine; they were already in place.
When this book was first published I had become a grandfather. Lois, my daughter, gave birth to twins. Charlie and Joe Faulkner are now at university. Joe shows unmistakable signs of becoming a notable writer and Charlie of becoming an agent, which sounds like a useful combination.
My parents had something like twenty brothers and sisters between them so there must be many unknown relatives out there. Mercifully we leave each other alone.
My own sons, Mark, Gareth and Matthew, live not far away. Matthew was married in St Paul's Cathedral on a mellow autumn day last year, a distinction afforded by my being awarded the OBE 'For Services to Literature'. The honour pleased me immensely and I hope showed a sign to those who like to dub themselves The Literary Establishment. Perhaps they did not notice.
For some years I have been a vice-president of Barnardo's (which would seem like taking after-care too far). When I was first elected, Princess Diana was president and there was a famous day (for me anyway) when, sitting beside her, I was to make a speech at the Savoy. This would have been a memorable occassion anyway, even if the outfitters where I purchased my new suit had not shortened the same trouser leg twice.
I counted (I needed to) the list of my novels; up to now they number twenty-nine plus four non-fiction books. I am about to start a thirtieth novel. Writing books is all I can do. Some have been commercially and artistically successful, others less so, but I have survived in the writing game. The advances are less exciting now although I had an excellent run for my money in earlier times. Many of my current readers are regular clients of their local libraries or Oxfam shops.
I did not have to read beyond page one of the original autobiography to find an error. My mother must have had one of her flights of fancy when she claimed I was born in a nursing home on Stow Hill, Newport. It always sounded a bit pricey to me. My birth certificate, which I have since read (after seventy-five years), marks the spot less exaltedly as 'Herbert Street'.
There is, however, some comfort in the knowledge that, as I have told in this story, W.H. Davies, the poet, was born only a few streets away. There was some confusion here too, as I have described, because a plaque commemorating this event, and relying on his own information, was fixed to the wrong house. Newport-born authors are apparently unreliable witnesses.
But, in all, being a writer is a grand life and you can stay at home to do it. My wife Diana, who, when I embarked on
In My Wildest Dreams,
requested that I mentioned her only in passing, has been a warm and interesting companion over more than thirty-five years. We have lived in more houses than some villages contain, we have explored the world in everything from a sailing ship to a Second World War Dakota. But when we get home to our house by the harbour in Lymington, Hampshire, we feel ourselves smile.
The city where I was born, Newport, is still just recognisable. It is an idiosyncratic place, a frontier town between England and Wales. When I was at school the town was geographically in England ('England and Monmouthshire' was the official placing) but its heart was always Welsh. We used to get a half-holiday for St George's Day and St David's Day. The pubs were also open on a Sunday, which meant a Sabbath exodus (religiously observed) from Wales, where they were closed. Now it is placed irrevocably in Wales where it belongs.
There are plans, expansive and expensive, to change the place, but not too much I hope. The River Usk still sidles like a muddy snake below the old girders of the Transporter Bridge which was to me as a child one of the wonders of the world and it is still a landmark. Now there are two motorway bridges spanning the inky river and it was never much good as a bridge anyway. I would not be surprised if somebody called it an icon.
The museum where I used to browse for hours as a boy has moved from Dock Street to John Frost Square (named after one of the Chartist rioters of the nineteenth-century, one of the few perpetrators in Newport of historical unruliness). It houses the marvellously huge ship models that once made me pine to go to sea like my father and brothers.
None of them is now living. My younger brother Roy, who had been closer to me than the others (he could hardly have been more remote), continued his adventurous life, becoming a bosun on a 200,000-ton ore carrier sailing around Australia from Port Kembla, New South Wales. True to the adventurous tenor of his life he finally lost it when he blew himself up. He was in hospital, dying anyway of the emphysema which had dogged him. He was breathing oxygen through a tube and casually lit up a cigarette at the same time. The resulting explosion almost lifted the roof off the ward. He was alive when I telephoned from England. 'I'm all right,' he assured me. 'Except there's not much left of my nose.' He died the next day. I sat down and laughed and cried at the same time.
Maesglas, the last council estate in England or Wales, whichever way you were looking in those days, was a penniless place everybody called Moscow. When it was built in the thirties the winter was of such Soviet severity that the frost-bound workmen gave it the name.
Poor though it was, nobody who ever lived there can today mention its name (which in Welsh means 'Green Fields'), or its Russian nickname, without breaking into a grin. It was a singular collection of streets and people. They have knocked it down now and rebuilt the houses that once half-hid behind the privets.
There was a patch of garden at the front and the back, and they were more spacious than our previous council house on the summit of the hill at Somerton at the other end of the town, where we perched among the Welsh winds. I also made a sentimental journey to that house and discovered that it too had been demolished. But only just. The outline of the brick footings was still to be seen. The only living room seemed so confined, even with the absence of walls. I remembered how my mother had performed the tango, a dance that needs space, across it. It was getting dusk and the same old wind was blowing. Secretly I tried a few tango steps myself in the tight outline of the room. A passer-by stopped to watch me in the dimness and then cautiously moved on.
Mysteries often solve themselves once they become histories. In these pages I have told of the strange 'gas attack' early in the war which had the Maesglas housewives, snorting through gasmasks, scrubbing down the pavements outside their homes. 'Mysterious White Powder Dropped By Germans' reported the
South Wales Argus
but its purpose was never explained. Recently I discovered that the alarm was occasioned by the overturning of a lorry carrying a cargo of bone-meal powder, which is used in the manufacture of deadly anthrax, presumably meant to combat the expected German invasion, so the emergency was not so unnecessary. There was a factory in Cardiff that processed the bone-meal.
Another discovery I have made is that I might have had a half-sister. As a small child I recall a lively young woman, about the age of my elder brothers, appearing at home. She came from Birmingham and, viewed carefully, I think she may have been the result of my mother's stay in that city. 'You had a sister once,' I remember my mother saying. This lady is only a shadow but even as I have been writing this paragraph I have miraculously remembered her name: Daisy Fern.
After many years I also rediscovered my boyhood friend Chubber, or he rediscovered me. When we were young and roaming the streets and woods, we used to leave secret messages for each other and at the bottom of the page was a drawing of a dagger dripping blood. Fifty years went past and one day I opened a letter to see that same childish sign. Appropriate to his nickname he became a locksmith and we have since kept in touch, meeting up on occasions. Once he said to me: 'I'm retiring next year. I'm going to finish
my
book then.'
'You're writing a book?' I asked.
'No, I'm reading one.'
Each November I go back to Newport to march in the Merchant Navy memorial parade, organised by another one-time Maesglas boy, Bertie Bale. More merchant seafarers were lost from the town than all the other wartime services put together. My father was one of them and I do it for him, wearing his medals and clanking along the main street. My marching days are limited, though. Last year I could hardly keep up with the mayoress.
The old man would have enjoyed the scene. So many aspects of his life were embroidered with farce – even, so I have discovered, the news of his death at sea. He had written the wrong address on his next-of-kin form before setting off on his final voyage. The message was delivered to another family several streets away and the hapless telegram boy had to trundle his bike around the many Thomas families in Maesglas trying to discover one with a missing-believed-drowned father.
Through the years I have made several sentimental journeys to the rather sombre house on the crest of Fore Street, Kingsbridge, in the South Hams district of Devon, where two anxious brothers, carrying their sparse belongings, arrived on the day after they had said tearful farewells to their mother. The house seems smaller now as childhood places do when revisited later in life. A housing estate has sprouted in the paddock where I used to ride Pommerse the pony. I used his name for a horse in my novel
Dover Beach.
Teatimes at Lower Knowle were redolent with peanut butter, a gift from American soldiers; many years later those same Americans provided me with the basis of
The Magic Army,
a book which revealed for the first time the bungling tragedy of more than seven hundred young men who died by German action in one night while they were only
practising
invasion landings off Slapton Sands, Devon.
The success of
The Magic Army
resulted in a summons from the United States, from the Pentagon no less, to receive an award for my part in revealing, years later, the terrible story. In Washington there was an impressive dinner attended by veteran survivors of the ill-starred Exercise Tiger and I was presented with an engraved plaque. But military blunders were not a thing of the past and the framed citation was made out in the wrong name. There were on-the-spot apologies and the right item was forwarded to me when I was back home in Britain.
Barnardo's called their reception homes 'Ever-Open-Doors'. The Kingsbridge home was in the charge of a grey and handsome man who, though not in holy orders, liked to dress in ecclesiastical garb, wearing a clerical collar and preaching in St Edmund's Church. More than thirty years later I saw his name in a local newspaper at Henley-on-Thames, where Diana and I were living. He had recently died after long being the well-respected vicar of a local church, presumably by then officially ordained.
Since I became a vice-president of Barnardo's I have been called on to assist in various ways. Once I presented a short television film about some disabled toddlers at Harrogate where I could scarcely stem the tears. The day after the film was shown on television I was walking my dogs in Kensington when a hearse, complete with coffin, stopped in the street and the driver alighted.
'Saw your film last night,' he said while the traffic piled up behind the corpse. 'And I want to give you this for Barnardo's.' It was four pounds. 'Somebody gave it to me as beer money' I thought it might have been 'bier' money – a joke in the undertaking business perhaps.
Cherie Booth is now President. We meet at an event sponsored by Monopoly in aid of Barnardo's. Mindful of the newspaper stories about Mrs Blair allegedly using her position as wife of the Prime Minister to feather her own nest, I warned her: 'Don't let the press photograph you with handfuls of Monopoly money.'
She replied smartly, 'Or the card that says "Go to Jail".'
Barnardo's do not have orphanages these days; their efforts are concentrated on deprived, abused and sick children. In those times they cared, as much as they could, for 8,000 children of various sorts. One of the orphanages was called Babies Castle.
I did cross swords with Barnardo's once about an advertising campaign that I thought was unacceptable, a baby supposedly photographed injecting heroin, a toddler about to jump from a roof, a man with his head blown apart. I wanted to resign as a vice-president but was dissuaded. An even more grisly set of full-page advertisements appeared the following year and the Advertising Standards Authority banned them.
It is not altogether known that people invited to appear in the famous pages of
Who's Who
are required to compile their own entry. When, to my considerable surprise, my name was added to that illustrious list in 1973 I summed up my career in the armed forces succinctly: Army Service 1949-51. Rose to lance-corporal.'